Chicago represents a test case for how a “sanctuary” city can welcome an influx of migrants, when as many as 2.4 million asylum seekers have crossed the southern border in the last year. Hundreds of migrants arrive weekly on buses dispatched by the right-wing governors of Texas and Florida.
Aldean has been known to sport the Confederate flag on t-shirts as recently as 2019. He also established himself as anti-vax and anti-mask during the pandemic. He has given voice to Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is teetering toward the edge of a cliff. But the right-wing fanatics currently enjoying a 6-3 supermajority in the Court do not allow such minor considerations (like accountability) to deter them from achieving their main goal: turning back the clock in U.S. society to the 1950s era, when LGBTQ people were forced to stay in the closet; college students were wealthy, Christian, and white; racial segregation still flourished; and, of course, abortion was illegal.
So far in 2023, state lawmakers have introduced a record-breaking least 483 anti-trans bills. Put differently, only four states have not done so. These include banning parents from allowing their teens to attend drag shows, barring insurance companies from covering gender-affirming medical care (already in use for several decades), and even making it illegal for parents and medical providers to dispense gender affirming care to minors.
This year alone, state lawmakers have introduced a staggering 483 anti-trans bills, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, which compiles information from civil rights groups and other sources. Only four states have not had an anti-trans bill introduced this session.
Threatened by the increasing left and liberal cultural offensive, which prominently includes the activities of “cancel culture” (although as we shall see by no means limited to it), the American right and extreme right have mounted a political and cultural counteroffensive of their own.
In the place of government-led public health measures, and requirements that employers provide safe workplaces, we have a reversion to the idea that protecting oneself from COVID-19 is an individual responsibility. And for making this approach to the pandemic the conventional wisdom, business has the Democrats to thank.
The June 2022 deaths of 53 people, victims of heat stroke, in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas, show the dangers of crossing the U.S. southern border without authorization.
“Anti-abortion zealots should be forced to read this…” asserted one journalist. “They are responsible for her suffering.”
Earlier this month, a coalition of reproductive rights groups filed a lawsuit in state court challenging the legislation, which Center for Reproductive Rights president and CEO Nancy Northup said is causing “mayhem at an unimaginable scale.”
There is no denying that we face a dismal situation, in which many millions of pregnant people have been stripped of their reproductive rights, while the right wing is chomping at the bit to attack a host of other civil rights.
With Medicare for All, the U.S. also could have avoided $105.6 billion in healthcare expenses associated with Covid-19 hospitalizations over the course of the pandemic, the study says.
The court’s reactionary justices, most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote, are “potentially poised to take down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws this summer.”
Does the US Left have a “cancel culture” problem? Or is ‘cancel culture’ just a cynical right-wing bogeyman aimed at disparaging leftists, Millennials, and academia?
The consequences, as always, will be most brutal for those who are young and poor or working class—which includes a disproportionate number of Black and Brown women—who do not have the financial means or the ability to take the time off work to travel far away to a state that still allows abortions.
