State of the Union Preview

Speaker 1 [00:00:07] Hey TransLash fam, this is The Mess, Imara’s guide to our political hellscape. And you guessed it, that’s me, Imara. Today on The Mess, I’m going to tackle Trump’s first State of the Union and the looming government shutdown, the repeal of civil rights protections for trans people in Iowa, and the threat of a new lavender scare across the federal government. As a heads up, as we always advise. This show was recorded before it gets to your ears. And so things may have changed between now and then. So now you know why. But that let’s get messy.

Speaker 2 [00:00:49] Are we or are we not headed for a partial government shutdown? Congress now has until March 14th. It’s only 12 days away to finalize the temporary funding bill. Republicans. They want to extend tax cuts and potentially cut Medicaid.

Speaker 1 [00:01:03] And that clip was from Fox five and DC. So that’s the context for Trump’s State of the Union address, which will be on Tuesday, March 4th, the day that this drops. Now, technically, just to nerd out a little bit. It’s not a state of the Union specifically. It’s actually this one is called an address to Congress. His first real state of the Union will occur next year, but it doesn’t really matter for 99% of the people out there. It’s the same thing. So in this address to Congress, what Trump is going to do is essentially lay out his plans for the rest of the year. And one of the things that’s going to be key is whether or not there’s going to be any flexibility. And the budget negotiations, which have stalled right now on Capitol Hill between the House and the Senate, because even though the Republicans control everything, they don’t agree the Senate is less restrictive Tive and less conservative, although, you know it’s all relative. Then the House, which is, you know, governed by a bunch of extremists. I say that politely, and they have to try to reconcile those two particular positions right now, and they’re trying to talk to the Democrats because they might need some Democratic votes to pass whatever to get through both houses, because there are a lot of Republicans who don’t believe that whatever they’re doing is actually, you know, far right enough. And so they might need some Democrats. And so the Democrats are having a say and pushing them in different directions. And right now there’s no agreement. And right now there is no way forward, which means that the government could shut down just, you know, essentially ten days after Trump’s address. One of the things that this means is that the chaos could very well continue. And of course, chaos is the goal here, because we’re dealing with a group of people who run the government that are not actually trying to create anything. They’re not even necessarily trying to actively, you know, bills or change institutions in their own right and life. They’re actually just trying to destroy things because there’s a belief that through that destruction, they’ll be able to bring about a world in which they essentially privatize the government and corporations run everything. And that’s why, you see, there’s this sort of techno billionaire alignment, because they believe that they’re going to be first in line for the spoils when government completely collapses. So that’s kind of the goal. And, you know, one of the things that’s also really important for us to think about as trans people, besides the impact of all of this chaos and the destruction of government services and the collapse of Medicaid, which is on the chopping block and the closing of the Department of Education, like all of these things that are are really important is whether or not in this state of the Union address, Trump is going to be even more extreme. I think one of the open questions is, is essentially the anti-trans stuff that they’ve done so far. Kind of the plan for this year. And they’re done in quotes. And what I mean by done is that they’ve done all of these things in terms of executive orders, and all they’ll be doing is working on implementing those really extreme and really harmful marginalization actions for trans people. So there’s a lot more things to do to implement them. But are we done with kind of the big splashy headlines in terms of the ways that they’re targeting trans people, not the impact on our community, because that’s going to be huge throughout the year, and there’s going to be a bunch of headlines about how this is impacting trans people and our lives and all the rest of it. But if he announces something new and big on trans stuff, or if trans stuff is a disproportionately large focus of his comments, then I think that what we will see and know is that this is just the beginning, and that there will be more things that we haven’t accounted for that are going to impact trans people in ways that haven’t been factored in. And I think that for a community that is already stretched, which is already on edge with the things that have been done so far, that plus a government shutdown, plus new things that we haven’t forecast is just going to stretch people really, really thin. And so it is actually important for us to be paying attention to what happens with these budget conversations and with the state of the Union. Maybe just read about it the next day, though. Spare yourself with looking at it in real time. Leave that to me and everyone else that I work with. That’s what we get paid to do. But you know, the next day, just take a quick peek and see if there’s anything new that he’s announcing, because it’ll be a part of what you have to do in terms of the way that everyone is adjusting and preparing their lives for the time to come. You know, I wish it wasn’t that way. I wish that we had different news, but that’s kind of where we are. I would also say the other thing to look for in terms of what the climate is like is do the Democrats ever get up and cheer for anything that Trump says, or are they in support of anything that he says? Because that’ll also give you an indication of of where the Democratic Party is. And right now it seems to be trying to actually figure out what it’s going to do. So I wish I had better news, but the reality is the reality. And that’s why it’s a Trump prime time mess. So just last week, Iowa passed a bill which is kind of unprecedented in modern America. It passed a piece of legislation which removed, like literally took trans people out of civil rights protections that the state legislature had written in trans people in 2007. So in just a matter of what, 14, 15 years they reversed themselves on including trans people and then removing trans people, and they did so within a week. So all of this has happened in the last two weeks. Thousands of trans people and allies, despite the short amount of time, were able to show up and rally at the state Capitol to put pressure on state legislators. But it didn’t go very far, and the bill was quickly signed by the governor. What’s disturbing is that it shows us that things can actually backslide, that things that people once thought were solid victories, victories within states such as, you know, California and other places that have anti-discrimination laws in New York, which is actually written in gender identity protections within the state constitution, that if people aren’t vigilant, those rights can be taken away. And by the way, the inclusion of trans people within the civil rights protections of the state had bipartisan support. So there were Republicans that supported that action, too. And we know that what happens in one state doesn’t stay there. And so the plan has to be where these protections are enshrined in state law to undo that and to undo that as quickly as possible. And this is just one of the consequences for people not standing up for trans people, because the rollback and rights, the rollback and protections don’t only stay in one place or don’t only stay within the limitation of one set of rights. And what this means for trans people in Iowa is that trans people could be denied equal access to housing, to education, to health care, to a full range of basic services, basic needs, basic opportunities that all people should be able to access no matter who they are. And that’s only going to further compound the difficulties that trans people are facing in this particular moment, which is why Iowa has received so much attention. It also shows the impact of the changed climate on the rights of trans people. So now there are these changes with regards to executive orders and all these regulations that are coming out, and the fact that no one is really seeing someone stand up for trans people. What that means is that those who want to be more aggressive, feel more emboldened, feel like they have more license to just go out there and run roughshod and shoot up everything, which is what’s proceeding, sadly, in all of this, though, in Iowa, even though that’s not the best of news. We know that one of the big changes that’s happened in the same time that Iowa has written in and then written out trans people within its civil rights protections, is that there are trans people that hold elective office at all levels of government that are standing up and making their voice heard and letting us know that our voices matter. And the person in Iowa who is doing that is state legislator and in which and all, who is the first trans person and the first trans woman by default elected to that state legislature. And here’s the cautionary tale that she gives to state legislators who believe that if they vote for this, then there’s nothing else that they’re going to have to vote on that’s going to impact on the rights of people that this is a one and done, and they can move on. Here’s Amy wishing to vote this bill down today because this is not the end. Those think tanks will ask you again and again and again to remove rights and freedoms from your fellow Iowans until none remain. That was from CBS news. And when she refers to the think tanks, she’s referring to the think tanks that were outlined by us in season one of the anti-trans hate machine who are pushing these anti-trans laws and measures across the country and from everything that I’ve seen, she’s exactly right there going to be more rights of all people that are going to be on the chopping block. And so, like always in this case, we should listen to trans women. Regardless, though, everything that has happened already with regards to trans people in Iowa is a corn husker mess. Last up today is the lavender scare. So what’s the lavender scare? Well, as Mother Jones reports, the Department of Agriculture is finding rooting out people who are members of the LGBTQ Employee Resource group as a way to move people, to chase people out the agency itself, and is looking to basically disassemble it by identifying the members of that group as employees and then running them out on the rails. Right. Outing them and pushing them outside the organization. Because as we’ve seen, there’s been a broad scale attack on Dei within the federal government where people who are identified in any way as being connected to anything Dei related are being forced out of the government. I mean, this includes also, by the way, nuclear scientists and engineers who have had to be reinstated because people realize that they’re not just Di hires, that they’re actually people that maintain and keep the nation’s nuclear stockpiles safe. So this is a new iteration of this war on Dei, not only closing the offices, but looking at employee resource groups. And again, you know, what we know is that the experiment and so this is just the Department of Agriculture right now, but will migrate surely across the federal government. And I say surely, because that’s just what we see in this administration. We haven’t seen anything that just pops up in one place and stays there. Kind of like the discussion earlier about anti-trans laws. And when we see one we are surely going to see more and others. So this is just a new level of scrutiny and fear. But this is being given the name of Lavender Scare because it is echoing the Red scare from the 50s and 60s, and that was essentially a fear that the government was being taken over by communists, and then a very systematic campaign to identify those people and to push them out of government. It even extended to places like Hollywood. But there was a similar drive to uncover people who were communists in Hollywood, and then to blackball them and chase them out and not allow them to make their craft, including movies and a whole host of other things. And here’s a clip from time magazine kind of making the connection between the Red scare and now the Lavender Scare.

Speaker 2 [00:13:33] It was believed that gay men and lesbians were a threat to national security because they were in the closet, presumably subject to blackmail by foreign Agents, and one day people were portrayed as disloyal. The Red scare kind of more than into the Lavender Scare.

Speaker 1 [00:13:54] And that was historian David Johnson. And while I can see the comparison between the two scares, I actually think that this is different. I actually think that this is more akin to the targeting of African-Americans, you know, in the early 19th century to remove African-Americans who had moved into federal government and federal bureaucracy, kind of out of the federal bureaucracy. As Jim Crow laws expanded across the South and other places where people were being identified and targeted and chased out. And I think that it’s more akin to that because this is not what people believe politically. It is about who people are. It’s like how people exist in the world. And so I actually think that this is even more pernicious and egregious than the Red scare. But at this point, we’re just debating between terrible things. And so it doesn’t really matter, actually. Talked a little bit about this recently on on MSNBC on Men’s Show, where I kind of made the case of what’s happening now is, is even potentially worse than the Red scare and McCarthyism, which is kind of the one word synopsis for what the Red scare was because it was driven by a senator named Joe McCarthy. But regardless of how terrible this is and what people call it and how you debate it, it just is requiring additional vigilance and just shows, you know, how serious the Trump administration is about removing trans people and LGBTQ people from from public life. And that means that it’s not just an agricultural mess. Thank you so much for being a Trans Am subscriber and for sorting through all the mess with me today. I don’t know, do we get it sorted or we just kind of looked at it. If you liked this show, it would mean so much to me. If you left a review on Apple Podcasts, you might just hear me read it out on the show. Actually, you probably likely will if it’s a good one. I’ll be back in your feed in two weeks to sort through all the shenanigans that come up between now and then, and there will be. So just hang in there. I’m Imara Jones. I’m your host. This show is produced by Aubrey Calaway. Xander Adams is our senior sound engineer and contributing producer. This episode was engineered by Lucy Little. Oliver-Ash Kleine oversees the production as director, podcast and TransLash media. This show gets to your ears with the help of our social media team, including Morgan Astbury. And of course, this show is made possible by TransLash FAM subscribers like you. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself and I’ll see you soon.