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Thanks to Republicans, you can bring guns just about anywhere these days. “Good guys” with guns are ubiquitous, as are bad guys with guns. And morally ambiguous guys with guns. And teenagers. And toddlers. And dudes in windowless white vans who’ll give you a discount on a George Foreman grill if you’ll have just one beer with them. And maybe just a skosh of black tar heroin. Come on, you know you want to.

Of course, ours is arguably the last country on Earth that should be awash in guns. We’re a little on edge, in case you hadn’t noticed. And yet we’ve become so blasé about gun ownership, we’ve started to see a rash of gun seizures at airports—and not just among Republican congressmen.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or getting all your information from Fox News (granted, those two are functionally equivalent), you know that North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn was recently cited for bringing a loaded handgun to the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. It was his second such offense. He’s also scheduled to appear in court next month for allegedly driving with a revoked license.

Madison Cawthorn is facing a primary this coming month. Listen to a breakdown of the May primaries on Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

As a serial lawbreaker, one might think Cawthorn would face the same kind of heat as the lowly plebs who have also conveniently “forgotten” about the guns in their meticulously curated carryons and found themselves in handcuffs. Like this guy. Or this one. Or this one. Or this lady. Or this one. And those are just from this month.

Or maybe, since Cawthorn is in Congress, the klieg lights should be trained upon his and his compatriots’ relentless efforts to turn our country into a giant Insane Clown Posse mosh pit with unlimited ordnance.

In fact, one political party is extrapolating exactly that lesson from Cawthorn’s latest misadventures. I’ll give you one guess which one.

CNBC:

A pair of House Democrats urged the Transportation Security Administration on Thursday to crack down on the growing threat of firearms at airports, days after a Republican congressman was caught bringing a gun to a TSA checkpoint.

[…]

“Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle agree that those who break the law and endanger the safety of other passengers — and especially repeat offenders such as Rep. Cawthorn — must be held to account,” read the letter from Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and transportation subcommittee Chairwoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J.

“TSA must pursue appropriate action without fear or favor against all such offenders, regardless of whether they are public figures such as Rep. Cawthorn,” they wrote.

While policies on whether or not to arrest these offenders vary by state, and even city, one lawyer CNBC spoke with hinted that Cawthorn did receive the kid-glove treatment in the wake of his alleged violation. Brad Smith, a Charlotte, North Carolina, criminal defense attorney, said at Charlotte Douglas, such violators are typically arrested at the scene.

“More often than not you’re taken to jail, and booked,” Smith said. “The DA’s office absolutely prosecutes those cases.” 

And they should prosecute this one, too; if they do, Cawthorn faces up to 60 days in jail for his misdemeanor charge. But even more important than prosecuting offenders like Cawthorn is rousting him and his fellow gun fetishists from Congress. Because until we do, we’re going to continue to see alarming news items—like this one from February:

With a surge in guns being discovered at airport checkpoints, some security experts are suggesting higher fines and even putting violators on a no-fly list to prevent firearms from getting on planes.

Airport screeners found 5,972 guns at checkpoints last year, easily breaking a record set in 2019 despite a drop in air travel, and 86% of those guns were loaded, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Guns seizures are rising as airlines report record numbers of disruptive passengers on flights. Together, that “makes for a toxic combination,” Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., said Tuesday.

Since travelers caught with guns tend to claim they “forgot” they had loaded weapons tucked in with their tiny toiletries, TSA leaders continue to point out how irresponsible that is, from the Garden State—

“Claiming to forget that you have a gun with you is inexcusable,” Thomas Carter, TSA’s Federal Security Director for New Jersey, said in a statement. “If you own a gun you need to know where it is at all times.”

—to the Old Dominion.

“The regulation preventing the carrying of guns onto planes has been in place for decades, so this is nothing new,” said Robin “Chuck” Burke, TSA’s Federal Security Director for the [Norfolk, Virginia] airport.

[…]

“Forgetting that you have a loaded handgun in your possession is a careless mistake to make, especially when you are headed to the airport for a flight,” said Burke.

Sadly, Republicans are more likely to impeach President Joe Biden for trying to sneak through airport security in a tan suit than pass sensible gun-control laws, even if those laws would be vital to maintaining airport security. 

Then again, when was the last time Republicans came out for anything other than chaos?

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. 

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Sometimes you get confirmation of something you already knew and it still makes you want to vomit your small intestines down a storm sewer. Ever wonder why there are so many racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and transphobic GOP candidates? Because GOP voters love ‘em, that’s why! Occam’s razor cuts pretty deep sometimes, doesn’t it?

The latest Morning Consult/Politico poll surveyed voters of all stripes and found, among other horrors, that a full 62% of Republicans are more or less cool with candidates who are accused of making racist remarks.

And that’s not all! They’re also bigger fans of domestic violence, sexual misconduct, homophobia, and antisemitism than Democrats and independents are. 

Here’s a quick summary.

For the nontweeters:

Morning Consult/Politico

If a candidate is accused of ___ is it a major problem?

Sexual misconduct:
83% of Dems say yes
77% Ind
66% Republicans

Domestic violence:
81 D
74 I
67 R

Racist remarks:
80 D
59 I
38 R

Homophobic remarks
71 D
50 I
25 R

Antisemitism
71 D
61 I
47 R

The party of personal responsibility and family values, right?

Of course, judging by Donald Trump’s vote totals in the past two presidential elections, it’s safe to assume that at least 98% of the 38% of Republicans who claim to be bothered by racist remarks also told Morning Consult their favorite pastime is lying to pollsters.

It would also be interesting to see what these numbers were before Trump decided to start devouring old-school Republicans’ souls like so much Fiddle Faddle. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance was simply too much for the 34% of Republicans who think sexual misconduct is no biggie, and they decided to be honest for once. But wait, you’re telling me racism may actually be a selling point for GOP candidates? Here I thought all those white Rust Belt voters were flocking to Trump because of Kanye West. 

By the way, you’ll be shocked to learn that only 26% of Republicans would consider it a major problem if a candidate was accused of making transphobic remarks. I’m surprised it’s that high, honestly.

They say it’s important to know your enemy. I’d like to amend that slightly: It’s important to know your enemies, but not so well that you can’t control your vomit reflex when you’re driving to the polls to vote them out. I sincerely hope this news hasn’t pushed you over that edge, because we need your vote. 

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. 

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Watching responses to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of United States v. Vaello Madero, where the only dissent came from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was painful. While legal scholars wrote a raft of opinion pieces on why or why not the decision was or wasn’t correct, all I could think of was the 1899 illustration from Puck, posted above, which I used to show my students back when I was still teaching a college course on the Caribbean. 

The Library of Congress description of the graphic describes the scene:

“Print shows Uncle Sam as a teacher, standing behind a desk in front of his new students who are labeled “Cuba, Porto [i.e. Puerto] Rico, Hawaii, [and] Philippines”; they do not look happy to be there. At the rear of the classroom are students holding books labeled “California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, [and] Alaska”. At the far left, an African American boy cleans the windows, and in the background, a Native boy sits by himself, reading an upside-down book labeled “ABC”, and a Chinese boy stands just outside the door. A book on Uncle Sam’s desk is titled “U.S. First Lessons in Self-Government.”

The racism encapsulated in the illustration is patently obvious. While Uncle Sam is portrayed as adult white father and teacher, colonized people are depicted as squirming and uncomfortable children, with racial stereotypes including menial labor, pigtails, bare feet, and feathers thrown in for good measure. 

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

I don’t remember ever being taught about the Insular Cases in school. I learned about them when studying Puerto Rican history outside of the classroom, as an activist for Puerto Rican independence. I wonder if readers here had the same schoolroom experience I did.

Back in 2017, Doug Mack wrote this story for Slate which describes the Insular Cases’ history.

How a series of racist Supreme Court decisions cemented the island’s second-class status.

The devastation wrought by Hurricanes Irma and Maria has reawakened many Americans to the existence of Puerto Rico as well as the archaic laws and domineering bureaucracies that continue to burden the island. News outlets have scrambled to explain the Jones Act, the 1920 law that restricts shipping between U.S. ports, the PROMESA board that Congress set up last year to oversee Puerto Rico’s finances, and the fact that territory residents can’t vote for president.

But beneath these data points lurks something deeper and more problematic, yet rarely discussed: the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court decisions from the early 20th century. When we talk about the differences between states and territories—and when we ask why the United States even has territories in 2017—we’re really talking about the legacy of the Insular Cases. The recent controversies are, in fact, the latest iteration of a conversation about American empire that goes back more than a century.

The earliest Insular Cases were decided by the same Supreme Court that allowed “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. That case was overturned, but the Insular Cases, which are built on the same racist worldview, still stand today. Legal scholars disagree about how many Insular Cases there are—some say six; others include more than two dozen—but the general view is that they begin with Downes v. Bidwell in 1901. Up to then, the U.S. government considered territories to have the complete protection of the Constitution and a clear, straightforward path to statehood. This was true for all of the territories that existed on the North American continent at the time—Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska. But as the new century dawned, the federal government’s definition of what it meant to be a territory was shifting rapidly, as manifest destiny morphed into empire-building. President William McKinley and other leaders of the day aimed to bolster U.S. global stature by following the template of European powers: controlling the oceans by controlling islands, holding them not as equals but as colonies, as possessions.

Social justice activist Debbie Pérez conducted the following hour-long interview with attorney, activist, and co-host of the Radio Independencia podcast Andrés González Berdecía last year. This interview was conducted in English; much of the information and discussions around Puerto Rico, from a Puerto Rican perspective, are in Spanish. This essentially limits the information to only Spanish speakers, but many Puerto Ricans in the diaspora don’t speak the language, much like a vast majority of mainland citizens.

Berdecía explains the history of not only the Insular Cases, but the Jones Act, which granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. He also points out that some of the best constitutional lawyers both here and in Puerto Rico haven’t studied or been taught about the Insular Cases in depth. 

When I was teaching, most of my students didn’t think of the U.S. as a colonial power; our “colonies” are dubbed “territories,” further obfuscating the political reality. Yet most of us here in the U.S. who have been watching the the disastrous Caribbean tours of the British royals—like this one covered here last month—have no problem describing the nations visited as “former British colonies.”

Now if only Americans could only get used to using “colony”—and understanding what that means—when we talk about our government’s relationship to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam, not to mention the rarely mentioned Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.

Erica Gonzalez, director of Power 4 Puerto Rico, which bills itself as “a national coalition of the Puerto Rican Diaspora and allies working full-time and year-round for federal policies and legislation that will support Puerto Rico’s just recovery, economic growth and self-sufficiency,” has no problem using the “C” word.

It’s often assumed that all Puerto Ricans are clamoring for U.S. statehood. That’s simply not true; as Gonzalez notes below, that’s a “colonizer mindset.”

Puerto Rico and its citizens should get to choose for themselves what happens next—known as self-determination. Activist Maricarmen Gutiérrez of CASA wrote about it just this week in a Daily Kos Community story. 

Even though slavery was abolished in the 19th century in the United States, it is dismaying to know that here in the 21st century, an entire country – my country – can be a possession of another country. That we can’t decide our destiny. No matter how many local governments you choose, your sovereignty is kidnapped.

To our surprise, there is a bill in Congress, HR2070, to decolonize Puerto Rico. This bill binds Congress in that process. It is not a perfect bill, but it has achieved the approval of important sectors in Puerto Rico, including all the existing political parties. The United States Congress denies that Puerto Rico is a colony. The existence of such a project – a new law to be passed which would allow Puerto Ricans to control their own political destiny – exposes this lie. This bill gives us hope, but we’ve seen sparks of hope fail to catch fire before.

If you are wondering what you can do to support the movement for self-determination for Puerto Rico, consider sending emails to Congress.

The Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act (introduced in both the House and the Senate) has diverse support.

Join me in the comments section below for more on Puerto Rico and for the weekly Caribbean Twitter Roundup.

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Journalist Spenser Mestel tweeted a photo on Wednesday of South Dakota Democrat Rueben Engelhart holding a 2018 ballot measure petition that stretched from his chin to his shins. “Per a new law in South Dakota, canvassers must collect signatures on the same single sheet of paper as the full text of the initiative — and the font can be no smaller than size 14,” Mestel said in the tweet. “It’s part of a wider Republican-led war on ballot initiatives.”

Gov. Kristi Noem signed legislation requiring the larger font size into law last year, and South Dakota Republicans as well as those in about a dozen other states are hardly stopping there when it comes to restricting the ballot initiative process. 

RELATED STORY: Explainer: What is a ballot initiative?

Last year alone, 146 bills were introduced to restrict that process, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a liberal advocacy organization. “After progressive issues like #MinimumWage won at the ballot in 2016 and 2018, you started to see an increase in state legislatures trying to make them less accessible,” Chris Melody Fields, executive director of the organization, tweeted.

Listen to a breakdown of the May primaries on Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

In 2016, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington pushed through ballot measures to raise the minimum wage by such a degree that at least 2 million Americans were due raises by 2020, The Atlantic reported. Major win.

A ballot measure to lower the minimum wage for employees in South Dakota under the age of 18 who do not receive tips was rejected by more than 70% of voters in 2016, the Associated Press reported. Another win.

The GOP didn’t, however, take the losses silently.

The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is monitoring 87 bills that aim “to change the ballot measure process or block ballot measure implementation in 13 states,” the organization reported. The organization identified Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota as “top states to watch.”

This year, Arizona voters will consider imposing both a “single subject rule” requiring each ballot initiative to address only one topic, and a repeal of the Voter Protection Act, “a 24 year old law which protects ballot measures from being altered by legislators after they are approved by voters,” according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Here’s what the center reported on Florida and Missouri:

Florida: Following the trend of their 2021 legislative session, Florida legislators have introduced bills intended to dilute direct democracy from a few different angles: (a) by making the signature collection process more onerous and more confusing, (b) by severely limiting the subjects voters can consider at the ballot, and by limiting campaign contributions during the signature gathering process.

Missouri: The legislature has introduced nearly two dozen attacks on the initiative process as of March 1, 2022. These attacks are designed to curtail Missourian’s initiative and referendum rights in a variety of ways, including raising the voter approval threshold, increasing the signature collection requirements, expanding the geographic signature collection requirements,  increasing the fees to file signatures, creating new ways signatures can be invalidated, and even making the processes indirect by giving the legislature say over what voters propose. After failing to pass attacks last year, Missouri legislators are even more determined to undermine the people’s tool this year.

Mestel tweeted that legislators are trying to raise the threshold for a measure to pass to 60% in Arizona and 66% in Missouri. “And when initiatives succeed, lawmakers don’t always listen,” he continued. “After FL voters raised the minimum wage, legislators tried to create a ‘sub-minimum’ wage for service workers.”

That bill failed, but a vital takeaway remains: Where there is a Republican will, there will be a suppressive way. The only real, long-term solution is to vote them out of office.

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Roger Stone is back! Nope. I spoke too soon! It seems that Roger Stone created a new Twitter account on Thursday morning, announcing he was back from his lifetime suspension. Stone seems to have been under the impression that Elon Musk’s impending take over of Twitter and all of the solipsism Musk represents meant that “free speech” speech talk included him coming back onto the social media platform that banned him back in 2017.

According to the Daily Beast, Stone took to Telegram to write, “Well bitches I’m back on Twitter.” He added, “I’m anxious to see how strong Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech is.” It took Twitter a little while to make sure that @RogerStoneUSA was indeed connected to the odiously pardoned criminal. After they did that, Twitter banned Roger Stone again.

Reporter Zachary Petrizzo followed the fastest story in the West today.

A Twitter spokesperson told the Beast: “The account referenced was permanently suspended for violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our ban evasion policy.”

Stone told the outlet, “I posted a new account to prove a point. I look forward to whoever made the decision to suspend my account getting fired. Attn: Elon Musk.” Only the best people.

Star Wars!

Don’t let the door …

And a classic.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

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In addition to his “dry mist” COVID-19 spray, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker has had other health products he’s promoted over the years. The problem is, the science-based health community—and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—have doubts about their efficacy.

The Daily Beast found an August 2020 interview in which Walker told right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck about the new FDA-approved “spray” that kills COVID on contact.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Walker says. “Do you know right now, I have something that [you can bring] into a building, that will clean you of COVID, as you walk through this, this dry mist?”

But the COVID-curing spray isn’t the only product the former Heisman Trophy winner has touted. There’s also Aloe-Lu-Ya, an aloe vera-based health drink launched via Walmart in 1999, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was deemed a “commercial failure,” as reported in an SEC filing.

RELATED STORY: No big shocker to learn that Herschel Walker hawked ‘dry mist’ spray to ‘clean’ you of COVID-19

AS reported by the AJC, when Aloe-Lu-Ya failed, Walker rebranded through another company with a plant extract drink called Sunutra. This time the claims were that the “phytonutrients” in the drink could ward off a slew of diseases, “including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, urinary tract infections and more,” the SEC filing reads.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

The company was also forced to admit to the SEC that these “beliefs” were “not supported by medical evidence generally accepted by the medical community.”

Maureen Meister, a registered dietician and lab researcher at Georgia State University, told the AJC: “It certainly isn’t going to prevent disease. … Certainly, it can slow it, but it won’t be a magic pill.”

In 2014, Walker partnered with multi-level marketing-based company Livio International as a spokesperson for an anti-aging creme, AJC reports.

Four years later, Walker was hawking Novagen, a testosterone-building supplement to help “push back time against time” in the “locker room,” the “boardroom,” or “even the bedroom.”

Then there’s the latest COVID-19 spray.

“When you leave—it will kill the virus as you leave, this here product,” Walker told Beck, adding that he has a second unspecified miracle product, a “spray” possibly indicated for use after the dry mist treatment.

“They don’t want to talk about that. They don’t want to hear about that,” Walker says. “And I’m serious.”

The two-time Pro Bowl champion running back refused to say whether or not he’s been vaccinated or boosted, but of course, he continues to poll high among Republicans.

According to an April 7 The Hill/Emerson College poll, Walker is leading Sen. Raphael Warnock 49% to 45%.

Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) has reported that Walker’s personal financial disclosures continue to be murky.

Walker’s net worth is between $29 million and $65 million, GPB reports. And his income from the end of 2020 to the end of 2021 was reportedly $4 million.

One example of Walker’s possibly opaque reporting comes from Stephen Spaulding, a senior adviser at Common Cause, a government watchdog organization.

“According to this candidate’s financial disclosure form, no person or entity paid more than $5,000 for any services provided by him—at the same time, he disclosed an interest in an LLC valued at more than $25 million and that provides ‘business consulting and professional services,’” Spaulding told GPB. “This may raise questions for voters trying to screen for conflicts of interest who want to know more about who got what from the consulting and professional consulting firm that bears his name and pays him millions in shareholder income.”

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While President Joe Biden pledged as a candidate that he would terminate all 287(g) agreements entered into by the previous administration, that pledge has largely remained unfulfilled. This is the very problematic Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that allows local law enforcement to cosplay as mass deportation agents.

But a deeply troubling report this week should give the administration all the reasons it needs to act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that a review revealed at least 59% of participating sheriffs have records of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, including one North Carolina sheriff who demanded his deputies “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters.”

The ACLU said that while ICE terminated Sheriff Terry Johnson’s 287(g) contract following a 2012 lawsuit from Justice Department, he won it back under the insurrectionist administration.

RELATED STORY: Immigrant communities describe ‘relief’ after Georgia sheriffs terminate ICE agreements

“From the beginning, ICE signed 287(g) agreements with sheriffs who ran on anti-immigrant campaign platforms and sought to participate in the program as a ‘political trophy in local anti-immigration campaigns,’” the report said. These arrangements also far precede the insurrectionist administration, with ICE entering into a 2007 agreement with Rogers, Arkansas, after it was sued for illegally harassing Latino residents.

What can Biden do? Listen to immigration activist Juan Escalante on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

“ICE signed an agreement with Frederick County, Maryland Sheriff Charles (‘Chuck’) Jenkins in 2008 after he ran on an anti-immigrant platform that included a warning that ‘aliens’ were moving to Frederick County from Northern Virginia—and a pledge that he would ‘shoot them right back,’” the report continued.

Jenkins also claimed that “the single biggest threat to our country is the immigration problem.” But if you’re Latino and in Frederick County, the biggest threat is more likely Jenkins. Just last year, he was forced to apologize to a Latina racially profiled by his department. Sara Haidee Aleman Medrano was pulled over for a supposed broken taillight that actually wasn’t broken at all. Deputies then contacted ICE. Under the settlement, the county also agreed to pay the harassed woman $125,000.

The ACLU noted that the Obama administration took decisive action to begin winding down 287(g) agreements, with Congress slashing the program’s funding by nearly half. “By the end of the Obama administration, only 34 local agencies remained in the program.” 

So, so close. But the next administration “exponentially expanded the 287(g) program, leaving it five times bigger by the end of its term and responsible for two and a half times as many deportations as before,” the report said. The ACLU said that as the insurrectionist administration was publicly appealing to anti-immigrant sheriffs to join the program, it was also “dropping civil rights investigations into local law enforcement agencies and even publicly encouraging police brutality.”

Sheriffs have campaigned, and won, on ending these racist agreements. In Cobb County, Georgia, immigrant communities have said they’ve been able to breathe a little easier. “They say it’s a relief, that they can leave their homes with less stress, knowing they will be able to come back at the end of the day and have dinner with their family and see their kids,” Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights’ Adelina Nicholls told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this year.

However, during a hearing last summer, the president’s nominee to head ICE, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, indicated it would not be his intent to end this program. But to continue this policy would go against the president’s pledge to usher in a more humane immigration system. In its recommendations, the ACLU said the Biden administration should end the program entirely, beginning with the more than 50 agencies identified as having particularly egregious records. 

Naureen Shah, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, said in a statement received by Daily Kos that by continuing these agreements, “President Biden is sending a message that he sanctions and approves of these abuses.”

“The Biden administration is also undermining its own efforts to repair the harm inflicted by the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda as well as its promise to hold law enforcement accountable for violating the law,” Shah continued. “The Biden administration should immediately cease working with these agencies, whose conduct is antithetical to the Biden administration’s vision for the country.” Click here to send the president a message urging him to end ICE’s harmful 287(g) program.

RELATED STORIES: Georgia county’s new Democratic sheriff ends flawed and racist ICE agreement on first day in office

House Democrats urge Homeland Security to end department’s racist and flawed agreements with police

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Depending on where you live and your upbringing, hearing people reference Bringham Young University (BYU), the private, religious university operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, might bring up a number of connotations for you. Here at Daily Kos, for example, we’ve covered the institution’s frustrating and disappointing stance on LGBTQ+ issues, including the brave forms of protest coming from current and past students.

One form of protest has gotten a lot of attention in recent days as graduate Jillian Orr went viral on social media for revealing an LGBTQ+ Pride flag stitched into her graduation gown while receiving her diploma. At some universities, this wouldn’t be a huge deal; after all, some schools let students wear Pride pins and related memorabilia as part of the ceremony. But BYU explicitly bans students from being in same-sex relationships under the school’s Honor Code. 

Orr, who is bisexual and had to hide her relationship with another woman as a student, decided she wasn’t going to end her time at BYU in silence. Thus the hidden Pride flag and the big reveal on stage, which was reportedly shown on live TV. 

RELATED: First openly trans lawmaker in Kansas faces explicit transphobia from Republican colleague

Orr, who graduated with a degree in psychology, told the Salt Lake Tribune in an interview that she knew she wanted to “protest” her time at the university after feeling like she had to hide for so many years. She explained to the outlet that she worried about being disciplined or even expelled from the university if anyone found out about her same-sex relationship while she was a student.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

And according to Orr, it wasn’t just social norms among her peers—the issue came up in her actual classes. For example, Orr told the outlet she was once assigned a paper on why it’s God’s “plan” that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Orr said she ultimately refused to write it and got a lower grade because of her decision. 

With the help of her sisters, Hope and Rachel Orr, the graduate explained she decided to incorporate rainbow imagery into her graduation gown but felt she had to be a bit “sneaky” to pull it off without the administration catching on before she walked across the stage. In the end, her sister stitched the rainbow colors inside her traditional graduation gown, not to be revealed until she was on stage.

In an additional video shared on TikTok, Orr said she actually received her diploma in January. She said she’s not sure if the school can revoke it based on what she did at the ceremony. In an interview with Good Morning America, she said she has not yet heard from the school about it either way. 

Orr has shared that she still identifies with the church and that the whole reason she initially attended the school was because of her religious beliefs and the less expensive tuition options there for church members. But she doesn’t feel that her faith and sexuality are inherently at odds with one another, and wants to see more acceptance and inclusivity for religious LGBTQ+ people at the school.

And Orr is certainly not alone in this experience. As she shared in an Instagram post, for example, she recalled that while moving through the crowd after the ceremony, another graduate thanked her for doing what she did she said her girlfriend saw her on live TV and was proud of her. 

You can catch a brief interview with Orr via local outlet FOX 13 below.

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The ongoing far-right strategy of targeting local politics—school boards and city councils and public health boards—to gain traction for their politics of bigotry and menace is clearly a daunting concern. Adam Harris has a good piece in The Atlantic this week about how it’s so effective at driving ordinary civic-minded people away from democratic institutions and replacing them with conspiracist ideologues that it’s a chilling exploration of what democracy’s defenders are all up against.

However, there really is still hope. There are increasing signs, as BlueMonday recently reported, that these tactics are beginning to backfire. Moreover, there already is a blueprint for fighting back successfully: One small town in the Pacific Northwest has demonstrated the power of local community organizing to stand up to the right’s bullying politics, as it did in last fall’s elections.

Harris’ piece focuses on the Michigan town of Grand Blanc, a reasonable stand-in for the ordinary rural towns across the country that have suddenly faced this bewildering barrage from the far right. The school board’s monthly meetings—once the most mundane and boring of affairs, typical for communities everywhere—have become battlegrounds for conspiracists who pack the seats with people who take over the open-question sessions and dominate the gatherings with talk about critical race theory and grooming.

In the case of Grand Blanc, the problem is aggravated by the presence of a QAnon-quoting extremist already on the board—one who now claims no connection to the conspiracist cult. “I’m a victim of cancel culture,” says Amy Facchinello. “I think they’re using the QAnon narrative to cancel conservatives … If you question their narrative, they label you a QAnon conspiracy theorist.”

Local residents say it’s less her beliefs in QAnon theories and more “the division and the chaos that she brings” that concerns them. And that’s not just a concern in Grand Blanc.

The same fate is befalling places like Eatonville, Washington, and Shasta County, California, as well. Around the nation, as more and more local political entities are confronted with this organized onslaught, the people who traditionally have held those jobs and run for those seats are backing away, as Harris observes:

[W]ith the increasing hostilities of the job, many school-board members have seen resignation or retirement as their only way forward. In Wisconsin, a board member resigned after receiving threats and seeing a car idling outside his house while his children were home; in Tennessee, members were called child abusers and harassed for supporting mask mandates. “My most recent time on the board has impacted who I am as a person and my inability to have peace and joy in my life,” one school-board member in Indiana wrote in a resignation letter last year. “If the past two years have taught me anything, it is that life is precious and that time is short.”

This spate of departures will leave seats open, seats for which only the loudest voices in the room might be willing to run. Who else would want to?

But after the past two years, researchers worry that the temperature around this vital institution has been raised irreversibly. They worry that, even as districts sunset mask mandates and vaccines become standard, the battles at school-board meetings will rage on. And they worry that too few reasonable people will want to devote themselves to ever getting things back on course.

This concern was recently front and center in the Shasta County elections in which longtime establishment Republicans were driven from office by “Patriot” movement ideologues. Militiaman Carlos Zapatas—fond of threatening county supervisors that “it’s not going to be peaceful much longer,” and “good citizens are going to turn to real concerned and revolutionary citizens real soon”—led a successful recall against Supervisor Leonard Moty.

“Their agenda is, ‘If you don’t agree with us then we have to get rid of you,’” Moty told the Los Angeles Times. He added: “I am concerned for individuals in our community.”

Extremists likewise have largely taken over the machinery of Oregon’s Republican Party, particularly on the local level. In Idaho, they’re attempting to take over local Democratic Party apparatuses as well.    

One such small town—Sequim, Washington, located on the northern rim of the Olympic Peninsula, a retirement-oriented community where the QAnon-loving mayor and his bullyboys on the city council took over local politics—fought back, however, and succeeded.

After the mayor forced out the city’s popular manager and began issuing dubious health directions during the COVID pandemic—and the subsequent coverage of Sequim’s takeover by QAnon, which embarrassed many longtime locals—concerned residents organized the Sequim Good Governance League (SGGL), which lined up a slate of candidates to run in last fall’s elections.

As Sasha Abramsky reported for The Nation:

When the votes were counted, they showed that the SGGL-backed candidates had ridden a wave of genuine popular fury against the faux populists aligned with Armacost. In Sequim, the five SGGL candidates for city council—[Lowell] Rathbun, [Brandon] Janisse, Vicki Lowe, Kathy Downer, and Rachel Anderson—all got between 65 and 70 percent of the vote. Both hospital commissioners’ positions in the county went to SGGL candidates, as did the fire commission and school district posts up for election last year.

“Our community has spoken and they want a change,” said Lowe, who had 68% of the vote against the incumbent. “Now we can take the focus back from everything else that doesn’t have to do with Sequim City Council, and start talking about housing and sidewalks and how our recycling is really getting recycled,” she added.

Those kind of results could point to a blueprint for pushing back against extremists at the local level, Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights told CityLabs’ Laura Bliss. He noted that the candidates’ success began with repeatedly calling attention to their opponents’ affiliations with QAnon, as well as their excessive devotion to non-local issues, and was sealed by their strategic and energetic combined organizing and door-knocking during the campaign.

“That combination is going to be a key for defeating far-right efforts to take over local government around the country,” he said.

“It does have a national ramification,” Bruce Cowan, a politically active Port Townsend retiree, told Bliss. “Folks who don’t believe in government—populists, people who don’t have faith in the institutions of governance—shouldn’t be in charge of the government. One of the things that happened in Sequim is that people were not engaged enough to see how important it was to find candidates for city council. Now they understand the importance.”  

As Blue Monday notes, the right’s politics of menace and intimidation directed at local school boards is beginning to run into organized opposition, with encouraging results so far in places like Missouri and New Hampshire, and mixed results in others, like Wisconsin.

The key critical factor in all of them is simple: Recognizing that you have a radical-right problem. Once communities can be persuaded out of being in denial about what they are up against and what they are dealing with—and that the only effective answer is to out-organize them—there is a very good chance of success.