More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave

As noted a number of times in previous posts, the Felon and congressional Republicans continue to claim they have a mandate to enact their white "Christian" nationalist agenda and huge tax cuts to the very wealthy which will be funded by draconian cuts to social programs that benefit the many, including younger voters.  They ignore the reality that the Felon received the votes of only slightly more than a third of registered voters and received less than 50% of all votes cast.  Moreover, cuts to Medicaid, changes to Social Security and restrictions on Obamacare will adversely impact countless younger voters, including working class whites who may have been motivated by economic concerns - particularly inflation fears - and not just their hatreds and prejudices and an embrace of conservatism. In addition, younger voters are the least religious of any generation, are more likely to identify as LGBT, and more progressive on numerous issues, so a negative reaction to the implementation of the Christofascist agenda of Project 2025 is entirely possible.  In short, predictions of Democrats losing the younger generations of voters may well be both false and premature as laid out in a piece at The Atlantic.  Thus, overreach by the Felon and his self-prostituting political whores in the ranks of congressional Republicans may alienate the younger voters they reached in a one off election.  One can only hope the backlash occurs quickly.  Here are article highlights:

Are the kids all right-wing? Donald Trump won the 2024 election thanks in part to increased support from young voters. Some experts see this as a sign of a generational sea change. As the prominent Democratic data scientist David Shor pointed out in a recent podcast conversation with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, 75-year-old white men were more likely to support the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, than 20-year-old white men were.

If Shor is right—if Gen Z (now ages 12 to 30) is durably to the right of previous generations—a significant part of the Democratic coalition is gone. Luckily for the party, however, he probably isn’t. The best available evidence suggests that the youth-vote shift in 2024 was more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.

The Cooperative Election Study, one of the largest politically focused surveys of Americans, goes back to 2006 and just released its 2024 data. Those data aren’t perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like Shor’s. The CES is also more comprehensive than the average election poll, asking about voters’ ideological self-identification, party affiliation, and views on specific issues.

Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020. . .

But voting for a Republican candidate isn’t the same as identifying as conservative. Here is where the CES data cast doubt on the notion that Gen Z is an especially right-leaning generation. According to my analysis of the CES data, young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).

What about young adults’ positions on specific political issues? For the most part, they are more liberal than previous generations. . . . In the 2024 CES survey, 69 percent of young adults supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of felony crimes and who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, up from 58 percent in 2012, the last year all 18-to-29-year-olds were Millennials. Also in the 2024 survey, 63 percent agreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,” up from 42 percent in 2012. Support for legal abortion among young adults rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2024, though the question was worded somewhat differently in those two years. Only one belief shifted in the conservative direction: 62 percent of young adults in 2024 supported increasing border patrols at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 45 percent in 2012.

The trend looks different if we look at data on partisanship rather than ideology. The Democratic Party has steadily been losing market share among young adults since 2008, mostly because young people have grown likelier to identify as independents; Gen Z is only slightly more Republican than Millennials were at the same age. These young independents tend to vote for Democrats, but, given their lack of party affiliation, their votes are more likely to swing from one election to the next. Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn’t in 2020.

Given that young voters have not become more likely to identify as conservative or hold broadly conservative political opinions, Gen Z might not be the disaster for Democrats that Shor and others are predicting. The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people’s deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.

Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation. . . . . Young Americans today are also unconvinced that their country is anything special: Only 27 percent of high-school seniors think the U.S. system is “still the best in the world,” down from 67 percent in the early 1980s, according to a long-running national survey.

If young people’s attitudes persist as they get older, Gen Z might never be pleased with how things are going in the country. They’ll want to “vote the bastards out” in the next election no matter which party is in power. Compared with the idea of a new and persistent conservatism in young voters, a generalized pessimism bodes better for the Democrats in 2026 or 2028. But if Democrats regain power, Gen Z might turn on them once again, repeating the cycle in an endless loop of political dissatisfaction.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Corporate America Is Abandoning the LGBT Community

Today is Hampton Roads Pride's main Pride event in downtown Norfolk's Town Point Park, complete with a boat parade.   The event is a reminder of how much things have improved from when I first came out of the closet.  When I came out of the closet almost 25 years ago, the event was tiny and tucked away in the back of Lafayette Park out of sight, there was no same sex marriage, in Virginia the sodomy statute subjected same sex relations to potential felony charges, and there were no state or federal non-discriminations protections.  Yet with the Felon pushing the Project 2025 white "Christian" nationalist agenda to silence or even erase anyone who basically is not a right wing white Christofascist many, including myself, worry that all the gains made may be lost and ponder if those who can should consider moving overseas to safer, more welcoming countries (personally, the issue is where to go and how do we get our children and grandchildren out of an increasingly ugly America). Adding to such worries is the reality that much of corporate America that courted the LGBT dollar are proving to have been fair weather friends/allies only out to tap into the pink dollar (a piece at JP Morgan Wealth Management estimates the global LGBT purchasing power is $4.7 trillion while the U.S. LGBT purchasing power is likely over $1 trillion).  Faced with potential threats from the Felon's anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion agenda and MAGA world's "anti-woke" fixation, many large corporate donors to Pride events and other LGBT organizations have either cut or reduced funding - better to alienate LGBT community members than face threats from the knuckle dragging MAGA provocateurs.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unsettling situation: 

I remember the heady days when Out magazine, which I edited from 2006 to 2018, would swell each June for L.G.B.T.Q. Pride month, its pages thick with ads. Our offices became cluttered with vodka bottles emblazoned in Pride flags, sneakers in rainbow hues, underwear so festively gay that they might as well have come with a parade permit. That deployment of marketing budgets to support the gay community became known as rainbow capitalism, and for a time it became a good business.

Maybe we were naïve. The forces that once propelled corporate America into the arms of L.G.B.T.Q. America have pivoted, retreating under the weight of political backlash and the calculus of risk aversion. The pink pandering hasn’t gone away entirely, but the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has turned Pride from a brightly colored bandwagon for brands to jump on into a possible liability — or worse, a political statement.

Consider BarkBox, a purveyor of pet toys and treats, whose leaked internal message in early June laid bare the new corporate zeitgeist: “We’ve made the decision to pause all paid ads and life cycle marketing pushes for the Pride kit effective immediately,” it read, adding, “We need to acknowledge that the current climate makes this promotion feel more like a political statement than a universally joyful moment for all dog people.”

What was once “universally joyful” is now, apparently, divisive. As if Pride were ever meant to be apolitical. The corporate retreat comes at a moment when pressure to reverse marriage equality is growing. This month the Southern Baptist Convention, emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, set its sights on Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationally 10 years ago next week. What a way to mark an anniversary.

BarkBox is no titan of industry, but such skittishness is echoed by giants. Garnier, Skyy Vodka, Mastercard, Anheuser-Busch, Diageo, PepsiCo, Comcast, Citi and PricewaterhouseCoopers have all slashed their Pride commitments this year, fleeing the parades they once clamored to sponsor.

Target, long a mainstay of rainbow capitalism, seems to be trying to revive a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by trying to have it both ways: still a sponsor of New York City Pride but asking organizers to keep their involvement on the down low.

The retreat didn’t come out of nowhere. The warning shots were fired in 2023, after Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch, teamed up with the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a sponsored Instagram post timed to the end of March Madness. The backlash was swift and theatrical. Kid Rock filmed himself shooting up packs of the beer with a rifle. The conservative troll Ben Shapiro posted a 12-minute rant. Donald Trump chimed in. “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game,” he posted. “Money does talk — Anheuser-Busch now understands that.”

It did. This March, Anheuser-Busch pulled out of Pride sponsorships, including marquee events like San Francisco Pride and St. Louis PrideFest. . . . In New York about a quarter of corporate donors have canceled or scaled back, leaving organizers to plug a $750,000 gap. Pride events in Washington, St. Louis and Salt Lake City have also faced sponsorship drops.

The rise and fall of rainbow capitalism is instructive. When I was hired as editor in chief of Out in 2006, the normalization of gay people was already well underway in popular culture. (The eighth season of “Will & Grace” was on the air.) Nine years later, the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, a decision that seemingly also enshrined the right of L.G.B.T.Q. people to be a consumer category to be catered to.

But here’s the thing about marketing campaigns: They seek to move product, not the culture. And when the culture goes in another direction, as it has especially since Mr. Trump was elected again, corporate allyship becomes corporate snubbing.

This backing off underscores what some critics have long argued: that multinational brands have flattened queer identity into bland consumerism. Queer activists have long pushed back against the corporatization of Pride.

But if Pride editions of Listerine and Oreos seemed frivolous, they also reflected how far society had come since Karl Rove used same-sex marriage ballot initiatives as a boogeyman to turn out the conservative base in swing states in the aughts. What does it say about society if Bud no longer feels safe being publicly pro-L.G.B.T.Q.?

For the best part of two decades queer activists exploited social media to shame corporate America for its historic neglect of L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Mostly that was a good thing. But Twitter also drove outrage to excess.

Did we help ourselves by piling on a carrot juice company or when we freaked out in 2013 about Barilla pasta when its chairman said he wouldn’t feature gay families in ads? GLAAD’s response to the Barilla chairman’s statement: a solemn suggestion that consumers would switch to “more inclusive brands like Bertolli,” because, you know, pasta must be progressive, too.

It’s hard not to see those campaigns now as a template for how the MAGA movement responded to Anheuser-Busch and Dylan Mulvaney. The conservative backlash to queer visibility is uglier by far, but it’s following the same script, compounded by our growing inability to reason and rationalize. Truth is very often the first casualty.

That’s what makes this year’s retreat so revealing: It’s not just a loss of funding but also a reminder that acceptance was always provisional. . . . Strides made yesterday can be reversed tomorrow.

With Mr. Trump back in office, the era of rainbow capitalism seems well and truly over. Corporations are, by their nature, opportunistic. They go where the money is. How else to explain why Coinbase, Coca-Cola, Walmart, ScottsMiracle-Gro and Goldman Sachs helped sponsor the Army anniversary parade last Saturday — in effect a MAGA pride parade?

For this to be the moment when corporate America steps back from Pride initiatives is to add salt in the wound. But is downsizing Pride so terrible? . . . . A leaner, meaner Pride won’t have the branded sheen of rainbow capitalism, but it could rediscover its teeth. Even better, it would sort out true allies from fair-weather friends. A little adversity goes a long way. We can manage just fine without the baubles of pinkwashing.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Abigail Spanberger for Governor of Virginia

Living in Virginia one never gets a year off from elections given Virginia's off year elections. This year all eyes will be on Virginia's gubernatorial race that pits two women, Abigail Spanberger the Democrat nominee and Winsome Sear's the batshit crazy (in my view) Republican, against each other. In Spanberger, Democrats have a former moderate member of Congress and former CIA officer who is smart, articulate, and focused on leading Virginia forward.  In Sears, despite the extremely deceptive ads she has been running that say nothing about her positions on issues, Republicans have an extreme culture warrior who wants a ban on abortion, unfettered gun rights, an end to same sex marriage and a continuation of Glenn Youngkin's effort to ban school curriculums that offend white Christofascist sensibilities and prejudices.  Plus, Sears has said Trump "was sent by god"- I hope Spanberger runs some ads with video clips of Sears saying this! Four years ago, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship by masquerading as a moderate, something his first actions in office showed to be a lie.  The chances of similarly duping voters this year is likely remote given Sears' past statements and ads (one shows her with an assault rifle).  Also looming over the election is the harm the Felon's regime has inflicted on Virginia's many federal workers and the threat the GOP's "big beautiful bill" poses to rural area hospitals and Medicaid coverage for rural working class voters.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the coming contest for governor of Virginia.  Here are highlights:

The politics of Washington nearly always bleed across the Potomac River and into Virginia’s odd-year elections for governor, long seen as the first sign of how the country is feeling about its new president.

This year in particular, that is a big advantage for Democrats. In Virginia, they have fully united behind a candidate they view as ideal to win a Trump-era election in a purple state: former Representative Abigail Spanberger, a onetime C.I.A. officer who has raised buckets of money and defined herself as a moderate willing to buck her party’s leadership.

She is widely seen as the favorite against Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, a socially conservative Republican who has struggled to remain competitive financially in the early months of the race. Ms. Spanberger had $14.3 million on hand as of June 5, the latest campaign finance reporting date, compared with under $3 million for Ms. Earle-Sears.

And while the party locked out of the White House usually performs well in the Virginia governor’s race, this is no ordinary year for the state. President Trump’s slash-and-burn tactics for cutting the government have heavily affected Virginia’s large population of federal workers.

Democrats in the state and far beyond see Ms. Spanberger’s campaign as their biggest opportunity yet to make a statement about their opposition to Mr. Trump.

“The list goes on and on,” Ms. Spanberger said in an interview on Monday, discussing what voters were telling her. “Sometimes it’s the chaos, sometimes it is the anger. Sometimes they’ll name the president.”

Virginia Republicans, for their part, are in disarray. The party has been squabbling over its nominee for lieutenant governor, John Reid, who faced a controversy this year involving explicit photos online. Some Republicans say they will not back Mr. Reid, who would be Virginia’s first openly gay statewide official.

“A lot of the traditional financial supporters in the business community are not yet convinced that Sears can win, and they’re not going to give her money until they are,” said former Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, the last Republican to hold that post before Ms. Earle-Sears won it. “A lot of them don’t view her as a serious candidate.”

Ms. Earle-Sears declined to be interviewed. Her campaign spokesman dismissed Ms. Spanberger’s fund-raising advantage as insignificant.

Ms. Earle-Sears did not face any primary rivals, nor did the party’s incumbent attorney general, Jason Miyares, or its choice for lieutenant governor, Mr. Reid.

But she [Sears] does not have the personal fortune or donor connections of Mr. Youngkin, a former private equity executive who could self-fund large chunks of his political operation.

A former one-term state legislator, Ms. Earle-Sears lost races for the U.S. House and Senate before her fierce opposition to same-sex marriage and her defense of gun rights propelled her to the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor four years ago. Mr. Youngkin’s victory in the general election helped carry her into office. . . . . It does not appear that she has inherited his popularity.

“If Abigail is able to nationalize the election, it’s a very difficult construct for the Republicans,” said Chris Saxman, a Virginia Republican who helped run Ms. Earle-Sears’s political action committee during the first part of her term as lieutenant governor. “For those people who are feeling the pinch of getting their jobs cut or funding cut or losing contracts, that matters. That’s their economy.”

Democrats who are optimistic about Ms. Spanberger point to her victories in tight congressional races in 2018, 2020 and 2022. In those elections, she performed better in rural precincts than many of her fellow Democrats on the ballot. Many in the party hope to repeat that feat and expand their narrow majority in the State House of Delegates this fall. . . . At the same time, Ms. Spanberger continues to haul in cash, accumulating a fund-raising advantage unseen in modern Virginia politics.

Polling is of limited value more than four months before a state election in which both candidates remain relatively unknown, but private surveys conducted by officials in both parties show Ms. Spanberger with a modest lead that probably reflects the state’s Democratic lean.

“The problem right now is that the blue part of the state is angrier and the red part is more complacent,” said former Representative Tom Davis, a Republican who represented the Washington suburbs. “Angrier people tend to turn out. That explains almost every Virginia election.”

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump, Stephen Miller and the GOP Are Misreading the Public

From the outset of the Felon's second regime he and his cult followers have claimed to have a mandate to impose his agenda on the American public, ignoring the reality that the Felon received votes only representing slightly more than a third of the total eligible voters and totaling to less than 50% of the votes cast.  Such does not constitute a mandate and polling shows the Felon underwater on most issues.  Similarly, as Politico is reporting, the Felon's "big beautiful bill" is likewise unpopular among those who have followed it and would likely become even more unpopular if enacted and working class voters begin to lose benefits, all to fund tax cuts for the very wealthy.  Thus, one has to wonder why congressional Republicans are backing a bill to please the Felon and ignoring the rage they may ultimately face from constituents at the polls. All of this is reviewed in a piece in the New York Times that looks at the Felon and the GOP's tone deafness when it comes to recognizing a potentially growing backlash as the ugliness of the Project 2025 driven agenda becomes increasingly apparent to the wider public.  Here are column highlights:

Most everyone other than apologists and professional contrarians would agree at this point that President Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his whims are policy and his will is law.

But the execution has been haphazard. Trump tried to overwhelm the public with a campaign of shock and awe. His executive orders targeted a broad swath of civil society, forcing states, localities, colleges, universities and law firms into a defensive crouch. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency — run, until recently, by Elon Musk, his billionaire ally — ransacked the federal government, fired thousands of civil servants, obliterated critical state capacity and destroyed entire agencies: including U.S.A.I.D., a move that may kill countless thousands of people worldwide.

The [Felon's] president’s most recent effort is an immigration crackdown in Democratic-led cities. . . . Interestingly, the two states with the next largest populations of undocumented immigrants after California are Texas and Florida. But under the operating philosophy of the administration — a version of “For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law” — both states have received something of an exception from the White House deportation program on account of their Republican governors.

Both the crackdown by ICE and the calling up of the military to suppress protests were supposed to rally the public to the administration, in opposition to alleged crime and disorder. The president’s military parade — meant to mimic the ornate processions seen in Russia, North Korea and other dictatorships — was similarly meant to be a show of Trump’s popularity: a demonstration of the almost-spiritual connection he is supposed to have with the American people.

Except it’s the opposite. Far from galvanizing the public to his side, Trump’s ambitious effort to impose his will on the country has only generated discontent and backlash.

We see it in the polling, where majorities of Americans say they disapprove of the Trump administration, and where the president is underwater on virtually every issue of note, including immigration. We also see it on the ground. On Saturday, an estimated 5 million Americans took part in a national protest against the president’s monarchical pretensions, in one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the nation’s history.

In his influential 1922 book, “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann observed that political leaders hold their greatest sway over the public when the issue or interest in question is abstract to most people’s experience. . . . . “If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due, above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the leader is likely to have a free hand.”

Here we see Trump’s fundamental problem. He and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies — the fallout from their effort to mold the country to fit their nativist and mercantilist obsessions — are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles, or even a few million undocumented immigrants, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many unauthorized people as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression.

“Immigration controls, more than many other instruments of governance, encourage the regulation of private and commercial life, the monitoring of social institutions — from schools and universities to professional organizations — and, at worst, the militarization of parts of society,” . . . Unchecked, they encourage the replacement of the rule of law by regulations, of politics by police.” . . . . Immigration laws, he emphasizes, “are restrictions on what citizens are allowed to do.”

Both Trump and Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies, may have imagined that their crackdown would isolate a relatively small group of people and be met with indifference by most Americans, giving Trump and Miller free rein to do as they pleased. In actuality, there is no way to execute an immigration crackdown in a way that spares ordinary citizens — that shields their families and keeps their communities intact. And so with each ICE arrest comes a new story: an immigrant parent torn from his citizen child; an undocumented business owner whose arrest threatens the livelihoods of his employees; lawmakers detained for the apparent offense of asking questions of ICE agents.

The result is a growing number of Americans who have turned against the White House out of anger and outrage over what they see as overreach. . . . . Even an autocratic president needs public opinion on his side, if only to stave off the opposition of his political opponents. You can imagine (or, well, you could imagine, if you worked at it) a more strategic Trump who understood the risk to his political project. This Trump might pivot away from his immigration crackdown to more favorable ground. He might recede to the background to work on consolidation: securing his wins while preparing for the next offensive.

Other than some slight waffling on ICE activity at farms and hotels, the actually existing Trump has done the opposite. His response to the failure of this past weekend — and the overall unpopularity of his project — has been to push the throttle even further. More threats, more arrests, more crackdowns in more cities . . . . There is every reason to think that this doubling-down will drive the public even further from the administration, and there is every reason to think that the White House will then triple-down in response. Some of this is no doubt explained by both the stubborn arrogance of Donald Trump and the blinkered monomania of Stephen Miller.

The only thing the White House seems to want, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, is for the American people to cease to call the crackdown wrong, and join them in calling it right. I do not think they’ll get their wish.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Federal Judge Calls Out Trump Regime Discrimination Against Minorities

Project 2025 - which the Felon's regime is implementing - is all about white supremacy and taking the nation backward in time to the 1950's where white "Christians" totally dominated American society and enjoyed unchallenged privilege.  Jim Crow was still the law in the South and gays remained invisible.  With endless attacks on DEI and things labeled "woke", the Felon's regime wants to bring back that era. Indeed, many of the funding cuts pushed by the Felon, DOGE and RFK Jr. have targeted racial minorities and the LGBT community, including severe cuts to medical research and efforts to improve health care .  In a stunning ruling, a Ronald Reagan appointed federal judge calls out this bigotry and discrimination in stinging language as he cancels cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Kudos to the judge for calling out deliberate bigotry and supporting the rule of law rather than diktats by a would be dictator and his minions.  A piece in Politico looks at the judge's stinging rebuke to Trump and his regime.  Here are highlights:

A federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan on Monday accused the Trump administration of “appalling” and “palpably clear” discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans.

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” said U.S. District Judge William Young, a Massachusetts-based jurist who took the bench in 1985.

Young’s sweeping rebuke during a court hearing was a reference to two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that led the National Institutes of Health to rescind funding for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Though Young said he was uncertain whether he had the power to block the executive orders themselves, he declared the NIH cuts Monday to be “illegal” and “void,” and he ordered the NIH to immediately restore the research funds. An appeal is likely.

“I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” the judge said. “That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.“

Young’s commentary was an extraordinary departure for a federal judge of any era even at a moment when Trump’s policies have been facing stiff resistance in the courts.

Trump swept into office in part on his promise to withdraw government support for programs he deems supportive of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives as well as any he claims support “gender ideology extremism.” The orders led to a governmentwide crackdown on funding for programs and research related to minority communities — and has spawned a long list of lawsuits calling the abrupt cuts illegal.

Young isn’t the first Reagan-appointed judge to take issue with the Trump administration. Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to relocate transgender women to men’s prisons, and he has used his perch to defend the courts against criticisms from Trump and his allies. In similarly memorable remarks from the bench, Judge John Coughenour, based in Seattle, accused Trump of viewing the rule of law as an “impediment” to his priorities.

Judges have routinely and repeatedly found that the administration’s race to terminate contracts, dismantle agencies and deport immigrants has been tainted by illegality and violations of due process, but few have mounted such a broad-based rejection of the administration’s policies themselves.

“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Young said. “The Constitution will not permit that. … Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

The Justice Department has contended that its efforts to cut research grants — and many other programs and agencies — were simply a reflection of the new Trump administration’s policy priorities, reflected in Trump’s executive orders and unreviewable by the courts.

But Young said the administration made virtually no effort to push back on claims that the cuts were discriminatory. “We’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community,” he said. “That’s appalling.”

Young’s comments came after he ordered the Trump administration to restore hundreds of scientific grants the National Institutes of Health terminated earlier this year. His order came as part of a lawsuit from more than a dozen state attorneys general and advocacy groups for public health researchers that alleged the grant terminations were haphazard and discriminatory.

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore rather than seriously examine biological realities. … It is an improvement to eliminate these,” DOJ lawyer Thomas Ports Jr. said during the hearing.

Young pressed the DOJ for an explanation: “Where’s the support for that? … I’m asking you [to] just explain to me ‘often used to support unlawful discrimination.’ I see no evidence of that.”

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

In Minnesota, Political Violence Rears Its Ugly Head

In the early morning hours yesterday a seemingly right wing evangelical, anti-ag, anti-abortionist assassinated a Minnesota Democrat representative and her husband and seriously wounded a Minnesota Democrat senator.  The shooter is still at large and police found a manifesto and hit list of other Democrat office holders and abortion providers. In some ways it's a wonder that such political violence has not occurred before now given how the Felon constantly signals that violence against his political foes and critics is not only acceptable but welcomed.  The Fox News echo chamber amplifies the dangerous rhetoric and willingly joins the demonization of Democrats and liberals and progressive using derogatory terms like communists, human scum, enemies of the people - the list goes on and on. Gays are constantly depicted as predators and a danger to children even though those arrested for actual sexual abuse crimes are more likely to be right wing pastors and youth ministers rather than gays or drag queens.  In short, the goal of many on the political right is to dehumanize those who are not white "Christians" with a subtle message that violence is fine. Meanwhile, talented individuals who would be wonderful public servants will be even more reluctant to run for office and put themselves and their loved ones at risk.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon is making more violence more likely:

Early this morning, a gunman apparently impersonating a police officer targeted two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers in their homes. First, he shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, who were seriously wounded. Law-enforcement officials believe the same gunman then shot Melissa Hortman, who served as Minnesota’s speaker of the House from 2019 to 2024. She was killed, along with her husband, Mark.

In September 2023, shortly after Donald Trump yet again encouraged direct political violence against his opponents, I wrote this: “As a political scientist who studies political violence across the globe, I would chalk up the lack of high-profile assassinations in the United States during the Trump and post-Trump era to dumb luck … Eventually, all luck runs out.”

That luck has now run out, in an idyllic Minneapolis suburb. . . . . The gunman reportedly had a manifesto and a list of targets that included the names of other Minnesota politicians as well as abortion providers in the state. Law-enforcement authorities intercepted but were not able to arrest the alleged shooter shortly after Hortman was assassinated. Had they not, it’s possible that he would have made his way to the homes of other Minnesota officials, trying to murder them too.

Political violence—and assassinations in particular—are notoriously difficult to predict, precisely because the violence is often carried out by “lone wolf” attackers. Just one deranged zealot is sufficient to carry out an act of consequential violence. In a country of 340 million people and even more guns, there will always be a small pool of potential killers eager to wreak havoc on the political system.

[T]hree key factors stand out [in the United States]: easy access to deadly weapons, intense polarization that paints political opponents as treasonous enemies rather than disagreeing compatriots, and incitements to political violence from high-profile public figures. When you combine those three social toxins, the likelihood of political violence increases, even as it remains impossible to predict who will be targeted or when attacks might be carried out.

Because they are rare, randomness plays a role in these instances, and many perpetrators are mentally unwell. But consider this comparison. Although we can’t say that climate change caused a specific hurricane, we know that climate change produces stronger hurricanes. Similarly, we may not be able to draw a direct link from rhetoric to a specific act of violence, but we do know that incitements to violence make killings more likely.

The United States has repeatedly refused to do anything about easy access to deadly weapons, despite having, by far, the highest rate of mass killings among developed democracies. As a result, the only feasible levers are reducing polarization and stopping high-profile incitements to commit violence. Instead, during the Trump era, polarization has sharply increased. And over the past decade, Trump himself has been the most dangerous political actor in terms of routinely inciting violence against his opponents, including against specific politicians who could become assassination targets.

Such incitements matter. When a person with a massive public platform spreads information that encourages violence, attacks become more likely.

From the beginning of his first campaign for president, Trump encouraged supporters to beat up hecklers at his rallies, saying he’d cover their legal bills if they “knock the crap” out of them. He floated the ideas of shooting looters, shooting shoplifters, and shooting migrants crossing the border. Trump also targeted the press, sharing a variety of violent memes involving specific outlets. He endorsed Greg Gianforte, now the governor of Montana, specifically because he violently attacked a reporter.

Trump’s rhetorical incitements to violence extend to politicians too. He has called his political opponents “human scum.” Even more worrying are Trump’s endorsements of violence against specific Democrats. In 2016, he suggested that maybe there was something that “Second Amendment people” could do to deal with Hillary Clinton. In October 2022, when a QAnon disciple who had peddled Trump’s lies about the 2020 election attempted to assassinate then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—and fractured the skull of her husband, Paul, with a hammer—Trump made light of the incident. . . . Less than a year later, Trump openly mused that Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be killed.

When such language becomes normalized, deranged individuals may interpret rhetoric as marching orders. In 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a die-hard Trump supporter, mailed 16 pipe bombs to people who frequently appeared as targets in Trump’s tweets. (Nobody died, but only because Sayoc wasn’t skilled at making bombs.) In 2020, Trump tweeted that people should “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” in response to its COVID policies. Thirteen days later, armed protesters entered the state capitol building. A right-wing plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was narrowly foiled months later.

It also matters that Trump is one of the biggest vectors for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation in the United States. When a major political figure disseminates lies about shadowy plots and treasonous acts carried out by the “human scum” on the other side of the aisle, that can increase the likelihood of violence.

Trump often makes a brief show of condemning political violence—as he has with the killings in Minnesota. While trying to play both the arsonist and the firefighter on social media, his actions in power make clear where his true loyalties lie, sending much stronger signals. One of his first official acts at the start of his second term was to pardon or grant clemency to people convicted for their involvement in the January 6 riots, including those who had violently attacked police officers and were targeting lawmakers. In recent weeks, Trump has floated the possibility of pardoning the far-right zealots who sought to kidnap Governor Whitmer in Michigan. The message is unmistakable: Use violence against my political opponents and there may be a pardon waiting.

[O]nly one party is led by someone who uses his megaphone to routinely normalize and absolve acts of political violence. There is overwhelming evidence of this asymmetric rhetoric between those in party leadership.

The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism. Cheap weapons of mass murder are readily available. And into that tinderbox, Trump adds incendiary rhetoric. We don’t know when or where the deadly conflagration will strike next, but more flames will no doubt come. We may still be shocked by tragic acts of political violence like the assassination in Minnesota, but we can no longer feign surprise.

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