Don't lie to me, Mister Trump. EVERYONE sees through that lame, "I don't know him" excuse. The talking points match. Elon Musk, that also goes for you. Nazi friendly is as dirty as total nazi. You own it.

Republican lawmakers in Florida have sparked outrage after passing a bill that LGBTQ advocates say will strip trans children from their parents' custody.

SB254 — which one former lawmaker has called "fascist" legislation — would allow the state to rip children from their parents when they are "at risk" or "subjected" to gender-affirming health care. The bill is written so that even a child of Floridian parents living out of state could trigger the law.

The Florida legislature approved three bills on Wednesday that aim to eliminate any expression of non-cis, non-hetero expression from public life.

HB1521 is the state's restroom bill, which prohibits businesses from utilising gender-inclusive bathrooms.

SB1438 empowers the state to take punitive measures against businesses that host LGBTQ friendly shows or drag performances. It also gives the state the power to prohibit minors from attending events it deems "inappropriate." Minors will be barred from events even if their parents consent, a policy that flies in the face of Governor Ron DeSantis’ educational agenda that favors parental consent to an extreme degree.

If SB1438 is made law, it would also likely mean the end of most Pride parades.

Alejandra Caraballo, a former staff attorney at the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, noted on Twitter today that Treasure Coast Pridefest has already cancelled its parade for this year.

She previously condemned HB254 as a Florida-approved pass for kidnapping trans children.

Florida is a Fascist hellscape ruled by hateful bigots.

I am at a loss. I don’t know what we do to stop this. At this point, we may want to start thinking about funding an airlift to get trans kids and their families out of that Nazi nightmare.

Nazis, openly waving Swastikas and doing the Sieg Heil salute in Orlando, Florida

Not a single uniformed police officer in sight. I say “uniformed” because the odds are that some of the people doing the Nazi salute are probably in law enforcement.

Now, contrast that to how overly militarized police have routinely shown up at peaceful Black Lives Matter protests

Or how the police treat peaceful college students protesting for free higher education

Or how the authorities treated Black people simply walking in our own communities, after the murder of Mike Brown

Oh, and how about six months before the January 6, 2021 white supremacist riots, when National Guard troops were deployed to the Lincoln Memorial on June 2, 2020, during George Floyd protests held in Washington, DC? Where was this overwhelming presence on January 6, 2021??

And finally, Ron DeSantis, a leading Republican candidate for President of The United States(!), has a large following of Neo-Nazis, but he has yet to explicitly denounce them. I guess maybe he’s too busy banning books, or making sure drag queens aren’t reading books to children, or making sure that accurate Black history—aka American history—isn’t being taught in schools.

I could go on and on and on, but the police never seem to have that same energy for actual fucking Nazis, or the Proud Boys, or Oath Keepers, etc etc etc

Domestic terrorism by white nationalists is the biggest threat to social stability, justice, democracy and to America itself.

👉🏿 https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/04/orlando-florida-nazis-march-blood-tribe/

👉🏿 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna103186

Opposing Antisemitism is Hard When You Just Assume It's a Political Stunt

The Republican Party of Texas just voted down a resolution that would have barred the state GOP from associating with persons "known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial." The internet is having a field day over this, and understandably so. Meanwhile, one of the resolution's proponents is baffled: “I just don’t understand how people who routinely refer to others as leftists, liberals, communists, socialists and RINOs (‘Republicans in Name Only’) don’t have the discernment to define what a Nazi is,” committee member Morgan Cisneros Graham told the Tribune after the vote. Far from raising a question, Graham has in fact answered it. The litany listed here -- "leftists, liberals, communists, socialists, RINOs" -- none of these are, in their "routine" use by Republican officials, terms that are actually meant to carry some sort of principled semantic meaning. They're slurs -- bits of rhetorical seasoning, nothing more. And it's no surprise that Republicans treat antisemitism and Nazism, like all other "-isms", in the same fashion -- as a contentless slur one opportunistically hurls at political opponents. They have genuinely drunk their own kool-aid on this. They really don't think that, when people talk about antisemitism or neo-Nazis, they might be referring to something real and objective in the world. Of course it's meaningless theater.  And if one believes that, then it absolutely makes sense why one would be worried about vagueness and unclear boundaries. The article observes that some committee members "questioned how their colleagues could find words like 'antisemitism' too vague, despite frequently lobbing it and other terms at their political opponents." Again, this bafflement disappears once one realizes that for these Republicans, the vagueness and lack of definition is a service, not a barrier, to the frequent lobbing -- it is because they studiously avoid thinking that antisemitism means anything that they can toss it out to attack everything. This is why one can never trust Republicans to tackle antisemitism. I mean yes, for the obvious reason that they can't even reliably disavow Nazis. But also for the slightly less obvious but still important reason that their entire orientation towards "antisemitism" is that it is nothing more than a gambit in a political game.* They don't take it seriously as an actual, extant phenomenon, and so they'll never be able to respond to it as one. * Somewhere -- I can't find it -- I remarked on how Republicans, shortly after Ilhan Omar's "Benjamins" controversy, tried to gin up another controversy over Omar aggressively questioning conservative foreign policy maven Elliott Abrams. There was transparently nothing there on the Abrams thing, but many conservatives seemed baffled that their antisemitism claims weren't getting traction after so much attention was paid to the "Benjamins" tweet. What was the difference? The possibility that the difference could be explained by actual substance -- the "Benjamins" tweet was plausibly antisemitic, the Abrams questioning was not -- truly, genuinely didn't seem to occur to them. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/Yj9nldL

Rachel Maddow MSNBC

Why doesn’t the media call out the collaboration between Neo-Nazis and Republicans?

Mike Godwin is an internet legend. He was the first known person to use the word meme in its internet context. He's also the originator of what's become known as "Godwin's Law".

In a recent interview, Mr. Godwin stated that comparisons of Donald Trump to Hitler or Nazis are fair and appropriate.

So to be clear — do you think comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler or Nazi ideology is fair? I would go further than that. I think that it would be fair to say that Trump knows what he’s doing. I think he chose that rhetoric on purpose. But yeah, there are some real similarities. If you’ve read Hitler’s own writing — which I don’t recommend to anyone, by the way — you see a dehumanizing dimension throughout, but the speeches are an even more interesting case. What we have of Hitler’s speeches are mostly recorded, and they’re not always particularly coherent. What you see in efforts to compile his speeches are scholars trying to piece together what they sounded like. So, it’s a little bit like going to watch a standup comedian who’s hitting all of his great lines. You see again and again Hitler repeating himself. He’ll repeat the same lines or the same sentiment on different occasions. With Trump, whatever else you might say about him, he knows what kinds of lines generate the kinds of reactions that he wants. The purpose of the rallies is to have applause lines, because that creates good media, that creates video. And if he repeats his lines again and again, it increases the likelihood that a particular line will be repeated in media reporting. So that’s right out of the playbook. You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much makes it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental. The question is why do it on purpose. Well, my opinion is that Trump believes, for whatever reason, that there is some part of his base that really wants to hear this message said that way, and he’s catering to them. He finds it both rewarding personally for himself and he believes it’s necessary to motivate people to help him get elected again.

He adds this cautionary comment about the state of American democracy...

When I was growing up and being taught the American system of government, we would always be taught that the U.S. government has checks and balances in its design, so you can’t take it over with a sentiment of the moment. But I think what we’ve learned is that the institutions that protect us are fragile. History suggests that all democracies are fragile. So we have to be on the alert for political movements that want to undermine democratic institutions, because the purpose of democratic institutions is not to put the best people in power, it’s to maintain democracy even when the worst people are in power. That’s a big lift.