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bigotry
Meet Mary Miller: The New Face of GOP Censorship
Do you want this bigoted Republican telling you what books you and your children can read?
Apr 15, 2026
When it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation, Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller is an odd choice for the job. The downstate Republican was first elected in 2020. During her 2022 reelection campaign, one of her employees was a man named Bradley Graven. The conservative Washington Examiner reported that Graven “was convicted of soliciting sex with a minor,” but this conviction did not stop him from fundraising for Miller, collecting signatures on her behalf, and chauffeuring the candidate around.
Shortly into her first term, Miller gave a shout out to Adolf Hitler in a speech before right-wing group Moms for America. Miller told the group “Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'” Miller later apologized for her compliment to der Fuhrer, saying she was referring to the efforts of “left wing radicals” to “re-educate young people.” Miller, unsurprisingly, does not see anything wrong with the efforts of right wing radicals like herself to re-educate young people.
And Miller is, to be clear, a right-wing radical. Often described as a “Christian nationalist,” she proclaimed that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” when she opposed a Sikh leading a prayer at the capitol after misidentifying him as Muslim. She is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and in return that caucuses political action committee is her largest campaign donor.
These seeming handicaps aside, Miller introduced House Resolution 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” on February 24th of this year, a misleadingly titled bill that restricts federal funding for schools unless they take action to ban “sexually oriented” books from classrooms and school libraries. For the purposes of the legislation, “gender dysphoria” as well as "transgenderism" [sic] considered sexually oriented. Schools could lose federal funding merely for having a title that features a trans person or fictional transgender character. On March 17th, the bill advanced from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to the House floor.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it.
Congressional supporters of HR 7661 are notable for their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Miller claimed the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act “attacks the traditional family.” Committee Chair Tim Walberg, who released a statement saying the bill will “safeguard children from inappropriate content in the classroom” went on a jaunt to Uganda in 2023 to urge their government to “stand firm” on maintaining their “Kill the Gays” law. Randy Fine, one of the most notorious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the House, has also made statements calling for the eradication of the LGBTQ+ community. One could continue down the list but the point is made.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it. Children, though, are complex beings with a variety of influences acting on them, social, biological, and familial. If educators were capable of influencing children to such a degree that Miller believes, they would focus on ensuring students complete schoolwork on time, study for tests, and bring classroom materials, not on changing their gender identity or sexual orientation. As gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk said during the campaign to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative: “If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you’d sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”
One is reminded of the US Senate testimony of comic book publisher William Gaines (Tales from the Crypt, Mad Magazine).In the 1950s, a moral panic asserted that crime and horror comics were making criminals out of helpless children, who, like automatons, followed the examples of comic book characters.“What are we afraid of?” Gaines asked. “Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?” The anti-comics crusade was popularized by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who worried about the “homosexual” influence Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman were having on their young readers in his sloppily researched tract Seduction of the Innocent. The current censorship efforts are an unfortunate repetition of Wertham’s pseudoscientific arguments.
As expected, HR 7661 has been opposed by the American Library Association, the National Education Association, Authors Against Book Bans, PEN America, among many others. The advocacy group 5 Calls has created a simple script for contacting Members of Congress and Senators to ask them to oppose this bill.
This horrific bill, HR 7661, represents the first attack on children’s freedom to read at the federal level seen in the United States. It creates a national censor deciding what every child in the United States can read. Under the guise of protecting children, Mary Miller—a woman who hired a convicted sexual predator and who once praised the Nazi dictator—has set herself up as the face of censorship and thought control in the United States. Would you let this woman decide for you what to read?
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Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s Bigoted Vision of America
The hatefulness and histrionics of Trump's allies exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.
Nov 08, 2025
The selection of musical megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles. The ostensive reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”
For the new form of conservativism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow, and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny. Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren, meanwhile, claimed Bad Bunny is “Not an American artist.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson not only mislabeled Bad Bunny as “Bad Bunny Rabbit,” he argued Bad Bunny was not a role model, calling for replacing him with someone with “broader Appeal,” like 82-year-old Lee Greenwood.
The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: what is America and how should it be represented?
The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves. For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American demonstrates profound ignorance. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a United States citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a US possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.
As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024, and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something that residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others, including the authors here, do not support mass ICE roundups. Such free speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago, and is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it towards our laudable goals of freedom and equality.
Further, Bad Bunny singing in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its dominant language, English. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue of Spanish. While Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration does not carry the weight of law. That edict also appears to run afoul of a host of US Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual country, including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols. holding that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.
The United States of America is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands that were conquered during a period of US imperial expansion in the 19th century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since WWI, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great. So, why being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican makes of Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA cohorts?
For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities, and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color, and immigrants (except for white ones).
Puerto Ricans, a Spanish-speaking, Latin American people of color (who also happen to be US citizens), do not fit the MAGA mold, and Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.
Previous Super Bowl halftime performers, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best (and diverse) talents, but suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough? Turning Point USA’s “All American” alternative halftime show is quite revealing of MAGA’s cultural whitewashing attempts by promising “Anything in English.”
This piece was first published in the Miami Herald.
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Charlie Kirk’s Toxic Legacy of Hatred and Division
We can condemn political violence and this hideous murder while also condemning Charlie Kirk for the rotten, vile hatred he fomented.
Sep 11, 2025
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, part of a distressing wave of political violence stalking this country, it would seem that the United States is coming apart at the seams, poised at the precipice of disintegration. So much hatred, so much anger, so much toxic rot, and so many, many guns. We are boiling a poisonous stew. Can anyone save us? Is there anyone or anything that can possibly cool us to a simmer, at least? At this time, it appears not—in fact, frighteningly, the rage that got us to this grim, spooky moment seems only to be spiraling.
Charlie Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the Left. Trump seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the Left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk's assassin or their politics. In a predictable yet grotesque display, Trump raged, “For years, those on the radical Left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump went on to enumerate the attempts on his own life, the shooting of United Healthcare’s CEO, the shooting of Steve Scalise, and “attacks ICE agents”—zero mention of the assassinations of Democratic Minnesota lawmakers or others who don’t fit Trump’s vision of worthy right-wing martyrs.
It is not clear how we climb out of this cauldron we are boiling in. We must all condemn political violence on all fronts. We must also acknowledge that Kirk’s legacy of bigotry and division wages its own violence...
The man who said there were “good people on both sides” of the Charlottesville killings by right-wing white supremacists could not bring himself to even mention the tragic shootings of people on the other side of the political aisle.
Soon after Kirk’s murder, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) lunged for the political jugular, telling reporters, “Democrats own what happened today....some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.” Mace hurled this profoundly reckless, irresponsible attack without a shred of evidence about the assassin’s politics.
These are not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit. They, along with Charlie Kirk, led us into it. Kirk became a wealthy influencer by spreading toxic rage and fear and division.
We can honor the sadness millions are feeling over Kirk’s murder, and maintain basic civil human decency, while also being honest about the deeply harmful and offensive things Charlie Kirk said. We can condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder while also condemning Charlie Kirk for the rotten, vile hatred he fomented.
And yes, while respecting that many are mourning, this is precisely the time to remind people of the hatred and division Kirk sowed and profited handsomely from.
Consider what Kirk said about Black women leaders and affirmative action. Assailing affirmative action “picks” Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Kirk said, sickeningly, “you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” without affirmative action. “You had to steal a white person’s slot.”
Let’s sit with that for a moment. Charlie Kirk said these exceedingly smart, strong, successful Black women do not have brain processing power. This is the supposed hero for whom Trump lowered the flag to half-mast.
Kirk was an equal opportunity hater who called Martin Luther King, Jr. “awful,” and “not a good person,” while insisting, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
In his gruesome rage against affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Kirk also spat out, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” That is some deeply racist garbage.
Kirk called gay and transgender people “groomers” who are “destructive,” opposed gay marriage, and campaigned against gender-affirming care for transgender people, insisting, “We must ban trans-affirming care—the entire country. Donald Trump needs to run on this issue,” Media Matters reported.
The legacy Kirk leaves behind burns on, a flame of reactionary anger and bigotry that keeps this country at a boiling point.
When Zohran Mamdani shocked the nation by winning the New York City Democratic primary, Kirk vented, hideously, “Twenty-four years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11…Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.” Kirk peddled in paranoid, racist, and Islamophobic right-wing nonsense. He called Islam “the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America.” How profoundly rotten and hateful can one be?
Because Kirk was so energetically prolific, one can find endless examples of his fearmongering and bigotry. What needs to be said now, even or especially in this moment, is that Charlie Kirk mightily helped foment the rage and division that seems to engulf and define our nation today. Kirk helped create this toxic, poisonous stew we are drowning in—he fed it and profited from it.
Despite the unseemly frothing of Trump, Mace, and others, we do not know—as of this writing—who shot Kirk or why. We do not know if it came from the left, the right, or something else altogether. It is reasonable and right to condemn all shootings and political violence. I absolutely condemn the violence and this murder, just as I condemn the bigotry Kirk fomented in his brief time on this earth.
It is not clear how we climb out of this cauldron we are boiling in. We must all condemn political violence on all fronts. We must also acknowledge that Kirk’s legacy of bigotry and division wages its own violence—a cultural, social violence that causes real pain, rage, enmity, fear, and isolation. The legacy Kirk leaves behind burns on, a flame of reactionary anger and bigotry that keeps this country at a boiling point.
No one person will save us. We can hope (and work) for a cooling period that at least lowers the flame and slows the spiral. We can all say, stop the violence, stop the shootings. And let’s also say, just as strongly—stop the hatred, stop the fearmongering, stop the bigotry.
Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Nancy Mace as a senator from North Carolina. She is a representative from South Carolina. It has been updated to reflect this.
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