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Trump Is Making a Move To Endanger LGBTQ and Civil Rights Activists Around The World

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US-funded nonprofit The Open Technology Fund is being pressured by Trump appointee Michael Pack to fund repressive surveillance tech that will put human rights activists around the world in danger.

The Open Technology Fund (OTF), “a U.S. government-funded nonprofit that provides encryption technologies to journalists and activists living under repressive regimes,” is under threat from Michael Pack, an appointee of President Donald Trump who now heads the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the group that oversees the OTF.

Pack is pressuring the OTF to change its funding allocation in a way that could endanger LGBTQ activists and others strategizing for civil rights in countries like China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey, leaving them subject harassment, arrest, violence, and death.

According to Vice News, Pack has packed USAGM’s board with Trump loyalists who are working to funnel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to closed-source technologies. Closed-source technologies are privately developed apps in which all or part of their coding is kept hidden. They could contain backdoor and security vulnerabilities allowing repressive regimes to track users and monitor their online communications.

Pack’s shift to closed-source technology is a fundamental change to the OTF’s long-running investment in “open-source technology,” tech whose publicly available source code can be studied and tested to ensure others can’t access user data.

Pack’s USAGM is currently pushing for OTF to invest in Freegate and Ultrasurf, two closed-source apps that purport to get around the Great Firewall of China, a censorious and domestically controlled internet that blocks activists from any sites critical of the Chinese government.

Open-source software experts that spoke to Vice said, “[Ultrasurf’s] code is out of date, dangerously vulnerable to compromise, and lacks the user base to allow it to effectively scale even if they secured government funding.”

Laura Cunningham and Libby Liu, who very recently served as OTF’s president and CEO respectively, told Vice News that in March 2020 (shortly after Trump installed Pack), Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation Human Rights and Justice (one of the groups pushing Ultrasurf) threatened them to fund the app or else risk being ousted by Pack and his board.

On June 13, 2020, Michael Horowitz, former director of the Project for International Religious Liberty (another group pushing Ultrasurf), then went on the radio show of white supremacist-enabler and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and called for Pack to fire Liu — four days later, he did. A day later, Pack fired Cunningham without providing any reason whatsoever.

Current and former OTF staff members told Vice they’re worried about the OTF’s direction under Pack. Longtime open-source technology advocate Cory Doctorow summed up the worry in a Twitter thread that linked to a petition urging Congress to intervene:

The Trump admin wants to nuke the OTF and give all its money to a bunch of grifty, closed-source privacy and firewall-circumvention tools. These tools are NOT auditable, and the companies that make them stand to make BANK from the move… If i was a Uyghur in Xinjiang or a dissident in Tehran, I would NOT trust my life to these tools. No goddamned way.

OTF’s ironclad rule of funding open, free code isn’t just a way to allay suspicions about the tools’ true purpose – it’s also a preventative against corruption, because the projects OTF funds CAN’T insert spy code without being caught right away… Based on this administration’s track record, I’m about 70-30 that this is just a bro deal that lets some cronies suck up millions in corporate welfare while hanging out tools used by vulnerable people around the world to dry.

Remember, Congress allocated this money for the OTF, not as pork for a bunch of connected insiders. This money built the tools that #BlackLivesMatter protesters use, to say nothing of the #HongKongProtests and many other movements around the world.

It will be a genuine, deep, widespread tragedy if this move isn’t stopped.

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Written by Daniel Villareal, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM

Trump’s HHS Finalizes Move Rolling Back ‘Unnecessary’ Transgender Healthcare Protections

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Roger Severino, the Christian right activist who heads the Trump HHS’s Office of Civil Rights, chose to roll back health care protections for transgender Americans during Pride month.

The Trump administration just moved to roll back hard-fought Obama-era healthcare non-discrimination protections for transgender people, just as coronavirus cases are surging in at least 21 states. The timing, too, is notable. While the President does not recognize LGBTQ Pride the move comes in the middle of the month devoted to celebrating and honoring the community, and exactly on the fourth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre.

The Wall Street Journal reports the new rule will take effect in 60 days, ending “a policy that expanded an antidiscrimination provision in the ACA to cover bias against” transgender people.

The move comes from the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is headed by far right wing religious extremist Roger Severino (photo).

OCR calls the protections for transgender people “overbroad” and “massive and unnecessary regulatory burdens that had been eventually passed on to patients and consumers,” while suggesting they are not “substantive.”

“This continues the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back protections in health care for LGBT people,” Bloomberg Law reports. “The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights sees preserving ‘religious freedom’ as essential to making sure health-care professionals don’t get penalized for the actions they do or don’t do in their jobs because of their moral beliefs.”

Severino is responsible for many of the administration’s most anti-LGBTQ polices.

Last year, in defending his new anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” regulation, Severino told reporters, “Patients want doctors who match their values.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM

Trump and the GOP Are About to Give a Rabidly Anti-LGBTQ Judge a Lifetime Appointment

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Part of a sweeping effort by President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate to pack the courts with extremely conservative justices, Mississippi judge Cory Wilson has been open with his anti-LGBTQ political views.

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted a hearing of Cory Wilson, an anti-LGBTQ Mississippi judge nominated by President Donald Trump to have a lifetime appointment on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Pink News points out that in 2012, Wilson strongly opposed same-sex marriage, calling it “a pander to liberal interest groups and an attempt to cast Republicans as intolerant, uncaring, and even bigoted.”

Keep in mind that the Republican Party has repeatedly pushed ballot measures, statewide bans, and national laws to keep same-sex marriage illegal. In fact, the party’s 2016 national platform sought to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

In 2016, Wilson also supported Mississippi House Bill 1523, a hideously anti-LGBTQ bill that would prevent lawsuits against anyone who discriminates on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” opposing same-sex marriage, transgender identity, or premarital sex. In short, the bill allows businesses and medical workers of all sorts to deny service to LGBTQ people.

The bill was signed into law by Governor Phil Bryant on July 27, 2016, and though U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law in 2017, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the exact same court Wilson now wants to sit on — reversed Reeves’s decision.

Wilson also wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion access, and the Affordable Care Act (aka. Obamacare). Wilson dodged questions about his desire to turn over the ACA during his senate questioning.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Slate has a rundown of Wilson’s very vocal disdain for Obama, Hillary Clinton and the ACA:

Wilson called Barack Obama “King Barack,” “petty and small,” “a fit-throwing teenager,” the “Anointed One,” a “radical leftist,” and “shrill, dishonest, and intellectually bankrupt.” He charged Obama with running the “most paranoid and politicized White House since Nixon.” He has also called Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary,” “criminal and clueless,” and either “felony dumb or willfully ignorant.” And he falsely accused her of destroying documents under subpoena.

Then there’s Wilson’s loathing for the ACA. He has called the law “illegitimate,” “perverse,” “big intrusive government” that “is less about healthcare than it is about redistribution of wealth and power.”

He has also stood up for his state’s voter ID laws and mass purges of voter rolls, repeatedly (and falsely) claiming that voter fraud is a serious problem in Mississippi, Slate writes. In short, he’s just the sort of ideologue that Trump would love to install in the increasingly right-wing 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thanks to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Wilson is likely to get confirmation.

Written by Daniel Villarreal, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM

Top Trump Campaign Adviser Compares Gays To Child Rapists, Supports Criminalizing Homosexuality

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In the wake of marriage equality becoming the law of the land, Jenna Ellis told a talk radio show that the decision opened the door for “bestiality and pedophilia.” She’s since become a high-profile Trump campaign surrogate.

Jenna Ellis, a top adviser for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, apparently thinks same-sex marriage is comparable to bestiality and pedophilia. She also supports criminalizing consensual same-sex sexual encounters.

When the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages nationwide, Ellis told the Apologetics.com’s radio show in May 2016, “It’s setting the stage for polyamory, bestiality and eventually pedophilia…. We are saying any sexual urge is valid. So pedophilia, why is that any different than any other form of love? Love is love, right?”

Right-wing conservatives have long linked the LGBTQ movement to people who sexually prey on children, a connection that empowers others to exclude, harass, attack, and even kill queer people under the guise of “protecting kids.”

In her 2015 book, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, Ellis wrote that she disagrees with the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating anti-gay sodomy laws nationwide. While such laws theoretically criminalized oral and anal sex for all adults, police and state governments mostly used them as justifications for criminalizing private same-sex sexual encounters between consenting adults.

She said the 2003 ruling “ignored the immorality of homosexuality” and”set the groundwork for open celebration of homosexuality and all kinds of deviant sexual behavior with any coupling or grouping.”

In short, Ellis was okay with arresting and throwing gay adults in prison for having consensual sex behind closed doors.

Ellis is also an attorney who worked as the director of public policy for the James Dobson Family Institute. Dobson is a longtime anti-LGBTQ evangelical bigot. However, her views as Trump’s re-election advisor might find welcome among the approximately 81 percent of Evangelical voters who supported Trump in the 2016 election. Evangelicals remain the religious denomination most opposed to LGBTQ equality.

Written by Daniel Villareal, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM.

Anti-LGBTQ Hate Groups Spike As Trump Embraces Their Leaders

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A report from Southern Poverty Law Center found anti-LGBTQ hate groups increased significantly in 2019, even as hate groups overall fell slightly.

Anti-LGBTQ hate groups are rapidly growing across America, a result, the Southern Poverty Law Center says, of President Donald Trump’s leadership, including his embrace of those groups. The White House in response has issued a thin statement denying any responsibility or blame – while not even offering to make any changes or to help with the growing danger.

While overall, active hate groups of all types fell slightly in 2019 from 1020 to 940, there was a “sharp expansion,” a nearly 43 percent increase, in anti-LGBTQ hate groups, the SPLC reports, warning that the “Trump administration has demonstrated a clear willingness to embrace their leaders and their policy agenda.”

“Though Trump promised during his campaign to be a ‘real friend’ to the LGBTQ community, he has fully embraced anti-LGBTQ hate groups and their agenda of dismantling federal protections and resources for LGBTQ people.”

Far right wing Christian evangelicals, including anti-LGBTQ hate groups like the Family Research Council, have become emboldened, enjoying what they have said is “open door” access to the Oval Office.

“Anti-LGBTQ groups have become intertwined with the Trump administration, and — after years of civil rights progress and growing acceptance among the broader American public — anti-LGBTQ sentiment within the Republican Party is rising,” the Southern Poverty Law Center adds.

The White House issued a thin statement in response, refusing to accept any responsibility or blame.

“While the radical left has pushed false accusations that LGBTQ Americans are threatened, the president has hired and promoted LGBTQ Americans to the highest levels of government, including positions at the White House, Cabinet agencies and ambassadorships,” White House spokesman Judd Deere told NBC News. “He launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. … And the president has made the bold declaration that we are committed to ending HIV transmissions in the United States within 10 years.”

(Note that nearly the entire statement hinges on the President appointing openly-gay Trump diehard loyalist Richard Grenell as his Ambassador to Germany, then installing him – despite his absolute lack of qualifications – as his acting Director of National Security. It was Grenell who launched the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality – which exists in name only. And Trump can say he is “committed to ending HIV transmissions in the United States within 10 years,” but his policies are likely to make the situation worse.)

The SPLC also issued another dark warning: this hate and extremism “will far outlast this administration,” and not disappear when President Trump leaves office.

“As the country continues to experience white nationalist terror, extremist ideas long believed outside of the realm of legitimate politics are penetrating deeply into the mainstream, spawning public policies that target immigrants, LGBTQ people and Muslims. The Trump administration has installed members of hate groups into government — particularly those with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim or anti-LGBTQ animus — and put in place highly punitive policies that seemed unthinkable just a few short years ago. These political moves will far outlast this administration, as Trump and his allies in the U.S. Senate have pushed through hundreds of new federal judges, many of whom are hostile to civil rights concerns and will serve for decades.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image: Trump with Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, via NCRM.