#uspoli

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew calls out ‘the Epstein class’ over the war on Iran.

Source: CanadaHOC (TikTok)

[iviarelleblr]

[allthegeopolitics]

Transgender kids have a right to privacy from parents, U.S. court rules - National | Globalnews.ca

In a 3-1 opinion, the court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the mother of a Manchester School District student.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a school district’s policy Friday that aims to support the privacy of transgender students, ruling that a mother who challenged it failed to show it infringed on a fundamental parenting right.

In a 3-1 opinion, the court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the mother of a Manchester School District student. She sued after inadvertently discovering her child had asked to be called at school by a name typically associated with a different gender.

At issue is a policy that states in part that “school personnel should not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status or gender nonconfirming presentation to others unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure.” [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @vague-humanoid

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Corrupt anticorruption

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/14/ill-have-what-xis-having/#binge-and-purge

An amazing thing happened this week: a whopping bipartisan Senate majority (89:10!) passed Elizabeth Warren's housing bill, which severely limits private equity companies' ability to buy single-family homes to turn into rental properties:

https://prospect.org/2026/03/13/elizabeth-warrens-amazingly-progressive-housing-bill/

It's a big deal. Since the Great Financial Crisis, US home ownership has fallen sharply, while corporate landlordism has skyrocketed. Rents are through the roof, and private equity bosses boast about gouging their tenants, with the CEO of Blackstone's Invitation Homes ordering the lickspittles to "juice this hog" with endless junk fees and calculated negligence:

https://www.aol.com/juice-hog-real-estate-companies-080301813.html

The corporate takeover of the housing market didn't fall out of the sky. It was a policy of the Obama administration, which directed the mass selloff of homes (foreclosed on by bailed-out banks) to corporate buyers:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-senate-votes-to-block-private

Sunsetting the American dream of home-ownership is the final straw. After all, once America killed off labor rights, the only path to wealth accumulation left for working people was assuming crippling debt to buy a house in hopes that its value would go up forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

The affordability crisis isn't solely a matter of high shelter costs (we see you, grocery greedflation, health care and education!), but housing costs are totally out of control. Mamdani's earth-shaking mayoral campaign centered affordability, with housing taking center stage:

https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-wants-to-take-buildings-from-bad-nyc-landlords-this-bill-could-make-it-happen

Trump – whose most important skill is his ability to sense vibe-shifts in his base – noticed, and started to make mouth sounds about tackling the affordability crisis, specifically blaming private equity landlords for high rents:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-stops-wall-street-from-competing-with-main-street-homebuyers/

But this isn't just a story about a stopped clock being right every now and again. It's a story about boss-politics anti-corruption, in which anti-corruption is pursued to corrupt ends.

From 2012-2015, Xi Jinping celebrated his second term as the leader of China with a mass purge undertaken in the name of anti-corruption. Officials from every level of Chinese politics were fired, and many were imprisoned. This allowed Xi to consolidate his control over the CCP, which culminated in a rule-change that eliminated term-limits, paving the way for Xi to continue to rule China for so long as he breathes and wills to power.

Xi's purge exclusively targeted officials in his rivals' power-base, kneecapping anyone who might have blocked his power-grab. But just because Xi targeted his rivals' princelings and foot-soldiers, it doesn't mean that Xi was targeting the innocent. A 2018 paper by an economist (Peter Lorentzen, USF) and a political scientist (Xi Lu, NUS) concluded that Xi's purge really did target corrupt officials:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

The authors reached this conclusion by referencing the data published in the resulting corruption trials, which showed that these officials accepted and offered bribes and feathered their allies' nests at public expense.

In other words, Xi didn't cheat by framing innocent officials for crimes they didn't commit. The way Xi cheated was by exclusively targeting his rivals' allies. Lorentzen and Lu's paper make it clear that Xi could easily have prosecuted many corrupt officials in his own power base, but he left them unmolested.

This is corrupt anti-corruption. In an environment in which everyone in power is crooked, you can exclusively bring legitimate prosecutions, and still be doing corruption. You just need to confine your prosecutions to your political enemies, whether or not they are more guilty than your allies (think here of the GOP dragging the Clintons into Epstein depositions).

14 years later, Xi's anti-corruption purges continue apace, with 100 empty seats at this year's National People's Congress, whose former occupants are freshly imprisoned or awaiting trial:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78xxyyqwe7o

I don't know the details of all 100 prosecutions, but China absolutely has a corruption problem that goes all the way to the upper echelon of the state. I find it easy to believe that the officials Xi has targeted are guilty – and I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that they are all supporters of Xi's internal rivals for control of the CCP.

As the Epstein files demonstrate, anyone hoping to conduct a purge of America's elites could easily do so without having to frame anyone for crimes they didn't commit (remember, Epstein didn't just commit sex crimes – he was also a flagrant financial criminal and he implicated his network in those crimes).

It's not just Epstein. As America's capital classes indulge their incestuous longings with an endless orgy of mergers, it's corporate Habsburg jaws as far as the eye can see. These mergers are all as illegal as hell, but if you fire a mouthy comedian, you can make serious bank:

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/7/18/cbs-cancels-colberts-late-show-amid-pending-paramount-skydance-merger

And if you pay the right MAGA chud podcaster a million bucks, he'll grease your $14b merger through the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

And once these crooks merge to monopoly, they embark on programs of lawlessness that would shame Al Capone, but again, with the right podcaster on your side, you can keep on "robbing them blind, baby!"

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-wild-day-as-trump-doj-settles-with

The fact that these companies are all guilty is a foundational aspect of Trumpism. Boss-politics antitrust – and anti-corruption – doesn't need to manufacture evidence or pretexts to attack Trump's political rivals:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

When everyone is guilty, you have a target-rich environment for extorting bribes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/tiktok-investors-set-to-pay-10-billion-fee-to-trump-administration.html

Just because the anti-corruption has legit targets, it doesn't follow that the whole thing isn't corrupt.

[iheartvelma]

via

[leguin]

[lagomore]

Hello! You might be Canadian.

I'm sharing this specifically for my American trans siblings, because many people are positively impacted by this. If you're looking for options for your safety, this might be a way.

Canada did something wild at the end of last year and removed their generational limits on Citizenship by Decent via Bill C-3. That means if you have a direct ancestor (parent, grandparent, great grandparent, xgreat grandparent) who was naturalized in Canada or born a Canadian Citizen, everyone in that direct chain of decent is also Canadian, regardless of where they were born. There seems to be no generational limit as of right now--if you can prove that your ancestor was Canadian through various documents such as birth and marriage certificates, name change court orders, census and baptismal records, etc. then you can get a certificate of citizenship which allows you to apply for a Canadian passport, apply for jobs, benefits. You are a citizen. This is not an immigration process, it is simply a civil change to correct various sexist and xenophobic laws that have impacted generations of Canadians who moved abroad and had children.

There are special rules for people who were adopted, but you may also qualify.

Even if you think there's no way, an ancestor who immigrated from Europe by boat to Canada, stayed long enough to have a kid, and then migrated to the US would be Canadian by way of naturalization.

There are some issues I have here--namely the preference this gives to White settler-colonialists while Xenophobia runs rampant in their Immigration processes; Canada's genocide of First Nation, Inuit and Métis peoples which as been ongoing since it was first invaded by Europeans, and the fake line drawn between Canada and the US is part of that genocide. White settler's ancestors were part of that genocide. Who is documented and who is not is evidence of that genocide. Bearing that in mind, I think it's also vitally important to have options right now, and if you are white or benefit from White Supremacy, and it turns out you're Canadian, and DO move to Canada, there is more work to be done regarding reparations and what it means to be a dual citizen on this continent when so many are denied rights.

So... How do you find out? Genealogy research!

Ask your family if you speak with them, get names, dates, locations of birth and death etc. of ancestors.

Visit Family Search and look up your grandparents, and their parents etc. on both sides of your family. Where were they born?

Reddit thread on searching for records

Your local library will often have genealogy resources like Anestry.com for free

Do not do a DNA test, this will tell you nothing and will sell your genetic data to private companies

Explore the r/CanadianCitizenship subredit

If you find out this applies to you, start reading up on the application process. There's a lot of information but also so many people are going through this process that can help

This is the page linking to the application on the Canadian Government website: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/proof-citizenship/apply.html#apply-paper

There are also simple and non-arduous options to have your name and gender marker appear correctly on any Canadian documentation even if they are incorrect in the US due to transphobic laws.

If you have questions, please let me know and I can do my best to help. This is a big deal and quite confusing at first because in practice it's very simple. We just live in a world where we expect there to be rules and restrictions on everything, but if you have a direct Canadian ancestor, you're already Canadian. You just need to prove it.

[twosides--samecoin]

I've typed and deleted so many posts about this topic but the nicest thing I have to say is "you are not immune to propaganda" also includes getting caught up in typing lukewarm takes about clear distraction tactics such as Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute while executive orders & bills that affect your neighbors are going into effect.

"The Laken Riley Act, as the bill is known, directs the authorities to deport immigrants who are accused — not yet convicted — of specific crimes, if they are in the country illegally."

"It's a snapshot of how much the needle has been moved by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of immigrants committing crimes, even though the statistics don't show that," said Marielena Hincapié, distinguished immigration visiting scholar at Cornell Law School. -NPR

Y'all best start organizing because if they take away the presumption of innocence until proven guilty from migrants, don't think for a second that they won't take it from legal citizens.

What Is the Laken Riley Act?

Republicans have promised that more measures to accelerate and expand immigration enforcement will follow.

unpaywalled link -> here <-