Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Thursday, January 01, 2026 at 12:36:07p EST
(Kenneth Fowler/CNN)
This article is going to explain what we’re actually facing, lay out its four preconditions, and show you that America meets every single one. It will then explain why knowing this is important, and what we can do once equipped with that knowledge.
There’s a name for what’s happening: electoral autocracy. Elections happen. Multiple parties compete. But the system is rigged to favor one faction through gerrymandered maps, voter suppression, captured courts, and media control. When the wrong side wins anyway, those captured courts block them from governing. Hungary operates this way. So do we.
Start with gerrymandered maps. The Brennan Center’s September 2024 analysis found Republicans hold approximately 16 extra House seats due to favorable district lines.¹ Republicans drew 191 congressional districts while Democrats drew 75.¹ Only 69 of 435 House seats are rated competitive.² The Senate is worse. California’s 39 million residents have the same representation as Wyoming’s 579,000, a ratio of 68 to 1.³ The 50 Republican senators who confirmed Trump’s Supreme Court justices represented 43.5 percent of the American population. Their 50 Democratic colleagues represented 56.5 percent.⁴ The last time Republican senators represented a majority of voters was 1996.⁵
Rigged maps only work if the right people show up to vote. That’s where voter suppression comes in. The evidence includes confessions. During floor debate on Montana’s HB 176 in 2021, a Republican state representative explained he wanted to end Election Day registration because young voters are “not on our side of the aisle.”⁶ The bill passed. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court that same year, Arizona Republican Party attorney Michael Carvin was asked what interest his party had in maintaining voting restrictions. His answer: eliminating them “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”⁷ When the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s HB 589, the court found the legislature had requested data on voting practices broken down by race, then restricted exactly those practices disproportionately used by Black voters. The law, the court wrote, “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”⁸ North Carolina enacted that law less than two months after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Between 2021 and 2024, states passed 79 restrictive voting laws, nearly three times the number passed between 2017 and 2020.⁹
Gerrymandering and voter suppression tilt the playing field. Media control ensures tens of millions of Americans never realize the game is rigged. Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates 178 television stations reaching approximately 40 percent of American households.¹⁰ The company requires stations to air “must run” segments including commentary from Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House official, nine times per week.¹⁰ In March 2018, Deadspin compiled footage of nearly 200 Sinclair anchors reading identical scripts warning about “fake news” at other outlets.¹¹ You can watch the video. Sinclair executive chairman David Smith reportedly told Trump in 2016: “We are here to deliver your message.”¹² When your local news is owned by a conservative media conglomerate pushing partisan content through trusted local faces, voters cannot punish leaders for policy failures they never learn about.
None of this would hold without the final piece: captured courts that enforce the rigged system and block any attempt to change it.
The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to decide whether federal district judges have the power to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential policies. The Court declined to hear the case.¹³ The Trump administration asked the same question. The Court took it, ruled in Trump’s favor, 6-3.¹⁴
Same legal question. Same Court. Different answer depending on who asked.
The judiciary abandoned neutrality decades ago. Bush v. Gore stopped votes from being counted. Shelby County gutted voting rights. Citizens United flooded elections with dark money. What we’re watching now is the endgame.
The Niskanen Center analyzed the Court’s treatment of lower court injunctions and found that within the first six months of Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court lifted approximately 77 percent of injunctions blocking administration actions. For the Biden administration over four years, the Court lifted 10 percent.¹⁵ Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck documented that in the first 20 weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration sought emergency action from the Supreme Court 19 times. That equals the total number of requests the Biden administration made over four years.¹⁶ The Court sided with Trump nearly every time.
In July 2024, the Court ruled 6-3 that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts within their core constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all other official acts.¹⁷ The Court held that Trump’s discussions with the Acting Attorney General about overturning the 2020 election fell within his exclusive constitutional authority and were therefore absolutely immune.¹⁷ Courts cannot inquire into a president’s motives. An action does not become unofficial merely because it violates the law.¹⁷ Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision makes the president “a king above the law.”¹⁷
A president can now direct the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. He can order federal law enforcement to investigate, harass, and charge anyone he designates as a threat. He can pardon co-conspirators before, during, or after any scheme. He can fire any official who refuses to comply. If these actions fall within his official duties, he faces no criminal liability. The Court manufactured this immunity from whole cloth. No statute authorized it. No constitutional text required it. No precedent compelled it. Six justices simply declared that presidents need this protection to act “boldly.”
The Court is simultaneously dismantling the independence of federal agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, currently before the Court, the administration argues that the president can fire Federal Trade Commission commissioners at will, eliminating the for-cause removal protections that have governed independent agencies since 1935.¹⁸ The D.C. Circuit has already ruled that Trump’s firings of Merit Systems Protection Board and National Labor Relations Board members were lawful.¹⁸ If Humphrey’s Executor falls, the Federal Reserve, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, and every other independent agency comes under direct presidential control. A president could fire the Fed chair for refusing to cut interest rates before an election. He could purge every agency of anyone who might resist.
Criminal immunity for official acts. Direct control of every federal agency. And now, with the nationwide injunction ruling, illegal orders take effect everywhere except in the specific jurisdictions where individual plaintiffs have standing to sue. The Court has built a legal architecture in which a Republican president operates with essentially no constraint.
Now consider what the same Court does when a Democrat holds office. In June 2023, the Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, a $430 billion initiative affecting over 40 million borrowers.¹⁹ Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major questions doctrine,” holding that agencies cannot make decisions of vast economic significance without explicit congressional authorization.¹⁹ The previous year, the Court used the same doctrine to strike down the Clean Power Plan.²⁰ In June 2024, the Court overturned Chevron deference entirely, eliminating the 40-year principle that courts should defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes.²¹ The six-justice majority handed every conservative federal judge in the country a veto over Democratic governance.
The student loan program and the Clean Power Plan were not radical initiatives. They were exercises of delegated authority that prior courts would have upheld without controversy. This Court invented new doctrines to stop them. As Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, the Court’s approach “overrules Congress’s decisions about when and how to delegate” and makes the Supreme Court itself “the arbiter, indeed, the maker, of national policy.”²²
SCOTUSblog’s analysis calls this the “who-what duality” of the Roberts Court: expanding presidential power over personnel while restricting presidential power over policy.²³ But that framing is too neutral. The personnel expansions let a Republican president fire anyone who might resist. The policy restrictions prevent a Democratic president from using the administrative state to do anything at all. One president gets to destroy. The other gets blocked from building. This is not judicial philosophy. It is collaboration.
None of these tools will transfer. A Democratic president attempting to invoke the immunity ruling, the removal power, or the elimination of nationwide injunctions would discover new limits, new doctrines, new procedural barriers. We know this because we already have the data. Seventy-seven percent versus ten percent. Nineteen emergency requests in twenty weeks versus nineteen in four years. Same questions, different answers, depending entirely on who is asking.
Here is what all of this means in plain terms. One faction wins elections while losing the popular vote, governs without constraint, and installs lifetime judges who validate the structures that enabled minority rule. The other faction needs supermajorities to win, cannot govern when it does, and watches every policy achievement get struck down by courts it cannot reform. The gears turn freely toward authoritarian consolidation. Try to turn them back and the teeth catch.
This is why nothing ever gets better. Two-thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.²⁴ Seventy-three percent believe the healthcare system needs major change or a complete rebuild, including 67 percent of Republicans.²⁵ Exposed to policies without party labels, supermajorities support them. Yet the federal minimum wage has not moved since 2009. Healthcare remains broken. Housing stays unaffordable. Climate action stalls. Not because these policies are unpopular. Because the system is designed to prevent the popular will from becoming law. Gerrymandered legislatures will not pass them. If they pass, captured courts strike them down. If courts uphold them, the next minority-elected president dismantles them.
Every precondition is met. This is not a warning about where we are headed. We are already here.
The federal government will not save us. It has been captured. Any strategy for preserving democratic governance must begin by acknowledging what we are actually facing. What remains is the ground we still hold at the city and state level, and the willingness to use it.
The Introduction to Soft Secession booklet explains exactly what that looks like: public banking, interstate compacts, criminal prosecutions of federal officials under state law, and revenue strategies that reduce dependency on a captured federal government. It’s free at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER, along with the Educate Activate Recruit Repeat Method for actually getting these policies passed, Being Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative, a printable trifold you can hand out, and Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, the full book explaining how we got here. Physical copies and merch at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.
The billionaire helped fund an effort to gin up fraud claims against the Democratic donation platform.
Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoingeffort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, in which one person donates on behalf of another. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions, any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it is a great deal of tedious, high-risk work for a scammer.
On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for money—even, theoretically, foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy-to-obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent WinRed) fairly silly.
And notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk.
Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July Federal Election Commission report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.
As Mother Jonesreported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.
More at the link above
Israel carrying out ‘live-streamed genocide’ in Gaza, Amnesty says
Amnesty accuses US President Donald Trump of committing a ‘multiplicity of assaults’ on human rights.
Israel is perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, committing illegal acts with the “specific intent” of wiping out Palestinians, Amnesty International has said.
Israeli forces in Gaza have violated the United Nations Genocide Convention with acts that include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to civilians” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”, the human rights organisation said in its annual report released on Monday.
Israeli air strikes have also frequently hit civilians who were following evacuation orders, while its forces continued to “arbitrarily detain and, in some cases, forcibly disappear Palestinians”, the rights group said.
DOGE has made a big impact on Washington. But government spending is up.
Elon Musk and his shadowy “tech support” team have ripped through Washington, reshaping the government and culling the federal workforce with astonishing speed and scope.
Nearly a quarter of a million workers have or are expected to leave their federal jobs. That includes more than 112,000 federal workers who have opted into the deferred resignation program, according to a POLITICO analysis of previous reporting and conversations with administration officials. It also includes some 121,000 workers across agencies who have been fired, according to a CNN analysis.
DOGE has hollowed out or shut down 11 federal agencies and says it has terminated more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. It has wiped out foreign aid and volunteerism in the U.S., slashed education spending and made sweeping changes to the way the government makes procurements, hires contractors and shares data.
DOGE, after promising $2 trillion in savings, now says it has saved the government $160 billion. But even these reported savings, so far, have not led to any meaningful decline in total government spending this year, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, which tracks weekly Treasury data.
In fact, the government has actually been spending more compared to this time last year, the model found.
Total spending rose by 6.3 percent, or $156 billion since Trump took office, compared to the first four months of 2024, said Kent Smetters, a Wharton professor who directs the model. Even when accounting for inflation, the federal government has still added $81.2 billion more spending to its books compared to the same period last year, he added.
Justice Dept. skirts judge’s deadline on plans to return wrongly deported man
A government lawyer argued that a Friday deadline was not enough time to detail steps for the return of Kilmar Abrego García, who was sent to a Salvadoran mega-prison despite another judge’s protection order.
These people are not undocumented. They had immigration papers. Plus the Tren de Aragua gang do not have common tattoos nor hand signals. So everything the government claims is again suspect and wrong. I offer the quotes below. They had papers saying this person is not subject to removal but ICE took them anyway. Hugs
“Let me be as crystal clear as possible,” Cano wrote in his resignation, obtained by KOAT. “The very first time I ever heard that the boys could possibly have any association with Tren de Aragua was when I was informed of that by [the] agents on the day of the raid.”
He added that each of the men had immigration paperwork that suggested that they were not subject to removal. “Their papers stated in the upper right-hand corner, ‘This Person is Not Subject to Removal.’ They each had a specific court date regarding their asylum hearing,” Cano stated.
Story by Kelly Rissman
• 23h
Immigration authorities raided a former New Mexico judge’s home, where they accused him of harboring an alleged Tren de Aragua gang member, and took him into custody.
Former Dona Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano, 67, and his wife, Nancy Cano, 68, were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcementx Thursday after a tipster claimed that undocumented migrants associated with the Venezuelan gang were staying at their home. The couple has been charged with tampering with evidence, jail records show.
The investigation began in January 2025 after ICE received an anonymous tip that “an illegal alien from Venezuela and a suspected member of a criminal gang, was residing with other illegal aliens in the United States” at the judge’s home in Las Cruces and was in possession of firearms, according to court filings.
Two search warrants were executed at the Canos’ home on February 28, during which authorities seized four guns and took three immigrants into custody, documents say.
The judge resigned in March after federal authorities accused the couple of housing an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant, Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, at their home.
A former New Mexico judge, Joel Cano, and his wife, Nancy Cano, were arrested after ICE accused them of harboring members of a Venezuelan gang (Dona Ana County Jail)
“Let me be as crystal clear as possible,” Cano wrote in his resignation, obtained by KOAT. “The very first time I ever heard that the boys could possibly have any association with Tren de Aragua was when I was informed of that by [the] agents on the day of the raid.”
He added that each of the men had immigration paperwork that suggested that they were not subject to removal. “Their papers stated in the upper right-hand corner, ‘This Person is Not Subject to Removal.’ They each had a specific court date regarding their asylum hearing,” Cano stated.
He continued: “I have three grandkids that I love dearly. Their ages are 15, 8 and 6. There is no way in the world that I would have allowed my grandkids to have any contact with the boys if I had sensed danger.”
Ortego-Lopez installed a glass door for Nancy Cano in late 2023, according to court documents. He continued doing a few jobs for her in 2024 and after he was evicted from his apartment in April 2024, she offered him a stay in their “casita,” a small house on their property. There, Ortego-Lopez was given access to guns, the filing says.
Ortega-Lopez allegedly posted photos of himself on social media holding guns. Agents also looked at the social media accounts of the other undocumented immigrants staying at the judge’s house that suggests “clear indicators” of association with the Venezuelan gang.
“These indicators included tattoos, clothing apparel and displaying hand gestures,” the government wrote.
Nancy Cano has been accused of witness tampering after she allegedly let Venezuelan gang members live in a ‘casita’ on her property (Dona Ana County Jail)
The president’s order states that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of [Tren de Aragua], are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” The ACLU sued administration officials over their use of the Alien Enemies Act and a judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the migrants from being deported. Still, the planes flew to El Salvador; the judge this month said he found “probable cause” to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt.
The Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the Trump administration has the authority to deport migrants under the centuries-old act but also ordered that the government provide detainees an opportunity to contest their removals in court districts nearest to the detention centers where they are being held.
The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.
A 20 year old man who is a US citizen with a Hispanic sounding name has twice been arrested and ordered held by ICE. The first time he was released as he sowed the judge his birth certificate and his social security card. The second time he was ordered held for 48 hours for pickup by ICE for an immigration hearing even after the judge seen and vouched for his birth certificate. The prosecutor claimed the court had no jurisdiction now that ICE had a detaining order on him. I don’t think that is legally correct as blue states have said they won’t honor those orders. But the point is it has happened twice now, and if the US doesn’t grant due process people like him could be detained and removed to El Salvador where the tRump people claim they can’t get people back from. We can get our people from Russia, North Korea, and China but we can’t from tiny El Salvador. Hugs
The two quotes from the article I added just below what I am writing give away the Fundamentalist Christian republican’s goal, which is to make those people they disagree with, that they hate, disappear from society. Their goal by taking LGBTQ+ media out of schools is to make it appear that all kids are straight and cis. No one can be different from them or their beliefs. Everyone must walk lockstep with them, their way is the only way people can live. Holy dictators. Their goal is to erase anyone different from them from the public view, from society. We must not let them do that. Hugs
A controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”-Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.
Trump’s Department of Education called the suggestion that rightwingers are trying to ban book a “hoax.”
The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.
The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.
Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.
The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.
And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.
Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
Authorizing the “truth”
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.
These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.
This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.
The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.
This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”
The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.
In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”
The fight for all the colors
To build off of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famed poem:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out — Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out — Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out — Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
This is horrific. They finally admit that without due process they are grabbing anyone brown and anyone Muslim even if they are here legally having a visa or green card and sending them as quickly as they can to a notorious horrific prison in El Salvador. They claimed they were all gang members and they did not care if they were or were not. The point was a Steven Miller Shock and Awe cause fear in anyone brown or Muslim. He is a hard core white supremacists. But the worst part is they know he is not the only one and they are refusing to bring him or any others back. Refusing a judges orders.
The administration argued that it cannot bring back Abrego Garcia because he’s in Salvadoran custody and knocked down concerns that he’s likely to be tortured or killed in CECOT.
The Trump administration conceded in a court filing Monday that it mistakenly deported a Maryland father to El Salvador “because of an administrative error” and argued it could not return him because he’s now in Salvadoran custody.
The filing stems from a lawsuit over the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who in 2019 was granted protected status by an immigration judge, prohibiting the federal government from sending him to El Salvador.
The filing, first reported by The Atlantic, appears to mark the first time the administration has admitted an error related to its recent deportation flights to El Salvador, which are now at the center of a fraught legal battle.
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the Trump administration filing states.
Abrego Garcia, who attorneys say fled gang violence in El Salvador more than a decade ago, had been identified by his wife in a photo of detainees entering intake at El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT.
Prior to his removal, he had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in mid-March “due to his prominent role in MS-13,” according to a court declaration from a senior ICE official. His attorneys say he’s not a member of nor has any ties to the MS-13 gang.
“Abrego-Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador,” Robert Cerna, an acting ICE field office director, said in his declaration, referring to federal immigration law. “Rather, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed.”
“Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13,” the declaration reads.
The administration argued that it cannot bring back Abrego Garcia because he’s in Salvadoran custody and knocked down concerns that he’s likely to be tortured or killed in CECOT.
—————————————————————————————————————
Another link to this story is here. This article has more information and is slightly longer. It expands what the tRump government lawyers told the judge even thought the farmer had legal asylum they won’t bring him back with more detail than the story above. Hugs
Trump admin. admits it wrongly deported Maryland dad from El Salvador
“The heavy interest in the President’s primacy in foreign affairs outweigh the interests on the Plaintiffs’ side of the scale. Although the Defendants recognize the financial and emotional hardships to Abrego Garcia’s family, the public interest in not returning a member of a violent criminal gang to the United States outweighs those individual interests,” the filing continues.
The above is the tRump admin trying to get other countries with higher standards in their food to send us their eggs to protect tRump from the soaring prices.
This scares me because the fundamentalist and white cis straight male supremacists will demand it be used here. First on trans people to protect the children then expand it to the entire LGBTQ+ as they have been doing everything else they tried to use against trans kids / people.
Famed Navajo Code Talkers Axed From Pentagon Sites
Yes I know that these were restored. But now tRump is demanding Vance who is on the board of the Smithson and the National Zoo to remove all illegal (purge) references to race, gender, the LGBTQ+ and so much more. He is demanding a national landmark the US government doesn’t control to toe the fundamentalist straight cis white supremacy Christians agenda to deny anything but them into history or society. We really are seeing a complete take over of society and we must do all we can to prevent the rollback of all rights and equality of anyone not white straight cis Christian males. This is horrifyingly scary. Because these hate groups have learned if they can control information, control education, control what is considered good or bad by their standards they can force the youngest people in the country to voice that belief and grow up to enforce it. It is what theocratic Islamic nations do. Are we now a nation taken over by theocratic Christian fundamentalist demanding a change in even the constitution to force everyone to follow their god and their rules? Please kill me first.
Every accredited organization except those directly driven by fundamentalist religiously motivated agree this is simply torture. The religious just simply refuse to believe sexual orientation is not a choice and no one wants to be like that no matter what has to be done to change it. Including electroshock therapy to the genitals. Think of yourself, gay straight, or any other orientation. If you are cis and straight, how much conversion therapy would it take to make you believe you were gay / lesbian and desire that. How could who you are attracted to be changed. That all comes from the idea that it is a mental illness and a sickness that needs to be cured. Which the majority of medical organizations reject, agreeing it is an inborn part of a fetus development. Plus if you could change a sexual orientation … look at my childhood. I was forced to please sexually both males and females. But the only rapes that totally crashed me in the military was the one by a woman with more rank than me who demanded I have sex with her … four times. The last time I was so upset and humiliated that I ran nude up the stairs of the housing unit for higher enlisted and pounded on my soon to be E-7’s door. I was sobbing incoherently. I have been raped all my life and was able to stand that. Why did what this woman force me to do reduced me to that state? Because it was against my very nature of who I was. I was having same sex relations with another young guy and loving it. What she was forcing me to do was against everything I felt inside. That is what the people of these gay conversions want to do.
Some of them think that being gay is a choice because … well when did they decide instead of men they would like to have sex with women? No they just felt it, but what gay / lesbian people feel is not valid and must be forced to change. The rest of this group feels their interpretations of their view of what their god wants must be enforced on everyone even those that don’t follow their god. Because it is their god and he must be pleased because their god hates what they hate. Even if it is not in the bible or they misunderstood it, their hate preacher told them it was so. They can not let others live their lives, everyone must live by their church dictates. Why??? Because only that way their god will love them? I am an atheist that is willing to let religious people believe as they wish as long as they don’t try to force their beliefs on others. You do you … but why can’t they do the same. They insist that no one can be different from them and their beliefs. That is scary just that they think like that and more that they are now running the US government.
PS. When James was a newly teen of 13 his parents went to the Florida Keys with a group of us. They always stayed apart even though they asked to be part of the caravan of RV going. Well I caused an issue. His … maybe abusive parents had lots of tattoos and were highly Catholic religious … even had a statue of the mother Mary in the entrance of their home. Yes the husband ruled the house and told the wife what she would do at all times. Which included the abuse of the child which is where we came in. In a year or so after this even the boy started staying at our home because he was not allowed home until the mother was there. I had seen a young kid come in with a Mohawk. The boy had his hair shaved on both sides of his head and long in the front and back. We had already talked to their son at our table because the parents they were trying to force the boy to get Christian tattoos.
When I spoke up and said there is …. next hair cut … it will look grand on him. His stepdad exploded and said he wouldn’t ever allow the boy in the house with that and he would hold him down and shave all his hair off. As anyone can imagine I got triggered, I had been held down and had my hair cut. I flew up from the table as Ron was grabbing at me and yelled you want him to have tattoos which is against the bible but a simple haircut which can be changed or grow back and has no mentioned in the bible upsets you so much you’re threatening the kid. I loudly said, “What the fuck is wrong with you”! They took the boy from our table and left his meal uneaten. I was furious. Others who did not know of my childhood tried to calm me down. The family of the boy left that day from our group at the campground. Next time the boy came to our home his hair was cut short and the parents never went on another trip with us. Hugs
Again an attempt to turn the country into a while male cis straight only nation. How much clearer can it be. And all these republicans or most of them are fundamentalist Christians who were funded by their church in a steal run to get elected. This not what the publican wants. But these republican fundamentalist groups understand … politicians can force change in public opinion if they support something loud and forcefully enough. Which is one why Kamala Harris l think lost the election, the democrats refused to respond to the attacks on trans people fearing it would hurt them. That is how you bring people along to a new understanding. The republicans are doing it in reverse of what the progressive movement did with government support in the early 2000s. Now that democrats have retreated only the hard right republicans are getting their voices heard returning the countries view to pre-rights for LGBTQ+ people. Hugs
(Kenneth Fowler/CNN)
Former President Donald Trump speaks about border security at a rally at Million Air, a private airplane terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Friday October 25, 2024.
