Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The Crisis Factory
The White House on Thursday held a roundtable that brought together the national leadership of federal law enforcement agencies with a group of right-wing Youtube streamers and social media influencers. The topic was Antifa, and the mood was a mix of aggression and paranoia.
“I’m attacked every time I do my job. When I leave my house to go to work, I’m violently assaulted,” said Cam Higby, a Turning Point USA staffer. “I’ve had guns pulled on me. I’ve been bear-sprayed. I’ve been beaten down. I’ve been almost killed.”
Higby and others spent more than an hour discussing Antifa, its origins, and its supposed encroachment on nearly every aspect of American life. What it really demonstrated was the call-and-response dynamic that exists between extremely online far-right influencers and senior administration officials.
Pro-Trump reporter Nick Sortor recounted being briefly detained by local law enforcement in Portland; Attorney General Pam Bondi replied that she and DOJ Civil Rights Division leader Harmeet Dhillon opened a “pattern and practice investigation” into the Portland PD in response. Trump asked Higby at one point to name the cable news network that treats Antifa opponents the worst; after Higby said MSNBC, Trump remarked that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts “allows that to happen.”
That dynamic carries through to the administration’s current attempt to fulfill plans that Trump has expressed since his 2016 presidential run: maximizing federal power to use as a cudgel against political opponents, trampling over safeguards that long prevented federal law enforcement and other functions from being used for partisan ends.
It still remains largely unnoticed by the mainstream press, but civil liberties advocates increasingly point to NSPM-7, a national security directive issued last month, as one of the administration’s most aggressive moves to clamp down on political opponents to date. It tells federal law enforcement and the Treasury Department to investigate and consider charging people who contribute to groups that express such common sentiments as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
As many have noted, it’s very difficult to pull off this kind of power grab in the absence of a true emergency. In the world that administration officials are trying to create, Antifa is that crisis — a threat so pressing that it justifies exceptional measures that give senior officials broad sway to pursue political opponents.
And yet the whole setup, as grave a threat as it may pose to civil liberties, remains very slapstick. At one point during the roundtable, Trump was asked if he was considering whether to suspend habeas corpus “to not only deal with these insurrectionists across the nation, but also to continue rapidly deporting illegal aliens.”
“Suspending who?” he replied, before handing it off to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. She said she hadn’t been a part of any conversations about it.
— Josh Kovensky
Here is what else we have on tap.
- Congressional Republicans are casting a coming “No Kings” protest as a “hate America rally.”
- As the shutdown drags on, a handful of Republicans are wondering if they should just blow up the filibuster after all.
- What Olympian Caster Semenya taught TPM’s publisher about the perils of “common sense.”
TPM is Turning 25!
Join us at the Metrograph Theater in Manhattan on Thursday 11/6 for a live recording of the Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga and an oral history of TPM with some esteemed alums.
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To Republicans, All Liberal Protesters Are Terrorists Now
It’s gotten lost amid the escalation of state violence, but the Republican conflation of “protester” and “terrorist” from what was recently thought of as a more responsible wing of the party has caught my attention.
Both Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) — the latter of whom never made gains in the speakership race to replace Kevin McCarthy because he condemned the Jan. 6 insurrecxtion — have referred to the No Kings protest scheduled for 10/18 as a “hate America rally.”
Johnson said that “pro-Hamas” people and “antifa” would be in attendance, while Emmer thundered that it would appease the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party.
At best, this kind of rhetoric is wildly irresponsible and a sign of how hostile to peaceful protesters the party has become. At worst, it’s an incitement of violence.
— Kate Riga
Some Republicans are Suddenly A Little Bit Anti-Filibuster
It’s day 11 of the government shutdown. There’s no resolution in sight to get Congress out of the deadlock and reopen the federal government.
On Friday federal workers received a partial paycheck for their work up until Oct. 1, when the shutdown began. Some workers, the administration promised, would be also receive notice that they had been laid off, a move one federal employees union has challenged in court. Members of the military are expected to miss their first paycheck on Oct. 15 if Republicans don’t act.
Meanwhile, a couple of congressional Republicans — including Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — have mused this week about ending the filibuster in order to pass the continuing resolution and temporarily fund the government without needing Senate Democrats’ votes.
“My point of view would be this: We have almost all Republicans on board,” Moreno told Fox News. “Maybe it’s time to think about the filibuster. You say look, the Democrats would have done it. Let’s just vote with Republicans. We got 52 Republicans. Let’s go. And let’s open the government. It may get to that.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) shot down that idea repeatedly this week.
“Super-majority requirement is something that makes the Senate the Senate,” Thune said at a Friday news conference. “And honestly, if we had done that, there’s a whole lot of bad things that could have been done by the other side. The 60-vote threshold has protected this country.”
Thune added the filibuster has been “a voice for the minority.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) seems to agree with that sentiment.
“Is it possible? Yes … Is it wise? A lot of people would tell you it’s not,” Johnson told reporters this week. “I mean, on the Republican side, I would be deeply concerned if the Democrats had a bare majority in the Senate right now.”
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats continue to hold the line, reiterating their main ask — that Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year, be extended — on a daily basis and condemning Republicans for not coming to the negotiating table.
“Donald Trump’s strategy during this government shutdown that he has created has been to play golf and issue deepfake videos,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said during his Friday press conference. “Mike Johnson’s strategy is to keep House Republicans on vacation. John Thune’s strategy is to continue to do the same partisan thing over and over and over again and expect different results. That’s legislative insanity.”
— Emine Yücel
Caster Semenya and the Illusion of Common Sense
In 2019, Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya was banned from international track and field competitions. The ban stems from her refusal to take medicine that would artificially lower her hormone levels to those more commonly found in women. The new regulations had been announced by the International Association of Athletics Federations in April of 2018. Semenya announced in June of 2018 that she would file a legal challenge to the rules.
The ban effectively ended Semenya’s career.
This month, in an email to the Associated Press, Semenya’s attorney said that she would be ending her legal fight. Now 34, the 2012 and 2016 Olympic gold medalist has shifted from athlete to coach. Though Semenya never got the outcome she hoped for, she goes out on something of a high note. In July, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Semenya had not gotten a fair hearing in a previous court proceeding.
Semenya’s story is long and complicated, and I don’t have the space to chronicle the entire thing. But here are the facts: She and her family have maintained since the very beginning that she was born a woman and that her birth certificate says she is a woman. She has never identified as anything else. She has eschewed the label intersex. In a 2023 New York Times essay that I strongly encourage everyone to read, she said:
I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man; I’m a woman. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman.
Semenya says that she found out during a medical exam when she was 18 years old that she had XY chromosomes, as opposed to the typically female XX, and elevated levels of testosterone due to undescended testis that she didn’t know she had. She was told that in order to compete she could have surgery to remove the testis, or she could take estrogen pills to lower the testosterone. She took the pills for a while to compete, but upon learning of another athlete — Indian runner Dutee Chand — who had challenged the rule in court and won, Semenya threw her pills in the trash. The IAAF then came back with even more strict regulations — requiring a testosterone level even lower than the one she previously struggled to meet.
I first learned about Caster Semenya from a 2009 article in The New Yorker. In the article, Ariel Levy lays out Semenya’s story at the intersection of race and gender political issues. As a Black South African, Semenya and those close to her are no strangers to Europeans coming in and trying to explain how biology supposedly works. Apartheid-era census takers often told people they were a different race than they had previously believed themselves to be. As Levy writes:
In 1985, according to the census, more than a thousand people somehow changed race: nineteen whites turned Colored (as South Africans call people of mixed heritage); seven hundred and two Coloreds turned white, fifty Indians turned Colored, eleven Colored turned Chinese, and so on. (No blacks turned white, or vice versa.)
This article had a profound effect on how I, then 21 years old, viewed the world. I’d never encountered anyone like Semenya before. Race as a social construct? Sure, of course. This was established. But biological sex being anything other than binary was new to me. It forced me to rethink how I organized and understood the world. It’s not as nice and neat as I thought. There’s a lot of gray. Things are fuzzy. As we learn more about how things work, the divisions that seem so obvious or common-sensical fade away and are replaced by spectrums. It’s often said there are no straight lines in nature. Well, there are also very few discrete distinctions.
These lessons are intrinsic, too, to our politics and the way in which we organize society. Again, Semenya is not a trans person, though it’s impossible not to view the fight over trans rights as related. Both deal with a government or aspects of a government, attempting to codify biological terms according to “common sense” understandings. I think in many ways what people like Semenya and what trans people help us to consider is the possibility that our conceptual understanding of a very basic building block in our construction of society — gender and sex identity — is not terribly sound. And if that foundational pillar crumbles, what’s next?
These sorts of conceptual revolutions happen from time to time. People get pretty mad because they don’t like change. Just when you think you have a grip on things, someone comes along and says that, actually, the Earth rotates around the sun, not vice versa. Some people who illuminate these truths for the rest of us are made to suffer by those who’ve grown comfortable in the darkness. Caster Semenya is one of those people, and it makes me sad. But she changed the whole course of my life — and so the least I could do as her career as an athlete comes to a close is pass her story along.
— Joe Ragazzo