Must-Reads and the War on Reality

Greetings friends,

In times like these, when it feels like the world is coming undone, movement art helps ground and orient me. The featured image that accompanies this edition of Organizing My Thoughts was created by artist Monica Trinidad, who was inspired by some words from my recent piece, “A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe.” I am honored that Monica felt moved to include my words in their powerful work, and grateful to them for sharing this image with me.

Must-Reads

From our ongoing public health crisis to Elon Musk’s government takeover, here are some of the most important articles I’ve read this week.

• Trans People in US Federal Prisons Face Brutal Crackdown Under Trump Order by Sam Levin. “Transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons have been placed in isolation, told they will be transferred to men’s prisons and advised they will lose access to gender-affirming medical treatments in response to Donald Trump’s executive order ‘defending women from gender ideology extremism’, according to civil rights advocates and people behind bars.”
• ICE is Swiftly Expanding its Sprawling Surveillance Apparatus by Maurizio Guerrero. “Within days of President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted several notices on the federal procurement website seeking contractors to provide technological tools to enlarge, transform, and modernize the agency’s capabilities to track, monitor, and surveil noncitizens.”
• "God Demands Justice": The GOP's Chilling Plan to Attack Clinics by Jessica Valenti. “With the anti-abortion movement eager to roll out a slate of deeply unpopular restrictions, giving extremists the green light to attack patients and providers without fear of arrest is, at least in part, a way to buy the administration time and goodwill.”
• Insurers Are Abandoning Homeowners Over Wildfire Risk But Investing in Big Oil by Derek Seidman. “Top insurers like State Farm have billions in oil and gas holdings, and are among the top shareholders of oil giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron, even as they decline to renew thousands of insurance policies.”
• “Don’t Open the Door”: How Chicago Is Frustrating ICE’s Campaign of Fear by Sarah Lazare and Rebecca Burns. “When Trump moved to make an example of Chicago, sending federal immigration authorities to the city on Sunday, Chicago’s immigrant rights community was braced for it.”
• Twenty Years Later, Guantánamo Is Everywhere by Baher Azmy. “As we reflect on our current democratic crisis, we should see that the indefinite and lawless detention of men at Guantánamo is of a piece with kidnapping children at the Southern border: they are both grotesque, inhumane forms of security theater, designed to project yet another message about America’s muscular capacity for vengeance.”
• Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management by Vittoria Elliott. “Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.”
• Exclusive: Musk Aides Lock Government Workers Out of Computer Systems at US Agency by Tim Reid. "Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials."
• 4 States Consider Bills To Treat Women Who Get Abortions as Murderers by Elizabeth Nolan Brown. “These measures would leave pregnant women who seek abortions subject to criminal charges such as murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, and attempted manslaughter and open to wrongful death lawsuits brought by partners or family members.”
• Israel’s Killing of Hind Rajab 1 Year Ago Is a Stain on Our Collective Humanity by Seraj Assi. “The global recognition of Rajab’s tragedy must not tempt us into resigning ourselves to the comforting notion of moral or symbolic victory, or a vague sense of historical justice; it must mobilize and galvanize us into action.”
• How Bad Could Trump’s Assault on Public Health Get? by Melody Schreiber. “If the [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report] is compromised, how can the public trust anything agencies say? Yet now, the MMWR’s message hasn’t been altered so much as silenced entirely, and for an indeterminate amount of time. Last week, a planned issue including an update on the bird flu outbreak was spiked, and it’s not clear when publication will resume.”

ICYMI

This week, I wrote about Trump’s ongoing attacks on trans communities and how we can fight back. This piece includes links to crucial resources for doctors, clinicians and all people of conscience who are determined to defend trans lives.

Community Defense Resource

Do you want to protect and defend your undocumented neighbors? Download a community defense playbook at defendandrecruit.org and sign up for a training. This Teen Vogue article, which I shared last week, explains how Siembra NC – a group of immigrant base builders – organized their communities and built defense networks during Trump’s first term. This is a great time to learn from their work. (We’ll talk more about this resource during an upcoming episode of Movement Memos.)

Movement Memos Returns

For those of you who have missed my podcast, Movement Memos, I have good news: The show will return Thursday, February 6, and our first episode of 2025 will be an important one. I will be in conversation with Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis about their work as tenant organizers, and how the lessons of their book Abolish Rent connect with this moment. I am excited to share Tracy and Leo’s insights about building and leveraging power, and why we cannot abandon radical tactics or aspirations in these times. 

Upcoming Zoom

As many of you know, I schedule periodic Zooms to discuss current events, recent articles and other topics with my paid subscribers. While I will never paywall this newsletter, I appreciate the chance to connect with people who make Organizing My Thoughts possible. If you’re a paid subscriber, be on the lookout for a Zoom invite next week. 

Repression of Student Activists Escalates

This week, Trump signed an executive order entitled, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” which signals a new assault on the Palestine solidarity movement. In a fact-sheet released alongside the order, Trump stated: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” Trump also stated that he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

It appears the administration is using the terms “pro-Hamas” and “pro-jihadist” as descriptors for all Palestine solidarity protesters and protests, in keeping with the narrative strategy outlined in Project Esther. 

The prospect of Trump initiating deportations on the basis of protected speech is chilling, to say the least. As Sophie Hurwitz observes in Mother Jones, “The order does not explicitly require schools to deport anyone—nor does it immediately cancel anyone’s visa. Instead, it puts the ball in the universities’ court: Will they collaborate in the deportation of Trump’s political enemies, or will they stand up for their students?”

Will schools aid and abet Trump’s efforts to revoke the visas of student protesters? Unfortunately, recent developments suggest that some universities may be amenable to Trump’s agenda. Palestine Legal, an organization that works to “bolster the Palestine solidarity movement by challenging efforts to threaten, harass and legally bully activists into silence and inaction,” has reported a recent uptick in disciplinary actions targeting student activists and organizers in the Palestine solidarity movement. The most recent wave of repression against students has included suspensions and substantial fines. These escalations began prior to Trump’s order, and seem to run counter to Timothy Snyder’s famous admonition: “Do not obey in advance.”

As Dima Khalidi, the Legal Director of Palestine Legal recently emphasized in a public statement, these maneuvers by the administration threaten all protected speech in college and university spaces. “The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi explained. “It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump's agenda, and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches.” Khalidi called on universities to resist this agenda of repression. “It is imperative that universities protect the rights of their students, refuse to cooperate with Trump's efforts to silence and criminalize dissent, and end the McCarthyite crackdowns of students speaking out for Palestinian rights,” Khalidi said.

Palestine Legal is committed to defending the rights of student organizers with the Palestine solidarity movement. You can support their efforts here.

Disappearing Data

Scientists and archivists are working to preserve datasets as the Trump administration purges information the CDC has amassed about queer and trans people, while data previously available through the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency continues to disappear.

STAT reported on Friday that federal agencies were racing to meet an afternoon deadline to remove all references to “gender ideology” from their websites. For the CDC, this process included the removal of Long COVID data because surveys had collected information about the prevalence of Long COVID among people of different sexual orientations and genders. 

Journalist Marisa Kabas discussed the situation on Bluesky, reporting:  

Multiple government employees have confirmed to me they received notice that many federal government websites will be taken down if they have not removed any mentions of DEI and/or haven't complied with the DEI Executive Order by 5pm today. People are being advised to download archives.

The erasure of data at government agencies should be understood in connection with Trump’s efforts to exert ideological control over schools, colleges, and universities. Purging scientific evidence, intimidating educators, and attempting to impose a fascist framework on curriculums are deliberate efforts to force us into the false reality Trump has constructed for his followers. This is a war on reality itself – and on any shared understanding of it – waged to make fascist myths dominant.

Keep Fighting

As upsetting as the daily news gauntlet has become, I am continuously heartened by the determined organizing of people who refuse to submit to Trump’s agenda. As I mentioned in this week’s feature piece, I am exceedingly proud of my city for resisting Trump’s mass deportation efforts in Chicago. I was also deeply moved by the words of a trans man incarcerated in Federal Medical Center Carswell, a federal prison for women in Texas, who spoke with The Guardian about the abuse of trans women at the facility. It is incredibly dangerous for imprisoned people to talk with reporters, even anonymously, as prison personnel often discover and punish whistleblowers. Nonetheless, the man spoke up, and shared harrowing details about what the trans women in his facility were up against, so that those of us outside prison walls might understand the situation and take action. We should honor the risk this man took and elevate the stories he shared.

We should also remember that, amid the many attacks Trump is waging, imprisoned trans people are especially vulnerable. Policing and carcerality are the fascist social fabric of our society. Imprisoned people are already at the mercy of a system that controls their movements, violates their bodies, and restricts their relationships and self expression, while subjecting them to torturous conditions that manufacture premature death. The violence imprisoned trans people are experiencing is an unrestrained illustration of Trump’s larger, fascistic agenda for trans people. When one takes this context into account, the courage of the trans whistleblower who spoke up about what trans women were experiencing is particularly inspiring. With a defiant sense of self, the man told The Guardian, “I’m happy to be the person that I am. They want to try to tell me that I’m something different, but I know who I am inside, and that’s something they will never be able to take away from me. We’re not just going to sit back and let this happen to us. We’re going to keep fighting.”

How can I lose heart while this man holds his head high? How can I surrender anything to my enemies while he celebrates his transness and rejects the dictates of the president and his jailors? While living in the grip of this country’s fascist machinery, he tells us, “We’re not just going to sit back and let this happen to us. We’re going to keep fighting.”

May we all feel called to embody those words. As Maya Schenwar and I have previously written, we have much to learn from our incarcerated co-strugglers.

May we fight for our trans siblings, in and outside of prisons, and for each other, with the severity and spirit that this moment demands.

If you would like to support organizations that defend the rights of imprisoned trans people, I recommend Pushing Envelopes and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s Prisoner Justice Project.

Until next time, keep fighting.

Much love,

Kelly

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