Stephen Miller is literally trolling us.

A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote op-eds comparing his liberal classmates to terrorists and musing that Osama bin Laden would fit in at his high school. In college, he coordinated an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” These efforts were not calibrated for persuasion; they were designed to agitate. And now that he’s in the White House, he is deploying similar tactics.

Take the travel ban, for example. During Trump’s first week in office, Miller worked with Steve Bannon to craft an executive order banning travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Trump signed the order on a Friday afternoon, unleashing chaos at airports across the country, complete with mass protests, wall-to-wall media coverage, and a slew of legal challenges. Afterward, Bannon reportedly boasted that they had enacted the measure on a weekend “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”

It seems implausible, that administration policy and PR are being shaped by the kind of people who spend their lives on Twitter harassing “snowflakes,” but there it is.

The AP reports:

The call came at mealtime — an anonymous threat demanding $5,000 or her son’s life.

So Blanca Orantes-Lopez, her 8-year-old boy and his father packed up and left the Pacific surfing town of Puerto La Libertad in El Salvador and headed for the United States.

Two months later, she sits in a federal prison south of Seattle. The boy, Abel Alexander, is in custody at a children’s home across the country in upstate New York. She has no idea when she might see him again.

“I still haven’t been able to talk to him,” Orantes told The Associated Press in Spanish as she wept through a telephone interview Monday from the prison. “The most difficult is not seeing him.”

She fled a threat of kidnapping her child, so now she’s in prison and the US government has kidnapped her child.

The phone call that prompted Orantes’ monthlong journey to the U.S. border was no idle threat, she said. About three years ago, Abel’s uncle was kidnapped by extortionists and freed only after the family paid up, according to her attorney, Matt Adams, legal director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

“When they don’t get their money, they kill people,” said Orantes, 26.

This time, the demand was more than they could muster. And they had only a week to pay, she said.

She and her son split from the boy’s father in Guatemala. He remains in hiding, and Orantes said she does not know where he is. Upon reaching the border, she and Abel found it impossible to apply for asylum at a port of entry, Adams said.

“A lot of people are showing up at the border to apply for asylum and are being told, ’We don’t have capacity for them,’” Adams said. “It’s not like they can just stand in a line for several days, because then the Mexican officials will grab them and deport them. So they’re then forced to go through the ravine or the river.”

That’s what they did. The pair crossed illegally into Texas and immediately reported themselves to immigration authorities and requested asylum, Adams said.

They were separated so Orantes could be prosecuted.

The woman said she was moved to different detention facilities, including in Laredo, Texas, and placed among other desperate, crying mothers. At one point, officials brought Abel to her, she said.

“They told me, ‘Say bye to him because he’s being transferred.’ I asked where,” she recounted. “They just told me to say bye to him. … He just started crying, saying, ‘Don’t leave me, Mom.’

“I just said, ‘It’ll be OK.’ That’s all I said.”

She was convicted of the misdemeanor of entering the US illegally, and sent to the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac to wait to learn if her asylum request will go anywhere.

Before Trump’s policy changes, she likely would not have been prosecuted, but instead allowed to remain with her son and granted an interview to determine whether she had a credible fear of persecution or torture in her home country. If officials found that she did, she and Abel would probably have been released while their immigration case continued.

It was weeks before she learned her son’s whereabouts, she said. She has not spoken with him. Her attorney said she has no money and is not allowed to make collect calls to the facility in Kingston, New York, where he is held. The boy has been able to call her sister, Maria Orantes, who lives in Maryland and has petitioned for custody, without success.

“He doesn’t feel well there,” Maria Orantes said in a phone interview. “When he calls, he’s crying. He doesn’t want to be there.”

In other words they’re both being tortured.

Masha Gessen published this at the New Yorker way back on May 9th, and damn did she see what was coming.

Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry.

Last weekend, independent Russian-language media published hundreds of photographs from protests that preceded Monday’s inauguration of Vladimir Putin, who has claimed the office of President for the fourth time. In many of the pictures, Russian police were detaining children: primarily, preteen boys were having their arms twisted behind their backs by police, being dragged and shoved into paddy wagons.

An unsubtle warning to their parents.

A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said. The Attorney General did not appear to be unveiling a new policy so much as amplifying a practice that has been adopted by the Trump Administration, which has been separating parents who are in immigration detention from their children. The Times reported in December that the federal government was considering a policy of separating families in order to discourage asylum seekers from entering. By that time, nonprofit groups were already raising the alarm about the practice, which they said had affected a number of families. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the hundreds of families that had been separated when they entered the country with the intention of seeking asylum.

The practice, and Sessions’s speech, are explicitly intended as messages to parents who may consider seeking asylum in the United States. The American government has unleashed terror on immigrants, and in doing so has naturally reached for the most effective tools.

And here we are. We’re on a level with Putin’s Russia.

Originally a comment by iknklast on Adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity searching.

Claire believes that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender roles that she had internalized

I had a lot of gender problems myself as a teen. My parents had rigid ideas of what a person should be based on their external genitalia. So I endured endless years of Home Ec when I would rather have been in Chemistry and Physics. I wore pink as a little girl when I preferred green. I washed dishes after dinner while my brothers watched Star Trek or played cribbage with Dad…or got to do fun things like going out and helping with the tractor. My mother was very firm in her conviction that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was too “mannish”. Not in my mannerisms, mind you, because I was never what she termed a “tom boy”. In my interests. I didn’t want a hope chest. I didn’t want a bridal registry. I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted books and magazines and science and politics and philosophy. She made it very plain, very clear, that I was wrong, I was messed up, I was seriously broken. I wasn’t fully a girl, oh no, not possibly. But she never suspected I might be a boy, because in her worldview boys were boys and girls were girls, and had nothing in common. For that, I am eternally grateful.

She also hated the idea of psychotherapy. To have one of her children in therapy would be more horror, more disgrace than she could handle. So I never had therapy for my depression until I was 25, married, and rapidly dropping weight from the most recent manifestation of a lifelong battle with anorexia, to that time untreated. So there were no therapists to ask “are you sure you aren’t really a boy?”

The day came when I finally realized what I was…I think I was about 14…and the truth hit me like a flash of light. It had nothing to do with whether I was a girl or a boy. It turns out, I was a feminist. A female who had her own interests and talents in spite of what society and my parents said. A female who was female and didn’t want to be male for some reason, but just wanted to be allowed to be female in my own way. The battle for ERA was raging, and I had many battles with my parents over the desirability of this particular constitutional amendment. They won on the national level; I won on the personal level by identifying for myself why I was not happy in the roles established for me, and why I didn’t want to wear pink (because I liked green better!) or take Home Ec (because Chemistry, Biology, and Physics are more interesting to me) or marry the first boy who asked me (actually, I did do that, but it was many years later, and a mistake).

That recognition did not solve my depression. It did not make my eating disorder go away. It did not give me control over my own life (frankly, I’m not in favor of 14 year olds having full control over their own life, but that view is not what I thought at 14). I was still an abused, unhappy, scared child who needed some serious help, but when I finally did get help 11 years later, it was the kind of help I needed, not the kind that would assume that my desire to do “boy” activities meant I was a boy inside.

What if the internet had been available when I was going through all this? What if I had been given YouTube videos to teach me the way to live, rather than sorting it out by working through the worst aspects of puberty and eventually discovering through a long, extensive, and still evolving process who I was, separate from my “gender identity” and separate from my “assigned at birth” and separate from my “parents think I am this”? What if I had been a member of the generation who thinks that vloggers hold more answers than experts, or that experts should tell me what I want to hear? Or, worse, that experts should get their information from vloggers and 4 year olds who happen not to like pink and people with baseball bats wrapped with barb wire?

I finally achieved a solution to my depression, my anorexia, and my other worries at the age of 35, and learned how to smile. I went back to school for the Biology degree I’d never dared dream of. I explored my own sexuality without fear or shame. And today, I am more content than most of my peers, and I appreciate that. I still suffer frequent flare ups of depression, but I no longer jump to easy, obvious answers and instead look at my world and myself and see if I can sort it out…if not, I ride it out. It Gets Better. And when my therapist one day asked me, when I explained I felt like some grotesque female-male mutant, “do you want to become a man?”, I had the courage, the knowledge, the insight, and the support behind me to say “no, I just want to be the woman I want to be”. And he had the good sense, the training, and the insight to support and respect that, and understand that I knew what the hell I was talking about. He never urged me to transition, to change my name or my “gender identity”, or to be anything other than the woman I wanted to be.

Thanks to all these things, I am today the woman I want to be, rather than a depressed, unhappy woman who can’t see her way to get out of bed in the morning, or a depressed, unhappy man who found out that my problem wasn’t solved by transitioning into a different body.

If my experience could be of some help to youth and teens who are suffering similar problems, I would gladly offer my assistance. But it seems that people don’t want to hear my story now, because it does not fit with the story they have incorporated into their worldview, and insist (loudly and violently) that everyone else should incorporate into not only their own worldviews, but into public policy and health care.

Oh no, says Amrou Al-Kadhi at the Guardian, London Pride is not just corporate but also Militantly Secular.

Pride’s corporative makeover contributes to an image that I find politically troubling – that neoliberal ideology is the generator of LGBT rights. As a gay person of Muslim heritage, the inescapable secularism of Pride makes me anxious. When western capitalism is painted as a haven for gay rights, I experience a friction between the Muslim and queer parts of my identity. This is particularly sensitive in a context where, for instance, a large number of gay men in Paris voted for Marine Le Pen in 2017, persuaded by her rhetoric that Islam was a threat to civic liberties.

And last year’s Pride saw its fair share of Islamophobia, with groups holding placards reading “Fuck Islam”, with some specifically damning the East London local mosque.

Well, let’s be real: religion has not always been a fan or ally of LGB rights, and conservative religions still are not. In places where Islam is the government being gay can be fatal.

And while the treatment of LGBT people remains dire in many Muslim countries, this militant secularism mutes the fact that many queer Muslims also hope to march at Pride, and that a majority of Muslims condemn homophobia…

That’s not what the surveys say:

Of those questioned, 88% said Britain was a good place for Muslims to live in, and 78% said they would like to integrate into British life on most things apart from Islamic schooling and some laws.

However, when asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed that homosexuality should be legal in Britain, 18% said they agreed and 52% said they disagreed, compared with 5% among the public at large who disagreed. Almost half (47%) said they did not agree that it was acceptable for a gay person to become a teacher, compared with 14% of the general population.

Al-Kadhi continues:

With Pride’s corporate redesign comes some exclusionary pragmatics. Despite organisers stipulating that marchers can’t be drunk, there is a lot of alcohol at the parade, and this can be difficult for many Muslims who don’t drink, or for those who are fasting during the month.

Oh come on. It’s a huge public event, where people are going to do what they feel like doing. It’s a celebratory event, and for a lot of people that involves alcohol. Deal with it.

The enormous media presence also makes it more difficult for queer minorities who don’t have the privilege of being safely out to their families.

But the majority opposes homophobia, so what’s the problem? He hasn’t really ironed out the wrinkles, has he.

As a reaction against Pride’s increasing inaccessibility, queer people of colour and faith are creating alternative events. Make-up artist Umber Ghauri, who identifies as Muslim and queer, helped set up Queer Picnic, which offers an alternative space to Pride that is safer for people of colour and faith. Umber tells me how the secular nature of “mainstream Pride” fragments their sense of self, “forcing you to chop off your Muslim identity in order to celebrate your LGBT identity”. Queer Picnic, however, is an inclusive gathering without any media intrusion, offering predominantly sober spaces, giving intersectional queer identities the chance “to celebrate all of who we are”.

Inclusive? Is it? Is it inclusive of people who dislike religion? Of atheists? Of secular human rights activists?

You can’t always have everything. You can be devout or Out and Proud but not necessarily both. Liberal religions are fine with being out but – newsflash – not all religions are liberal.

Terry Sanderson commented on Facebook:

Here we go again, with religious people (or person in this case) whinging that they aren’t being given special privileges. This time its gay Muslims and Pride. This writer complains about Pride’s apparent “militant secularism” which he says excludes “people of faith”.

But surely secularism is there to ensure that everyone – people of all faiths and none – can take part on an inclusive basis. It tries to avoid the “I refuse to take part if they take part” mentality – and as we know, religions are very good at objecting to one another.

So now, apparently, we have a separate Pride event just for “people of faith”. This is so sad. I haven’t seen restrictions in the main parade on anyone with religious leanings. I have seen people marching under religious banners.

What this man seems to want is some kind of special privilege for religious marchers.

A new level of ugly:

In the flourishing world of baseless conspiracy theories, this one, part hoax, part smear, has been having its moment.

The idea that people whose experiences speak to some of the consequences of government policies are not to be taken at face value, and are actually “crisis actors” working for a nefarious purpose, has taken on particular prominence in the wake of mass shootings, such as those in Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter on Sunday became the latest figure to spread a similar claim, as a guest on a Fox News show, when she charged that some of the migrant children who have been photographed in varying stages of distress were “child actors,” in a bit of messaging she directed at President Trump.

Yes, certainly, that’s highly plausible, because of course it would be terribly difficult to find real children who were distressed by being yanked away from their parents by strangers. Real children in that situation are all smiling happily as they settle down on the floor of the small room walled with chain link and filled with other children, foil “blankets,” and water bottles. What child wouldn’t be delighted to have a journey interrupted in that way?

“These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now; do not fall for it, Mr. President,” she said, staring directly into the camera. “I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV.”

She says, on TV, staring into the president’s eyes via the camera.

Coulter’s remarks went unquestioned by Fox News host Steve Hilton, on whose show she appeared. He did try to move the conversation forward as a break in the show approached.

“I don’t know if that’s …” he said, trailing off as Coulter continued. “I told you we wouldn’t get a word in,” he said to the two other guests, Republican former congressman Jason E. Chaffetz and Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.

But Coulter continued.

“These kids are being coached,” she said. “They’re given scripts to read by liberals. . . . Don’t fall for the actor children.”

She said her information came from New Yorker magazine, though it was not immediately clear which report she was referring to.

Over a series of emails with The Post, Coulter did not provide evidence for her claim.

Well she couldn’t, could she.

Erdoğan could be our future.

Public schools are closing, on little or no notice, and being replaced by religious schools. Exams are scrapped by presidential whim. Tens of thousands of public teachers have been fired. Outside religious groups are teaching in schools, without parental consent.

The battle over how to shape Turkey’s next generation has become a tumultuous issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he seeks re-election on Sunday in a vote that is shaping up as a referendum on his deepening imprint on the country after 15 years at the helm.

Mr. Erdogan has already chipped away at Turkey’s democratic institutions, purging the courts and civil service of suspected opponents, bringing the media to heel, and leaving in place a state of emergency after a failed coup in 2016 that has added a new level of precariousness to the campaign.

His opponents fear that his re-election to a newly empowered presidency after constitutional changes last year will give Mr. Erdogan almost unchecked authority to push his agenda even further and fundamentally alter Turkish society.

He’s already done a lot to ruin the schools.

Even while prime minister, six years ago, Mr. Erdogan declared his desire to “raise a pious generation.”

“Do you expect that a party with a conservative, democratic identity would raise an atheist youth?” he said, challenging his opponents about the aims of his Justice and Development Party. “You may have such an aim, but we don’t.”

The words revealed a cause close to Mr. Erdogan’s heart and those of his supporters in his conservative, rural and religious base.

More forced god, less freedom from enforced god. Erdoğan has replaced many of the secular public schools with religious ones.

The Imam Hatip schools teach the national curriculum, but roughly half their courses are religious and their core classes — those which a student has to pass to matriculate — are the Quran and Arabic.

Mr. Erdogan has vastly expanded the schools, from just 450 schools 15 years ago to 4,500 nationwide today. His government increased the budget for religious education this year by 68 percent, to $1.5 billion.

…

In early May, an Islamic organization visited and gave a talk to girls from the seventh and eighth grade.

“They said don’t wear leggings as it will arouse men’s attention,” said Oya Ustundag, an accountant who has a son in the eighth grade. “They said only hands, eyes and feet should be shown.”

They told girls that girls should be erased.

[M]any link Turkey’s recent fall in international rankings — it dropped in the PISA index, which evaluates critical thinking, from 44th to 49th out of 72 countries — to constant disruptions and the focus on religion.

“When I started 18 years ago the quality was high,” said Aysel Kocak, a district leader of the Union for Laborers of Education and Science, who teaches math at a technical school in Istanbul’s third district. “Now I cannot teach them as intensively as I would wish.”

She pointed to a working-class district of Istanbul, in Kagithane, that has two public high schools, but seven Imam Hatip schools — five for girls — and eight technical schools.

“This illustrates what this government proposes for low income people,” she said, “that your son will end up as cheap labor and your daughter in an Imam Hatip.”

It’s sad that human beings can’t get free of this horrible god myth.

Jesse Singal starts his piece in the Atlantic with Claire, age 14.

During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.

Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”

The thing is, though, how much did she, how much could she know about the usual preteen woes? Not that much, because of being twelve. When you’re twelve you don’t really understand that your experiences and feelings and woes are generic…at least I didn’t, and now that I’m not twelve I no longer think I’m Unique and Special, including uniquely dorky or wrong or weird or any of that.

Around this time, Claire started watching YouTube videos made by transgender young people. She was particularly fascinated by MilesChronicles, the channel of Miles McKenna, a charismatic 22-year-old. His 1 million subscribers have followed along as he came out as a trans boy, went on testosterone, got a double mastectomy, and transformed into a happy, healthy young man. Claire had discovered the videos by accident, or rather by algorithm: They’d showed up in her “recommended” stream. They gave a name to Claire’s discomfort. She began to wonder whether she was transgender, meaning her internal gender identity didn’t match the sex she had been assigned at birth. “Maybe the reason I’m uncomfortable with my body is I’m supposed to be a guy,” she thought at the time.

Except that there’s no such thing as one’s “internal gender identity.” That’s a made-up label, and it sows a lot of confusion.

So Claire thought she should transition.

Claire initially kept her feelings from her parents, researching steps she could take toward transitioning that wouldn’t require medical interventions, or her parents’ approval. She looked into ways to make her voice sound deeper and into binders to hide her breasts. But one day in August 2016, Mike asked her why she’d seemed so sad lately. She explained to him that she thought she was a boy.

This began what Heather recalls as a complicated time in her and her husband’s relationship with their daughter. They told Claire that they loved and supported her; they thanked her for telling them what she was feeling. But they stopped short of encouraging her to transition. “We let her completely explore this on her own,” Heather told me.