A new LGBTQ+ nightclub has opened its doors in downtown Orlando, right in time for Pride celebrations during the city’s annual parade and festival.Anthem, located in the heart of downtown, is meant to be a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community and to add to the city’s nightlife scene.Owners Michael Vacirca and Emmanuel Quiñones, who are also fiancées, said it has been a years-long dream for the pair to open a LGBTQ+ nightclub after meeting at another Downtown nightclub.”The LGBT community has been losing spaces all over the city, and now we have a brand new one,” Vacirca said. Anthem is in the former “Saddle Up” space and had its grand opening on Pride weekend.Both said it was a journey getting to this point, obtaining the needed permits, etc. “Anthem is for you to feel free, be seen, dance like no one is around you, and you can express yourself,” Quiñones said.”It’s just bringing the heart back to Orlando.” Vacirca and Quiñones said they plan to hold community events and skills workshops.”We want to make sure we level up the community together. We want to make sure we’re bringing everybody to a better place, a better future,” Vacirca said.The hope is that Anthem is more than just a club, but also a home for Central Florida’s LGBTQ+ community.”It’s just our queer people, they need it. They sometimes feel they are alone, they don’t have a friend, they don’t have a home. When they walk through those doors, that’s what we want them to feel. We want them to feel that love and you’re welcome.”
ORLANDO, Fla. —
A new LGBTQ+ nightclub has opened its doors in downtown Orlando, right in time for Pride celebrations during the city’s annual parade and festival.
Anthem, located in the heart of downtown, is meant to be a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community and to add to the city’s nightlife scene.
Owners Michael Vacirca and Emmanuel Quiñones, who are also fiancées, said it has been a years-long dream for the pair to open a LGBTQ+ nightclub after meeting at another Downtown nightclub.
“The LGBT community has been losing spaces all over the city, and now we have a brand new one,” Vacirca said.
Anthem is in the former “Saddle Up” space and had its grand opening on Pride weekend.
Both said it was a journey getting to this point, obtaining the needed permits, etc.
“Anthem is for you to feel free, be seen, dance like no one is around you, and you can express yourself,” Quiñones said.
“It’s just bringing the heart back to Orlando.”
Vacirca and Quiñones said they plan to hold community events and skills workshops.
“We want to make sure we level up the community together. We want to make sure we’re bringing everybody to a better place, a better future,” Vacirca said.
The hope is that Anthem is more than just a club, but also a home for Central Florida’s LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s just our queer people, they need it. They sometimes feel they are alone, they don’t have a friend, they don’t have a home. When they walk through those doors, that’s what we want them to feel. We want them to feel that love and you’re welcome.”
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HRC President Kelley Robinson is collaborating with local LBGTQ+ leadership and advocates to increase awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and raise the alarms for much needed organization and policy change in a wider effort to bring equality to every corner of the country.
Through coordinated initiatives, the American Dreams tour looks to push back against the unprecedented wave of attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, from bans on gender-affirming care and curriculum censorship to anti-trans legislation and HIV funding cuts.
The tour has made stops thus far in red-state cities where LGBTQ+ individuals are facing the most hostility, but where hope shines through the hate.
This included an Atlanta stop which coincidentally coincides with the Atlanta Pride Festival weekend. Robinson joined alongside a pioneer in the Black Trans community, activist, and actress, TS Madison, sat down for an intimate kitchen table conversation about the importance of HIV prevention, care, and PrEP.
Photo by Isaiag Singleton/The Atlanta Voice
The kitchen table conversation was held at Ts Madison’s Starter House, a home for formerly incarcerated transgender women.
Robinson said as the fight for equality marches forward, the American Dreams Tour aims to up light the important message that there isn’t just one American dream, but there are many.
“The American dream has never belonged to just one kind of person. It has been built by people who dared to demand more, by women who marched, by workers who organized by Black folks who bled for Freedom, and by LGBTQ+ people who refused to disappear,” Robinson said. “Every time this country has tried to erase us, and we rebuilt something bigger with our stories, our truth, and our refusal to be silent.”
Ts Madison says you have been on the wrong side of history, encouraging the erasure of Trans women.
“Every time issues like this come up when you try to eliminate and erase people, they do it. They’re doing it to trans people now, they did it to people living with HIV and AIDS, they did it to gay people and black women,” she said. “We know we got on the right side, and that’s why what we do is important.”
Also, the Fiscal Year 2026 budget released by the Trump administration, which maintains funding for existing domestic HIV care, treatment, and PrEP programs, cuts HIV prevention and surveillance at the CDC, housing, and other programs, amounting to cuts of over $1.5 billion.
Some of the conversation between Robinson and Ts Madison centered on the Trump administration’s policies targeting HIV funding, trans identity, and the broader implications for marginalized communities.
“They are only worried about power. They are not worried about anybody’s safety. They’re only worried about them being in power and their children’s children being in power,” TS Madison said.
The tour also coincides with the launch of HRC’s “One Million Voices for Equality,” a nationwide campaign to engage one million LGBTQ+ people and allies. Among the planned stops, each stop features training by HRC Foundation’s Voices for Equality storytelling program to help people harness their private experiences as tools for change.
Robinson reiterated that the Trump administration is taking the American people’s tax dollars and using them to bail out billionaires and the governments of other countries, taking away access to health care that people look for.
“$3 billion has been cut from HIV prevention care, from mental health services, from the 988 hotlines,” she said. “We’ve got to see what’s happening and know that it’s not just about policies and numbers. It’s about the impacts that we’re starting to see right now and today in our communities, from Atlanta to Chicago, and everywhere in between, the real enemy is our government.”
She also says the problem isn’t in your neighborhoods, and you can do something about the real problem by not putting certain people in power.
Additionally, Ts Madison says the starter house is extremely important because the girls who step inside the house must be themselves and love themselves.
“In this house, you must tell the girls that you are trans. We want you to live completely aloud because we want you to stand in resilience,” she said. “Do not fall into this place of you have to hide now, I need to be safe. You got to resist and the only way you’re going to get through anything is in numbers and resisting stuff by saying no, we’re not going to let that happen.”
With the current climate and the attempted erasure of black successful transgender people like Ts Madison, she says the Trump administration and anyone who opposes basic human rights are going to have a fight on their hands.
“They are going to have a fight on their hands because I am a girl who knows how to unify people, and I know how to unify by being real and by telling people to fight and not lay down because the only thing that’s laying down is the floor and you can walk all over the floor,” she said. “You got to be a thick wall.”
“It’s our job to protect our people. They’re coming after Black women, especially black Trans women, and we must see it for what it is. They are attacking our power and our community,” Robinson said. “There is a place for healing and for accountability, but we must stand up and not allow the wrongdoings take place. We have a voice.”
Madison and Robinson criticize the administration’s tactics, suggesting they aim to distract and divide people of color by scapegoating trans individuals.
Also, Robinson emphasizes the importance of unity, resistance, and visibility for trans and Black individuals, advocating for active engagement and accountability from elected officials. The conversation concludes with a call to instill hope and strength in the community.
Overall, this conversation about the importance of fighting back for LGBTQ+ rights are instilled in the hope of people, Ts Madison says.
The importance of this conversation, she says, is for the LGBTQ+ community to fight back against hate and instill awareness that things and laws are changing.
“If you watch TV long enough, you will be extremely afraid. I remember when he first got in office, and I was so afraid at first thinking I needed to get an SRS surgery so I could blend, but then I shook it and told myself I am who I am,” Madison said. “You don’t need to chop it off to get through because they’ll get you with a hole. What we need to do is stand in who we are and rally the truth and line the hands up to build a forceful wall against them.”
She also says some people might be silent or “stealthy” but that might only be safe momentarily.
“Being open, loud, and in color, and being strong brings numbers, builds walls, keeps things right, and that’s what matters,” she said.
Ts Madison says she would like the Trans community to understand their importance and that their existence is a part of activism and ethics.
“Do not be afraid to exist. Don’t let what you see on TV make you fearful. Do not fear. If you want to live in stealth, that’s great, but the more we speak out about us being trans, there’s power in immunity,” she said. “Go after your dreams. You are a gift to your families, and a prayer was answered.”
The American Dreams tour is a bold, nationwide initiative to spotlight LGBTQ+ resilience, resistance, and joy.
HRC President Kelley Robinson is collaborating with local LBGTQ+ leadership and advocates to increase awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and raise the alarms for much needed organization and policy change in a wider effort to bring equality to every corner of the country.
Through coordinated initiatives, the American Dreams tour looks to push back against the unprecedented wave of attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, from bans on gender-affirming care and curriculum censorship to anti-trans legislation and HIV funding cuts.
The tour has made stops thus far in red-state cities where LGBTQ+ individuals are facing the most hostility, but where hope shines through the hate.
This included an Atlanta stop which coincidentally co-inside with the Atlanta Pride Festival weekend. Robinson joined alongside a pioneer in the Black Trans community, activist, and actress, TS Madison, sat down for an intimate kitchen table conversation about the importance of HIV prevention, care, and PrEP.
The kitchen table conversation was held at Ts Madison’s Starter House, a home for formerly incarcerated transgender women.
Robinson said as the fight for equality marches forward, the American Dreams Tour aims to up light the important message that there isn’t just one American dream, but there are many.
“The American dream has never belonged to just one kind of person. It has been built by people who dared to demand more, by women who marched, by workers who organized by Black folks who bled for Freedom, and by LGBTQ+ people who refused to disappear,” Robinson said. “Every time this country has tried to erase us, and we rebuilt something bigger with our stories, our truth, and our refusal to be silent.”
Ts Madison says you have been on the wrong side of history, encouraging the erasure of Trans women.
“Every time issues like this come up when you try to eliminate and erase people, they do it. They’re doing it to trans people now, they did it to people living with HIV and AIDS, they did it to gay people and black women,” she said. “We know we got on the right side, and that’s why what we do is important.”
Also, the Fiscal Year 2026 budget released by the Trump administration, which maintains funding for existing domestic HIV care, treatment, and PrEP programs, cuts HIV prevention and surveillance at the CDC, housing, and other programs, amounting to cuts of over $1.5 billion.
Some of the conversation between Robinson and Ts Madison centered on the Trump administration’s policies targeting HIV funding, trans identity, and the broader implications for marginalized communities.
“They are only worried about power. They are not worried about anybody’s safety. They’re only worried about them being in power and their children’s children being in power,” TS Madison said.
The tour also coincides with the launch of HRC’s “One Million Voices for Equality,” a nationwide campaign to engage one million LGBTQ+ people and allies. Among the planned stops, each stop features training by HRC Foundation’s Voices for Equality storytelling program to help people harness their private experiences as tools for change.
Robinson reiterated that the Trump administration is taking the American people’s tax dollars and using them to bail out billionaires and the governments of other countries, taking away access to health care that people look for.
“$3 billion has been cut from HIV prevention care, from mental health services, from the 988 hotlines,” she said. “We’ve got to see what’s happening and know that it’s not just about policies and numbers. It’s about the impacts that we’re starting to see right now and today in our communities, from Atlanta to Chicago, and everywhere in between, the real enemy is our government.”
She also says the problem isn’t in your neighborhoods, and you can do something about the real problem by not putting certain people in power.
Additionally, Ts Madison says the starter house is extremely important because the girls who step inside the house must be themselves and love themselves.
“In this house, you must tell the girls that you are trans. We want you to live completely aloud because we want you to stand in resilience,” she said. “Do not fall into this place of you have to hide now, I need to be safe. You got to resist and the only way you’re going to get through anything is in numbers and resisting stuff by saying no, we’re not going to let that happen.”
With the current climate and the attempted erasure of black successful transgender people like Ts Madison, she says the Trump administration and anyone who opposes basic human rights are going to have a fight on their hands.
“They are going to have a fight on their hands because I am a girl who knows how to unify people, and I know how to unify by being real and by telling people to fight and not lay down because the only thing that’s laying down is the floor and you can walk all over the floor,” she said. “You got to be a thick wall.”
“It’s our job to protect our people. They’re coming after Black women, especially black Trans women, and we must see it for what it is. They are attacking our power and our community,” Robinson said. “There is a place for healing and for accountability, but we must stand up and not allow the wrongdoings take place. We have a voice.”
Madison and Robinson criticize the administration’s tactics, suggesting they aim to distract and divide people of color by scapegoating trans individuals.
Also, Robinson emphasizes the importance of unity, resistance, and visibility for trans and Black individuals, advocating for active engagement and accountability from elected officials. The conversation concludes with a call to instill hope and strength in the community.
Overall, this conversation about the importance of fighting back for LGBTQ+ rights are instilled in the hope of people, Ts Madison says.
The importance of this conversation, she says, is for the LGBTQ+ community to fight back against hate and instill awareness that things and laws are changing.
“If you watch TV long enough, you will be extremely afraid. I remember when he first got in office, and I was so afraid at first thinking I needed to get an SRS surgery so I could blend, but then I shook it and told myself I am who I am,” Madison said. “You don’t need to chop it off to get through because they’ll get you with a hole. What we need to do is stand in who we are and rally the truth and line the hands up to build a forceful wall against them.”
She also says some people might be silent or “stealthy,” but that might only be safe momentarily.
“Being open, loud, and in color, and being strong brings numbers, builds walls, keeps things right, and that’s what matters,” she said.
Ts Madison says she would like the Trans community to understand their importance and that their existence is a part of activism and ethics.
“Do not be afraid to exist. Don’t let what you see on TV make you fearful. Do not fear. If you want to live in stealth, that’s great, but the more we speak out about us being trans, there’s power in immunity,” she said. “Go after your dreams. You are a gift to your families, and a prayer was answered.”
San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert doesn’t generally agree with political parties redrawing congressional maps to gain power.
But after President Trump persuaded Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s maps in order to improve Republican chances of retaining control of Congress in 2026, Von Wilpert said she decided California’s only option was to fight back with new maps of its own, favoring Democrats.
There’s too much at stake for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized Californians to do otherwise, said Von Wilpert — who is bisexual and running to unseat Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, a Trump ally whose district in San Diego and Riverside counties will be redrawn if voters approve the plan.
“We can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and just hope that the far right will play fair or play by the rule book,” said Von Wilpert, 42. “If we don’t fight back now, I don’t know what democracy is going to be left for us to fight for in the future.”
San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, whose Southern California district would be redrawn if voters approve the redistricting plan of California Democrats.
They are running to counter those efforts, but also to resist other administration policies that they believe threaten democracy and equality more broadly, and to advocate around local issues that are important to them and their neighbors, said Elliot Imse, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute.
The institute, which has trained queer people on running for and holding political office since 1991, has already provided 450 people with in-person training so far this year, compared with 290 people all of last year, Imse said. It recently had to cap a training in Los Angeles at 54 people — its largest cohort in more than a decade — and a first-of-its-kind training for transgender candidates at 12 people, despite more than 50 applying.
“LGBTQ+ people have been extremely motivated to run for office across the country because of the attacks on their equality,” Imse said. “They know the risk, they know the potential for harassment, but those fears are really overcome by the desire to make a difference in this moment.”
“This isn’t about screaming we are trans, this is about screaming we are human — and showing that we are here, that we are competent leaders,” said Josie Caballero, voting and elections director at Advocates for Trans Equality, which helped run the training.
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington on March 26, 2025. The summit brings together policymakers and influencers to discuss important issues facing the crypto industry.
(Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Across the country
Queer candidates still face stiff resistance in some parts of the country. But they are winning elections elsewhere like never before — Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first out transgender member of Congress last year — and increasingly deciding to run.
Some are Republicans who support Trump and credit him with kicking open the political door for people like them by installing gay leaders in his administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Ed Williams, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ+ organization, said his group has seen “a surge in interest” under Trump, with “new members and chapters springing up across the country.” He said that “LGBT conservatives stand with President Trump’s fight for commonsense policies that support our schools and parents, put America first, and create opportunities for all Americans.”
Ryan Sheridan, 35, a gay psychiatric nurse practitioner challenging fellow Republican incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner for her House seat in Missouri, said Trump has made the Republican Party a “more welcoming environment” for gay people. He said he agrees with Trump that medical interventions for transgender youth should be stopped, but also believes others in the LGBTQ+ community misunderstand the president’s perspective.
“I do not believe that he is anti-trans. I do not believe he is anti-gay,” Sheridan said. “I understand the fear might be real, but I would encourage anybody that is deeply fearful to explore some alternative points of view.”
Many more LGBTQ+ candidates, however, are Democrats or progressives — and say they were driven to run in part by their disdain for Trump and his policies.
LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates listen to speakers at an LGBTQ+ Victory Institute training in downtown Los Angeles in September.
(David Butow / For The Times)
JoAnna Mendoza, a bisexual retired U.S. Marine, said she is running to unseat Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) because she took an oath to defend the U.S. and its values, and she believes those values are under threat from an administration with no respect for LGBTQ+ service members, immigrants or other vulnerable groups.
Mike Simmons, the first out LGBTQ+ state senator in Illinois, is running for the House seat of retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and leaning into his outsider persona as a gay Black man and the son of an Ethiopian asylum seeker. “I symbolize everything Donald Trump is trying to erase.”
Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who is a lesbian, said she is running for the House seat of the late Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), in a historically Black district being redrawn in Houston, because she believes “we need more gay people — but specifically Black gay people — to run and be in a position to challenge Trump.”
Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, who is running for Colorado treasurer, said it is critical for LGBTQ+ people — especially transgender people like her — to run, including locally. Trump is looking for ways to attack blue state economies, she said, and queer people need to help ensure resistance strategies don’t include abandoning LGBTQ+ rights.
“We’re going to be extorted, and our economy is going to suffer for that, and we’re going to have to withstand that,” she said.
Rep. Brianna Titone speaks during the general assembly at the Colorado State Capitol on April 23, 2025.
(AAron Ontiveroz / Denver Post via Getty Images)
Jordan Wood, who is gay, served as chief of staff to former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County before co-founding the Constitution-backing organization democracyFIRST. He’s now back in his native Maine challenging centrist Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.
Collins, who declined to comment, has supported LGBTQ+ rights in the past, including in military service and marriage, and has at times broken with her party to stand in Trump’s way. However, Wood said Collins has acquiesced to Trump’s autocratic policies, including in recent budget battles.
“This is a moment with our country in crisis where we need our political leaders to pick sides and to stand up to this administration and its lawlessness,” Wood said.
Candidates said they’ve had hateful and threatening comments directed toward them because of their identities, and tough conversations with their families about what it will mean to be a queer elected official in the current political moment. The Victory Institute training included information on how best to handle harassment on the campaign trail.
However, candidates said they also have had young people and others thank them for having the nerve to defend the LGBTQ+ community.
Kevin Morrison, a gay county commissioner in the Chicago suburbs who is running for the House seat of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who is running for Senate, recently had that experience after defending a transgender high school athlete at a local school board meeting.
Morrison said the response he got from the community, including many of the school’s alumni, was “incredibly positive” — and showed how ready people are for new LGBTQ+ advocates in positions of power who “lead from a place of empathy and compassion.”
Maebe Pudlo, 39, is an operations manager for the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition and an elected member of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council. She is also transgender, and running for the Central and East L.A. state Senate seat of María Elena Durazo, who is running for county supervisor.
Pudlo, who also works as a drag queen, said that simply existing each day is a “political and social statement” for her. But she decided to run for office after seeing policy decisions affecting transgender people made without any transgender voices at the table.
“Unfortunately, our lives have been politicized and trans people have become political pawns, and it’s really disgusting to me,” Pudlo said.
Like every other queer candidate who spoke to The Times, Pudlo, who has previously run for Congress, said her platform is about more than LGBTQ+ issues. It’s also about housing and healthcare and defending democracy more broadly, she said, noting her campaign slogan is “Keep Fascism Out of California.”
Still, Pudlo said she is keenly aware of the current political threats to transgender people, and feels a deep responsibility to defend their rights — for everyone’s sake.
“This whole idea of rolling back civil rights for trans people specifically — that should be concerning for anybody who cares about democracy,” Pudlo said. “Because if they’ll do it to my community, your community is next.”
Former Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton speaks at a training event for LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates in L.A. in September. Also in the photo are, from left, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund President Evan Low, West Hollywood City Councilmember Danny Hang, Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish and Virginia state Sen. Danica Roem.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Juan Camacho, a 44-year-old Echo Park resident also running for Durazo’s seat, said he feels a similar responsibility as a gay Mexican immigrant — particularly as Trump rolls out the “Project 2025 playbook” of attacking immigrants, Latinos and LGBTQ+ people, he said.
Brought to the U.S. by his parents as a toddler before becoming documented under President Reagan’s amnesty program, Camacho said he understands the fear that undocumented and mixed-status families feel, and he wants to use his privilege as a citizen now to push back.
Veteran California legislative leader Toni Atkins, who has long been out and is now running for governor, said the recent attacks on LGBTQ+ and especially transgender people have been “pretty disheartening,” but have also strengthened her resolve — after 50 years of LGBTQ+ people gaining rights in this country — to keep fighting.
“It’s what it’s always been: We want housing and healthcare and we want equal opportunity and we want to be seen as contributing members of society,” she said. “We have a responsibility to be visible and, as Harvey Milk said, to ‘give them hope.’”
America’s already roiling debate around transgender rights sharply escalated in recent days after Charlie Kirk — one of the nation’s most prominent anti-transgender voices — was fatally shot by a suspect whose life and social circles have been meticulously scrutinized for any connection to the transgender community.
Taking over Kirk’s podcast Monday, top Trump administration officials suggested they are gearing up to avenge Kirk by waging war on left-leaning organizations broadly, despite law enforcement statements that the shooter is believed to have acted alone. Queer organizations took that as a direct threat.
Kirk railed against transgender rights in life, and just prior to being shot on a Utah college campus last week was answering a question about the alleged prevalence of transgender people among the nation’s mass shooters — an idea he had personally stoked, despite pushback from statistical researchers.
Those circumstances seemed to prime the resulting outrage among his conservative base to be hyper-focused on any transgender connection.
The connection was further stoked when the Wall Street Journal reported on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report that suggested — seemingly erroneously — that etchings on bullet casings found with the rifle suspected as being used in the shooting included transgender “ideology.”
It was further inflamed when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that suspect Tyler Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner — who he said was “shocked” by the shooting and cooperating with authorities — is currently transitioning.
Leading conservative influencers, some with the ear of President Trump, have openly called for a retribution campaign against transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly. Laura Loomer called transgender people a “national security threat,” said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY,” and said that Trump should make transitioning illegal.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, meanwhile, have condemned such generalizations and attacks on the community and warned that such rhetoric only increases the likelihood of more political violence — particularly against transgender people and others who have been demonized for years, including by Kirk.
“The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile & dangerous,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of California’s leading LGBTQ+ voices, wrote on social media. “First they try to say the shooter might be trans & WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism & truly disgusting.”
Many political leaders have called for calm, and for people to wait for the investigation into the suspect’s motivations before jumping to conclusions or casting blame. Cox has said that Robinson’s political ideology, different from that of his conservative family, appeared to be “part of” what drove him to shoot Kirk, but that the exact motivations for the crime remained unclear.
“We’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”
Searching for a connection
Officials were expected to release charging documents against Robinson on Tuesday that could contain more information about a motive. However, the debate has hardly waited.
Both the political right and left have searched for evidence connecting Robinson to their opposing political camp.
One of the first pieces of information to catch fire was the ATF reporting on the bullet etchings including transgender “ideology” — which turned out to be untrue, according to Cox’s later description of those etchings. That reporting immediately inspired condemnations of the entire transgender community.
“Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said in a Rumble livestream Thursday.
On Friday morning, President Trump said “vicious and horrible” people on the left were the only ones to blame for the political violence. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump was asked Monday afternoon if he thought the suspect acted alone.
“I can tell you he didn’t work alone on the internet because it seems that he became radicalized on the internet,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And he was radicalized on the left, he is a left. A lot of problems with the left and they get protected and they shouldn’t be protected.”
The ATF declined to comment on the leaked report. The Wall Street Journal published an editor’s note walking back its reporting, noting that Cox’s description of the etchings included no references to the transgender community.
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group, responded to the uproar by criticizing the Wall Street Journal for publishing unsubstantiated claims that fueled hateful rhetoric toward the transgender community.
“This reporting was reckless and irresponsible, and it led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers — and a resulting wave of terror for a community that is already living in fear,” the group said.
Spreading the narrative
The debate has heightened existing tensions around transgender rights, which Trump campaigned against and targeted with one of his first official acts — an executive order that said his administration would recognize only “two genders, male and female.”
He and his administration have since banned transgender people from military service, blocked the issuance of U.S. passports with the gender-neutral X marker, threatened medical providers of gender-affirming care for minors, and sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports.
In September, the Department of Justice also reportedly began weighing a rule that would restrict transgender individuals from owning firearms — a move that came after a shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 18 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
That shooting led prominent conservatives, including senior Trump administration officials, to link gender identity to violence. National security advisor Sebastian Gorka claimed that an “inordinately high” number of attacks have been linked to “individuals who are confused about their gender” — a trend he claimed stretched back to at least 2023, when a transgender suspect shot and killed three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school.
After that shooting, Trump Jr. had said that “rather than talking about guns, we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender-affirming bull— on our kids,” and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, had said that “giving in” to ideas on transgender identities was “dangerous.”
After it was reported that Robinson’s partner is transitioning, Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X that “trans militants” pose a “very serious” threat to the country. Billionaire Elon Musk agreed, saying it was a “massive problem.”
Many in the LGBTQ+ community have strenuously pushed back against such claims, noting research showing most shootings are committed by cisgender men.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University has found that the majority of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by men, and less than 1% of such shootings in the last decade were by transgender people.
An analysis by PolitiFact found that data do not show claims that transgender people are more prone to violence, and that “trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender peers.”
A legacy amplified
Kirk espoused a Christian nationalist worldview and opposed LGBTQ+ rights broadly, including same-sex marriage. He called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.”
Just before he was shot at Utah Valley University, Kirk had said that “too many” transgender people were involved in shootings.
It was not the first time Kirk had addressed the issue.
Days after the 2023 shooting in Nashville, Kirk went after then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for unrelated comments denouncing a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state houses and saying the transgender community was “under attack.”
“It is the first shooting ever that I’ve seen where the shooter and the murderers get more sympathy than the actual victims,” he said, appearing to blame all transgender people for the attack.
The idea that liberals generally or members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically should be held accountable for Kirk’s killing has gained momentum in the days since. Vance and Trump advisor Stephen Miller seemed to allude to reprisals against left-leaning groups on Kirk’s podcast Monday, with Miller saying federal agencies will be rooting out a “domestic terror movement” on the left in Kirk’s name.
LGBTQ+ advocates called such rhetoric alarming — and said they worry it will be used as a pretext for the administration to ramp up its assault on LGBTQ+ rights.
Union leaders say a majority of the Oregon AFL-CIO membership have voted to pass a resolution endorsing and committing to help support the Equal Rights for All ballot measure. MGN image.
SEASIDE, OR – During the most recent Oregon AFL-CIO Convention, leaders say delegates from unions around the state voted to pass a resolution endorsing and committing to help support the Equal Rights for All ballot measure.The campaign for Equal Rights for All ballot initiative targets the November 2026 election.If successful, voters will be asked to update Oregon’s constitution to include language clarifying that everyone has equal rights to make private and personal decisions regardless of a person’s sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or if they are pregnant or seeking reproductive health care like IVF.
“Working people can’t always afford to pay out of pocket or travel long distances for healthcare. And each of us should be able to marry who we love, access the healthcare we need, and be who we truly are without fear of discrimination,” says Evelyn Kocher, a chief petitioner on the Equal Rights for All campaign. “We need to do everything we can to protect and affirm that each of us has these basic rights and freedoms. That’s why passing the Equal Rights for All measure matters for Oregon’s workers.”
The those behind the campaign must collect 156,231 signatures from Oregon voters to qualify for the November 2026 ballot, and have been seeking support for their efforts.
“We know that when we as workers do not have control over our own decisions and bodily autonomy, it affects our ability to work and organize effectively for the best working and living conditions,” Sarina Roher, Secretary-Treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO said. “We also know that the same forces attacking our reproductive, transgender and LGBTQ+ rights are the ones seeking to destroy our unions. Supporting the Equal Rights for All ballot initiative is a straightforward action we can take to protect our rights and build a stronger Oregon labor movement.”
AFL-CIO leadership puts membership in Oregon more than 300,000 people across 300 unions.
On April 15, about 60 or so Broadview Heights residents showed up to their City Council chambers, some heated, some empathetic.
All were focused on what they perceived to be a subject of prime importance: whether or not the town’s second Pride Fest should or should not happen on city property.
Most present, the Plain Dealer reported, were against the festival.
“We are Broadview Heights,” Robert Kilo, an organizer with the Center for Christian Virtue policy group, told Council. “We are not Lakewood. We are not Cleveland.” Citing religious beliefs, Kilo warned, “You try to cram this down our throats, we the people will have something to say.
“And tonight is just the beginning,” he added.
That festival, slated to go on from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on June 8, is being hosted by Broadview-Brecksville Heights Pride, an area nonprofit that formed in May 2022 as an anti-discrimination advocacy group for LGBTQ+ folk. Pride Fest, as the group advertises, is one its prime events to showcase its uniting mission.
But not without its difficulty. Though long threatened by religious extremists and hate groups, LGBTQ organizations have had to ramp up security plans and insurance policies in light of a more vocal opposition, from Proud Boys protesting drag in Chardon, to tension with evangelists at Cleveland’s own festival last June.
In Broadview Heights, a majority white suburb of 19,936, such vocal opposition to a Pride Fest has driven public confusion as to how some in such a seemingly peaceful town could reject such festival. Just as it has, for BBH Pride, for the underlying laws that have led to tension in the first place.
“You know, some organizations reached out to city council to kind of explain to them, ‘Hey, let’s understand the line between free speech and hate speech, and it’s fine that residents say, oh, I have a concern, or I don’t care for Pride Fest,” BBH Pride director Jennifer Speer told Scene.
“But the fact that they want to influence policy over this, and they are coming after the mayor?” she said. “That’s really bad.”
Counter-protestors outside Element 41 at a contentious drag brunch in Chardon last April. Tension between the LGBTQ community and hate groups has become more apparent in recent years.
Speer is talking about a 97-year-old statue that gives the Broadview Heights mayor—in this case, Mayor Sam Alai—the ability alone to say whether or not an event is hosted on city grounds. Because the city is co-sponsoring Pride Fest, Speer said, Mayor Alai was allowed to bypass any necessary council greenlight.
It’s seems to be why Vince Ruffa, the law director for Broadview Heights, expressed confusion at the April 15 meeting, as to why Pride Fest sparked a revisit to the longstanding laws.
“When it is a city sponsored or co-sponsored event it is an administrative function good, bad or indifferent, Council doesn’t vote on that,” Ruffa said, according to the minutes. “I have been the law director or almost 21 years we have never used that process for a city sponsored or co-sponsored event.”
On Thursday night, half of Broadview Heights City Council will be gathering at council chambers to entertain a possible change to that law, thus requiring council approval for future events held on city property.
As for BBH’s seminal Pride Fest last June, Speer recalled similar tones of opposition, mostly regarding the group’s choice to host it at Broadview Heights Middle School. (On a Saturday though, Speer said.) Despite one protestor, Speer said the event surpassed its mission. Six-hundred showed up. It was rated seventh best Pride Fest in Northeast Ohio.
“We’re talking dozens upon dozens of people have approached us since the last Pride Fest, and saying, ‘This has changed my outlook. This has changed my perspective,'” Speer said. “‘I now believe I might be able to stay in this town.'”
BBH’s festival on June 8, Speer said, will host a range of activities, from a feminist choir to flowerpot making and karaoke. There will also be vendors touting crochet or dog rescuing, along with four churches and one voter registration agency.
It all goes swimmingly as planned, Speer believes that this year’s Pride will help the nonprofit segue nicely into finishing, and distributing to City Hall, a city action plan that would act like a blueprint for how to train city employees, or teachers in the Brecksville-Broadview Heights School District, to better accommodate the LGBTQ population.
“If people would just come and meet their neighbors,” Speer said. “These lovely people work around you, they raise children around you.
“And guess what?” she added. “They attend church, too.”
After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.
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During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.
Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.
Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.
The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.
The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”
If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”
Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.
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The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.
The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”
The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.
One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”
The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)
The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.
The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.
“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”
In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”
“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”
Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.
In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.
Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.
It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.
It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.
Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.
All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.
Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A MAGA Judiciary.”
President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.
Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”
With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.
While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask “Who is on your side?”
The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.
But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.
“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”
But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)
“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”
My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.
More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”
Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.
The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”
When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”
To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”
Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.
Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.
The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.
To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”
The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has already been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.
About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those orders to expire; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
But “endgame” doesn’t mean “over”—and mpox will be with us for the foreseeable future. The U.S. outbreak is only now showing us its long and ugly tail: 15 daily cases is not zero daily cases; even as the number of new infections declines, inequities are growing. Black and Latino people make up a majorityof new mpox cases and are contracting the disease at three to five times the rate of white Americans, but they have received proportionately fewer vaccines. “Now it’s truly the folks who are the most marginalized that we’re seeing,” says Ofole Mgbako, a physician and population-health researcher at New York University. “Which is also why, of course, it’s fallen out of the news.” If the virus sticks around (as it very likely could), and if the disparities persist (as they almost certainly will), then mpox could end up saddling thousands of vulnerable Americans each year with yet another debilitating, stigmatized, and neglected disease.
At this point, there’s not even any guarantee that this case downturn will persist. “I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods,” says Sara Bares, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. Immunity, acquired through infection or vaccines, is now concentrated among those at highest risk, says Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. But researchers still don’t know how well those defenses can stave off another infection, or how long they might last—gaps in knowledge that may be tough to fill, now that incidence is so low. And although months of advocacy and outreach from the LGBTQ community have cut down on risky sexual activities, many cautionary trends will eventually reset to their pre-outbreak norm. “We know extensively from other sexually transmissible infections that behavior change is not usually the most sustained response,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University.
At the same time, this year’s mpox outbreaks are stranger and more unwieldy than those that came before. A ballooning body of evidence suggests that people can become infectious before they develop symptoms, contrary to prior understanding; some physicians are concerned that patients, especially those who are immunocompromised, might remain infectious after the brunt of visible illness resolves, says Philip Ponce, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the medical director of San Antonio’s Kind Clinic. (Some 40 percent of Americans who have been diagnosed with mpox are living with HIV.) Researchers still don’t have a good grip on which bodilyfluids and types of contact may be riskiest over the trajectory of a sickness. Cases are still being missed by primary-care providers who remain unfamiliar with the ins and outs of diagnosis and testing, especially in people with darker skin. And although this epidemic has, for the most part, continued to affect men who have sex with men, women and nonbinary people are getting sick as well, to an underappreciated degree.
Intel on the only mpox-fighting antiviral on the shelf, a smallpox drug called tecovirimat, also remains concerningly scant, even as experts worry that the virus could develop resistance. The treatment has been given a conditionalgreenlight for use in people who are currently, or at risk of becoming, severely sick. Anecdotally, it seems to work wonders, shaving days or weeks off the painful, debilitating course of symptoms that can send infected people into long-term isolation. But experts still lack rigorous data in humans to confirm just how well it works, Bares, who’s among the scientists involved in a nationwide study of the antiviral, told me. And although clinical trials for tecovirimat are under way, she added, in the U.S., they’re “struggling to enroll patients” now that infections have plummeted to such a sustained low. It’s a numerical problem as well as a sociocultural one. “The urgency with which people answer questions declines as case counts go down,” Varma told me.
Recent CDC reports show that a growing proportion of new infections aren’t being reported with a known sexual-contact history, stymieing efforts at contact tracing. That might in part be a product of the outbreak’s gradual migration from liberal, well-off urban centers, hit early on in the epidemic, to more communities in the South and Southwest. “In small towns, the risk of disclosure is high,” Bares told me. In seeking care or vaccination, “you’re outing yourself.” When mpox cases in Nebraska took an unexpected nosedive earlier this fall, “a colleague and I asked one another, ‘Do you think patients are afraid to come in?’” Those concerns can be especially high in certain communities of color, Ponce told me. San Antonio’s Latino population, for instance, “tends to be much more conservative; there’s much more stigma associated with one being LGBT at all, let alone being LGBT and trying to access biomedical interventions.”
Hidden infections can become fast-spreading ones. Monitoring an infectious disease is far easier when the people most at risk have insurance coverage and access to savvy clinicians, and when they are inclined to trust public-health institutions. “That’s predominantly white people,” says Ace Robinson, the CEO of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation, in Washington. Now that the mpox outbreak is moving out of that population into less privileged ones, Robinson fears “a massive undercount” of cases.
Americans who are catching the virus during the outbreak’s denouement are paying a price. The means to fight mpox are likely to dwindle, even as the virus entrenches itself in the population most in need of those tools. One concern remains the country’svaccination strategy, which underwent a mid-outbreak shift: To address limited shot supply, the FDA authorized a new dosing method with limited evidence behind it—a decision that primarily affected people near the back of the inoculation line. The method is safe but tricky to administer, and it can have tough side effects: Some of Titanji’s patients have experienced swelling near their injection site that lasted for weeks after their first dose, and now “they just don’t want to get another shot.”
The continued shift of mpox into minority populations, Robinson told me, is also further sapping public attention: “As long as this is centered in BIPOC communities, there’s going to be less of a push.” Public interest in this crisis was modest even at its highest point, says Steven Klemow, an infectious-disease physician at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and the medical director of Dallas’s Kind Clinic. Now experts are watching that cycle of neglect reinforce itself as the outbreak continues to affect and compress into marginalizedcommunities, including those that have for decades borne a disproportionate share of the burden of sexually associated infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV. “These are not the groups that necessarily get people jumping on their feet,” Titanji told me.
Some of the people most at risk are moving on as well, Robinson told me. In his community in Washington, he was disappointed to see high rates of vaccine refusal at two recent outreach events serving the region’s Black and American Indian populations. “They had no knowledge of the virus,” he told me. Titanji has seen similar trends in her community in Georgia. “There’s some sense of complacency, like, ‘It’s no longer an issue, so why do I need to get vaccinated?’” she said.
The tide seems unlikely to shift. Even tens of thousands of cases deep into the American outbreak, sexual-health clinics—which have been on the front lines of the mpox response—remain short on funds and staff. Although the influx of cases has slowed, Ponce and Klemow are still treating multiple mpox patients a week while trying to keep up the services they typically offer—at a time when STI rates are on a years-long rise. “We’re really assuming that this is going to become another sexually associated disease that is going to be a part of our wheelhouse that we’ll have to manage for the indefinite future,” Klemow told me. “We’ve had to pull resources away from our other services that we provide.” The problem could yet worsen if the national emergency declared in August is allowed to expire, which would likely curb the availability of antivirals and vaccines.
Rivers still holds out hope for eliminating mpox in the U.S. But getting from low to zero isn’t as easy as it might seem. This current stretch of decline could unspool for years, even decades, especially if the virus finds a new animal host. “We’ve seen this story play out so many times before,” Varma told me. Efforts to eliminate syphilis from the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, for instance, gained traction for a while—then petered out during what could have been their final stretch. It’s the classic boom-bust cycle to which the country is so prone: As case rates fall, so does interest in pushing them further down.
Our memories of public-health crises never seem to linger for long. At the start of this mpox outbreak, Titanji told me, there was an opportunity to shore up our systems and buffer ourselves against future epidemics, both imported and homegrown. The country squandered it and failed to send aid abroad. If another surge of mpox cases arrives, as it very likely could, she said, “we will again be going back to the drawing board.”
NEW YORK, March 30, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– MCCNY Charities, INC. one of the longest operating LGBTQIA+ homeless youth shelters and food pantries, has announced today that the organization will be operating under a new name and now will be known as Sylvia Rivera’s Place. This includes Sylvia’s Place, a homeless youth shelter and the Sylvia Rivera Memorial Food Pantry, as well as a clothing closet and various community programming.
This name change was a natural evolution of the services offered, as well as an homage to the founding and history of the organization, inspired by the work and vision of the late, great queer icon, Sylvia Rivera.
Along with this change, the organization has revealed a newly designed company logo and new website, which can be found at www.sylviariverasplace.com. “We hope this new name and website will help better share our services, and reflect our long-standing impact and relationship with the LGBTQIA+ Community in NYC,” says Michael Easterling, Acting Director.
For more information about the name change or to learn more about Sylvia Rivera’s Place please visit: www.sylviariverasplace.com
Michell Rebel Reyes, Sole Owner and President of REBELMC ENTERTAINMENT LLC, joins networking organization
Press Release –
updated: Feb 5, 2019
CHICAGO, February 5, 2019 (Newswire.com)
– The International Association of Women (IAW) recognizes Michell Rebel Reyes as a 2019-2020 Influencer. She is acknowledged as a leader in entertainment. The International Association of Women (IAW) is a global in-person and online networking platform with nearly one million members, 1000+ in person and virtual events, over 100 Local US based Chapters and International Chapters in several cities in China.
“I’m pleased to welcome Michell into this exceptional group of professional women,” said IPDN President and IAW Spokesperson Star Jones. “Her knowledge and experience in her industry are valuable assets to her company and community.”
A resident of Las Vegas, NV, Michell Rebel Reyes saw the need for an entertainment company that catered to the needs of women, particularly those in the LGBTQ community. “Here in Las Vegas, everything is mostly for men,” she said. “For example, there is not one LGBTQ women’s bar or a space for women to hold their events; everything has to be shared with the men and their spaces.”
So, two years ago, Ms. Reyes founded REBELMC ENTERTAINMENT LLC, which provides themed pool and club parties, venues for all functions, party buses to local areas, and more, for women. “I promote it as being a safe environment for women and one that does not exploit them,” she said. As the Sole Owner and President, Ms. Reyes is responsible for all aspects of the business, including customer service, sales, marketing and promotion.
“I am an MC (Mistress of All Events) and also a VJ/DJ,” she explained. “I am able to MC the events and also VJ/DJ the parties.” In addition to playing the music and showing music videos on a screen, Ms. Reyes ensures the correct sayings, such as personalized birthday greetings, flash across the screen as the video plays.
Although getting a company up and running is costly and a lot of work, Ms. Reyes is rewarded by the fact that she provides her clients with entertainment in a fun and safe environment. An active member of the LGBTQ community, she was a member of a committee in Chicago that brought the first Gay Games to the city. “I also started the Las Vegas Gay Chapter and got funding for it from one of the major credit card companies that I used to work for,” Ms. Reyes said. “I was also the VP of the Betty’s Outrageous Adventure, which is the largest LGBTQ women’s club here in Las Vegas with a membership of over 3,000 members. My future goal is to have the first LGBTQ women’s restaurant and nightclub in Las Vegas.”
Education: Wirral Metropolitan College, England
About IAW The International Association of Women (IAW) is a global in-person and online professional networking platform that provides nearly one million women the forum, professional development and services needed to thrive in an interconnected world. Through 100+ local chapters, International Chapters in several cities in China and 1000+ in person and virtual events, members cultivate valuable connections, develop professionally, and promote themselves and their businesses. Founded in Chicago in 2017, IAW is a division of Professional Diversity Network, Inc., an online network tailored to provide diverse professionals in the United States with access to employment opportunities.
Source: International Association of Professional Women
