Amid Legacies of Colonial and Anti-Trans Harm, Two-Spirits Struggle for Safety

This Trans Day of Remembrance, we are holding Nex Benedict and all Two-Spirit people in our hearts.

By Desiree Kane & Jen Byers , 

Truthout

November 20, 2024

People gather outside the Stonewall Inn for a memorial and vigil for Oklahoma teenager, Nex Benedict, who died after being bullied in a high school bathroom, on February 26, 2024, in New York City.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Nex Benedict was a Tulsa-area teen of Choctaw descent. His friends described him as an “adventurous little thing” who had a flair for creating art with a sense of ease. They called him “Roachie,” and he was loved.

After Nex’s death in February 2024, his portrait splayed across international news, vigils and social media posts. The picture shows Nex with deep brown eyes, short, loose brown curls grown out a little bit and a gentle smile. Nex has a crisp white shirt and black vest on. He looks like he’s dressed up for a dance or recital, at that cusp age of 16, when pre-teen clothes are out and quality vintage clothes become of interest.

On February 8, 2024, Nex collapsed and died at his home. The day before, he sustained a head injury during severe bullying at his school, Owasso High. The medical examiner ruled Nex’s passing a suicide after finding an antidepressant and an allergy medication in his system. This finding has been questioned repeatedly by local community members and national organizers.

“Regardless if it was caused by the fight or suicide, Nex died from bullying. Period,” said Olivia Carter, administrative coordinator for Oklahomans for Equality.

Nex’s death did not happen in a vacuum.

Related Story

Op-Ed |
LGBTQ Rights
Our Mourning for Nex Benedict Calls Us to Action Against Transphobia and Fascism
Nex Benedict, a gender-expansive teen in Oklahoma, died the day after enduring a beating in their high school bathroom.
By Kelly Hayes , TruthoutFebruary 23, 2024

In the immediate wake of his passing, a discourse erupted about anti-trans legislation, social neglect and health care inequity. But, in order to fully understand Nex’s death by bulling, this present history needs to be analyzed alongside histories ofthe boarding school system and the Indian Removal Act — policies that resulted in land theft, warfare, cultural genocide and widespread propaganda campaigns that stoked fear, dehumanization and colonial violence against Indigenous and Two-Spirit peoples.

Both the anti-trans campaigns and the boarding school system share a key component: the attempt of the far right United States political body to enforce a heteronormative, Christian identity on the public. And both the boarding school system and the anti-trans campaigns have yielded lethal results.

Since the introduction of anti-trans bathroom bills in 2015, anti-trans rhetoric and policy have been on the rise throughout the U.S. The increased vitriol against trans people has resulted in over 650 anti-2SLGBTQ+ (Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and additional sexual orientations and gender identities) policies being introduced in 2024 alone. As a high political watermark, the Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist Project 2025 paints a picture of the U.S. where transgender ideas are codified as “pornographic” and are thus minimized, if not eradicated, from public life.

Despite the majority of the U.S. population believing that trans people should be protected from discrimination, trans identities, culture and medical care have been used by the far right as an effective wedge issue in U.S. politics. This tactic of engaging a “hot-button” or controversial topic to drum up political fervor often includes pushing bigotry against a perceived mortal threat of “the other.”

This bigotry, often stoked by moral panic and misinformation, has been used to create support for policies that marginalize members of the public and restrict basic bodily autonomy. When enacted, othering policies limit, or even remove, the demonized community’s ability to get their basic needs (like gender-affirming care or a safe abortion) met above ground. Thus, these life-supporting services become less and less publicly available — especially to poor, Black, Indigenous, undocumented and/or rural communities.

This pattern (of social and political othering that results in the denial of material resources)is a key tactic of the violence that underpins settler colonialism in the U.S., and public institutions (like schools) are key enforcers of settler values. Thus, the history and impact of the settler-led school system on LGBTQ and Indigenous communities must be understood in order to fully unpack the broader circumstances surrounding Nex Benedict’s death.

Just Because It’s Legal Doesn’t Make It Right

Starting in 1819, the U.S. government instituted a sprawling schooling system consisting of 408 federal Indian boarding schools meant to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Made possible by legislation such as the Indian Removal Act, these schools aimed to assimilate Native children into settler society by forcibly removing them from their families and raising them in group homes.

These schools were often run by abusive, state-funded Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox Christian religious groups, and they operated for over 150 years. Shortly after this, many of the religious schools became state-run. Structurally, these schools enforced cultural genocide via the tactic of assimilation, which continues to severely and negatively affect young people — especially (but not exclusively) Native children.

“This suppression … is linked to the claiming and the colonization of space. I see a direct link,” said Taté Walker, a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, a Two-Spirit storyteller and co-founder of the Phoenix Two Spirit Community group. Walker is a well-respected Two-Spirit teacher and parent who educates on tribal issues, including how the modern U.S. school system is built on tactics from the boarding school era.

“Everyone who attends these schools is not receiving community wellness teachings, elder care, lessons about protecting the air and water,” Walker told Truthout. “We are not receiving information about how our past continually cycles itself. We’re not given information on how to prevent violent events from recurring — such as a kid [whose death] is deemed a suicide. It’s left at that ridiculously simplistic reasoning, when in fact it’s hundreds and hundreds of years of stochastic terrorism, transphobia, homophobia — all set up to make a violent environment for someone like Nex Benedict.”

Indigenous residential schools, whether run by the state or religious groups, were quite literally designed to strip away the languages, cultures and community structures of non-Christian peoples in order to make them more like European settlers. Children were forced to speak English, follow the Bible and live in church-sanctioned, cis-hetero, nuclear families. This forced assimilation is a key component of cultural genocide, and it is a clear violation of international law.

“It benefits the folks in power to keep down people with their own sense of power and medicine. They see beyond the status quo. They’re fighting for a society that recognizes justice and fights injustice, that all classes are able to exist,” Walker explained.

According to Native scholars, an estimated 40,000 Native children died in the boarding schools. In these schools, the administrators subjected children to consistent abuse, malnutrition, sexual assault, manual labor, beatings and neglect. Many children’s bodies were never returned to their families and were instead buried in unmarked, sometimes mass, graves. Hundreds, potentially thousands, of deaths were never reported at all, and innumerable family records were lost or destroyed. These graveyards can be visited all over the continent openly today.

In a 2022 report, the Bureau of Indian Affairs acknowledged that there is “inconsistent Federal reporting of child deaths, including the number and cause or circumstances of death, and burial sites.” Burial grounds at the boarding schools epitomize this deadly system. The bureau describes “The intentional targeting […] of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children to achieve the goal of forced assimilation of Indian people” as “both traumatic and violent.”

A recent 2024 Department of the Interior report confirmed that at least 973 Indigenous children died at the boarding schools in the United States and were buried in one of at least 74 mass graves. The schools cost the public the equivalent of $23 billion in today’s dollars.

This report, and a similar investigation in Canada, highlight the scale at which settler governments and religious groups used these institutions as tools of cultural genocide and violent relocation efforts. Through assimilation-centered education and punishment, paid for by public funding and encouraged by federal policy, school officials enforced settler culture. All of this happened at the expense of Indigenous children’s lives and safety.

President Joe Biden acknowledged the scale of these harms in October 2024 when he issued a formal apology on behalf of the U.S. government for the violence of the schools.

Many survivors of these schools argue that, historically, there has truly never been a culture of care and commitment to the survival of Indigenous, especially Two-Spirit, youth in settler-led schools. Many believe the violence of the boarding school era still resonates today.

A Living History of Violence

Nex Benedict was an Indigenous trans youth, and the settler system appears to have not changed much since 1819. Oklahoma, where Nex Benedict lived, had 95 Indigenous boarding schools — the most known of any state in the U.S. There were at least five in the Tulsa area near where he lived.

So, when the public asks, “How did this happen?” The answer is that lawlessness, forced assimilation and Indigenous death have always been critical facets of the settler school system.

In Nex’s case, this history manifested in 2024 through neglect and legislation-backed prejudice. Administrators failed to step in during the year of bullying Nex suffered. Anti-trans politics created a moral panic around bathroom use. The demonization of LGBTQ-inclusive educational materials stoked ignorance and a devaluation of lives like Nex’s. Collectively, the far right policies in the Oklahoma education system and all the adults who uphold them are responsible for the hostile environment that killed Nex.

Shortly before Nex’s death, a 12-year-old named Eli, a gay child from Oklahoma, also died by suicide following extensive bullying that his school repeatedly failed to address.

“We are told, ‘If you are bullied so badly, why don’t you fight back?’ and in the next breath, ‘If you wouldn’t have fought back, this never would have happened.’ We are forced to play a rigged game,” said an Owassa High alum at a school board meeting in mid-March. “Let me be very clear, we will not allow this to continue.”

In Oklahoma, advocacy groups like Freedom Oklahoma and the ACLU continue to offer educational, social and legal opposition to anti-trans policies and social bigotry. They offer community support groups, volunteer training and gatherings in order to build collective power and solidarity among LGBTQ folks and their allies. But they have their work cut out for them.

In the week immediately following Nex’s death, the national youth crisis line Rainbow Youth Project reported receiving a surge of at least 1,000 calls — with a 200 percent increase specifically from Oklahoma. Many callers reported that they, too, were being bullied.
Going Forward

“The history of how Oklahoma was founded in lawlessness is important. The violence in how the state itself was created is critical in understanding why and how the current climate is adversarial when it comes to the State of Oklahoma and the Tribes, Tribal people,” explained Rebecca Nagle, Two-Spirit Cherokee author of By the Fire We Carry. “The Tribal schools the Indigenous kids were taken out of taught literature, art and global languages. The government put [Indigenous children] into the state-run school system that the kids exist within today. The state was started with ruthless lawlessness, not arts and collaboration, at its beginning.”

The modern-day attacks on trans health care have, similarly, influenced public policy, despite ample scientific and social research supporting trans rights. This disparity — between known, proven research and the lawlessness of anti-trans hatred — reflects a deeper political misinformation crisis that seeks to further reduce the autonomy and freedoms of marginalized people. Similar to the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in the boarding schools, the current anti-trans push is an attempt to lethally enforce a culturally-specific political structure onto a group of people that, simply, does not agree with or wish to live within it.

From 2023-2024, the Trans Legislation Tracker shows that, in Oklahoma, anti-trans bills have increased 46.3 percent — from 41 to 60. Oklahoma is a major node of the national anti-trans campaign, with 4.5 times more anti-trans bills than the average state and 8.8 percent of all anti-trans bills introduced this year. These bills restrict health care, access to education, sports, medical care and other aspects of public life — and, in many ways, seem to be a clear attempt to eliminate a people as a people, a core component of the UN definition of genocide.

When asked what Indigenous Two-Spirit youth in Oklahoma should do — be visible or remain in the closet — Nagle reckons with a difficult reply.

“Coming out and being visible is a very personal decision. There’s no telling young people what to do when it’s something so personal,” Nagle explains. “It can be very dangerous. I also know from my own experience that it can also be very dangerous to stay in the closet. It’s a very personal and important decision, and the stakes are just so very high in Oklahoma.”

Desiree Kane
Desiree Kane is a Miwok descendant and multimedia journalist focused on producing stories with a conscience at the intersection of Indigenous peoples and the environment. Follow Desiree on Bluesky.


Jen Byers
Jen Byers (they/she) is a visual and investigative journalist. Their work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Showtime, CalMatters and elsewhere. Follow Jen on Bluesky.

'I’m not here to fight': First trans member of Congress responds to Johnson’s bathroom ban

WOMENS BATHROOMS HAVE CUBICLES FOR PRIVACY

MENS HAVE URINALS  AND 2 - 3 CUBICLES

Sarah McBride, Delaware state senator and candidate for United States Representative, is interviewed by Reuters in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., October 26, 2024. REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski

David Badash

November 20, 2024

U.S. Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride (D-DE) says she will “follow the rules” after Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson issued a ban on transgender women using women’s restrooms in the U.S. Capitol, a direct reaction to McBride becoming the first transgender member of Congress.

“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” McBride (photo, center), 34, a member of the Delaware state Senate, said in a statement. “Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”

“This effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me over the last several days, as l’ve remained hard at work preparing to represent the greatest state in the union come January. Serving in the 119th Congress will be the honor of a lifetime – and I continue to look forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

“Each of us were sent here because voters saw something in us that they value. I have loved getting to see those qualities in the future colleagues that I’ve met and I look forward to seeing those qualities in every member come January. I hope all of my colleagues will seek to do the same with me.”

McBride’s comments followed a wave of targeted attacks on social media and in the news by U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC). Reports indicate that Mace posted over 260 messages on social media within 36 hours, specifically targeting McBride and transgender women more broadly.

Among them, a video in which Mace declared she will file legislation to make the ban on transgender women using women’s restrooms a national ban for all federal properties.

Speaker Johnson on Tuesday had insisted he was not interested in implementing any new rules, and was “not going to engage in this.”

“We don’t look down upon anyone,” he proudly told reporters, before adding, “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman.”

Twenty-four hours later Johnson issued his ban.

“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings – such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms – are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson’s statement reads. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he concluded, not offering the same claim for men.

While Mace led the attacks against McBride and transgender people in general, Huffpostreports, “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) even suggested she would physically fight McBride for using the ladies’ room.”

Mace also waged her campaign against McBride in the news media, telling Forbes that the Congresswoman-elect was “absolutely” a “threat” to her personally. She claimed, “any man who wants to force his junk into the bathroom stall next to me or in a dressing room watching me, that is an assault on women.”

Forbes also notes, “McBride has never been accused of sexual misconduct or any kind of threatening behavior.”

The South Carolina Republican’s baseless allegations against McBride come just a few years after Mace began her congressional career by claiming to be pro-LGBTQ.

“I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” Mace said in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.”

“I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ,” she added. “Understanding how they feel and how they’ve been treated is important. Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime.”

Mace, as Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman reports, is also fundraising off her attacks.



Watch the video above or at this link.

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LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Gay Old Communists

SPACE/COSMOS

Opinion - Can Jim Bridenstine rescue NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission?

Mark R. Whittington, opinion contributor

THE HILL
Sun 27 October 2024 


Ever since resigning from his post as NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine has been working as a consultant and occasional public speaker in his beloved Tulsa, Okla. He has not made a lot of news.

That all changed when NASA appointed Bridenstine to chair a Mars Sample Return strategy review team. The team will assess the various proposals to return geologic samples from Mars for study on Earth.

The Mars Sample Return mission was a NASA project to retrieve geological samples on Mars that have been collected and stored by the Mars Perseverance rover. In June 2023, as reported by Ars Technica, the costs of the mission had started to balloon from $4.4 billion to $10 billion. The Senate was not amused and capped the project at $5.3 billion on the pain of seeing the mission canceled entirely.

At the time, I suggested NASA seek help from the private sector to see if the Mars samples could be returned cheaper than estimated. The space agency went in that direction and requested proposals.

NASA let out several study contracts in June, with another added in October. The group is an eclectic one; including commercial space companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, as well as the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, among others.

Before he ascended to be head of NASA, Bridenstine’s experience ranged from service as a naval aviator, business and finally, politics. He was the first elected official to be nominated as NASA administrator, a fact that became a point of contention during his confirmation hearings.

Nevertheless, Bridenstine is considered one of the greatest heads of NASA ever to serve in that role. He got the Artemis return to the moon program started and sold it to both sides of the aisle. Bridenstine’s efforts were so successful that Artemis was one of the few Trump-era programs to have been adopted by President Biden when he assumed office.

The task of sifting through the various proposals to go to Mars, collecting samples and returning them to the Earth will be a difficult one. The mission involves a 100 million mile voyage taking at least six months, landing on a planet with one-third of Earth’s gravity and a thin atmosphere, then collecting and loading the samples and blasting off to return to Earth.

Without a close examination of the options, the casual observer night conclude that SpaceX has the better case. After all, Elon Musk has boasted that he will be able to send his enormous Starship rocket to Mars uncrewed in two years, and then with people two years after that. Even if he’s off by a few years, Starship could provide a lot of capacity for a Mars Sample Return mission.

The mandate for Bridenstine’s team is not to select an option but to evaluate all of them and report the results by the end of 2024. According to Space News, six of the proposals are end-to-end plans for the Mars Sample Return while the rest examine particular aspects of the mission such as the size of the Mars Ascent vehicle. NASA’s leadership will select the final option for the mission.

After Bridenstine finishes assessing the Mars Sample Return program what is next for him? By the time his team is finished, a new president will have been elected and will be staffing his or her new administration.

If Trump is elected, the temptation to recall Bridenstine to the colors and offer him his old job at NASA back will be overwhelming. All will depend on whether Trump makes the offer and Bridenstine accepts, neither of which is certain.

If Bridenstine becomes administrator of NASA again, his first task would be to get the Artemis program on track. The program has been beset with cost overruns and schedule slippages all too common with big NASA projects such as the International Space Station, the James Webb Space Telescope and Mars Sample Return.

Artemis remains popular, but the first cracks are appearing.

In Bloomberg Magazine, Michael Bloomberg called for the program’s cancellation and the end of any thought of human spaceflight to the moon and Mars. Someone needs to get control of Artemis, revamp it, and get it moving again. Otherwise, it may go the way of the last two post-Apollo space exploration programs.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 

Nasa spots shocking ‘green spots’ on Mars

Andrew Griffin
Mon 28 October 2024 at 4:26 pm GMT-6·1-min read


NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image, a nighttime mosaic of the Malgosa Crest abrasion patch at “Serpentine Rapids,” using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Nasa has found shocking “green spots” on Mars.

On Earth, those spots can be a mark of the activity of microbes. Nasa cautioned that there is nothing to indicate the same is happening on Mars – but noted that it was an interesting and unexpected feature in the rock that could be an important find on the planet.

The discovery was made when the Perseverance rover scraped away at a bit of the rock on the Martian surface. The 5 centimetre patch that it left showed what Nasa called a “striking array” of colours in the rock, with white, black and green patches.

One of the biggest surprises was the dark green coloured spots that were found in the patch. They are made up of dark-toned parts with fuzzy and light-green rims around them.

On Earth, we have red rocks that are made that colour from oxidised ion, which is the colour of rust or the red in our blood. In similar rocks to those on Mars, green spots of this kind can be seen, and form when water runs through the sediment before it hardens into rock, which changes the chemical reaction and leaves behind a different, green colour chemical.

Microbes are sometimes involved in that process on Earth. But it can also happen for other reasons, including interactions between sulphur and iron that don’t need microbial life.

Nasa did not have enough space to place Perseverance’s other instruments on top of the green patches to better understand their composition. It remains a “mystery”, Nasa noted.

But the space agency will continue to look for similar and unexpected features in the Martian rock, in the hope that it can explore them and perhaps find hints of alien life.

Justice Department opens cold-case investigation into 1921 Tulsa race massacre

Attorney for living survivors of racist massacre says federal report will set the record straight for the ‘largest crime scene in the history of this country’

Alex Woodward

More than 100 years later, the federal government is opening an investigation into a white mob’s destruction of a bustling Black neighborhood and the massacre of dozens of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Department of Justice is reviewing the attack under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which empowers the federal government to reopen civil rights-related cold cases, named after the Black teenager who was abducted and lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.

The probe comes roughly four months after Oklahoma’s highest court rejected a decades-in-the-making lawsuit filed by the racist massacre’s two remaining survivors who have demanded justice in its ongoing aftermath. No one was ever charged with a crime for the two-day attack within the decades that followed.

Justice Department announces criminal charges in Russian interference campaign

“We acknowledge descendants of the survivors, and the victims continue to bear the trauma of this act of racial terrorism,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said on Monday.

Federal investigators do not expect to criminally prosecute any living perpetrators, but the Justice Department will be “examining available documents, witness accounts, scholarly and historical research and other information on the massacre” for a report “analyzing the massacre in light of both modern and then-existing civil rights law,” according to Clark.

That report is expected by the end of the year.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, announced a federal investigation into the Tulsa race massacre on September 30 (AP)

On May 31, 1921, in Tulsa’s thriving “Black Wall Street” of Greenwood, an armed white mob deputized by law enforcement fired indiscriminately on Black Americans in the street.

According to witness accounts and limited news coverage of the attack, planes dropped flaming turpentine-soaked rags and dynamite, and the bodies of Black victims were thrown into the Arkansas River or into mass graves. Survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and detained in internment camps.

The mob torched and looted homes and businesses, including restaurants, hotels, theaters and a newspaper’s office. A truck mounted with a machine gun fired on Mount Zion Baptist Church before it was burned to the ground.

A lawsuit from Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 – who were small children during the attack – continued even after the death of Fletcher’s brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who was also a plaintiff before dying at age 102 last year.

“It only took 103 years, but this is a joyous occasion, a momentous day, an amazing opportunity for us to make sure that what happened here in Tulsa is understood for what it was: the largest crime scene in the history of this country,” attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons said from Tulsa on Monday.

“The dead cannot cry out for justice,” added Tiffany Crutcher, a descendant of massacre survivors. “It is our duty, as the living, to do so for them.”

They Eat Humans, Don’t They?

John G. Russell

 September 24, 2024
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An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.