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Stephen Miller’s version of “the great replacement theory.”
Last October, the administration of The Orange Overlord (TOO) said the US would admit just 7,500 refugees in all of 2026, a 94% cut from the previous year’s level of 125,000. Most of the few available slots were to be taken up by Afrikaners supposedly fleeing a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa.
On May 18, TOO’s underlings said the total would be raised to 17,500 - with all the additional 10,000 slots allocated to white South Africans.
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Some dreams should die - immediately.
On May 18, Meidas Touch News, quoting a New York Times report, said that above and beyond the murderous attacks on boats off Venezuela, the death toll for which is now above 200, the US already has troops engaged in joint operations in Ecuador, Guatemala has now made a secret agreement to allow similar joint operations there, and Honduras is expected to follow.
The excuse is always “drug trafficking cartels,” but the real point certainly appears to be normalizing the presence of American troops across Latin America with a goal of forcing Mexico to accept a large-scale US military presence there. - all part of an overall dream of direct US military dominance of the whole of the Western Hemisphere. Kind of like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids without bothering with any claims about “defending” anyone.
Oh, and don’t worry, they’ve already war-gamed military attack plans to respond to what reports call “the potential collapse of Cuba’s totalitarian government as early as this summer.”
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PEPFAR is on life support.
Since its start in 2003 under George Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives by funding HIV prevention and treatment in poor countries.
On May 5, the TOO gang announced a restructuring of the CDC’s role in distributing funding and overseeing PEPFAR-related programs.
Instead of the current interactive programs, countries will receive funding under bilateral five-year agreements which will require some reciprocal benefit to the US - meaning US corporations - such as access to assets like mineral resources.
In other words, the program has gone from humanitarian assistance to a transactional arrangement based around “Nice country you got there; it’d be a shame if lots of people died unnecessarily.”
The result is to fracture the on-going coordination between the CDC and local health agencies, the very thing that made the program so successful.
Experts on global health say this is effectively the end of PEPFAR.
But then again, what do we care, they’re just LGB people from shit-hole countries and we have our own LGBTQ+ people to screw over.
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Speaking of which…
Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington have a total of six anti-trans measures on their fall ballot. Mores are in the works in Arizona, Nebraska, and Nevada.
The Nevada example is noteworthy because the governor, one Joe Lombardo, openly admitted his administration is offering a proposed constitutional amendment to ban “Men in Women’s Sports” specifically because, quoting him “That’s going to get people out to vote.”
The thing is, the public still largely endorses equal treatment trans folks but that same public for several years has been under a relentless and coordinated political assault from a concoction of reactionary flakes, gender bigots, and most importantly right-wing operatives looking to maintain and expand their power by deliberately generating and maintaining a social panic - one which, like most social panics, revolves around some emotional issue, usually involving some combination of sex and children and one which, precisely because it is being promoted and maintained as part of a deliberate campaign, hasn’t burned itself out in a few years the way most do.
The result has been that public opinion has shifted toward the reactionaries on a carefully chosen narrow set of emotion-driven issues, primarily trans girls being playing on girls’ school sports teams, bathrooms (of course), and pediatric healthcare, particularly the eye-bulging, spittle-flecked rants about non-existent “genital mutilation of children.”
And by the way, this is an assault that has gone effectively unopposed by whole swaths of the supposedly progressive left, some of who have actively embraced parts of it and thank you Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, and others for making the whole thing harder.
Measures like those coming in the fall have been called “ballot candy,” done not because of any benefit to the public or even in response to public interest - when you ask people what their concerns are, trans issues always rank very low on that list - but rather to, as Gov. Lombardo acknowledged, drive right-wing turnout by preying on the very fears and fantasies that they have been creating.
But here I have to inject a bit of hope for the future. The effect of a good number of these proposals is to stick into a state constitution things that are already illegal under state law. So their immediate impact on the lives of trans people is effectively zero. Then why do it? Specifically and avowedly to make it harder to undo.
The gender thugs know things are changing. Ten years ago, there was open talk of a “revolution” in our understanding of gender and today demographic analyses of the US population show that overall, the younger the age group, the greater the support for trans and nonbinary people. The reactionaries know they are losing and these measures are part of their effort to be, in William Buckley’s famous description of conservatives, “standing athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’”
Because we’re seen this before. We’ve seen it before. In 2003, when support for same-sex marriage was rising and headed for a majority, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage as violating the state constitution.
In the desperate immediate reaction to hold off that prospect, between 2004 and 2008 24 states added bans on same-sex marriage to their state constitutions specifically to hold off the rising tide.
It was of course the Obergefell decision in 2015 that undid all those measures. I can’t imagine that this Supreme Court will do anything like that, but still, history will not be denied and I can and do look forward to a time when the train of history runs over the gender bigots, their allies, and their useful idiot followers.
I may not live to see it - but then again, I thought (and said) the same thing about same-sex marriage.
Footnote: A couple of places where I’ve addressed some aspect of social panics:
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2009/01/think-of-children.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/04/052-erickson-report-for-april-21-to-may.html (from roughly 17:30 to 23:10 in the video)
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/10/064-erickson-report-for-october-27-to_30.html
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Ending on an up note.
Finally for this time out, we have some good news on the death penalty.
For the second time in two weeks, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4. tossed out a death sentence.
In this case, coming out of Mississippi, the prosecution had removed four of the five Black jurors in the selection panel, claiming the removals were for “race-neutral” reasons. That is, it had nothing to do with them being Black oh no of course not perish the thought.
SCOTUS found the defense attorney wasn’t given opportunity to properly challenge the prosecution’s claims of “race-neutral” reasons, declaring that the District Court got the law right and the Mississippi state Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals both got it wrong.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor were joined by Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the majority.
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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.
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