Where's Waldo: The Authoritarian Game No One Ever Wins

"Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants."

- Adam Serwer, "Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention Is a Trial Run"

Authoritarians, dictators, and fascists - whether still aspiring or long established - do a lot of the same damn things.

I will list several of these, but since I have not devoted my professional life to the study of authoritarianism, I will draw my list from the work of someone who has - namely Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen. From that book, I will focus particularly on authoritarians in the "personalist" tradition, who (as Ben-Ghiat notes) attract followers with their charisma, their "rogue nature," and their appeals to their followers' resentments (251).  These authoritarians:

• Promise to restore a lost glory, or "to make the country great again. This involves the fantasy of returning to an age when male authority was secure and women, people of color, and workers knew their places" (67, emphasis in original).
• Insist they are implementing "law-and-order rule," even as they permit, oversee, and benefit from "lawlessness" (251). The result, Ben-Ghiat observes, is that "government evolves into a criminal enterprise."
• Convert their personal fixations into the priorities of the entire country. "Their private obsessions set the tone for public discourse, skew institutional priorities and force large-scale resource reallocations"(12).
• Detain, deport, demonize, and scapegoat immigrants, particularly those who are Black and brown. Silvio Berlusconi, who ruled over Italy three separate times, once asked, rhetorically: "Why does xenophobia have to have a negative meaning?" (80, translation by Ben-Ghiat).
• Create "a culture of surveillance and threat" that saddles people in marginalized and targeted groups with constant worry and fear (167).
• Put their "enemies in penal colonies, prisons, and camps" (168). 
• And finally, embrace violence.

The Call from Inside of the House

I say "finally," but for millions of Americans, state-approved violence - on its own - is not new. Indeed, state-approved anti-Black violence is as old as America itself, with a very obvious historical throughline from slavery through lynching to modern policing and mass incarceration, facts I mention to make this point: Black Americans have been living in an American culture of surveillance and threat since there was an America to live in, and White Americans who are at all historically literate - or at all honest with themselves - know that to be true. We just don't really care. 

We have grown up in a nation that falsely equates Whiteness with virtue, beauty, morality, intelligence, wisdom, and basic spiritual worth, and since that equation happens to be pretty flattering to us, we believe in it worshipfully, with a radical and terrible faith. And that faith? That has primed us in this moment to choose Whiteness over democracy.  

Many of us - way too fucking many of us - prefer authoritarianism to a multi-racial democracy where we are all considered equal. 

Smooth Criminal

In his first campaign for president, Donald Trump convinced millions of Americans that building a literal wall between the United States and Mexico - and making Mexico pay for it - was not only possible but essential to restoring America's lost greatness.

During his second campaign, he abandoned the wall but doubled down on defaming and smearing immigrants, right down to the genetic level. He also promised his base he would engage in human rights violations on a massive scale, causing pain to create spectacle. But where would he put people that he seized?  

Now that he's in office, he hasn't debuted camps (yet), but he has invoked an 18th-century war statute to give himself powers not available to presidents in times of peace. And he has used those powers to dump men from Venezuela into a prison in El Salvador indefinitely - without even a whiff of due process.

The marketing, the pretext Trump is using, is public safety. He and an army of talking heads are all repeating the most electric words they can find to characterize the men they sent to El Salvador, because they want to make the men seem even more shocking than the lack of due process. We must see through that propaganda.  

In fundamental ways, America is defined, is even exemplified by the rights enshrined in our Constitution, including free speech and due process. Given that Presidents take an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," the horror here is that the American president is violating his oath. With disregard if not contempt for the Constitution, he is torching the freedoms guaranteed to individuals to grant authoritarian powers to himself.

Due what now?

Free speech is a right familiar to Americans; due process, perhaps less so.  The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution says that no person can "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." But what does that mean?  

For starters, under ordinary circumstances, it means that agents of our government are not supposed to grab a PhD student off a sidewalk and throw her in prison because her visa has just been revoked; they are supposed to tell her they have revoked her visa and give her some amount of time to take action (e.g. leave the country) before they deprive her of her liberty (read: arrest her). This component of due process is referred to as notice, or sometimes reasonable notice. 

The same would be true if your neighbor had 16 old, rusty cars in his side yard.  The government can't just show up with fleet of tow trucks, take the cars, and send him a bill for $25,000. They have to provide notice to your neighbor that he is violating code XYZ, and they have to provide some reasonable amount of time to remove the cars before they deprive him of his property. 

Except.

What if the "reasonable" amount of time they give him is 15 days? What if he has cancer and is undergoing radiation and is not physically able to meet the government's timeline?  Happily, your neighbor has the due process right to object and to be heard by what Cornell Law School describes as a "neutral decision-maker."  A judge might then grant him six months from the conclusion of his treatment, or whatever the judge believes is fair. At the end of the day, the fuel for due process is fairness. 

Pushing and Threatening

Let's briefly break down what happened to men from Venezuela put onto those planes to see how their due process rights were violated.

I quote now from the 3/24/2025 Memorandum Opinion in J.G.G. et al. v. Donald Trump et al.:

In early March, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] began interrogating Venezuelan migrants in its custody, including Plaintiffs, about gang membership. Even after 'vehemently den[ying] any affiliation with a gang, past or present,' Plaintiffs say they were moved from detention centers across the country to the El Valle Detention Facility in south Texas. The reason for this transport was unveiled on the night of Friday, March 14, when, in Plaintiffs’ telling, they were among over 100 Venezuelan noncitizens who were pulled from their cells and told that they would be deported the next day to an unknown destination (citations omitted).

I know it's not Waldo, but you can spot the problem, right?  The men told DHS, repeatedly, that they were not gang members, but they were shackled and put on planes without having a hearing before a "neutral decision-maker." 

At some point after the planes took off, agents of the state started demanding that the men sign statements that they were in fact gang members.

We know this because El Salvador had agreed to take custody of Venezuelan men (only), and therefore turned away a man from Nicaragua and eight women, one of whom later described the scene in a Declaration for use in court.

While on the plane the government officials were asking the men to sign a document and they didn’t want to. The government officials were pushing them to sign the documents and threatening them. I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA. 

If the government had such strong evidence that these men were in fact members of TdA, why try to coerce them into incriminating themselves, which they have a separate Fifth Amendment right not to have to do? 

Why not just operate lawfully and give them the hearing that they are constitutionally entitled to have?

It seems pretty obvious that the government didn't want to hold lawful hearings because it could not prove these people were gang members, and that it unlawfully rushed them out of the country because it could not otherwise achieve its goal, which was to place these men into an infamous prison where they would be tortured and possibly killed - not because it bears any true animus toward these specific individuals (or even recognizes their individual humanity in any way whatsoever), but because it wanted to make them into an example.

“This is one of the consequences”

It's clear from the Memorandum Opinion that I quoted earlier, but it still bears repeating that the people put onto those planes were already being detained in the United States. If the concern were truly public safety, that would have achieved the goal. Public safety, however, was never the point.  

The prison in El Salvador is called CECOT, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem flew there to shoot a propaganda video in which she says: "I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face."

Screen shot from Newsweek

Ironically, even though this is propaganda, Noem is finally revealing the truth. The first Trump administration made family separation its official policy in an effort to stop the flow of people seeking protection, freedom, and a better life in the United States.  As quoted in a CNN article from June of 2018, DHS spokesperson Katie Waldman said, "Of course we expect the 100% prosecution policy at the border to have a deterrent effect. The application of consequences for breaking our nation’s immigration laws and violating our nation’s sovereignty will be effective."

This is the same effort, made worse. It's Family Separation: The Sequel - except it's even more terrifying because of its scope.

They are throwing aside the US Constitution in an effort to be so lawless and so cruel that they will deter people from coming to America.  And. They are also throwing aside the US Constitution to lock up PhD students from other nations who express viewpoints they disfavor.

And.

They have made clear they are willing to punish students who are American citizens for the same reason.  That is the United States government loudly threatening to ignore the First Amendment protections for Americans. Is it still a slippery slope if you're already part of the way down it?

Trump's Newest Horrors

We have to get real. We may be holding onto the idea that America is a democracy, but they aren't. They have let that go.

As Serwer says in the headnote, they want to corner us rhetorically by violating the rights of people they claim are bad.  

About that. 

They will always claim to be violating the rights of people who are bad - and not individually, but on the basis of their membership in a group. They have vilified undocumented immigrants as a group. They have vilified trans people as a group. They have vilified 'the radical left' as a group.  That's what authoritarians do.

If you want to live in a democracy, the time to act is now. They are moving as fast as they can, and now that the courts are slowing them down, they are threatening to destroy the courts. I am not trying to be an alarmist; the alarm is going off all by itself. 

They are counting on you to be afraid, stay home, keep silent, be cowed. That's the worst possible response to current events.  

• Call your elected representatives.
• Create grass roots messaging.  See this article for help.
• Speak up. Talk to family and friends. Post on social media.
• Participate lawfully in live events to the extent that you are able.
• Know your rights while they are still nominally recognized.

Pushing Back on Propaganda

"People tell us, 'oh, my top issue is the economy.' The temperature-taking approach is 'guess we gotta talk to them about the economy.'  But the job of a good message isn't to say what is popular; it is to make popular what we need said. And so what we need to understand - and the Right already does - is not 'where are people at?' but 'where are they capable of going?'"

- Anat Shenker-Osorio on the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast

Maybe two weeks ago, maybe three, it struck me: I don't know the most effective ways to push back against propaganda. I have spent decades writing about political subjects, but I could not rattle off "the five most effective ways to counter a narrative," or "two things to avoid when trying to take down your opponent."  Those seem like things we all need to know right about now, so let's get fucking empowered.

Don't repeat their words

To begin, here's Jonathan Day from an article about smear campaigns:

First, never repeat your opponent’s smear. This is true even if you want . . . to refute the smear, and it’s for a very good reason: repetition cements the most emotive words in your audience’s mind. For example, let’s say . . . the government calls you a 'foreign agent who is a traitor to the country.' If you reply by saying, 'I’m not a foreign agent and I’m not a traitor to the country, I’m just defending the rights of freedoms of everyone' . . . the words many people will remember are 'foreign agent' and 'traitor.' You end up doing more harm than good.

This makes immediate sense to me, as I hope it does to you. Over the next couple of days, however, listen to members of the media. You'll hear experienced journalists doing this way more than they should. 

While covering for Lawrence O'Donnell on Friday, March 21, 2025, for example, the very experienced Ali Velshi repeatedly referred to the Right's claim that people showing up at town halls are paid protesters sent by George Soros - and Velshi used those exact words, more than once, giving oxygen to an anti-Semitic dog whistle.

Honey, Let's Make Sandwiches

Instead of taking that approach, Day advises building a message as a “truth sandwich.” He explains:

You begin your response by underlining what you stand for – the causes you are promoting. Second, allude to (but don’t repeat) your opponent’s attack and explain why they are attacking you – exposing their malign motives helps discredit them. Finally, offer a solution and ask people to support you. (Emphasis added)

To make this as clear as possible, I will number the parts and paraphrase the substance:

1. Underscore your position, the point you want to make.
2. Nod to the attack from your opposition and expose their "malign motives" (I love that phrase!)
3. Propose a better way.

Political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, whom I quote in the headnote above, agrees with the sandwich model, adding this important element: The layers should be positive, negative, positive. And the final layer of the sandwich should point us to the way things could be, a brighter future that seems doable and possible. 

Following this combined advice, here's the message I created:

1. We see from town halls springing up all over the country that Americans reject DOGE. 2. Republicans who claim these town halls are not authentic clearly  haven't been to one. People are really scared and really angry. They don't want Elon Musk blowing up the federal government like one of his test rockets. They don't want to lose their health care or travel 75 miles to a Social Security office so that Republicans can give more tax breaks to the ultra-rich 3. The people want government that works - not for some, but for all.

In my third layer, I tucked in something I think is really important: People want government.  We want an organized body of people looking out for us and facilitating things like healthcare for veterans, Social Security payments for our elders, and Medicaid for those living in poverty.  Republicans representatives need to hear that message.

Don't accept their framing

I often find myself frustrated with the American media, and by frustrated I mean cutting myself off mid-scream. There seems to be an unwritten rule that the Left must be considered extreme while the Right is considered reasonable.

We have a moral obligation to push back on that, but not on the Right's terms.

The Right is currently hawking the narrative that the federal government is rife with "fraud, waste, and abuse."  Over and over, I hear Democrats begin by saying, "Of course we should address waste and fraud. No one objects to that, but." Or "Obviously we should eliminate waste when we see it. That's just common sense, but."

Stop right there, please. Don't start off by agreeing with your opponent's sales pitch.  And don't accept or reinforce this idea that Republicans are reasonable. For fuck's sake, their favorite quote about government is "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  I know I'm not alone in being disturbed by that, but WOW have I always been disturbed by that.

For Republicans, government is the villain, not because of the centuries of racist violence at home and abroad, not because of Dred Scott or Andrew Johnson or Tuskegee, not redlining, forced sterilization, the abduction of Native children, union busting, the Lavender Scare, McCarthy, Vietnam, Kent State, and Reagan's refusal to help Americans with HIV/AIDS. Not any of that.  

For Republicans - for Grover Norquist and his bathtub fantasies - government is the villain because it taxes the rich to benefit the people, and the rich don't want to do that. Of course they can't say that, so Republicans say other things instead. For example. They say programs that benefit the American people must be restricted because they are rife with fraud.

That is not our cue to start debating how much fraud there is. That accepts their framing and puts us into an unproductive battle where we lob statistics at them, and they lob statistics at us, and we don't gain any ground, largely because "fraud" and "abuse" are dog whistles in the first place. The existence of "fraud" and "abuse" requires there to be fraudsters and abusers, low-down, no-good people receiving benefits they haven't earned and don't deserve. As we know from Reagan's grotesque, racist "Welfare Queen," the fraudsters are racialized. From that implication - from the implication that some (Black / immigrant) people might be - defrauding the (somehow always white) taxpayer - the program becomes an appropriate target for reduction, restriction, and added humiliation.  

"A few people are cheating maybe! Let's punish everyone!"  Are we a fourth grade classroom or are we a free and prosperous nation?

Americans across the country are struggling in deeply serious ways with poverty and food insecurity.  They need elected representatives ready and willing to have serious conversations about wage stagnation, hunger, and maybe the food deserts created by the government's refusal to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act, which once allowed local grocers to compete comfortably with large nationwide retailers. 

Under President Biden, the simple act of giving people money during COVID reduced child poverty by 50%. 

What's more important for America as a society, giving more money to rich people because they want it, or giving assistance to children in poverty because they need it?

That's the kind of conversation we can have when we use our own words.

Love is Love: Engaging the base

Let's turn back to Anat Shenker-Osorio. On her Substack, she describes herself as the host of Words to Win By, "a podcast about progressive victories around the world and how we achieved them." I first heard her being interviewed on the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast and was dazzled.

One of her many excellent insights - quoted on the front page of her company's web site and mentioned in the interview - is "Engage the base, persuade the middle." On the podcast, this is how she puts it: "You have to have a message that the base doesn't just agree with and find kind of inoffensive or palatable; you have to have a message that they actually want to repeat."

What the base wants to repeat is something energizing, something real and uplifting, like "Love is love" (her example). Speaking of "Love is love," I would add that we don't just  "repeat" a message with our mouths. Stickers, patches, buttons, posters, t-shirts, memes - all of these are repetitions. When messages are good, we want to speak and display them, wear them, share them however we can.  Good messages put us on our front foot instead of our back foot. We feel confident. We believe we can gain ground. 

Hate is hate: Losing our way

At the risk of turning suddenly dark, I would add that in the absence of good messaging, we can lose ground very quickly.  In the absence of lines we want to repeat, sometimes the base will fall largely silent. That's how the Right gets traction for their ridiculous white supremacist narratives about things like CRT and trans athletes. First, (white) people are so gobsmacked by the factual falsity of the propaganda that we act like it's going to short-circuit on its own absurdity. (As in, CRT is graduate-level content taught in law schools.  Kindergarten teachers are not using CRT to indoctrinate five year olds. It is laughable that anyone thinks this.)

ALL propaganda is untrue, though, and it rarely turns out funny in the end.

Second, we benefit from good messaging in the same way that hikers benefit from trails.  Sure, we could probably maneuver over sticks and big rocks and dead leaves, depending on the wheelchair we're using or the kinds of shoes we're wearing, but we don't know what's under there. Snakes? Poison oak?  A decomposing frog? We're quicker and more confident on a path. We don't hesitate because we see how it moves forward.

Under Biden's administration, to use an example from this exact moment in time, the government did some good things to enshrine the rights of trans Americans. The right wing, unhappy with this progress, began to invest more and more time in anti-trans fearmongering, ultimately spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads to make pronouns and trans athletes some of the defining issues of the campaign. In response, Democrats didn't so much drop the ball as quietly set it down in the corner behind the bleachers where they hoped no one would look at it. Most of them didn't want to talk about the subject on the Right's terrible terms - which, good call, except they hadn't developed messaging of their own, leading them to do the classic (and extremely obvious) pivot to another subject, one that pollsters had told them "really mattered" to the American people. 

Leadership did not "engage the base, persuade the middle" for trans Americans, and they largely accepted the Right's framing of immigration, leaving two vulnerable groups of humans hanging all alone in the wind. Both are now being aggressively scapegoated, targeted, and harmed by this administration.

You know what, though?  This is go-time, and we don't require leaders to know that we can't leave anyone behind. Maybe we can't travel to El Salvador and break people out of prison, but we can sure as hell put our heads together at the local level to develop good messages for our own communities. We can make sandwiches!

Making your mark

People move through a variety of family and community spaces: Churches, dinners, block parties, book clubs.  You can message to a community, if for example you want to engage fellow church members, or you can brainstorm with a community, if you and your neighbors want to speak to your county, region, or state.  

If you are in a rural area or can't easily leave your home, gather people virtually on Teams or Zoom.  

If you feel un-creative and need help picking a topic or words:

• Go to a town hall or watch a good recording online. People will knock your socks off with their sincerity and their eloquence.  
• Peruse the signs at a local protest or online. If you want to be super-ethical, ask their creators if you can post the signs to social media.
• Go back to a book or essay that's been speaking to you. Is there a dynamite quote in there that sparks something for you?
• Host a guerilla messaging potluck. Have people bring messages they hear and struggle to refute. Workshop a couple of messages and create one-sheet explainers to display and distribute.  As a bonus, enjoy the good feelings that come from working together.

Once you have done your brainstorming work: 

• There are loads of places online to make affordable stickers and buttons. Ask 10 friends for $10 bucks and spread them around.
• Make 8x10 signs to put up around your neighborhood or downtown.  (As many have advised online, use wheat paste or something else that dissolves to adhere them to posts.)
• Distribute one-sheet explainers at protests and other gatherings. (I am very much indebted to Mariame Kaba for this excellent idea.)
• Have a sign-making party. People can take their creations back to their neighborhoods or trade them.

These are just small ideas, but they can go big places and help real people.  Who knows - you might even dream up the next big thing!

Appendix: Sample Brainstorm on Cuts to Medicaid

I am including this sample for those who would feel better with another example of how to break down propaganda.  My recent piece on trans athletes, by the way, is a longer-form version of breaking down propaganda, and I appreciate the positive feedback from those who have read it.

If you don't need another example, hie thee hence! Start texting friends!

The propaganda (quoted from an AP article):

"Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has floated the idea of tying work to Medicaid.

'It’s common sense,' Johnson said. 'Little things like that make a big difference not only in the budgeting process but in the morale of the people. You know, work is good for you. You find dignity in work.'"

 

Break it down

Write everything you think of. You can pick and choose after you brainstorm.

What kinds of assumptions are packed into these comments?

• Some number of people receiving Medicaid can work but are choosing not to (ties back to fraud / waste)
• Work requirements are an effective means of getting people to seek and hold jobs (nope - Googled it)
• It's easy to be poor and use Medicaid to access care, which is why someone would deliberately choose that "lifestyle" over employment
• Don't people in poverty actually have shorter lives?  MIT study
• People deserve healthcare only if they labor (an idea already implicit in our system of tying healthcare to employment)
• People who don't / won't work have no dignity
• People who don't / won't work have low morale, which in turn is bad for them / their health
• If they worked, their health would improve on its own
• Being lazy / not laboring is making them sick(er)

Now you can talk it over (or think it over) and decide which of these points will be most effective. You can even set up a poll online.

Avoid the temptation to use their words / framing

• You will want to argue about work in ways that could easily get you into a battle of statistics
• If you feel like the work message will be powerful in your community, keep it general and unassailably accurate - e.g. the majority of people on Medicaid who can work already do

Honey, let's make a sandwich

1. Sixty years ago, we created Medicaid so that Americans living in poverty could go and see a doctor.
2. Now, Republicans want to cut taxes for the ultra rich, and they want to pay for that by taking Medicaid from the poor. Living in poverty is so difficult that poor people live have a shorter life expectancy. Republicans want to make that experience even harder so that being rich can get even easier? I don't think so. 
3. Elected representative should protect and defend their constituents by supporting and even expanding access to healthcare.

Will you stand up?

Today, Americans who did not yet know the name Jerce Reyes Barrios learned about his fate as we learned about our own.  Mr. Reyes Barrios is a Venezuelan soccer player who sought protection from the United States government after being tortured by the government of Venezuela.  He has that right, the right to seek out safety and to be free from torture.  Instead of getting to make his case, however, Mr. Reyes Barrios was abducted, put on a plane to El Salvador, and put into a prison built to house terrorists. 

The American government sent an asylum seeker to a prison for terrorists where men are caged for all but 30 minutes a day, where they wash themselves from a bucket and sleep under bright lights without a mattress, pillow, or sheets. 

Why is this happening?

Why did we put this man on that plane? The honest answer is that we have no idea. We have no idea because he wasn't charged with a crime, put on trial, and allowed to defend himself from the State's accusation that he is a member of a Venezuelan gang. 

We have no idea because the Trump administration is in such a hurry to engage in "mass deportation" of "criminals" that it can't be bothered to utilize any of the existing frameworks we have put in place to decide upon the facts of things. 

We have no idea because the government won't say.

Someone, somewhere decided to say this man was a gang member, so the American government disappeared him into a notorious prison in a faraway place where anything could happen.  No fewer than 261 people died in El Salvadoran prisons between 2022 and 2024, "four of them children."  America's prisons are terrible places, but at least here, organizations like the ACLU can file lawsuits based on violations of people's Eighth Amendment rights.  In El Salvador?  In El Salvador, they declared a state of emergency and suspended their constitution for 30 days. In 2022. They have renewed the 30-day window 36 times.  I guess it must be a pretty big emergency, since they have arrested more than 1% of their own population.

Fascism by any other name (still smells like hell)

Fascists, authoritarians, tyrants, dictators - they don't start with the popular kids.  They start with the unpopular ones. And if the people Dear Leader doesn't like seem a little too sympathetic, don't worry. That's what propaganda is for.  

Have you noticed who the propaganda is aimed at here lately?  

It's immigrants and trans people, first and foremost. 

Have you noticed who the propaganda has been aimed at historically?

Black Americans, gay Americans, gender non-conforming Americans, and every single wave of immigrants who have ever rolled in.

If you've been on the fence, historically, about how you feel or what you think about  undocumented immigrants or trans people, it is long past time to knock that shit off.  Human beings don't need anyone else's personal blessing in order to have rights, dignities, histories, and worth.

Will you stand up?

This the time, friends.  Not next year. Not next month.  Right now.

Right now, the government is putting men on planes without explanation and sending them to places where journalists can't interview them, constitutions don't exist for them, and family can't speak with them.

Right now, almost 1 in 100 Americans is already incarcerated. As a percentage of population, we're not on pace with El Salvador yet, but Trump hasn't put us in a state of emergency yet.

Yet.

Unfortunately, many of us aren't used to standing up, even when things are dire. White Americans in particular have been participating in the dehumanization of the people all around us since we got to this country.  And we have a history and a habit of abducting people born in other nations and relocating them to places where constitutions don't exist for them and family can't speak with them. We fought a war about it, and after we botched the Reconstruction, we almost lost the country to the KKK.  After just a few decades of rising equality, Republicans want to drag us back into unapologetic inequality, quashing not only voting rights but also memories, histories, vocabularies, words.  We're not to speak about Black history, Black artistry and innovation, Black Lives that Matter. 

Which means we must speak of all of it. Right now.

Right now, cisgender Americans must speak of trans dignity, must demand that our government stop targeting and abusing trans folks, who are being actively defamed and dehumanized by federal and state governments, offensive executive orders, and your gross friend.  Are you calling out your gross friend?  Your respectable pastor who demonizes trans athletes? Your brother who thinks the left should abandon trans rights?

This is happening. If you are scared, it's okay. People can do great things, even when they are afraid.

Practice calling out your friend. Practice being in respectful but uncomfortable dialogue with others. Practice making yourself do things that scare you, like singing or speaking in public. Feel yourself surviving the fear.

As someone much wiser than I said recently on BlueSky, practice breaking rules.  Last week, when I was at Kroger, I took three gift cards and hid them behind a box of food because they fund an establishment that embraces hate. It scared me. It was good to practice that tiny act.

We have to do this. We don't get to choose.

It's game time.

Translating the Discourse: Republicans and Women's Sports

If you enter the phrase "protect women" on just about any search engine right now, you'll stumble face first into a fog of bigotry.  That's because in very literal ways, conservative politicians conjure the figure of a White woman in danger to demonize groups of people they don't like.  And sadly, it works. White Americans get a little triggered, and that makes us a little more receptive to those politicians' regressive agendas.

Benevolent sexism

Although we could look to the past to see how this pattern has played out historically, we shouldn't assume this is a rusty, dusty old phenomenon languishing in the barn out back.  It's happening now. In a 2023 article called "Protecting Our (White) Daughters: U.S. Immigration and Benevolent Sexism," Rachel Smilan-Goldstein  observes that "conservative U.S. politicians" interested in promoting what she describes as "restrictive immigration policies" have "advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity."  

Specifically, Smilan-Goldstein argues that White Americans respond to this narrative with "benevolent sexism," which "invokes warm, protective feelings toward women who embody traditional feminine virtues of morality, purity, and chastity."  To be very clear, this virtuous, chaste woman is and must be White; in Smilan-Goldstein's experiments, "a Latina or Black woman victim of immigrant crime does not activate benevolent sexism among White Americans of any party affiliation." 

The names we know

As a catchphrase for anti-trans organizers, "protect women" seems like a similar appeal to benevolent sexism.  After South African runner Castor Semenya won a 2009 race - finishing in "less time than it takes . . . to microwave a Hot Pocket," as one writer put it - the sixth-place runner from Italy, Elisa Cusma, said, "These kind of people should not run with us . . . . For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.”

As it happens, Castor Semenya was not then and is not now a man; however, her body produced higher levels of testosterone than a typical woman.  She was thereafter classified as "a non-woman" (!) and barred from competing unless she agreed to lower her testosterone with medication or surgery.

As many others have noted, testosterone levels are not capped in male athletes.  According to Jaime Schulz, "In fact, male athletes with low testosterone can apply for a 'Therapeutic Use Exemption'" in order to take exogenous testosterone without breaking the rules.  Meanwhile, elevated endogenous or "natural" testosterone levels have been used to disqualify Francine Niyonsaba, Margaret Wambui, Christine Mboma, Dutee Chand, and Beatrice Masilingi,and more. It probably won't shock you to learn that none of these women are White. 

I have no idea how many White woman have been excluded, by the way - and as Rachel Maddow would say, neither do you.  Schultz writes:

The results of the tests are supposed to be confidential, so we don’t know exactly how many women have been drummed out of sport as a result. Researchers estimate that between 1972 and 1990, sex-testing procedures disqualified approximately one in 504 elite athletes. An untold number of women competing at the lower levels of sport met a similar fate, or else abandoned competition altogether based on fears that they might not meet the standards for femaleness.

The point, in any case, is not simply that a Black or brown athlete might win any given race; it's that a Black or brown athlete might beat a White woman who worked really, really, really hard. And then the White woman might feel sad about losing. And might appear sad to onlookers. And so it is that White Americans get wrapped up in benevolent sexism and start carrying on about the need to protect women - but only the proper kind of women: The white kind, the chaste kind, the kind that's definitely pure.

Trans women

The differences between trans women, on the one hand, and cis women with elevated testosterone, on the other, seem all but irrelevant to the discourse.  People who purport to care vey much about whether someone was born with a vagina do not in fact care at all if someone was born with a vagina, as demonstrated in the summer of 2024 when cisgender boxer Imane Khalif did what boxers do and popped her opponent in the nose.  (But oh, the crying. That poor girl. Protect women.)

The claims about what trans athletes are doing to cis athletes by competing with them are pretty astounding.  Did you know trans women are "severely undermining women's rights"?  Here I thought rights involved things like having bodily autonomy, in which case, it's far more accurate to say that trans women are having their rights undermined, aggressively and unconstitutionally, all over the country.  Trans women are also being actively demonized and dehumanized on the news, in ads, and in state legislatures, but there is a shocking silence from the public around the unfairness of those efforts.

And that's because of women's sports.

That's because conservatives got tired of being told that trans folks weren't hurting anyone, including and especially in public bathrooms.  They got tired of losing in court, including the Supreme Court. So they decided to use the same tactic they have deployed against CRT (protect White children!) and immigration (protect White women!). Conservatives have produced "victims" of trans-inclusive policies.

Cisgender swimmer Riley Gaines, 

who tied with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas

for fifth place in 2022.

The idea here is to make you angry, at best, or at worst, confused. Men are stronger, faster, and better at sports. Everyone knows that.  It's not fair for women to work hard when it's inevitable they will lose.

Except, as you might notice from the words in italics above, Lia Thomas (a woman) and Riley Gaines (a woman) were both defeated by the same four cisgender swimmers (also women). Loss is not inevitable, even though in the broadest sense, it is. There is no athlete anywhere in the world who has never lost. Athletes are not and cannot be paired up with competitors who are physiologically and psychologically identical, and who therefore have no advantages.  Sports are inherently pretty unfair.  

Again, as Schultz writes:

Researchers associate physical performance with over 200 different genetic variations. More than 20 of those variants relate to elite athleticism. These performance-enhancing polymorphisms – PEPs – can affect height, blood flow, metabolic efficiency, muscle mass, muscle fibers, bone structure, pain threshold, fatigue resistance, power, speed, endurance, susceptibility to injury, psychological aptitude, and respiratory and cardiac functions, to name just a few.  We don’t disqualify athletes with these types of predispositions.

To get worked up about testosterone and not fatigue resistance or psychological aptitude or muscle fibers is ideological. It's benevolent sexism, which politicians are deliberately activating to piss (White) people off and get them to support regressive policies.  

Why so mad?

The gender binary that underpins our White supremacist patriarchy cannot work if women won't play their role - their weakness to a man's strength, their softness to his roughness, their inferiority to his superiority. Trans women problematize that binary in ways Republicans clearly do not want to be tolerated. By anyone.

As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, "They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants."

See these tactics for what they are. Protect the rights of women. All of us.

To be clear

Mariame Kaba is an activist, a thinker, and a writer I have long admired, and she has been giving exceptionally great advice lately on Blue Sky, including this, which I will paraphrase: 

For a whole range of reasons, people are not well-informed about what is taking place right now in America. To address that problem, create a one-sheet explainer that can be printed and distributed at in-person protests or other events, as well as online.

Now mind you, she gave this advice weeks ago, and all that while, I have been sitting with it, possibly on it, sometimes beside it. Because who am I to explain things?!  I am not an economist. I am not an attorney. I am not a historian or a sociologist or an ex-KGB agent with a closet full of cocktail gowns and trench coats.

After reading the comments on a friend's Facebook post about Ukraine, however, I decided that it does not matter. It does not matter that I am not an expert; it matters that I am as intellectually honest as I know how to be and that I know how to do research.  

To that end, here is a one-sheet explainer on Putin and Ukraine. 

Please use it as it best serves you - to improve your own understanding, to hand out at a protest or other event, to send to your Uncle Marvin who is retired.  It is intended to be shared. It is intended to be helpful. 

My name is not on it. I created a gmail address so that people can give feedback, ask questions, make corrections, or scream at me. I therefore introduce . . . To Be Clear.

 

Go forth, little one-page explainer!