Minnesota, the Iran War, preserving knowledge, queer people under attack, government repression, mass surveillance, dangers of A.I., and celebrating victories
This newsletter will focus on topics such as resistance in Minnesota, bombing of Iran, marginalization of queer people (particularly in the U.S.), and problems with A.I. usage.
There’s a lot to write about today since my last newsletter about pop culture was published in early February. The last month was busy for me with interviews and everything else. In this newsletter, which I’m publishing one day before No Kings 3, I’ll talk about federal occupation (and resistance to that) in Minnesota, the joint U.S.-Israel war on Iran, the importance of preserving knowledge, a spotlight on queer people who remain under attack, megaconglomerates, government repression, mass surveillance, celebrating victories and resistance, continued dangers of A.I., and my final thoughts on assorted topics, such as pressure placed upon sex workers, to name one of the topics. With that, let me get to it.
If you would like to support this newsletter, you can directly contribute here. Feel free to share this newsletter with others and comment on what I’ve put together. Thanks for reading. I deeply appreciate it.
Occupation and Resistance in Minnesota
Building upon what I said in my current events newsletter in January in which I listed some stories of resistance including those on the streets of Minneapolis, there’s been a lot of attention related to events in Minnesota since this past January. People's CDC had a sub-section of January 26th newsletter entitled “Minnesota ICE OUT! General Strike.” They talked about a day of no work, no school, and no shopping by tens of thousands in Minnesota, marching in Minneapolis, led by the AFL-CIO, local labor unions, clergy leaders, and others. They had various demands like: an end to federal funding for ICE, legal accountability for the ICE officer(s) who murdered Renee Nicole Good, ICE’s departure from Minnesota, and investigation of ICE for “human rights and constitutional violations.” People’s CDC noted, in their report, that there have been over 25 shootings by ICE agents since late January 2025, plus others by Customs & Border Protection, killing at least nine (like Alex Pretti), and over 30 dying in ICE custody in 2025. They stated that general strikes are often pivotal moments in bigger social and labor movements, even though they are rare, possibly because the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 bans political/solidarity strikes, wildcat strikes, jurisdictional strikes, and secondary boycotts/mass picketing.
The report added that the regime is trying to “win mass consent for their campaign of maiming, kidnapping, and shooting people in the streets” through fear, and commended people across the U.S., and in Minnesota, who are “coming together on a massive scale to defend their neighborhoods and workplaces from occupation by armed federal police forces.” They called upon people to wear masks during protests to protect themselves from “future complications from COVID and other illnesses…[and as]…a sign of solidarity with immigrant populations…avoiding vital medical care so as not to risk being kidnapped by ICE.”
In a follow-up posting in early February 2026, People’s CDC praised the aforementioned general strike, and said that such general strikes demonstrated the “country’s hunger for change and demand that those in power do something” while expressing dismay at the response from Democratic Party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries (House) and Chuck Schumer (Senate). In the same post, they again emphasized the importance of wearing a high-quality mask to protests to protect people from COVID-19 and other illnesses, a sign of solidarity with immigrant populations being denied care, and a way of shielding yourself from “the federal government’s growing database…[of] anyone who dares question, or even record, them,” adding that people should protect their health and identities.
After the above-mentioned resistance, the federal government began a sort-of withdrawal from Minnesota (but not complete) which involved one-third of ICE agents leaving the state, replacement of effective mission commander (Tom Holman took the place of Greg Bovino) for Operation Metro Surge, and requiring federal immigration agents to wear body cameras. Perhaps they feel, as Republican Bill Cassidy admitted, that the credibility of ICE and DHS are “at stake.” Although the partial withdrawal is a clear victory, community organizing (even on a block-by-block level) still continues, while librarians in the state provide resources and musicians like Bruce Springsteen write songs for the moment. Minneapolis booksellers resisting ICE are going viral, seeing their sales spike. Minnesota NBA fans had a fierce message, shattering the moment of silence for him with their anger over over Alex Pretti's murder. Tech workers are calling for CEOs to speak up against ICE. Actors like Olivia Wilde are protesting ICE.
At the same time, the “campaign of terror” has not ended. It has evolved instead. People continue to live under constant threat, with pregnant immigrants staying away from critical care as they fear ICE, despite the fact that immigration agents are apparently terrified of the backlash against them, according to documents Ken Klippenstein examined. The immigration crackdown will continue without stop, with no plan to end, or even suspend, the operation, as Popular Information noted in late January. Reports are that last year, the regime deported, from late January 2026 to early February 2026, nearly 400,000 people, with almost 69,000 in detention, with said detention centers apparently at the brink of failure as Arturo Dominguez noted in early February.
Journalists have been targeted. Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested under the claim they violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act while covering a protest at a church where one of the pastors is an local active ICE field director. This arrest is not “shocking” nor is it that corporations, like Amazon, Citizens Bank, and AT&T, are enabling the immigration crackdown. DOJ is refusing to seek justice in the murder of Renee Good. ICE is asking companies about big data and ad tech they can use in investigations. Despite corporate CEOs urging de-escalation in a joint letter, possibly in an effort to avoid boycotts, Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims of Popular Information rightly described it as “hollow” and filled with “vague phrases.” They said it is an example of “corporate timidity” in contrast to how “major corporations responded to other major incidents, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020.”
I don’t know if the actions in Minnesota, whether the gunning down Alex Pretti, detaining a five-year-old boy as bait (as Shaun King noted), or arresting those who fed them at a taqueria in Minnesota (as Ariana Jasmine noted) are examples of what some call the imperial boomerang, a phrase coined by Aimé Césaire, meaning that “empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland,” or not. There is one obvious truth: these federal agents are cruel and racist. It goes beyond smears toward people like the outspoken congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The crackdown will surely continue. But, as Ken Klippenstein put in early February, the public is winning, despite federal agents amassing, by mid-January, “some 35,000 weapons in Minneapolis…intended for protesters, not to facilitate immigration enforcement.” Let us hope that these public victories continue.
The recent news that Kristi Noem is out as DHS Secretary, and sliding into a position for yet another U.S. initiative to justify intervention in Latin America (arrogantly named the “Shield of the Americas”) is a victory thanks in part to what people did in Minnesota. As Emily Amick stated in her newsletter, Noem was fired because “Democrats pushed for hearings and grilled her publicly, and the court of public opinion turned on her” so much that it convinced the orange one that “she was worth cutting.” As Amick points out, Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, was an Oklahoma senator who will continue the “deportation agenda.” Mullin is a “Cherokee Nation citizen and reliable Trump loyalist who once challenged a union leader to a fistfight at a Senate hearing.” Ken Klippenstein, in a posting, asserted that Noem’s ouster was due to “public activism” and “people power.” As for Mullin, he defended the mass pardoning of the January 6ers last year and tried to personally go to Afghanistan in 2021 with a helicopter to “save people,” despite the fact that the Biden administration already had a massive evacuation plan. He is also rabidly pro-ICE, racist, very transphobic, and embraced the big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.” As Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng aptly stated in a posting for Zeteo, “it has been the Stephen Miller DHS since January 2025. It will continue to belong to him, no matter where Noem ends up.” For Mullin to be approved by the Senate in a 54-45 vote, with two Democrats voting in favor, one of whom is a basically a Republican (John Fetterman) and the other who is a Lutheran that supports fracking (Martin Heinrich), is disgusting. It says everything you need to know about Congress.
U.S./Israel War on Iran
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On the final day of February, during a month set aside in the U.S. to honor Black history, the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, claiming that they were stopping “pre-emptive strikes,” for which they have provided no evidence. Since then, the war has only gotten worse, with failed attempts to topple the Iranian government. This continues the pattern of failed regime change wars and regional chaos, with thousands displaced, violent Israeli strikes on Lebanon (part of a broader plan to “occupy, annex, and dominate Lebanon”). All the while a war between Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to heat up. This has already become a wider regional war with thousands upon thousands already displaced. As Leslye Joy Allen, Historian said in a posting talking about her experience growing up during the Vietnam War, “the United States has already lost most of its credibility in the majority of the world which is majority people/s of color.” Let us not forget this. We should pay attention to the language the U.S. and Israel are using to describe what is happening in Iran, the importance of finding lies and contradiction in war, and how we are all living with the 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, as Lady Libertie noted in one post.
Some are saying that the underestimation of Iran’s military prowess as an example of “imperial hubris.” Iran is refusing to engage in negotiations and continues powerful retaliatory strikes, particularly against U.S. bases in the region and blocking the Strait of Hormuz. One strike almost hit the U.S./U.K. base in Diego Garcia, the same base that the International Court of Justice ordered the U.K. to return to Mauritius in the case of Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965. The U.K. violently expelled the original inhabitants (Chagossians) from 1968 to 1973. There is a pending colonialist/racist treaty giving the U.K. control of the base for a period of 99 years (with a renewal period of 40 years). In addition, there are questions as to whether the U.S. and Israel are trying to start a civil war in Iran, while the orange one has declared he might send in ground troops. He is arrogant and does not care if U.S. troops are killed or not. If the reports that 2,500 more Marines are being sent to the Persian Gulf, are accurate, they will become cannon fodder. As a recent posting by Laura Rozen in diplomatic noted, former Pentagon senior officials are warning that the lack of a functional U.S. national security process, with “aides shying away from telling the president that he may need to compromise to reach a diplomatic off-ramp with Iran,” risking a dangerous military escalation, including placing U.S. troops on the ground.
The Western corporate media is not even trying to report on the war accurately, with lots of misinformation and outright lying, including about the claimed ground invasion of Iran which Ken Klippenstein debunks easily (and says this all part of a strategy to “scare the shit out of the Iranian government”). The media also is hiding that the war is blatantly illegal. They are obscuring war crimes like the gross mass murder of unarmed Iranian sailors in the Indian Ocean, the bombing of elementary schools, like the school in Minab in broad daylight which has killed over 170 people (mostly little girls) which was bombed a second time when people went for shelter. There was a mass funeral for those killed. There’s been double-tap strikes, bombing of a sports hall, and many other acts of destruction, to give some examples. Even a stalwart liberal like Emily Amick, whose views on the murder of Ayatollah Ali Khomeini I strongly disagree with (more on that later) and support for “a path for the people of Iran to build a fair and free democracy” (in terms of how that would be achieved, if it necessitated U.S. intervention), stated that the war is plainly unconstitutional (violating Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution) and illegal (violating the War Powers Resolution).
On the latter, Iran has not engaged in a sudden attack on the U.S., nor does it pose an imminent threat. Instead the war is about “neutering” the government, with claims of weapons of mass destruction like the fake/manufactured nuclear threat. As Amick puts it, the regime has offered a “series of discombobulated, disorganized legal justifications for the war,” making it almost appear as if this is meant to confuse the public. She worries that “today it is Iran; tomorrow it will be whoever the President decides is inconvenient, and Congress will have already taught him he can.” In addition, the war plainly violates the U.N. Charter, which states that countries can only strike others in an act of self-defense (article 51) and that all other military attacks need approval of the U.N. Security Council, along with international law agreements that the U.S. had agreed to. If the U.S. did attack Iran because “the target was simply too tempting to pass up” with no consideration given to the consequences because the orange one is “captive to an intelligence machine…that…produces kill packages so clean and seductive that it practically runs itself,” as Ken Klippenstein puts it, that is terrifying.
When it comes to the murder of Ali Khamenei, this is the worst possible thing the U.S. and Israel could have done. Regardless of whether you say he is “evil” or not, the fact is that he is an important Islamic religious figure. As an article in Zeteo noted in early March, they didn’t just eliminate a political leader, but they “created a martyr with reach far beyond Iran’s borders – and triggered a backlash that Western media is barely covering.” There are protests across the Muslim world, attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the region, and mass demonstrations. This has opened another front in the war, with Hezbollah even citing his death as the reason they fired rockets into Israel. As the Iranian death toll is rising, some reported that there might have been a Christian nationalist reasoning for the war. Others, like Sarah Kendzior, questioned that, saying that the war is actually “being fought for Greater Israel — and for annihilation” with the orange one “surrounded by warmongers like Netanyahu who have spent decades planning an Iran War.”
Right now, the orange one’s political base is fracturing, even so much so that The Economist interviewed White nationalist Tucker Carlson in one of their recent issues, in a headline story, and they are noting the economic impact of the war. It politically threatens Republicans in a big way. Some are profiting off of the war on online betting platforms like Polymarket and through market manipulation. The U.S. effort is being financially backed by Jared Kushner (the orange one’s son-in-law) and the Saudis. Kushner was part of the U.S. negotiating team with Iran and also advised the orange one to attack Iran, as did Steve Witkoff. I am reminded not of the continued failed attempts by the U.S. Congress to limit the president’s war powers, or some Democrats seeing the war as “politically beneficial” but what Ariana Jasmine wrote recently about the orange one’s five-day pause in bombing of Iranian energy infrastructure and power plants:
…[he] claimed the U.S. and Iran had engaged in “very good and productive conversations” over the past two days, signaling what he described as “major points of agreement” toward ending hostilities in the region…But…Iranian officials flatly denied that any direct negotiations with Washington have taken place. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf accused Trump of fabricating talks to manipulate global markets and distract from what he described as a failing U.S.-Israeli military campaign. The Foreign Ministry echoed that position, stating Iran’s conditions and strategy remain unchanged. That contradiction leaves the situation in a familiar place: competing narratives, high-stakes brinkmanship, and a rapidly escalating regional crisis…Over the past three weeks, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has pushed the Middle East to the edge…[the] sudden pause may signal…not a breakthrough, but an off-ramp…[the U.S.] underestimated the amount of cards Iran can pull to make this war much more complicated than anything we have seen in the past decades…U.S. intelligence suggests the situation on the ground is far more volatile than any talk of diplomacy implies…the five-day pause looks less like diplomacy and more like a pressure valve on a conflict spiraling toward something much bigger…This isn’t de-escalation. It’s a countdown…
Preserving Knowledge
There’s a lot to talk about in this section. Knowledge is at under threat. There’s the end of B&T, as I noted in my newsletter in February, and the decline of mass-market paperbacks. Readerlink is no longer distributing the latter, a format which has “long served as an affordable, portable option and gateway for readers.” There’s surging book bans, audiobooks booming on Spotify, and new brick-and-mortar storefronts opening for Barnes & Noble, among the top five publishing shifts of last year, as noted by Brown Books Publishing Group this past December. There will be “monopolization of distribution channels in publishing” as digital and physical retail is “increasingly concentrated.” The latter is what Kathleen Schmidt talked about in a detailed analysis back in mid-November. Such monopolization will further leave smaller publishers vulnerable if they rely too much on one platform, resulting in those publishers having to engage in “agility, strategic partnerships, and a willingness to embrace the new,” with the rise of trends like AI-assisted publishing (which is worrisome and anti-author), along with “social media-driven discovery and audiobook expansion.”
Amazon is making its move. It entered the library wholesale market in June of last year. As ad astra noted, Amazon’s attempts to monopolize the industries they’re invested in “includes the book market.” If they can offer lower pricing and convenience, allowing them to eliminate competitors, “soon there will be no competitors at all, and they’ll be able to increase prices.” While Amazon is offering discounts for now, if libraries move to Amazon while other distributors go out of business, Amazon could increase prices and place additional strain on public institutions. Such a situation would give the company “control over what libraries may or may not be able to offer.” What if Amazon is “persuaded to no longer sell a book or demand changes before offering to distribute”? After all, publishers are already rejecting an increasing number of queer book manuscripts and proposals, cowering as they obey in advance to the regime, and apparently promoting queer books in coded ways, so they aren’t targeted. They are giving the regime, and the other reactionaries who support them, the control they desire. All the while, Amazon is showing its muscle, pulling out a book festival in Paris after a booksellers association, Syndicat de la Librairie Française, accused online retailer of “trying to ‘flood the market with fake AI-generated books’.”
More than that, I feel obligated to follow-up on my previous newsletters in late December [bloglink] and late November [bloglink] where I talked about the book ban in Tennessee. After I emailed the Society of American Archivists (SAA) about this, they ended up releasing statement entitled “Note from SAA Council on Book Bans in Tennessee” about the Tennessee book ban, on a few internal message boards, particularly those for Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC) and Announcements. The statement is as follows:
Tennessee Secretary of State, Tru Hargett, the administrator who oversees the Tennessee State Library and Archives, is requiring public libraries across the state to review their holdings and implement book bans that align with the White House’s definitions of “inappropriate content.” In particular, the State is requiring public libraries to remove books from children’s sections that are deemed to be “harmful” to children in accordance with the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” Executive Order. State archives and libraries are trusted agents for information sharing and empowerment of the public. They are not to be used as tools for the abuse of power or to promote a single ideology. As allied information professionals, SAA supports the statement put forth by a coalition of publishers and national library and literary advocacy groups that, “Tennessee’s public libraries are steadfast guardians of the right to read, serving every member of their communities without prejudice, censorship, or fear. Content reviews create an unnecessary expenditure for ends that are likely unconstitutional. Libraries must be guided by directives that respect free speech and constitutional values.” For SAA members in Tennessee who wish to join in the effort to push back against censorship and book bans, we urge you to learn more from the Tennessee Freedom to Read Project. If you are not in Tennessee but have friends and family there, you can educate them about this effort. Because state-level advocacy is most effective when constituents and residents engage with their policymakers, those in Tennessee are the best positions to contact legislators or state government officials. Initiatives like this are not confined to Tennessee. They are happening across the country. If they are happening in your state or locality, you can add your voice to the conversation. Look for your state’s Freedom to Read resources to learn how you might take action. We also encourage you to make SAA aware of such initiatives so we can respond as we are able and share the information with members.
The statement is good as it aligns the SAA against dangerous proposed laws in Arizona and Iowa, which make librarians criminals, first for recommending certain books and second for giving minors access to what they deem is “sexually explicit material.” However, it ignores part of what I mentioned in my email to them. I said that Tru Hargett is using his role as Tennessee Secretary of State, overseeing the Tennessee State Library and Archives “to justify/support his proposed book ban” and involving Tennessee State Librarian and Archivist, James Ritter. I further wrote that it “could be argued that this [action by Hargett] is a politicization of archives.” In my previous-linked newsletters in this section, I further raised concern about weaponization of archives for right-wing/reactionary purposes. So, in that way this statement is disappointing. I don’t know if organizations like Archivists Against, Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) of the ALA, or others have put out statements about this or not, but I am very doubtful. I know that the Society of Tennessee Archivists has not released a statement about this nor any articles in their Winter 2026 edition of their official newsletter. It is good to hear that Rutherford County Library System Director Luanne James is refusing to “comply with a directive to relocate more than 190 children’s books from the kids section to the adult section,” citing the First Amendment (and following a coalition of organizations saying the same). Good for her!
There are the new chilling political grant guidelines for libraries and museums under the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), demanding that grants must align with “the MAGA vision” for the U.S., fostering an appreciation for the country “through uplifting and positive narratives” and promoting “civic pride and a deep sense of belonging among all Americans.” The same agency is, as kelly jensen put it, “prioritizing projects that undermine professional credentialing and education of library workers”! That agency, which the orange one unconstitutionally demanded the abolishment in executive order 14217 in mid-March of last year, is led, illegally, by Keith Sonderling. An acting director can, under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, only serve for 210 days in that position. His term began on March 14, 2025 and ended on October 11, 2025, which was over five months ago. Strangely, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), has not issued a decision on this, perhaps because this happened before in 2001 when they claimed there was “no violation” or they were pushed/bought off by the regime to do nothing, despite declaring that the Impoundment Control Act applies to illegal reduction of agency functions by the IMLS.
Beyond that are assorted articles about various topics. This includes one by four scholars (Allison Bailund, Deborah Tomaras, Michelle Cronquist, and Tina Gross) on how “equity, rather than neutrality” should be the appropriate lens for judging subject heading proposals by the Library of Congress while recommending “several reforms that could improve the subject heading process and make it more equitable,” and others about the secrecy around funders of presidential libraries (not just those of the orange one but those for JFK, Obama, Reagan, and George W. Bush), how audiobooks do count as reading, a public library reviving an old card catalog as a seed library, and a proposed bill in Wisconsin requiring warning labels on what they claim is “explicit content.”
Queer Issues Spotlight
There’s a lot I will cover here, positive and negative. Let me start with the latter. Erin Reed has a great resource: the anti-trans National Legal Risk Assessment Map. In the most recent edition, published on February 20th, she said that on a nationwide level, “the situation continues to deteriorate for transgender youth care…the risk profile for adults has shifted” with expanding bathroom bans in Kansas and Indiana, while in Montana, “the state court system has repeatedly blocked or enjoined anti-trans laws under the state constitution.” She noted that for trans youth, nationwide, it has grown more unstable with “federal policy shifts, institutional capitulations, and ongoing legal battles” which have “created a volatile patchwork.” She further warned that in the present environment, “no state can reasonably be considered low risk for transgender youth”! Others, like Willow Tabitha Kawamoto, have said that sports and bathroom bans “hide the bigger picture,” asserting that we must ask why these restrictions are growing, why there are are “such strong Christian grass roots movements…gathering strength and numbers” and so on, as the right-wing stokes “[unfounded] fear that transgender girls are dangerous.” Kawamoto ends her post by saying that it is “time to see the broader, bigger picture” and calls upon readers to “save not only our transgender youth, but the right to our education.”
There are examples of trans people under attack by the federal government itself either by the EEOC (the agency tasked with stopping discrimination) greenlighting discrimination against trans people, the U.S. 4th District Court which declared that states can encourage citizens to appreciate “their sex” through bans of care (affirming the Medicaid ban by West Virginia as applying to trans adults), the Department of Education attacking a middle school for supposedly letting a “trans student onto co-ed cheer squad,” and the U.S. Supreme Court handing down more anti-trans decisions. This includes shadow docket decision which “could mandate forced outing of trans youth across America” with a ruling favoring this in California. The regime is also:
making violence against trans people harder to track by removing gender identity questions from federal crime surveys
erasing queer history through methods such as removal of the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument (later restored by New York City officials)
falsely linking trans people to domestic terrorism, which is making people afraid and anxious
increasing pressure (from the orange one) to bypass the filibuster and pass the massive anti-trans, anti-woman, anti-people voter disenfranchisement law known as the SAVE Act
targeting major LGBTQ+ health care centers in a legal attack
allowing a college campus drag ban in Texas to continue with absurd comparison of drag to blackface by Judge Kacsmaryk, exempting drag from protection under the First Amendment
attempting a possible backdoor gun ban on trans Americans (which would violate the Second Amendment that gun-rights people cherish so much)
pressuring international organizations to disavow trans care and “social transition” on a global level with funding ban
Trans kids have become the “new political targets” of political strategists after same-sex marriage became law as RESIST | FIGHT noted in a posting, and in a related posting by Arturo Dominguez. This is no more clear when going state by state. The Idaho legislature is considering a bill (House Bill 752), which passed the state’s House of Representatives in a 54–15 vote, and will likely pass the Senate, where Republicans hold a 29–6 majority. It could imprison trans people for using public bathrooms, with up to a five year prison sentence! This harsh law could “turn everyday life into a criminal risk” as RESIST | FIGHT noted. It follows laws regarding bathrooms expanding with proposals to bar trans people from restrooms in privately-owned facilities in Kansas, which seemingly created a “mechanism allowing so-called bathroom bounty hunters to sue transgender people encountered in any restroom, whether in a government-owned building or a private business.” Similar laws that cause any trans people who want to use the appropriate bathroom of their gender to face lawsuits have been proposed in Idaho (House Bill 607 and House Bill 606), Indiana (HB 1198), and Missouri (HB 2314), moving “enforcement out of institutional hands and into the realm of lawsuits and vigilantism” as Erin Reed stated.
This targeting of trans people has sparked opposition in those states, even as Republicans are using transphobia to trick voters into an abortion ban and pushing through bills in late-night sessions to enshrine the hateful policies into law and prevent public comment. If that isn’t bad enough, in Florida, local officials can be removed by Governor Ron Desantis for promoting Pride (or anything claimed to be promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion). There have been proposals to make it illegal to fire transphobic people in the state and to prosecute people for “aiding and abetting” trans youth care. Adding to this is the passage of an extreme trans public bathroom ban in the New Hampshire House in early March, in enshrined in House Bill 1442. It has been referred to the New Hampshire Senate’s Judiciary Committee, where it has sat since March 6th. As for Kansas, it has aimed to push trans people into second-class citizen status by demanding they surrender their drivers licenses, and other measures (like one that allows bounty hunters to patrol private business bathrooms), without any grace period, pushing it through in an anti-democratic manner. Furthermore, Nebraska legislators proposed anti-trans restrictions on health care and access to bathrooms at all state-run facilities. In addition:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared that therapists providing gender-affirming care for trans youth is illegal and “child abuse” while creating a tip line that “allows civilians to become headhunters” against trans people
anti-trans ballot measures in Colorado and Maine, backed by wealthy conservative interests, will be in the hands of voters in November
NBC used its journalism to attack trans athletes at the Olympics
a new NHS England Review which supported a ban on HRT for anyone under age 18 excluded 97% of trans studies which say care is helpful and lifesaving
trans youth being recruited for a study led by researchers’ with “long and tumultuous histories with trans research subjects”
the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum being held hostage over anti-trans demands by House Republicans (i.e. saying trans women shouldn’t even be part of the museum at all!)
the Portuguese Parliament advancing a package of sweeping anti-trans people, threatening the country as a place that had been (previously) leading in Europe on rights for trans people
Jesse Singal lying about trans care in the New York Times again
Joe Rogan sharing more anti-trans hate on his podcast
Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President, calling for outlawing all trans adult care, indicating the organization’s position
rising attempts by trans and gender diverse youth to end their own lives amidst the war by the U.S. against trans kids, with a similar trend in the U.K. after a drawdown in trans care (which the British government covered up)
continued cowardice by American medicine on trans youth care after hospitals across the U.S. are capitulating
As noted above, queer people are under attack, with this backsliding having “a deep connection to authoritarianism, with research showing that when governments weaken protections for queer and trans people, they often turn to broader democratic institutions next.” Cops are gaining new powers under these the above-described reactionary laws and gender stereotypes remain intact. There are some positives that should be highlighted. ACLU of Kansas filed a lawsuit against Kansas laws revoking licenses of trans people and calling for bounty hunters to search bathrooms for trans people. A federal judge ruled that Aetna’s blanket denial of facial surgery for trans women is sex discrimination. San José State University is suing the U.S. government (Department of Education) over anti-trans threats. California’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Rady Children’s Hospital for dropping trans youth gender-affirming care. Parents of “six young, transgender patients who had received gender-affirming care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles…successfully kept the Trump regime from accessing sensitive medical information, including names, social security numbers, and addresses of over 3,000 transgender children.” In a big win, the American Medical Association, the largest organization of physicians in the U.S., reaffirmed the medical necessity of gender-affirming care for minors, including surgeries, and stated that such access “should not be impeded.” All the while the anti-trans movement has been, as Erin Reed noted, “building up a sprawling apparatus of anti-trans pseudoscience for years.”
In terms of elections, four anti-trans Democrats lost badly in a Democratic Party primary election in North Carolina, in early March, along with other conservative Democrats. Voters had a clear message, which was, as Erin Reed put it, “if you abandon transgender people, your Democratic voters will abandon you,” with victories for pro-trans Democrats like Veleria Levy and Rodney Pierce. Reed further noted that “anti-transgender Democrats have not fared well in recent years.” After Texas Democrat Shawn Thierry voted to pass a gender-affirming care ban for transgender youth in 2023, the next year “she lost her primary runoff to Lauren Ashley Simmons, a Black queer union organizer, in a 65-35% blowout.” In Kansas, when Democrat Marvin Robinson was the only Democrat who voted to override the veto of Governor Laura Kelly on a trans sports ban, he “lost his 2024 primary, receiving just 22% of the vote.” Lastly, the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favor of a non-binding resolution recognizing trans women as women, possibly a signal that “the European bloc is increasingly willing to defend transgender people on the world stage.” At the same time, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU member states must allow trans citizens to update their official ID documents to “reflect their lived gender.”
Megaconglomerates, government repression, and mass surveillance
Building upon the other sections, there’s a lot I’d like to focus on here. For one there’s the ascension of new far-right leaders across Latin America, including José Antonio Kast, who has tried to distance himself from “pinochetista accusations” but actually is very close to the views of Pinochet. In Ecuador, there is a growing authoritarian shift from Daniel Noboa. He attended the Shield of the Americas summit in Florida, in early March, along with an assortment of right-wing and/or U.S. complaint leaders like President Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), President Santiago Peña (Paraguay), Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar (Trinidad and Tobago), President Rodrigo Chaves Robles (Costa Rica), President Luis Abinader (Dominican Republic), and President Irfaan Ali (Guyana). As Arturo Dominguez noted, a few days before the summit, which created a regional anti-drug coalition (the ACCC), Noboa launched an attack supposedly for counter-narcotics reasons. In actuality, Indigenous communities opposed to Noboa’s government were attacked, with U.S. and “Europol forces from Belgium and the Netherlands” assisting. This was despite the fact that “no evidence has been provided to validate that a cartel was targeted, only allegations.” As Dominguez warned, the ACCC will likely provide convenient cover for governments to suppress opposition, particularly in Ecuador and El Salvador.
Domestically within the U.S., ICE and DHS are increasing their repressive tactics, not only by paying off local cops to do their bidding, as ICE has done, but by expanding their watchlist apparatus to seek out supposed “criminals,” primarily undocumented immigrants and transnational criminals (as they claim), planning to monitor social media 24/7 (with Taylor Lorenz saying it is “becoming harder and harder to criticize ICE online”), and otherwise surveilling Americans in neighborhoods across the U.S. As Arturo Dominguez notes, they are using A.I.- based programs “to monitor U.S. citizens under the guise of immigration enforcement and cynical claims of national security.” As such it is no surprise at all that some people within Latino communities are afraid to leave home even if they have medical complications from HIV/AIDs, to give one example. All of this is coupled with deflective cover-ups, bloated deportation numbers, spying on Reddit users, rigging immigration courts against Somali migrants, and tracking protesters with a watchlist (like those who film them).
All the while, the tariff regime continues even though it is still illegal, the anti-immigrant policies (which involve arresting people who the U.S. government invited in the first place) continue unabated, despite the fact that, as John Harwood puts it, there are big lies at the center of this mass deportation campaign: that immigrants are violent criminals and welfare chiselers “bankrupting the government at the expense of American taxpayers.” Both are not true. The Florida legislature has been pushing to designate groups as domestic terrorist organizations based on secret evidence, with a single corporation, based in Israel, named Cellebrite, lobbying for this law. Their technology would allow Florida to “extract troves of text messages, photos and location data from phones and other devices, overriding password protection and encryption and even accessing deleted files”! This all comes when CBS censored Stephen Colbert, Discord declared it was adding age verification to the social messaging platform which would necessitate treating everyone like a teen unless they proved they were an adult (which led to them facing backlash and sort of backing away from it for now), and there are efforts to disturbingly normalize surveillance under the banner of helping lost pets. As I said in a previous newsletter, in late December, age verification violates people’s rights to privacy and free expression, by encouraging censorship and self-censorship while it does not promote online safety but makes people more unsafe instead.
Recently, Zohran Mamdani and DSA has been labeled, with the help of A.I. tools, used by Network Contagion Research Institute, as foreign agents. The report has beenn described by Ken Klippenstein as “pure McCarthyite guilt-by-association.” Even so, it was shared with the DOJ with calls for an investigation. Their report has additionally been shared with Congress, with Rep. Jason Smith embracing it. The regime is, at the same time, manufacturing “Antifa” enemies, controlling more social media platforms (such as TikTok), suppressing dissent with help/consent of Silicon Valley, gaining access to customer data at Microsoft (which handed over their encryption keys), and aiming to supposedly “free” the nation’s banks, through a deregulation plan proposed by Scott Bessent.
There are continued revelations from the Epstein files, whether about the “cryptocurrency” scam, and emails that almost sound like what people were talking about for Project MKUltra, like those about torture or hacking the genetic code to “break” the genome. The files unsurprisingly have ensnared people such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the Muskrat (since he asked Jeffrey Epstein to invite him to the “wildest party” on his notorious island), and former Prince Andrew. Epstein played a direct role in increasing ties between elites in India, Israel, and the U.S. The files are a glimpse into the rot of the U.S., even as the regime refuses to engage in any accountability for anyone named in the files. Just as dangerous are the plans to undermine the 2026 midterm elections by calling for Republicans to run the elections, and stealing ballots in Fulton County, Georgia (part of a quiet federal takeover of local elections).
Lastly, I’d like to talk about Netflix’s recent to pull out of the bidding war and Paramount moving ahead to acquire Warner. Previously in this newsletter, I strongly criticized the proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). I said in late December, that the merger would be, among other issues, a “recipe for monopolization…will reduce competition…will further squeeze Hollywood talent with thousands…laid off…is illegal (and unnecessary)…may impact physical media releases…will lead to less diversity in what is made…will cause Black economic power…to shrink…[and] is a cultural threat to the First Amendment.” Many of the same issues apply to the competing claim by Paramount Skydance, after Netflix backed down, with Atharv Gupta saying the numbers are “really bad” since the proposed combined Paramount-Warner company will have $79 billion in debt. He added that many things will have to go right to save the company within three years, and predicted it will be a disaster. This is after S&P placed Paramount Skydance on negative credit watch.
The deal will involve $111 billion dollars, clearly goes against antitrust laws, and will, as was the case [bloglink] for the Netflix-Warner merger, “result in more slop and less diversity, especially since there certainly will be massive layoffs.” It could, if it occurred (some have predicted that the merger won’t even happen and will unravel), involve separating Adult Swim and Cartoon Network, as has already occurred on YouTube TV. It could doom everything on HBO Max, as that streaming platform will merge with Paramount+ if this merger goes through, lead to mass job losses, and trigger a shake up of cable. With right-wingers grumbling about non-existent “trans ideology,” as Josh Hawley said in a hearing in relation to Netflix, and David Ellison trying to reassure those in Congress that this merger is better than the one Netflix proposed, a merged company will likely skew content (as will his father Larry Ellison) in an “alpha male” way that aligns “more closely with MAGA messaging,” coupled with embrace of A.I. and Zionism.
With the recent cancellation of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, after two seasons, it makes me worry not only about Star Trek: Lower Decks ever getting renewed. If this merger gets approved, will upcoming series like Steven Universe: Lars of the Stars, Starfire!, and My Adventures with Green Lantern be cancelled? I’d say the same could happen to Ark: The Animated Series at Paramount+ or My Adventures with Superman on HBO Max. Will any shows with any semblance of “diversity” be cancelled and/or removed from the streaming service? After all, the HBO Max content purge already impacted series like OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, Victor and Valentino, and Infinity Train in 2022, and others in later years. I have been writing about content purges for years in this newsletter, so it is nothing new to me. Will the merged company remove shows like Steven Universe, Craig of the Creek, Harley Quinn, Oh My God... Yes!, Common Side Effects, and Women Wearing Shoulder Pad, which have replete LGBTQ+ representation, or keep/cancel them? If they did remove them, that would awful for everyone.
Celebrating Victories and Resistance
There’s a lot to talk about here. For one, Ken Klippenstein is noting how the aforementioned Mullin “testified before his colleagues this week and apologized,” showing that, in his words, “the anti-ICE protesters in cities across the country like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles” winning big, with Mullin offering up “one concession after another, the exact opposite of [Kristi] Noem’s unyielding, my-way-or-the-highway rhetoric.” Klippenstein also said that the public has claimed many victories this year, with the “fall of super-elites from former Prince Andrew to Bill Gates” and anti-ICE protests which “forced the…administration into retreat in Minnesota,” claiming that, in his words “the revolution is here, against royals both literal and figurative who think they have some divine right to rule over public life,” but says the news media is not reporting this. His words may be overly-optimistic, although he is onto something. Those who sneer at No Kings 3 Protests, like Caitlin Johnstone, are wrong, as much as they were previously (see my previous postings responding to criticisms by Johnstone and Lee Camp of the No Kings Day 2 protests on September 18, 2025, here and here). The same goes for others such as Twitter-brained Michael Arria who declared, in a recent article, which cites, among a variety of other sources, a mix of critics which are still within the Twitter cesspool (Adam Johnson and Sana Saeed) that the protests are “refusing” to address the U.S./Israel war on Iran, completely ignoring the multiple Indivisible emails which are strongly anti-war, with calls for those on the email list to either sign petitions, call their congresspeople, etc.
I am fully aware of what Lady Libertie said back in early January: that marching, chanting, and holding a sign feels good but this does not “remove fascists from power.” In her view, modern protest culture strips out the “context, sacrifice, and hard work” which go beyond protests and “replaces it with vibes.” She further, and rightly, says that oppressive governments fall when elite defect, money stops flowing, “labor refuses to cooperate[,] police, military or ICE fracture or stand down[, and] parallel institutions replace state legitimacy,” with protests involved but never the engine of action. She also said the work which actually matters are slow, relational, and structural actions, laying out what those mean for individuals, groups, and movements, saying it is not glamorous but it is effective. She concluded by saying that fascism falls “because systems stop obeying,” that we should do more than just march, and that the “real fight happens where the regime actually lives.” As I see it, protests are a tactic, a way to bring together people, and a way to raise awareness, as UMD community members did when they rallied to keep ICE off campus, but they should never be the be-all-end-all.
More than that, there are some victories of note, apart from the U.S. Supreme Court blocking the economically-destructive tariffs imposed by the orange one in a 6-3 vote, including the Green Party in the U.K. winning their first parliamentary by-election, beating Labour and Reform parties, in late February, and:
Rep. Delia Ramirez openly calling on abolishing and prosecuting DHS
the U.K. ban on Palestine Action deemed unlawful by the U.K.’s High Court even as the “terrorist” status remains in effect for now
Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeating Republican Leigh Wambsganss “in a special election for the Texas state senate” by a 14-point margin in a Republican stronghold, showing that people are “getting sick of the far-right telling them what they cannot read” as Wambsganss was pro-censorship
Residents, like those in Springfield, attending sessions that focus on “how to observe ICE activity”
Queer celebrities, like Billie Eilish and Myha’la, speaking out against ICE
The French government stating it will no longer use “American video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom” and will use French platforms, like Visio, instead
Growing alliances between the E.U. and India, India and African states
More and more artists cancelled their shows at the Kennedy Center after the illegal name change, resulting in retaliation from the regime
the removal of National Guard from various cities
the Mount Zion Baptist church in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming the last shelter, for the community, against pollution, a community which is facing an ongoing water and environmental crisis
Otherwise, Arturo Dominguez have penned an article challenging the “insurrectionist narrative” (as he calls it) about interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez participating in “the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro” as she seems to be engaging in concessions to the U.S. while the U.S. seems to be blackmailing her and the Venezuelan government in certain ways. On a related note are postings from Ann Wright and Teri Mattson of CodePink calling for solidarity with Cuba against U.S. aggression and Mexico aiming to protect is sovereignty and remain in solidarity with Cuba without incurring military or economic repercussions from the U.S. in one way or another.
Janet Mills is reportedly “flopping” in the Democratic Party primary for the Maine Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins, and facing a Berniecat/progressive named Graham Platner who has a questionable history including Nazi tattoos, embracing White supremacists, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan as an enlisted soldier, and served as a security contractor for the notorious Blackwater (now known as Constellis) for six months. Recently, Mills recently forcefully supported trans youth in sports and opposed a new ballot referendum that “would ban transgender girls from sports, bar transgender students from bathrooms in schools across the state, and carve transgender students out of the Maine Human Rights Act in certain cases.” Platner has also supported rights for trans people as well, meaning that, as Erin Reed put it, the fight over trans rights in Maine will simultaneously play out in “the Senate race…and the referendum.”
The dangers of A.I.
There’s a lot I could write about when it comes to A.I.’s dangers, whether it is A.I.’s pushing nuclear war in 95% of simulated war games, “cutting-edge” A.I.-powered cockroaches being created for military use, an A.I.-generated podcast network publishing 11,000 episodes a day by ripping off local media outlets, and the A.I. industry’s $100 million play to influence the 2026 elections. Most of all, I’d like to describe what has happened with Anthropic, which is at war with the Pentagon after the company said they didn’t want the government using their A.I. model, Claude, to do “evil things,” specifically for killer robots and mass surveillance. This is an stance supported by hundreds of employees at Google and OpenAI. While the A.I. company’s lawsuit could destroy the Pentagon in court, as Elie Mystal puts it, they are not one of the “good guys”:
Anthropic, makers of the “Claude” AI model, has sued the Department of Defense in two separate lawsuits, including one alleging that the government is violating its First Amendment rights…Anthropic wants to keep “safeguards” on Claude that prevent the system from being used to power autonomous weapons…and to engage in widespread surveillance of Americans…The government repeatedly threatened Anthropic with consequences if it didn’t remove its safety restrictions…but…[while] the current crop of war criminals running the government wants horrible things…Anthropic mostly wants to provide them…the company’s leaders have been falling all over themselves to talk about how “patriotic” they are, and how much they believe in using AI for national security. They’re basically saying they’ll let Claude do anything other than pull the actual trigger…The company wants to help the Trump administration do almost all of the bad things the Trump administration wants to do. And it’s happy to play along in ways both big and very small…The best thing to happen would be for the DOD to be prevented from using autonomous lethal AI and from surveilling the American public by an act of Congress…while Anthropic (for now) doesn’t want its technology to be used this way, the next company won’t have a problem with it. OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, are already trying to fill the void left by Claude.
Anthropic, which has its own Substack newsletter “called Claude’s Corner, written by AI, where the AI will be publishing ‘weekly essays on topics of its choosing’,” according to Taylor Lorenz, is powering a new election spending boom that is as destructive and deceptive as anything AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations have done, as The Nation noted. Even a post on Drop Site stated, which seemed somewhat sympathetic, that although the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has promised to build “an ethical AI,” the company’s A.I. model (Claude) was reportedly used in the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and it seems it was used to kill people in Iran. Amodei earlier said that he and the regime were aligned on “key areas of AI policy” which he has criticized of “authoritarian” governments in the Middle East. Reporting has stated that back in November 2024, Anthropic partnered with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to use Claude across U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Usage began at least by sometime in June 2025, including on classified missions. Similarly, OpenAI made a wide-ranging deal with the Pentagon, leading the company’s robotics leader to resign. This isn’t surprising. The U.S. military embraced a generative AI model for all three million military employees and will run on “every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” which was “developed with Google Gemini and will soon incorporate xAI’s Grok”! In addition, Google, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, SpaceX, and Microsoft will be developing A.I. data centers for the military.
A.I. is being used to pay workers for Uber and DoorDash (and later Amazon) as little as possible. All of GitHub’s submissions will be used as A.I. training data (unless you opt out of it). The regime is planning to use A.I. to write regulations. A.I. continues to have a negative environmental impact, particularly through data centers and on the water supply, which leads inevitably to environmental racism. This makes it unsurprising that A.I. is set to become of the defining issues for the 2026 midterm elections. More than that, or the detailed postings here and here about AI’s origins, pinkwashing, anti-DEI AI-surveillance, and the legacy media by Lana Leonard, and A.I. disproportionately discriminating against trans people (because of course it will), there are some victories of sorts:
OpenAI shuttering Sora, causing Disney to end its $1 billion investment in the company, even as the company says it will “continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are”
Grammarly removing, after backlash, the A.I. expert review feature copying the writing of well-known academics and writers
16 top YouTube channels which upload A.I. content deleted by YouTube
San Diego Comic-Con banning AI from art show
Publishers seeking to join class action against Google and “its generative AI product Gemini” for copyright infringement
Encyclopedia Britannica suing OpenAI for copyright and trademark infringement (as they should!)
A.I. agents poised to hit a mathematical wall according to a study
Pope Leo XIV urging “tech leaders to cultivate moral discernment in building artificial intelligence, developing systems marked by justice, solidarity, and reverence for life” (this will not happen)
At the same time, A.I. researchers (who formerly worked at Anthropic and OpenAI) are sounding the alarm. The orange one’s acting cyber chief dumbly uploaded sensitive files to a public version of ChatGPT. There were other findings about: how A.I. makes writing more bland (study by Google and leading universities), the phenomenon on vocational awe and A.I. fatigue in academic libraries, Palantir CEO Alex Karp claiming that A.I. makes “large-scale immigration ‘hard to imagine’” (a connection of racism and greed), and South Korea’s new A.I. law raising questions for Webtoons platforms and creators. In addition, Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS gave a guide on how to spot A.I. hallucinations like a reference librarian by listing “verification tricks that would make fact-checkers weep with joy.” Zachary Kaiser talked about the bullshit of teaching students to use A.I. in an ethical way. He noted that:
…“Artificial Intelligence” itself was always a marketing term (and thus a bunch of bullshit) as well as the fact that there are a whole bunch of domains of computing research that seem to now fall under this umbrella term. But, these days, unfortunately, it seems like we’re talking mainly about generative AI, and primarily we’re talking about LLMs and genAI that are served up to our institution by third parties such as Microsoft or OpenAI or Google or whoever…I have yet to find…anyone talking about “ethics” and “AI” who has actually defined the term “ethical” in the context of the use of genAI…What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t lie to each other, our administrators, or our students when we tell them about how to—and when to—use particular technologies. And, furthermore, it means we should be explicit about the nature of the development of the technologies we are using, regardless of the utility they seem to present to us or our students in a given moment
Final thoughts
There’s a few more topics I’d like to talk about before bringing this newsletter to a close. For one, s.e. smith wrote about how sex workers are screwed over by the payment processors, with a “collision of our society’s deep-seated loathing of sex workers, right-wing pearl clutching, capitalism, and the looming power of the tech industry over every aspect of our lives” with the ultimate goal of a “total ban on pornography.” Sites like Pornhub are earning revenue with ads while content performers do not make money from those ads. Adult sites have a “dizzying number of content restrictions” which is not consistent, serving as a form of algorithmic violence. On top of this, content creators must “meet strict legal requirements.” s.e. smith asserted that by making sex work so untenable, “these policies are actually putting sex workers in extreme danger.”
Otherwise, there were posts asserting that: gender-based violence for incarcerated women is ignored, men cannot be feminists, White culture “has no culture” (and that many White people do not understand racism), White Americans are scared of Indigenous burial grounds, there are quiet truths about activism, sex makes people uncomfortable (and calling for inclusive health education), and 18th century Americans were just as obsessed as people are today in their genealogy. One posting that is a bit scary to think about is what The Guardian talked about in late October: the fragile system of internet infrastructure holding the modern world together, which could break at any time.
Apart from all of that, The Mouthy Renegade Writer posted on how Mexico became the first country in the world to let citizens vote for Supreme Court justices (which is very democratic), Arturo Dominguez noting a Twitter feature which exposed Cuba social media influencers and journalists who were supposedly in Cuba (but weren’t actually there), John Harwood asking why Republicans are always on the wrong side of history, guerrilla fighters in West Papua facing extermination by the high-tech forces of Indonesia, and Venezuelans dramatically rounded up in a massive raid in Chicago by federal agents losing everything but have never been charged with a crime.
That’s all for this newsletter. Until next time. Thanks for reading.
- Burkely