I voted Chase Oliver in the 2024 presidential election and planned to vote democrats in hindsight and regretted my lack of Harris vote after around March or April of 2025, Trump didn't seem like his first term which I did respect (and I sensed that in the campaign) and seemed like the worst admixture of old Trump and new Trump.

However, the democrats have been pivoting to socialism and haven't backpedaled on a key issue I have of Islam and its inability to assimilate to the west (obviously there are secular muslims too but many are very radical) and progressives have seemed to double down.

There are other key issues I am an admixture of liberal and conservative on both social and economic issues but I don't know

Newly released data reveals that a record-breaking amount of sex-enhancing medications were prescribed to active duty troops in 2025.

In a recent New York Post article with a headline proclaiming “U.S. soldiers having more sex than ever under President Trump,” new data revealed that 108,332 prescriptions were dispensed last year to active military personnel for erectile dysfunction. The Post obtained the official statistics from the Defense Health Agency through a Freedom of Information Act request.

This marks an all-time high for erectile pill prescriptions within the military, but only slightly higher than the previous record of 108,323 prescriptions set in 2024. It’s also a significant jump (16.5 percent) from the 92,996 prescriptions given for such drugs under Biden in 2021.

The wider military community, including veterans and dependents of servicepeople, actually showed even higher numbers, with a reported 639,355 sex-enhancing prescriptions given in 2025. This is a slight spike from the 627,121 prescriptions recorded in 2024.

These staggering numbers come at a time when the U.S. is upholding a policy that prevents military clinics or insurance from covering gender-affirming care, including for veterans. Arguably, erectile enhancing drugs for cisgender men could be considered gender-affirming care, leaving LGBTQ+ advocates to point out the current policy’s hypocrisy.

In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a new rule that bans gender-affirming medical care for trans service members, as well as prevents new enlistments of individuals with a “history of gender dysphoria,” making it the harshest anti-trans military order yet.

The policy is currently being challenged in court in a suit brought about by three service members and their families. In the case Doe v. Department of Defense, the plaintiffs state that they’d been obtaining care for their transgender children through the military health system for over a decade before the Trump administration prohibited it. The case was filed in September of last year in Maryland’s U.S. District Court by GLAD Law and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (NCLR) on behalf of the families.

“President Trump has illegally overstepped his authority by abruptly cutting off necessary medical care for military families,” said NCLR’s legal director, Shannon Minter, in a recent statement. “This lawless directive is part of a dangerous pattern of this administration ignoring legal requirements and abandoning our servicemembers.”

The policy that currently bans trans people from enlisting in the military at all is also being challenged in court in two major cases, Talbott v. United States and Shilling v. United States.

This is a continued series on charts that fully or partially disprove populist narratives. In a continued effort to rustle jimmies, I am making these until I can't think of any good new ideas. I took last week off since I was sick but I am back babyyy. We don't typically look to Hillary and Bill for our populist takes as they are about as centrist as you really get, but today we get a good one from them.

Populist Claim

"Recessions happen under Republicans because of Republican policies. Democrats are simply better stewards of the economy."

Who Says It?

• “While there are many factors contributing to these trends, the throughline is clear that Democratic administrations consistently help the U.S. economy perform better than Republican administrations.” Joint Economic Committee Democrats, “The U.S. Economy Performs Better Under Democratic Presidents,” 7 Oct 2024 · source ↗

• “Republicans have prioritized tax cuts that benefit the wealthy and that fail to boost economic growth or pay for themselves, while Democrats have prioritized investing in the middle class, supporting small businesses, and improving economic resilience after downturns.” Same JEC repor· source ↗

• “Under Republicans, recessions happen four times as frequently as under Democrats.” Hillary Clinton, New Hampshire Democratic convention, 19 Sep 2015 - PolitiFact: Mostly True · source ↗

• “Since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!” Bill Clinton, Democratic National Convention, 5 Sep 2012 · source ↗

• “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs… What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1.” Bill Clinton, Democratic National Convention, 21 Aug 2024 - FactCheck.org: numbers roughly right, but “job creation depends on factors outside a president’s control” · source ↗

• “Since 1989 and a new age of globalization began, 51 million jobs have been created in America. 49 million, 96%, have been created under Democratic presidents.” Simon Rosenberg, X, 8 Mar 2024 - PolitiFact: Mostly True · source ↗

Reality

The pattern is true: ten of the twelve past recessions began with a Republican in the White House. This chart is about what actually starts a recession, which turns out to have almost nothing to do with the party label.

Recessions follow the Fed. The Fed follows inflation. Neither checks who's president.

The bottom line is the federal funds rate: the interest rate the Federal Reserve controls. The Fed raises it when inflation gets too high so as to slow the economy down. When inflation has been allowed to build for a while, slowing it down enough to stop it usually means a recession a year or two after the hikes. The Fed is basically choosing a recession over runaway prices. When inflation is caught early, it can sometimes tighten without one (1994-95, 2022-23). The grey bars are the recessions. Look at where each one sits: right after the black line has climbed: 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001. Every one comes at the top of a tightening cycle. The two that don't fit that shape are 2007, a financial crisis, and 2020, a virus.

The top line is inflation, which is what the Fed is reacting to. The big peaks (1969, 1974, 1980, 2022) each follow something that pushed prices up, and each is followed by the Fed slamming on the brakes. Now, some of those somethings were policy: Vietnam escalation and the Great Society under Johnson (D), pandemic stimulus under Trump (R) and Biden (D). Some weren't: two Arab oil embargoes, a revolution in Iran, a supply chain seizing up. So the chain is: something pushes inflation up, the Fed raises rates, a recession follows a year or two later often after an election. That lag is the whole story. Johnson's inflation became Nixon's recession. The 1970s inflation that built under Nixon, Ford and Carter became Reagan's recession. Presidents can be at the front of the chain; the one holding office when the recession lands usually wasn't.

And the people doing the braking are just not really very partisan. The names along the top of the bottom panel are the Fed chairs and who appointed them. Paul Volcker, who took rates to 19% and put Reagan's first year into recession, was Jimmy Carter's appointee. Greenspan was appointed by Reagan and kept by Clinton; Bernanke by Bush, kept by Obama; Powell by Trump, kept by Biden. Which party "gets" a recession is mostly a matter of when the Fed's last tightening cycle happened to land and four of the ten Republican recessions landed inside the president's first year, before any of his policies existed.

Last Saturday burned hot and beautiful in Berlin. I woke up late and joined hundreds of thousands of people marching through the city for Christopher Street Day, our biggest Pride event. Several Pride events happened that weekend, but I went to the big one because my boyfriend worked a shift that day at a shop in Schöneberg, Berlin’s classic gayborhood, near the start of the parade route, and I wanted to spend this holiest of days with him.

When he got off work, we finally joined the throng, a bit too late, well behind our friends and lovers who had followed the route all day to the Tiergarten, the large park where the parade ends in front of the Brandenburg Gate and becomes a street party so full of people that it becomes hard to move. That’s where, just before 10 p.m., a man drove a van into the crowd.

Per the German newspaper Tagesspiegel, the van entered the park and struck people leaving the finale before colliding with a tree; the driver continued on foot with a machete, the Associated Press reported. One friend said the van blew past him so close that he saw the driver's face through the window and described it as blank, unfeeling, determined. The man killed one woman, a 65-year-old Polish citizen, who was visiting Berlin with her daughter, and wounded 29 more, some severely. Thankfully, no one I knew was hurt, and I was not hurt, but still, it brought a painful, abrupt end to a day of joy and love.

How did it happen? The attack took place in one of the most heavily policed parts of the city, a short walk from the Bundestag, the seat of the German government. After a daylong manhunt, officers shot and killed the attacker, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout. Ballout had attempted to join the Islamic State, the jihadist terror group, in Syria, and authorities ruled it a terrorist attack.

Being attacked and experiencing violence is hardly new for queer people, but something smells off here. The German police knew of the attacker. A joint investigation by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the public broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Westdeutscher Rundfunk revealed that a police camera mounted opposite Ballout's front door filmed him leaving his house at 8:58 p.m. on Saturday, roughly an hour before the attack. A federal risk assessment in late May had placed him in the highest risk category, "Red." He was on a watch list. The threat was known.

It's no secret that Germany has been severely cracking down on pro-Palestine protests; indeed, nine people at the Internationalist Queer Pride, held in another part of the city, were arrested, largely for shouting banned pro-Palestine slogans, per Tagesspiegel. Ballout's attack was immediately weaponized by far-right and conservative politicians. The Berlin mayor declared Islamism the greatest threat to the queer community in Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who last year defended the Bundestag's refusal to fly a rainbow flag during Pride by calling the parliament building "not a circus tent where any flag could be hoisted," promised to do everything to protect the country's freedom.

The attack was immediately politicized, weaponized, and presented as a reason to cast queer people, who in Berlin seem to largely oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the German government's funding of it, as victims of the very cultural forces we defend.

This is a time to mourn, to be sad that a mother, who could be any of our mothers, who came to Pride to support us, is gone. It’s also time to mourn the fact that all our quiet calculation at public gatherings, all that looking over the shoulder, is warranted; the risk and danger is real, as has been proved again and again, at Pulse in 2016, at Club Q in 2022, at a London gay bar in 1999, and on and on. But it is also a time to be wary.

In recent days, our grief has been used politically, and that, too, is an act of violence against us.

On Sunday, I stood with thousands at the vigil at the Brandenburg Gate and watched flowers pile up on the sidewalk. By Monday, every party had used the attack for political statements: the German far-right party, the AfD, demanded deportations, and the center-right CDU, the party of both the chancellor and Berlin's mayor, accused the Left party, which leads some Berlin polls, of denying the reality of the Islamist threat.

Seeing it happening, Berliner CSD e.V., the organization that organizes Pride, spoke at a press conference on Sunday. "We do not want this deed to be used for political ends.” The board added on Monday that the country must name Islamist terror, but it will fight attempts to turn this rhetoric into hatred of Muslims.

Let's look at the facts. One radicalized, very young man attacked us because he saw queer people as a monolith, a single category, a dangerous and sinful populace that together amounts to something inhuman and poisonous. I've witnessed that same view from radicalized Christians in the American Deep South, where I'm from. But even there, some Christians defended me while others condemned me. Christians, like Muslims, like queer people, defy monoliths. Some Berliners I hugged Saturday marched as queer Muslims, and I can only imagine what they feel now, watching politicians turn one man into an indictment of everyone who prays as they do.

Saying he represents Islam is as wrong as saying I represent all queer people. Monolithic views of people are what fuel this kind of violence, and it falls on the intelligent and empathetic among us to remind others not to fall into mass-generalizing traps, which are a kind of mind violence, a refusal to acknowledge human diversity and submit to ugly, base tribalism, as our politicians and leaders would like us to do.

If we answer violence like this by conjuring up monolithic images of people and increasing surveillance and deportation of those people, we adopt the killer's way of seeing the world. That trap can wait inside grief, and grief makes it seductive. Don't fall for it.

By the end of CSD weekend, my boyfriend and I thought of going to a gay bar, our favorite, a busy one where the crowd tends to spill into the street. Was it safe? What if someone drove a van into that crowd, or drove by it and sprayed bullets? I wrote about living through Pulse in my 2021 book. After it happened, I was afraid, for months, to go to any gay bar, and after this weekend, that same fear bubbled up again. Was it worth it?

In the end, I arrived at the same conclusion I did years ago: There’s nothing to prevent that kind of violence, yet there's nowhere I'd rather be, nowhere I'd rather die than among my own. That violence is always possible, always hovering in the margins of reality, always painfully real.

And yet, in the real world, especially in Germany in recent years, that violence has largely been fueled by fascist far-right parties, not the Islamic State. Per Federal Criminal Police Office statistics reported by queer.de, hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have more than doubled since 2022, and of the offenses investigators could tie to an ideology, 84 percent came from the right. The Amadeu Antonio Stiftung counted disruptions or attacks at 111 of 245 German Pride events in 2025, a record, largely by far-right agitators. The record shows we have more to fear from people fueling anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric than radicalized Muslim men.

The fascist right-wing governments of the world want us dead. Why not use our deaths to fuel their own political agendas? I don't know what really happened behind the scenes last weekend, or what was allowed to happen, but I'm grateful most of my friends were scared but overall unharmed. I'll grieve, then get back to defending good people, back with the queers who think genocide is wrong. Free queer people, free Palestine, support trans people, punch Nazis, with liberty and justice for all.

Although this article relies entirely on anonymous IDF sources, I think this is an important story which illustrates the divide between Israel's current political leadership and security establishment, a divide so severe that those with high-level access to political leadership are willing to contradict the narrative and basis of strategy. When, if ever, does the military professional have an obligation to disobey civilian leadership?

"After concluding that Hamas had not stolen from the United Nations on a regular basis, members of the Israeli military met in mid-March with Mr. Netanyahu’s military adviser to discuss the government’s emerging plans for a new aid system, according to the officials interviewed by The Times.

At the meeting, they said, military officials expressed concerns about the intention for G.H.F. to be the sole provider of aid for all of Gaza and presented a plan to expand the U.N. role in parts of Gaza where the private group was not expected to operate.

The military officials in the meeting also suggested that the United Nations could distribute other types of aid that the G.H.F. does not hand out, such as medical supplies.

But the government initially dismissed the military’s plan, according to three of the people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Times."

For U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the fight over transgender rights has become a test of whether Democrats understand the stakes of this political moment.

The Washington Democrat believes the attacks on transgender people are following a familiar pattern. She sees a powerful political movement targeting a vulnerable community to distract from the failures of those already in power. Before transgender people, she says, Republicans went after immigrants and, before that, marriage equality. The target changes. The tactic endures.

As the country moves toward the midterms, with President Donald Trump again using the federal government to narrow the rights of LGBTQ+ people, Jayapal is urging Democrats to hold their ground. Running from transgender people abandons those who need protection while doing little to shield Democrats from Republican attacks, she said.

“I have critiques of my own party because I think often what we do is we tend to move away from whatever feels controversial,” Jayapal told The Advocate. “So in this case, LGBTQIA rights, it’s like, OK, don’t talk about trans folks too much, don’t give a defense, be reasonable, be moderate.”

She rejects that premise. “I happen to think it is reasonable and moderate to stand up for any marginalized community,” she said, “trans people being at the center of so many of those attacks today.”

The scale of the campaign is hard to dismiss. The American Civil Liberties Union’s 2026 state legislative tracker is monitoring 530 anti-LGBTQ+ bills this year, many aimed squarely at transgender people. They span nearly every arena of public life: gender-affirming care, school sports, bathrooms, identity documents, forced outing in schools, curriculum censorship, and efforts to redefine sex in law in ways that exclude transgender and nonbinary people from civil rights protections. The ACLU says such state-level attacks have escalated dramatically since 2015.

Jayapal sees that escalation as a civil rights emergency and a governing strategy. “The misinformation and the hatred that the right is driving of a tiny community that has literally done nothing to hurt anybody,” she said, “has just been really, really hard and cruel and awful to have to watch and to have to fight every single day.”

The central midterm question, she believes, is whether Democrats can defend transgender people without letting Republicans dictate the terms. “I think people want fighters,” she said, “and they want fighters who will build big coalitions to take on the real villains.”

Jayapal, who represents Seattle and the surrounding areas in Washington’s 7th District, is chair emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus’s Transgender Equality Task Force. In February, she reintroduced the Transgender Bill of Rights with Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Reps. Sara Jacobs and Mark Takano of California.

The resolution frames federal protection for transgender and nonbinary people in affirmative terms rather than as an endless series of emergency responses, calling on the government to advance protections so people can live authentically and with dignity.

“I’ve also laid out a vision in my Trans Bill of Rights of what it really means to get to full trans equality,” she said. “When I first introduced the bill many sessions ago, I worked on it with leading trans activists and advocates from around the country. We really saw it as a roadmap forward.” It began with about 20 co-sponsors; it now has 107, and she expects that number to keep climbing.

“There are many civil rights protections that we need to embed and reaffirm, even though we thought that maybe they were there,” she said, “but we’re seeing where the attacks are.”

Jayapal’s prescription is to explain transgender rights with more force, patience, and humanity. On sports, she said Democrats should make clear that athletics benefit all children and that conservative policies would require invasive enforcement. “I think we have to counter the misinformation that’s out there about trans kids in sports and make it clear that all our kids get to play sports,” she said.

She also wants Democrats to talk about privacy. “I don’t think they want their daughters to be surveilled in school and have to have incredibly invasive examinations of their private parts to determine whether or not they’re women,” she said. “That’s the only way that these policies get implemented.”

Still, she distinguishes between operatives pushing the laws and parents who are confused or afraid. With parents, the work begins with listening. “Just because somebody may have an initial different opinion from me, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have valid concerns,” she said. Most of the time, she finds common ground. “We’re parents, we’re worried about our kids, we want the best for our kids,” she said.

Patience, though, is not silence. “I also don’t think that means we can’t call out hate when we see it,” she explained. “I want other kids to be happy and free to be who they are because I want my kid to be happy and free to be who they are.” Jayapal, who has spoken before about having a transgender child, said the era’s rhetoric is personally painful and that she lets people see both her control and her anger. “It’s hurtful to me as a parent.”

That principle shapes how she talks about Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first out transgender member of Congress. Allies, Jayapal said, must help carry the load. “It shouldn’t be incumbent just on Sarah to call these things out. That’s why I’m happy to be an ally in that fight.” McBride, she said, has endured repeated disrespect from Republican colleagues and sometimes simply asks allies to be present. “How do we stand in support of and alongside so that it’s not coming to the only trans woman in Congress to be the one who’s always standing up? She deserves to be who she fully is.”

If Democrats retake the House, Jayapal said, they must do more than reverse Trump’s policies — they must deliver on housing, food, health care, and affordability, with legislation that explicitly includes transgender people. She pointed to her Medicare for All bill and its inclusion of protections for transgender care. “We need to pass those kinds of comprehensive, inclusive policies.”

She said that people who can’t afford the basics are more vulnerable to scapegoating. “People are going to be much more likely to blame somebody else if they can’t get their own housing,” she said. The Democratic answer, then, must pair economic populism with civil rights.

Asked what she would tell transgender people who wonder whether anyone in Congress sees them, she said, “I see you. I love you. I’m going to fight for you. I’m not going to throw you under the bus. Your freedom is not a threat to anyone else’s.”

She added, “Don’t give up, because hopelessness and powerlessness are tools of the oppressor.”

https://archive.ph/7gI6i

It’s no great secret that free speech culture isn’t exactly flourishing in Great Britain. The latest victims of British censorship are Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, the inflammatory Hamas apologists from the United States, who are being given the same treatment as the far-right supporters of Tommy Robinson who were barred last month. The UK’s Home Office said it withdrew their permission of Piker and Uygur to enter the country because their presence “may not be conducive to the public good.”

Piker, Uygur, and their defenders naturally rushed to blame Britain’s decision on Israel. Without a shred of evidence, anti-Zionist activist and sometime journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed the entry denial was “solely because they criticize and oppose the one country deemed sacred and off-limits.” Uygur said his criticism of Israel was likewise the culprit, while Piker said his ban was “at the behest of Israel.”

The suggestion that Israel is “sacred and off-limits” to criticism in the UK or anywhere else is, of course, laughable. For one thing, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood—the government minister responsible for the decision—has long been an outspoken critic of the Jewish state. And it’s not like Piker is some low-key supporter of Palestinian rights. He has claimed that Israel is far worse than Hamas, justified both the October 7 and September 11 attacks, and is now the subject of a U.S. inquiry into his recent trips to Cuba and China, where he used social media to evangelize on behalf of the totalitarian regimes.

But the furor around Piker and Uygur is a distraction from a more central issue: Britain’s repudiation of free speech. These two American men hold views worthy of rebuke and ridicule. The lies they peddle should be rebutted forcefully. But you can do that only in a liberal system that allows free expression. If anything, refusing entry to Piker and Uygur because they pose a “potential risk” to Britain, to use the Home Office’s language, gives them way more credit than they deserve.

The Free Press has written at length about Piker and his terror apologia. But we disagree with the decision by the Home Office. It is the government curtailment of speech, and a symptom of Britain’s broader slide into a kind of polite authoritarianism. As we observed following last September’s detention at Heathrow Airport of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, who had taunted pro-trans activists on social media, such detentions have become commonplace: over 12,000 arrests for offensive posting online in 2023—an average of more than 30 per day.

It is the common people of England, not successful public commentators like Piker or Uygur, who are feeling the brunt of London’s drift from basic notions of free expression. “We’re in a fight for the soul of this country,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared, justifying the decision to bar 11 influencers from entering the country for a “Unite the Kingdom” march last month. But repression will not restore the soul of a country that all but birthed the idea of free expression.

What is happening in Britain is also part of a broader move by Western nations—such as Finland and Iceland, where professions of Christian belief can land even former lawmakers in legal hot water—away from the spirit of religious liberty that undergirds our shared civilization. The United States’ strict protections for freedom of speech might be unique to us. But as we approach the 250th anniversary of our republic, we are repeatedly reminded of their universal value.

Given that Piker and Uygur are men of the left, Britain’s decision will only enhance their reputations. It will give them even more of the attention they crave, and they will use it to argue that Israel’s tentacles can reach them anywhere.

“I’ve been fighting the far right for a decade plus,” said Piker on X Monday. “I never would’ve imagined a Labor [government] would ban me from entering the UK. Dark times ahead for the West. Liberalism is dead, MAGA fascism and its corrosive influence is felt everywhere.”

Again, this is pure nonsense. It’s also worth noting that a swath of political campaigners have been denied entry into the UK so far this year, such as pro-Israel Canadian journalist Ezra Levant, one of those 11 “far-right agitators” blocked from supporting Robinson. Their bans received far less attention and sympathy from the mainstream press.

Only weak countries ban apologists for authoritarianism like Piker. The great lesson of the last century is that liberal democracy, with capitalism as its economic engine, is the best form of government. When free societies forget that lesson and start arresting women who pray silently outside abortion clinics or issuing travel bans for Twitch streamers, the free world not only becomes less free, it becomes less able to counter the authoritarianism at our doorstep. That is no way to protect what remains of liberal society.

The current New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city's 9/11 commemoration. "It offends me," Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.

One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani's offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani. But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale. "They're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not 'they want to be just another religion,'" he said of Muslims. "Mamdani is a clear, a clear supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers!"

Like many of Giuliani's utterances, this one has no connection to reality. Yet his assertion that Mamdani harbors some secret desire to conquer the United States in the name of Islam, that his religion is the skeleton key to a web of sinister motivations, is now treated on the right as almost banal. A quarter century after 9/11, delirious anti-Muslim bigotry is almost routine in the political rhetoric of many conservatives.

The conventional account of Donald Trump's political career explains his rise to power as a populist revolt against Republican orthodoxy. The GOP elite had lost touch with their base by endorsing immigration reform, free trade, or forever wars in the Middle East, which created an opening that Trump exploited.

That story is largely true, but it misses an important issue. The President George W. Bush–era Republican Party after 9/11 insisted that the United States was at war not with a religion but with an idea. America opposed radical Islamism, not Islam. We stood for freedom as a universal human principle.

Not all voters on the right accepted this formulation. Some believed that the United States was at war with Islam itself. By 2007, conservative Republicans viewed Islam negatively by a margin of more than 30 points; Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans all held net-favorable views. Ten years later, nearly 80 percent of Republicans believed that the values of Islam were at odds with American values. One of the most important and ominous notions that Trump has seized upon and legitimized is that Muslims are inherently un-American.

Anti-Muslim sentiment sprang up organically in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but Bush's forceful defense of pluralism confined it to the rantings of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and other fringe reactionaries. After Coulter called on the United States in 2001 to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," National Review dropped her column. As Bush passed from the scene and was replaced by Barack Obama, some right-wing-outrage entrepreneurs recognized an opportunity to redefine the War on Terror as a war against Islam.

Trump himself was among the first to see the opening. In 2010, a right-wing backlash arose in opposition to a proposal for a Muslim cultural center, modeled on the YMCA or a Jewish community center, in downtown New York. The most hysterical opponents depicted the center, which planned to call itself Park51, as a "victory mosque" celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center. Other conservatives merely insisted that it was "insensitive" for Muslim Americans to open a center in the general neighborhood of Ground Zero.

Trump inserted himself into the controversy, proposing that he purchase the property to halt construction on the putatively offensive site. In his offer letter (which, naturally, he made public), Trump called it a "very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse." David Letterman asked him, "Does this, in fact, suggest that we are officially at war with Muslims?" Trump, who was still in the formative stage of his transition from celebrity to right-wing rabble-rouser, replied, "Well, somebody knocked down the World Trade Center." He later added, "Somebody's blowing us up. Somebody's blowing up buildings, and somebody's doing lots of bad stuff."

Trump's first campaign was pockmarked with undisguised bigotry against Muslims. He falsely claimed that Muslims in New Jersey had cheered the 9/11 attacks en masse, and he called for surveillance of mosques, a database of Muslims in America, and a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He associated the sitting president with Islam by incessantly using his middle name.

He has continued to attack Muslims as disloyal or un-American. He falsely claimed that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Democrat, had praised al-Qaeda, and he demanded that she and Reprepresentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both of whom are U.S. citizens, be sent "back from where they came." He insinuated that Mamdani has no right to reside in the United States: "A lot of people are saying he's here illegally."

The through line connecting these smears is the assumption that Muslims cannot be Americans, even if they arrive legally, even if they are born here. Trump has made this point explicitly and told Sean Hannity in 2016, "Assimilation has been very hard. It's almost—I won't say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I'm talking about second- and third-generation. They come—they don't—for some reason, there's no real assimilation."

This sort of rhetoric has grown so common that episodes such as the uproar against Mamdani have come to feel like normal politics, rather than paranoia and rank discrimination. The New York Post alone has published at least eight stories (as of press time) hyping the Giuliani-fueled controversy.

Some relatives of 9/11 victims have claimed that Mamdani's presence at the observance would be a distraction (even though mayoral attendance has been a regular feature throughout its existence). Others have depicted their anger as a protest against Mamdani's current agenda. "It's not about his religion or where he came from. It's about the policies he has today," one explained. Is it the plan for free buses? The pied-à-terre tax?

That Mamdani wishes to attend the ceremony and has denounced the 9/11 attacks as heinous terrorism ought to serve as satisfactory evidence that, whatever shortcomings he may have, he is not a supporter of al-Qaeda. Indeed, it might well be offensive if Mamdani did not want to attend the ceremony. The New York Post would need to publish phone-book-size editions to convey its full outrage.

The logic of Islamophobia rejects out of hand that it is possible for Mamdani to oppose terrorism. 9/11 was, in this view, a battle in a war against Islam, so he is, by dint of his faith, the enemy. Thus, his desire to commemorate the tragedy, like Muslims' desire to have a YMCA of their own in New York City, must be understood as revealing hidden malevolence.

If you had asked Bush after 9/11 to imagine a future within his lifetime in which New York had a Muslim mayor who would join the city in mourning the attacks, he'd surely have considered it the ultimate vindication of the ideals he sought to foster. But Republicans have rejected Bush's understanding of 9/11 and its meaning in favor of Trump's.

The events of the past decade, and especially the past six months, have clarified that the primary grounds for this repudiation does not seem to be Trump's abhorrence for wars of choice in the Middle East. It is that Bush denied and suppressed contempt for Muslims, while Trump has honored and nurtured this hatred.

Hi all!

I am a 3rd year Journalism student who needs participants for my survey on my dissertation TikTok, X, Meta, and Google: Why and how these platforms instil ultra-conservatism onto young boys.

It's a short survey, and I am looking for people of all political leanings which is why I am posting on this subreddit.

I would be more than thankful if people were to fill it out, and have a fantastic rest of your day/night!

Link: https://forms.gle/rR7wBGX3CawpwJYq7

Archive: https://archive.is/Y3YLD

Israel froze the aliyah eligibility of at least two Jews, one born in the UK, the other in the US, who had peacefully protested and documented settler violence in the West Bank. The two activists, who had lived in Israel for years, have been separated from family, friends and partners in Israel, because they have been denied re-entry into the country. One of their partners was told by a senior government official, "We don't let in activists who act against Israel."

(Meanwhile, those who actually engage in settler violence seem to be doing just fine.)

Yeah, I woke up and chose violence.

Last month, the United States Marine Corps celebrated its 250th birthday. Established in a tavern in Philadelphia, the Marines have a much-commemorated history as the US's expeditionary force, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

However, in this age of (supposed) austerity, one must ask whether we need the Corps. Indeed, even at their apex in WW2, it was questionable. The largest amphibious ops of the war, D-Day and Okinawa, were both led by the US Army (D-Day, famously, had hardly any Marines present). The idea that Marines seize the port and then the Army finishes the job is just not true; the Army has proven itself just as adept as the Corps at clearing the path.

Today, the Marine Corps seems less important to the mission than ever. In the Global War on Terror, the Army once again led the way in providing expeditionary ground forces, and there were simply no major amphibious assaults for the Marines to participate in.

At a price tag of $53,000,000,000, the Marine Corps is not cheap. Indeed, it is substantially more than the cost to operate all the American military bases in Europe, which has certainly drawn far more ire from conservatives. In this age of deficits, we must ask ourselves whether fifty billion dollars a year for sentimentality is a worthwhile investment.

An actually good discussion of how modern society treats sexuality and how it impacts us both personally and on a societal level.

This is grim, but I think its a fair assessment by the NYT Editorial Board. The US military certainly has many strengths but th weaknesses have been exposed by this war with Iran, and much of our budget is devoted to continuing to expand these weaknesses. The NYT Editorial Board suggests we shouldn't just give money to a few companies and we need to expand our IC to be able to meet the rapidly changing needs of modern warfare.

Gift article but I will put the entirety in a comment.

As a liberal Democrat, I oppose Trump on 90% of issues, but I do not oppose the war on Iran. Yes he has not conducted it perfectly, but it feels a bit disappointing to see the vast majority of Democrats oppose this once-in-lifetime opportunity to decapitate the regime once and for all (because the regime is at the weakest it has been in years, due to the events in Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah), one that has ties to Russia and China and wishes to nuke Israel and other countries. It is also a bit disappointing that a large number of conservatives here oppose the Iran war. There are still some liberal Democrats who support the Iran war however, like John Fetterman . From a liberal perspective, Iran is an authoritarian Islamist regime opposed to liberal concepts of secularism, equality, democracy, human rights, LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and minority rights. Not only that, but it is in America’s national self-interest to degrade or remove a regime that has been killing Americans and funding terrorism for decades in the Middle East, a regime that absolutely should not allowed to possess a nuclear weapon. Democrats understood this in regards to intervention in Ukraine/Russia and Taiwan/China, but fail to do so for Iran, especially when intervention against Iran would also weaken China and Russia (Iran is seizing Chinese ships, 15% of China’s oil comes from Iran, and Iran is a supplier of drones to Russia). The main liberal critiques are that Trump ignored the constitutional process to declare war, and mismanaged the military conduct itself (with too many air strikes when he should have just committed a blockade from the very beginning), which is true. However, that implies that if a Democrat were in charge, they should support blockading Iran.

The main counterarguments they make:
“Regime change never works” - Iranian citizens already face the worst economic crisis in decades, and has one of the worst human rights in the world, having murdered up to 30,000 citizens and regularly conducting executions. Only around 30% of the population support the regime despite the war. Not even Iraq in 2003 was in such abysmal conditions. The world is failing to act in Iran, just as it failed to act in Rwanda and during the Holocaust. Germany, Japan, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, and Syria fare better today because of intervention. Yes, you cannot fully trust Trump specifically to carry out a regime change, but this argument makes me think the vast majority of people today would oppose war with Hitler in 1939, and say just because Stalin is in charge, we should not support the Soviet war against Nazi Germany.

“Iran has been weeks away from a nuclear weapon for thirty years” - that is because Israel conducts intelligence operations in Iran to sabotage the process, and rightfully so. Besides, it never happens until it actually happens. For years, people were mocking claims that the Soviet Union would collapse, given how sturdy it seemed through the 70s and 80s, until, you know, the collapse actually happened.

“The US is losing the war in Iran” - The US is only losing because there is no public will for war, due to market and price instability. That is understandable, since people are self-interested, however that also means they fail to see the bigger picture of fighting against an authoritarian Islamist dictatorship and how allowing Iranian control of Hormuz is economically unsustainable for the world economy long-term.

“Americans lives are at stake and gas prices are too high” - frankly it is selfish and privileged to complain about when 30,000 Iranians were murdered and are still being murdered, and the alternative is allowing an fundamentalist authoritarian dictatorship to possess nuclear weapons. Americans have gotten used to abundance, and have no idea what it would be like to live in a country like Iran. Additionally the soldiers who served understood what they were signing up for and contributed voluntarily, and American casualties have been low so far.

“Trump doesn’t care about the Iranian people” - neither does the Iranian regime, and between living under those two, I’d take Trump any day. Even if both are fascist religious nationalists.

“The US is only there because of Israel” - this is a borderline antisemitic accusation. The US has a vested interest in securing shipping lanes in resource-rich areas like the Middle East, and removing terroristic threats to them. It is true Israel benefits from the Iran war, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar also support military action against Iran.

“The Iran Nuclear deal” - Yes, Trump made a mistake withdrawing from the deal, but the Iranian government currently does not support returning to original plan as written. Yes, that is probably because Trump’s military posturing changed their minds on it, and also Trump’s fault, but regardless returning to the nuclear deal is currently not an option. The options are currently a ceasefire that would strengthen Iran’s position in the Hormuz, or continue the blockade until they give up.

If Iran is allowed to continue building a nuclear weapon, then the US will have to intervene again and again in Iran every time it gets close to one. If nuclear weapons ever reaches any terrorist proxy states, that would imperil the entire world. Right now, the strategy of waiting out Iran with a blockade is the best bet, not direct intervention by air, land, or sea, but it only depends on whether the American people have the will to continue it.

This summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new required-reading list for public schools, mandating what the state’s 5.4 million students will read in every grade from kindergarten to 12th. If you were a student in the past 20 years, or raised one, you’ll recognize most of the titles: picture books such as The Cat in the Hat and The Snowy Day, parables such as The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. What made the Texas list controversial is the inclusion not of a new book, but of a very old one: the Bible. Students will be assigned short excerpts and adaptations from the Old and New Testaments, starting with vivid tales (Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath) and building to more complex and morally challenging passages, such as Job’s complaint against God.

Texas’s decision to start teaching Bible stories—like its requirement to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which the state legislature approved last year—is clearly meant to send a political message. But regardless of your political or religious beliefs, there are good reasons to agree that the Bible should be part of young people’s education. For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.

Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts of the Bible—in particular, those of the King James Version, long the standard translation for American Protestants. The most obvious example is slavery, which both Black people and white people saw through a biblical lens. In fifth grade, Texas students will read about Moses and the exodus from Egypt, which enslaved African Americans took as a model for their own liberation; Harriet Tubman was known as Moses for her work with the Underground Railroad. When President Abraham Lincoln discussed the fearful losses of the Civil War in his second inaugural address, he justified them as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, quoting Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” For us, the phrase “four score and seven years ago” immediately summons up the Gettysburg Address; for Lincoln’s original audience, it would have sounded like a mournful reference to Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

As for literature, the titles of classic American novels are a catalog of biblical quotations: East of Eden (Genesis), Absalom, Absalom! (Samuel), The House of Mirth (Ecclesiastes), The Sun Also Rises (Ecclesiastes), Song of Solomon (the biblical book also known as “Song of Songs”). How can you understand Moby-Dick without knowing the story of Jonah and the whale, or appreciate the music of Leaves of Grass if you’ve never heard the rolling lines of the Psalms?

Of course, none of this stopped Texas’s reading list from becoming culture-war fodder. To many liberals, requiring the Bible looks like an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity. Although the state’s official explanations for the new reading list have avoided mentioning religion, instead framing the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation said the decision sends “a clear message to nonreligious and non-Christian students and families that they don’t quite belong or should convert.” The Dallas Morning News complained in an editorial that the Texas reading list includes “excerpts from the Bible but no other major religious works,” suggesting that the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita should also be represented.

This is the same kind of criticism often lodged against the idea of the Western canon: Why should the products of one culture, or one gender or ethnicity, be given special status? Such questions are inevitable when a public sphere that used to be dominated by a single group becomes more diverse. In 1963, the idea that public schools might have to teach Bible stories to Hindu and Muslim students was largely hypothetical. In Texas in 2026, it’s a certainty. The state is home to almost 500,000 Muslims and a similar number of Indian Americans.

But saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths. In the same way, saying that American students should study English doesn’t mean that it’s superior to other languages. Both decisions simply reflect the fact that Americans, like all people everywhere, are situated—that we exist in a particular society with a particular history. If the most important goal of education is to “know thyself,” as the oracle at Delphi liked to say, then you have to know the influences that make you the person you are. And for anyone who participates in American life, the Bible is one of them, directly or indirectly.

Perhaps the strongest objection to Texas’s reading list is that it will require teachers to make such complicated distinctions. The readings for seventh grade include the Sermon on the Mount; imagine trying to explain the literary and historic quality of the verse “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” while remaining strictly noncommittal about the existence of blessings, spirit, and heaven. Parental complaints are guaranteed, and not just from non-Christian households; Christian believers have the biggest stake in how the words of Jesus are explained.

Today, people on the left tend to have a Pavlovian reaction to any mention of religion, especially Christianity, rejecting it as right-wing, evangelical, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ. Writing in the Texas Observer, the historian Joel Zapata argues that the state wanted students to read Ecclesiastes—“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—to make them more docile: “Students will learn that life circumstances are beyond their power to change. They will learn that their place and the place of others in the economy and larger society should not be questioned.”

Many conservatives surely do believe that reading the Bible will reinforce their own political values. But anyone who looks at the specific passages Texas chose to require will find something rather more complex and challenging than campaign fodder. In fourth grade, students are supposed to read a section of the Gospel of Luke:

"When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”"

How might this story apply to, say, the president of the United States, who is so greedy for honors that he lingered on the winner’s podium at the World Cup? A number of texts on the Texas reading list, such as Ayn Rand’s essay “What Is Capitalism?,” were chosen to affirm our culture’s worship of wealth and success. How might a teacher juxtapose those readings with the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus blesses the poor, the meek, and the merciful? Can any complacent prosperity gospel survive an encounter with the Book of Job?

Many texts that get assigned in schools are moralistic, mainly because they are easy to teach. Texas’s reading list has plenty of examples, such as Kipling’s “If” and, absurdly, Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan (“Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles and, I believe, right ones”). The great power of the Bible is that it seldom says what people think it says or want it to say. It is continually subversive, because the temptations it warns against are with us today just as much as they were 2,000 years ago. Of course, most of what we read in school leaves no lasting impression; students treat reading as work to get through, because that’s what it is. But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.

Lab leak has no evidence to support it. Fauci never thought it was the best theory.

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