Hungary passed a constitutional amendment banning public LGBTQ+ events and has given the green light to facial recognition technology to catch anyone who dares to attend such an event.
You’d better believe that the Trump Administration is taking notes. It sounds dystopian, but this is where we’re headed.
Pride events are already seeing a mass exodus of sponsors. The Republican attack on D.E.I. (which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, all good things) has led corporate sponsors of Pride events across the country to pull out, fearing reprisal from the Trump administration.
“We will remember who stood by us and who didn’t,” Suzanne Ford, executive director of San Francisco Pride, told NBC News. “When it was politically popular, they were lined up.”
And there is good reason to fear Trump. Because he’s clearly demonstrating that he does not give a single fuck about things like human beings and the law.
I mean, Trump is literally kidnapping people off the street and sending them to concentration camps for the crimes of having tattoos and for having opinions he doesn’t like. It doesn’t get much more dystopian than that. Republicans seem by and large a-OK with this, by the way.
Trump even deported a dad from Maryland — by accident. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is now sitting in a concentration camp in El Salvador and Trump has no intention of bringing him back even though the Supreme Court says he has to. Instead, Trump invited El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to the Oval Office because they’re buddies now. A relationship, as The Advocate puts it, “built not only on shared culture war politics but on a brutal approach to immigration and incarceration.”
When asked by reporters if Garcia would be released and sent back to his family in the U.S., Bukele said that would be “preposterous.”
Hurry, Google “Constitutional Crisis.” Are we in one?
The answer is yes. Yes, we are.
Right now, as it stands in the United States, you can be kidnapped off the street and sent away without any kind of judicial overview. You don’t have to be undocumented. You don’t have to be charged with a crime. You don’t have to even have a criminal record. Trump just has to say you’re a criminal, and it’s a done deal.
This should scare the living shit out of everyone, especially LGBTQ+ people.
Oh, at that little tête-à-tête between Trump and Bukele where they said Garcia would never see the light of day again? They also took time to trash-talk transgender people.
Seemingly out of the blue, Trump asked Bukele, “Do you allow men to play in women’s sports? Do you allow men to box your women and box? Because I know you have a lot of boxers.”
In response, Bukele said, “That’s violence.”
According to The Advocate, “Trump went on to repeat long-debunked claims about trans women dominating women’s sports.”
But then he stopped. Not out of decency, mind you. “I don’t like talking about it because I want to save it for just before the next election,” Trump said.
Let that sink in. How transgender people are merely political cannon fodder. How Trump believes that transgender people playing sports will scare voters much more than disappearing a man legally in the country.
Trump is proud of his concentration camps. In fact, he told Bukele to build more prisons so that he could send “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador next. But in Trump’s sick mind, transgender people existing is a bridge too far.
And then there’s Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay man from Venezuela who was seeking asylum in the U.S. He was also forcibly removed and sent to the concentration camp in El Salvador. Why? ICE deemed that he had gang-related tattoos. The tattoos in question? Crowns with “Mom” and “Dad” above each.
Rachel Maddow had Romero’s lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, on to talk about what happened to him. “These are not the tattoos of somebody who is involved with gangs,” Toczylowski told Maddow. “Our client’s life is at risk. We’re concerned for his safety. And the fact that he was forcibly taken from the United States with no due process — it’s just… it’s something that really shocks the conscience.”
We are in danger. What Trump did to Garcia and Romero, he can do to you. Or me. Or anyone for any reason.
That is, if we don’t die of measles first.
The only thing that is safe to say right now is that we are not in a good place.
