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discrimination
In Milwaukee, the GOP United Around Hate
Most convention speakers called for unity by rallying their base against marginalized communities like immigrants, trans people, and others they consider undesirable.
Jul 20, 2024
The Republican National Convention here in Milwaukee seems very far away from Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
As one approaches the RNC, inside the heavily guarded, temporary steel wall erected around Milwaukee’s downtown as part of this so-called National Special Security Event, one encounters a side street next to Media Row, filled with food vendors, a stage, t-shirt and souvenir booths, and a slew of organizations touting conservative issues. Also present is a replica of The Little White Schoolhouse, towed into place by the Ripon Chamber of Commerce. It was in the actual schoolhouse, still standing in Ripon some 90 miles northwest of Milwaukee, that a group of abolitionists launched their new Republican Party on March 20, 1854.
The abolitionists who met in Ripon in 1854 included many from a nearby socialist community known as Ceresco. They felt the freedom they sought should be enjoyed by all, including the millions of people enslaved in the U.S. Two years after the party formed, an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln joined. In 1858, he ran a failed Senate campaign against a pro-slavery Democrat, Stephen Douglas, then, in 1860, ran for president. Southern states began seceding within months of Lincoln’s election, launching the nation into civil war.
“They have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s scapegoating politics, rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case.”
Several years earlier, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, giving bounty hunters from the South significant powers to abduct and remove suspected runaway enslaved people from the North to the South. When Joshua Glover, an escaped slave from Missouri living in Wisconsin, was caught and held overnight in the Milwaukee jail in 1854, a crowd of up to 6,000 formed, stormed the jail, freed Glover, and helped him escape to Canada. It was the Glover incident that spurred the Wisconsinites to finally launch their new abolitionist political party.
“Resolved… we will cooperate and be known as Republicans… we cordially invite all persons, whether of native or foreign birth, who are in favor of the objects expressed, to unite with us,” read one of the founding resolutions. The principal “object expressed,” their main goal, was the abolition of slavery in the United States.
One hundred seventy years later, the rhetoric pouring forth from the RNC podium sounds strikingly different. Back in 1854, immigrants were a large part of the population swelling new states like Wisconsin. Now, hostility to immigrants is a central theme of the Trump campaign. Former U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the streamlining of the GOP’s platform from 66 pages of detailed policy prescriptions to a compact, 16-page document.
“We must deport the millions of illegal Migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country,” it reads, promising to “begin [the] largest deportation program in American history.” Many delegates at the convention were enthusiastically holding signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”
On stage at the Fiserv Forum, MAGA Republican loyalists spoke from the podium, heaping praise on their party’s unquestioned leader, Donald Trump, just days after an attempted assassination that left him with a bloodied right ear over which he now wears a white bandage. A number of Republican delegates have been wearing symbolic ear patches in solidarity.
Speakers compared Trump to legendary leaders like President Abraham Lincoln, Civil War General then President Ulysses S. Grant and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the wake of last Saturday’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, several key Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, are calling for national unity. Unfortunately, most convention speakers are calling for unity by rallying their base against marginalized communities like immigrants, trans people, and others they consider undesirable.
“We are facing an invasion on our southern border—not figuratively, a literal invasion,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said from the podium. “Every day Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has engineered an armed standoff between Texas National Guardsmen and U.S. federal border agents, and who proudly busses desperate migrants to cities run by Democrats, spoke as well:
“Biden has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists.” In fact, the crime rate in the immigrant population is far less than in the general U.S. population.
Responding on the Democracy Now! news hour in Milwaukee, Jean Guerrero, a senior fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab, said, “They have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s scapegoating politics, rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case.”
The answer to the current threat to democracy is more democracy. “Knocking on doors and talking to people,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera Action, suggested as the best organizing strategy, speaking on Democracy Now! “You need to get the word out, because every vote counts.”
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'Huge Win in Florida' as Judge Strikes Down Gender-Affirming Care Ban
"Today's ruling blocks the state of Florida's cruel campaign to deny fundamental rights and basic healthcare to its transgender citizens," said one LGBTQ+ advocate.
Jun 11, 2024
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that key sections of Florida's ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors—which also limits adults seeking such care—are unconstitutional and that the Republican state lawmakers and GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis were acting with "anti-transgender animus" and not in the interest of public health when they approved the legislation.
"The state of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment—treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state's full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient's transgender identity," Judge Robert L. Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division, wrote in his 105-page opinion.
"Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs, but they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender," Hinkle—an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton—continued. "In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished."
"To paraphrase a civil rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," he added, referring to a famous quote by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Hinkle also struck down a provision of the law forcing adults seeking transition healthcare to meet with a doctor in person before beginning treatment.
One year ago, Hinkle temporarily blocked portions of the law prohibiting doctors from providing, and minors from receiving, so-called "puberty blockers" and other hormonal treatments, calling the proscription "purposeful discrimination" against transgender people.
Civil rights advocates cheered Tuesday's decision.
"Today's ruling striking down Florida's discriminatory restrictions on gender-affirming medical care is a huge victory for the transgender community and for the freedom of all Floridians and their families to make their own private medical decisions," Equality Florida executive director Nadine Smith said in a statement.
"Despite the governor and his rubber-stamp GOP supermajority continuously stripping away our rights, the brave plaintiffs, legal experts, and judges have dealt another powerful blow to DeSantis' agenda of censorship, surveillance, and government intrusion into our personal healthcare decisions," Smith added.
Simone Chriss, director of the Southern Legal Counsel's Transgender Rights Initiative, said in a statement:
The federal court saw Florida's transgender minor healthcare ban and adult restrictions for what they are—discriminatory measures that cannot survive constitutional review. Today's ruling blocks the state of Florida's cruel campaign to deny fundamental rights and basic healthcare to its transgender citizens. We are so proud of our brave plaintiffs, without whom we could not have achieved this victory for the state of Florida.
DeSantis—a failed 2024 GOP presidential candidate who has centered waging what fans and foes alike have called a "war on woke"—signed the gender-affirming care ban into law in May 2023 as part of what one activist condemned as "the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history."
Among the legislation signed that day were the so-called "Don't Say They" law prohibiting transgender public school students and staff from sharing updated preferred pronouns; S.B. 1438, which bans minors from attending "adult live performances" like drag shows; and H.B. 1521, which empowers cisgender people to order transgender people to leave publicly available restrooms or face criminal trespass charges that could result in up to a year behind bars for refusal to comply.
A spokesperson for DeSantis toldThe New York Times after Tuesday's ruling that "there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children."
"These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror," she added.
Lucien Hamel, an adult plaintiff in the case, said Hinkle's ruling brought relief.
"I can't just uproot my family and move across the country," Hamel said in a statement. "The state has no place interfering in people's private medical decisions, and I'm relieved that I can once again get the healthcare that I need here in Florida."
Plaintiff Jane Doe—the mother of 12-year-old transgender girl Susan Doe—asserted that the ruling "means I won't have to watch my daughter needlessly suffer because I can't get her the care she needs."
"Seeing Susan's fear about this ban has been one of the hardest experiences we've endured as parents," she said in a statement. "All we've wanted is to take that fear away and help her continue to be the happy, confident child she is now."
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‘Bluelining’ Is the Insurance Industry’s Latest Contribution to Climate Injustice
Areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks.
May 22, 2024
In an era of climate disasters, Americans in vulnerable regions will need to rely more than ever on their home insurance. But as floods, wildfires, and severe storms become more common, a troubling practice known as “bluelining” threatens to leave many communities unable to afford insurance—or obtain it at any price.
Bluelining is an insidious practice with similarities to redlining—the notorious government-sanctioned practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities, which were often marked by red lines on map.
These days, financial institutions are now drawing “blue lines” around many of these same communities, restricting services like insurance based on environmental risks. Even worse, many of those same institutions are bankrolling those risks by funding and insuring the fossil fuel industry.
This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks.
Originally, bluelining referred to blue-water flood risks, but it now includes other climate-related disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms, all of which are driving private-sector decisions. (Severe thunderstorms, in fact, were responsible for about 61% of insured natural catastrophe losses in 2023.)
In the case of property insurance, we’re already seeing insurers pull out of entire states like California and Florida. The financial impacts of these decisions are considerable for everyone they affect—and often fall hardest on those in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.
A Redfin study from 2021 illustrated that areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks. This overlap is not a coincidence but a further consequence of systemic discrimination and disinvestment.
This financial problem exists no matter where you live. In 2024, the national average home insurance cost rose about 23% above the cost of similar coverage last year. Homeowners across more and more states are left grappling with soaring premiums or no insurance options at all. And the lack of federal oversight means there is little uniformity or coordination in addressing these retreats.
This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks. For one thing, financial institutions must pivot from funding fossil fuel expansion to investing in renewable energy, natural climate solutions, and climate resilience, including infrastructure upgrades.
What about communities in especially vulnerable areas?
One strategy is community-driven relocation and managed retreat. By relocating communities to low-risk areas, we not only safeguard them against immediate physical dangers but also against ensuing financial hardships. Additionally, preventing development in known high-risk areas can significantly decrease financial instability and economic losses from future disasters.
As part of this strategic shift, financial policies must be realigned. We need regulations that compel financial institutions to manage and mitigate financial risk to the system and to consumers. We also need them to invest in affordable housing development that is energy-efficient, climate-resilient, and located in areas less susceptible to climate change in the mid- to long-term.
Meanwhile, green infrastructure and stricter energy efficiency and other resilience-related building codes can serve as bulwarks against extreme temperatures and weather events.
The challenge of bluelining offers us an opportunity to forge a path towards a more resilient and equitable society. We owe it to the future generations to do more than just adapt to climate change. We also need to confront and overhaul the systems that harm our climate. The communities most exposed to climate change deserve no less.
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