Tennessee Becomes the First State to Pass a Ban on Drag Shows

Tennessee lawmakers passed the country’s first ban on drag performances Thursday, part of an onslaught of bills restricting LGBTQ rights across the United States that could have much further-reaching consequences.

House Bill 9 is headed to Governor Bill Lee, who has said he will decide whether to sign the bill once it reaches his desk. If he does, the measure will go into effect on April 1, two months ahead of Pride Month.

The bill bans “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to prurient interest,” meaning of a sexual nature, either in public or if there is a minor present. The language is vague and makes no distinction between drag performers and transgender people.

When H.B. 9 was first introduced in November 2022, the ACLU of Tennessee noted that “dance, fashion, and music—essential components of a drag performance—are all protected by the First Amendment. Yet, these laws are written so broadly and vaguely that they would allow government officials to censor performers based on their own subjective viewpoints of what they deem appropriate on any given day.”

“So, let’s call this what it is—a malicious attempt to remove LGBTQ people from public life,” the group said in a statement.

The bill’s vagueness could also affect Pride celebrations, which last for the month of June. Drag performers or trans people appearing in public could be charged with felonies simply for existing.

“By passing House Bill 9, the Tennessee legislature has done nothing but spread hate, misinformation, and extremism,” Human Rights Campaign legal director Sarah Warbelow said in a statement. “Drag is a longstanding, celebratory form of entertainment and a meaningful source of employment for many across the state. Yet, rather than focus on actual policy issues facing Tennesseans, politicians would rather spend their time and effort misconstruing age-appropriate performances at a library to pass as many anti-LGBTQ+ bills as they can.”

It should go without saying that drag, like any performance, can be tailored to be appropriate for any audience. Seeing drag performances can actually be beneficial to younger people who are LGBTQ, because it shows them that they are not alone. More than half of LGBTQ youth struggle with depression, and 45 percent of trans kids have considered suicide, according to the HRC. But those with at least one adult in their life who accepts them are 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide.

Tennessee’s bill, unfortunately, is part of a homophobic and transphobic backlash to the increasing visibility of LGBTQ people. Drag performers have become a particular target for Republicans and right-wing extremist groups, who accuse the entertainers of being pedophiles.

There are dozens of bills being moved through state legislatures across the U.S. that would ban drag performances. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently revoked an organization’s liquor license because it hosted a drag show.

At a time of growing public pressure on the monopolistic practices of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the ticketing giant doesn’t seem to be crumbling one bit. On Thursday, the company announced record profits, reporting a 2022 operating income up 125 percent from pre-pandemic levels to $732 million, and revenue up 44 percent to $16.7 billion.

Last month, the Senate held a hearing on Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s hold over the ticketing industry. And in November, Senators Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Ed Markey sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking for a Justice Department investigation into the massive company, even suggesting the department consider breaking up the dominating duo’s merger. Members of Congress from all sides of the aisle have expressed their interest in taking on the massive company and helping consumers not be hounded by exorbitant fees and no alternatives.

And since then? Not too much. But in the meantime, Live Nation–Ticketmaster is swimming in cash.

The struggle against the de facto monopoly spans years. Thirty years ago, members of Pearl Jam began advocating for the breakup of Ticketmaster’s hold on consumers. “All the members of Pearl Jam remember what it’s like to be young and not have a lot of money,” said guitarist Stone Gossard. “We have made a conscious decision that we do not want to put the price of our concerts out of the reach of our fans.”

Public pressure has spiked more recently after fans of performers like Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift suffered from prohibitive prices and poor ticketing practices that led to people being turned away from concerts even though they had valid tickets. Millions of frustrated fans, big artists who care about those fans, and smaller artists’ income streams suffer from the monopoly power of entities like Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

On Wednesday, Senators Klobuchar and Mike Lee sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, citing their findings from the January hearing and encouraging the Justice Department’s antitrust division to investigate further and act if it finds the company has indeed “walled itself off from competitive pressure at the expense of the industry and fans.” If that’s the case, so long as the division really looks for even a moment, it’ll have plenty of justification to take action.

Students at Florida public universities, including Florida State University, the University of Florida, and Florida International University, among others, staged a coordinated walkout Thursday in protest of Governor Ron DeSantis’s ongoing attacks on education, including policies targeting people of color and LGBTQ people.

The student protests were inspired in part by the DeSantis administration’s order for public universities to provide data on how many people seek gender-affirming care. But the collective action also came to be a stance against the broader authoritarian onslaught directed underneath the DeSantis administration.

Florida school districts are banning books en masse, while others are closing their libraries in order to avoid prosecution under a new law that requires a “specialist” to review every book in school. The New College of Florida’s president was forced out by the DeSantis-stacked board of trustees and replaced with another DeSantis ally. DeSantis has pushed through the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity through third grade. He has lobbied for the “Stop Woke Act,” which restricts teaching on race in colleges. And he has announced plans to mandate Western civilization courses and to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on state college campuses.

DeSantis also banned schools from being able to teach Advanced Placement African American Studies, after his administration first pushed the College Board to water down the class anyway. He even filed an administrative complaint against the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation for hosting a drag show, stripping the organization of its liquor license.

While it may feel easy to yield to frustration or cynicism in the face of DeSantian authoritarianism, the kids, as always, are not relenting—for themselves, and those they may not ever know.

“Ron DeSantis, we’re on our way to take you down and we’re full-steam ahead for a better day,” Dream Defenders Tallahassee organizer Malik Gary told Teen Vogue. “For people that work in the minority class, for people of the Black and brown community, for people that identify in the LGBTQIA community, for folks that are somebody, no matter what color, or race, or gender, or ethnicity. Everybody is somebody and deserves respect.”

Democrats are slamming President Joe Biden’s new immigration policy, with many branding it no better than the measures seen under his predecessor, Donald Trump.

The convoluted policy prevents adults or families from receiving asylum in the United States if they traveled through another country en route and did not apply for (and were denied) asylum there. The new process to apply for asylum in the U.S. includes multiple steps that are neither obvious nor easy to accomplish. It also requires immigrants to use a phone app, CPB One, that is poorly designed and glitchy.

Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman slammed the policy Thursday as “extreme” and “not supported by U.S. law.” His fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Biden’s administration to rethink the policy, which she argued was far too restrictive.

Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley both called seeking asylum a “fundamental human right,” with Omar adding the policy “flies in the face of international law, U.S. law, and basic morality.”

Other Democrats have been pushing back on the policy since it was unveiled on Tuesday. Senators Bob Menendez, Cory Booker, Alex Padilla, and Ben Ray Lujan released a joint statement warning the policy “only perpetuates the harmful myth that asylum seekers are a threat to this nation.”

Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Jerry Nadler called on the president in another joint statement to increase the number of pathways to asylum instead of restricting them. “The ability to seek asylum is a bedrock principle protected by federal law and should never be violated,” they said.

Biden has come under fire since taking office for what Republicans have deemed a crisis at the southern border. Border crossings have reached their highest level in 20 years, and many lawmakers have warned that the U.S. is not equipped to handle the massive influx of people. This latest policy is an attempt to stem that flow, but many immigration rights groups say it could prevent tens of thousands of people from claiming asylum.

“This asylum ban is, at its core, Trump’s asylum ban under a different name. It will leave the most vulnerable people in much the same position as Trump’s policy did—at risk and unfairly denied the protection of asylum for reasons that have nothing to do with their need for refuge,” Anu Joshi, the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department, said.

The National Immigration Justice Center and its partner groups are preparing to sue the Biden administration if the law passes, noting that a similar Trump policy did not stand up in court.

Adding to the sting was Biden praising Poland for accepting so many Ukrainian refugees, just hours before his administration unveiled the new measure.

While the public is coming to understand how dangerously deregulated the railroad industry is, rail companies themselves are desperately trying to ward off regulation by finally giving workers the necessary benefits. In doing so, though, the companies reveal they could’ve done this of their own volition this whole time.

In the weeks since the disastrous February 3 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, as more details come to light on how threadbare rail regulation is, and how much of that is thanks to the close relationship between industry and government, companies have coincidentally begun announcing new benefits for workers.

On Wednesday, Norfolk Southern, whose train derailed in East Palestine, reached an agreement with the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division, or BMWED, to provide some 3,000 workers with four days of paid sick leave, and the ability to designate up to three paid personal leave days as paid sick leave.

On Monday, workers at Union Pacific announced an agreement between the company and the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers, or NCFO, and Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, or BRC. Effective April 1, the NCFO agreement prorates the deal to give workers three days of sick leave this year, and the regular four beginning in 2024; the NCFO members can use the paid sick time in half or full-day increments. BRC members, moreover, will have the ability to designate personal leave days for sick leave. In total, 2,100 Union Pacific workers will have gained the benefits.

On February 7, railroad company CSX reached agreements with the BMWED and BRC for four paid sick days, with another three paid personal leave days offered; the agreement also gives workers the option to dedicate unused paid sick leave to their 401(k) or to receive it in a payout. On February 10, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, or IAM, and NCFO joined the agreement; on February 14, the IAM Roadway Mechanics division and BRC Carmen for Fruit Growers Express Company division signed on as well. The eight other unions are said to be signing on eventually as well; for now, some 6,000 workers will gain the new benefits.

The cascading agreements, with suggestions of more to come with other unions, is a good thing; workers are finally earning some of the baseline protections and benefits they deserve, ones the government failed in bipartisan fashion to advocate for previously. However, these incredibly late voluntary decisions to finally relent to workers’ demands shows how they could’ve given these workers such benefits even without government regulation or public pressure—but they never did.

Meanwhile, railroad companies are still getting away with a myriad of other things—too big of trains with too little staff; using outdated braking and safety systems, minimizing inspections and audits; and more. Accordingly, the pressure shouldn’t dissipate, but rather increase.

Rail workers (who have been proven right in their warnings of disasters like that in East Palestine) are rallying for complete public ownership of rails. There is widespread, cross-partisan public support for finally clamping down on these corporate freebooters. Now is a moment demanding to be seized. While these companies pretend to tap their brakes, the government would do well to call their bluff and proceed to full throttle.

A media tour this week by the forewoman for the Georgia special grand jury on Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election has raised concerns across the board, especially after reports that the former president’s team might use her comments to block possible indictments.

Emily Kohrs gave five interviews to media outlets over the last two days, during which she discussed parts of the special grand jury’s report, including indictment recommendations. She stopped short of saying who exactly had been recommended but said people won’t be “too surprised” by who’s on the list.

Her comments raised widespread concerns that Trump’s legal team could use them to crush any possible charges. CBS News reported Thursday that lawyers were preparing to argue that Kohrs had corrupted the legal process.

Two of Trump’s lawyers told The New York Times that Kohrs had “poisoned” the pool of potential jurors of a potential regular grand jury, which would issue the criminal indictments. They also slammed her “flippant, jovial, almost disrespectful approach” to the investigation in general.

Trump himself took aim at the forewoman, calling the special grand jury a “strictly political continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time.”

“Now you have an extremely energetic young woman, the (get this!) “foreperson” of the Racist D.A.’s Special Grand Jury, going around and doing a Media Tour revealing, incredibly, the Grand Jury’s inner workings & thoughts. This is not JUSTICE, this is an illegal Kangaroo Court,” he wrote Wednesday on Truth Social.

“All I did is make TWO PERFECT PHONE CALLS!!!”

Many legal experts agreed, however, that Kohrs’s comments are unlikely to affect the outcome of the case. She didn’t give away any confidential information, and the grand jury can only recommend indictments. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will make the final call on whether to bring charges against people. Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, tweeted that the Trump team’s attempts to use Kohrs’s media tour to quash indictments was “not gonna work.”

But legal experts also agreed that what Kohrs did was unprecedented and incredibly inappropriate. “Kohrs’s media tour isn’t helpful, and feeds into Trump’s argument that the grand jury investigation is a political witch hunt by a Democratic district attorney and the left-leaning mainstream media,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek.

Former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Bromwich called Kohrs a “reckless idiot” on Twitter, while Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told MSNBC that in his 25-year career, he had never seen a grand juror of any kind speak out the way she has.

Almost three weeks after the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials in Ohio, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump visited and lied to the people of East Palestine, all to score a few photo ops.

Appearing alongside Senator JD Vance, Trump kept his public remarks short, focusing mainly on securing his photo ops, dropping in the occasional quip about Biden visiting Ukraine one year after it was invaded by Russia, and claiming that Biden and FEMA said “they would not send federal aid to East Palestine under any circumstance,” which is not true.

When later asked by a reporter about his administration overturning an Obama-era rule requiring better braking systems for trains carrying hazardous materials, he lied again, saying his administration had nothing to do with it.

Trump otherwise kept his visit brief, allowing the cameras to focus on his organized donations of “Trump water,” “much lesser quality water,” and other goods to the community, in order to avoid actual accountability for his role in leading up to disasters like that in East Palestine. Indeed, during his presidency, Trump oversaw numerous corporate-friendly deregulatory measures that made railroads less safe for the public, and more profitable for companies like Norfolk Southern.

With his party buttressed by millions of dollars in donations and lobbying from companies like Norfolk Southern, Trump overturned an Obama-era rule that required more adequate braking systems for trains carrying highly flammable and hazardous materials (instead of the Civil War-era brakes trains use now). He pulled a stalled Obama-era proposal that would have directed companies to have at least two-man crews on trains and banned states from instating such a requirement themselves. He also halted an auditing program of railroads that has since been revitalized by the Biden administration.

Much of these regulatory slashes were made at the behest of special interests like the Association of American Railroads, which represents massive corporations like Norfolk Southern and heavily lobbied for the deregulatory cornucopia that Trump provided.

Trump also tapped someone with deep ties to the chemical industry to head the EPA’s chemical safety and pollution prevention office.

He also appointed someone who spent five years in a senior role at the American Chemistry Council—the foremost lobbying organization for chemical manufacturers like Dupont, Monsanto, and Exxon—to the same office. Beck proceeded to try weakening proposed protections against carcinogenic PFAS chemicals in drinking water supplies and consumer products; rewrite EPA rules to downplay how worker exposure to asbestos would factor into whether the cancer-causing mineral poses an “unreasonable risk”; and slash proposed Obama-era rules to protect workers and the public from the chemical TCE, which is linked to cancer, fetal heart defects, liver and kidney toxicity.

EPA staffing overall went down under Trump.

Of course, as The New Republic has previously reported, the blame for a dangerous industry that leads to over 1,000 train derailments a year is cross-partisan. Railroad companies inject millions of dollars into both parties—leading to deregulation of the rail industry, state Republicans in Ohio unwilling to promptly accept federal help, and a Democratic administration that has not properly advocated for rail workers or and advanced much needed rail regulation.

The common denominator of it all is a conservative politics that argues that the government is weak, and therefore weakens the government in order to prove it at all. So, as Trump visits East Palestine, and as fellow deregulation-chasing Republicans (and even conservative Democrats) may posture themselves as the benevolent voices on the issue, may we not allow them to weasel off the hook so easily.

Multimillionaire Vivek Ramaswamy is running for president. The 37-year-old former biotechnology executive announced his run Tuesday night on Tucker Carlson’s show.

“We are in the middle of this national identity crisis, Tucker, where we have celebrated our diversity and our differences for so long, that we forgot all the ways we’re really just the same, as Americans, bound by a common set of ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago,” Ramaswamy pontificated. “And that’s why I’m proud to say tonight that I’m running for United States president, to revive those ideals in this country.”

Ramaswamy is among the growing array of elite-educated Republicans like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance who purport to be speaking to deeper truths plaguing America that are completely unrelated to the actual material conditions of the people. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Ramaswamy has a long resume, co-founding and leading technology and pharmaceutical companies, as well as an asset management firm backed by Vance and billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Beyond crusading against companies for investing in environmental, social, and governance activities, Ramaswamy has focused much of his campaign on “wokeism,” the right wing’s catchall term for anything they don’t like. His early campaign signs, instead of offering a vision of hope or collective material uplift, simply say “Stop Wokeness. Vote Vivek.” He is the author of two books on American culture being plagued by “wokeness” and victimhood culture. His entire project, as his announcement on insurrection-inciting Fox News indicates, is to cut through these dynamics that allegedly divide and weaken America’s shared identity and replace them with a revitalized sense of original American exceptionalism. (Nevermind that America’s original “ideals” were constructed by slave owners who did not even pretend to treat women or non-white people as equal.)

When asked about actual policies he’d push for as president, Ramaswamy focused much of his attention on enacting stricter immigration rules and ending affirmative action to “put the merit back in America.” His focus on wokeness supersedes all else. In this way, he falls in line with much of the Republican Party, with its incessant attacks on schools and libraries, under the guise of “defending” against this supposed ideology.

Further explaining his candidacy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ramaswamy described kitchen-table policies like releasing “state action files” à la Elon Musk’s Twitter files. He continued his very in-touch discussion by arguing that Americans find “meaning” in “secular religions like climatism, Covidism, and gender ideology,” and “the woke agenda.” Beyond dismissing issues like climate change as millions worry about environmental impacts after the East Palestine train derailment, Ramaswamy himself is advancing an uncritical glorifying doctrine, one that worships historically nonexistent sacred common American ideals.

Ramaswamy becomes the second Republican after Nikki Haley to announce a challenge against twice-impeached former President Donald Trump. A number of other Republicans have indicated strong interest in running; the 2024 GOP primary, already befallen by the party’s absurd topics of focus, will likely be all the more anarchic given how crowded it may come to be.

Perhaps Ramaswamy understands the basic, fundamental tensions underlying his candidacy, and is just doing it all disingenuously; maybe he’s seeking to become the next person of color to gain more success and wealth by appealing to white conservative fantasy. Or he’s actually gullible enough to buy into lazy narratives about American exceptionalism—ideas he may present as bold truths others are afraid to say, but have indeed been defining features of the status quo of America since its founding.

Possibly, it’s all just a game to the college debater, a way to win an argument he has no business winning. “I consider myself a contrarian,” Ramaswamy told The Harvard Crimson long ago. “I like to argue.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a “national divorce,” voter suppression, and now seemingly civil war, appeals made all the more concerning by the key committee positions she holds in Congress.

In an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, the Georgia representative lamented the fact that the country was so polarized and her “way of life” was under attack from the left.

“The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war,” she said. “But it’s going that direction, and we have to do something about it.”

In the same segment, Hannity also said he couldn’t see another option aside from splitting up the country, touting supposed benefits including continued fossil fuel use, paper-only ballots, and full state control of public education.

Greene’s outrageous comments came just hours after she told Charlie Kirk that Democratic voters who move to Republican-controlled states should lose the right to vote for five years. The day before that, she tweeted that the U.S. “[needs] a national divorce.”

Her borderline seditious rhetoric is made all the more frightening by the fact that Greene sits on several powerful committees in the House of Representatives, including the Oversight and Homeland Security committees. She earned those appointments through a shrewd rebrand, during which she allied herself closely with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but her true colors seem to be coming back out. McCarthy has yet to speak publicly on Greene’s comments.

Despite her complaints about divisive “abuse” from the left, Greene has shared conspiracy theories, peddled racist and antisemitic beliefs, and helped incite the January 6 riot. And when she talks about “our way of life” being under attack, it’s a pretty safe bet she doesn’t mean a way of life that includes equal rights for all.

The Mississippi Senate passed a bill Tuesday banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, the latest in a torrent of anti-trans legislation across the United States.

The bill is now headed to the desk of Governor Tate Reeves, who is expected to sign the bill, having expressed opposition to trans rights multiple times. If the bill becomes law, it will ban transition-related care for people under 18 and defund any public institutions that provide it.

The bill will block health insurance from covering gender-affirming care for minors, and Medicaid from reimbursing or covering the procedures. Physicians could have their licenses revoked for providing such care, and anyone claiming to have experienced harm by those doctors would be allowed to sue them for up to 30 years after the event.

The bill will also ban gender confirmation surgeries. But as the Mississippi Free Press noted, House lawmakers admitted while voting on the bill in January that they were not aware of any trans state residents receiving such surgeries.

LGBTQ rights groups slammed the bill. “No children are undergoing surgeries in this state. There are not even options for bottom (genital) surgeries for adults in this state. And anyone under 18 who is placed on gender-affirming medication undergoes a thorough and lengthy multidisciplinary evaluation prior to ever reaching the point of taking medication, during which time parents are always involved,” said Stacie Pace, a doctor at Spectrum: The Other Clinic.

“This problem [lawmakers] perceive with trans youth getting procedures done simply doesn’t exist.”

Rob Hill, the state director of Human Rights Campaign Mississippi, also criticized the Republican lawmakers who passed the bill. “Politicians who don’t have an ounce of medical training are interfering with our rights as parents and acting as if they know how to raise and support our children better than we do,” he said.

“Attacking LGBTQ+ Mississippians will not solve any problems or make life easier for working folks in this state. The only thing it will accomplish is to further demonize and alienate transgender kids.”

Mississippi’s bill is the third measure banning gender-affirming care for minors this year alone, after Utah and South Dakota. All three bills are part of an absolute deluge of anti-trans legislation across the country, from bills banning coverage of care to forbidding trans girls from playing in girls’ sports.

Lawmakers usually argue they are implementing such legislation to protect children, but a study published in January found that trans and nonbinary teenagers who receive gender-affirming care have significantly less depression and anxiety and more satisfaction with their lives than before treatment.

The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that almost 70 percent of participants who experienced severe depression saw it drop to moderate or even minimal levels after two years of hormone therapy. Participants who had mild depression experienced subclinical levels after treatment. And almost 40 percent of participants who had clinical anxiety saw it fall to the nonclinical range after treatment.