Skip to main content

Red States

  • Half a dozen states, including Tennessee, Montana, Iowa, and Texas, have passed legislation allowing gun owners to carry their weapons without a permit.
  • Texas, South Carolina, Idaho, and Oklahoma have passed legislation banning abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, after about six weeks of pregnancy (before women typically even know they are pregnant); Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas also passed virtually complete bans on abortion. Arizona approved an extremely restrictive bill that includes barring abortions for certain genetic conditions.
  • Ten states have adopted about two dozen laws in total targeting transgender individuals, including legislation in seven states that bars transgender athletes from competing in school sports. In the U.S., “2021 has officially surpassed 2015 as the worst year for anti-LGBTQ legislation in recent history,” the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ-advocacy group, recently concluded. “States have now enacted more anti-LGBTQ laws this year than in the last three years combined.”
  • Through mid-May, “14 states have enacted 22 new laws with provisions that make it harder for Americans to vote,” and many other laws are still pending, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “At this rate,” the organization wrote, “the United States is on track to far exceed its most recent period of intense legislative activity to restrict the vote—2011.” More red states may join this push: After a walkout by state House Democrats blocked a restrictive Texas voting law this week, Governor Greg Abbott announced that he would call a special session to pass the law later this year.
  • Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and about half a dozen other states have passed laws stiffening penalties against demonstrators who block traffic or cause property damage, and several of those states have simultaneously provided civil or criminal protection for drivers who hit protesters, according to a tally by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.
  • Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas have barred public schools from teaching “critical race theory,” which focuses on racism as an endemic feature of American history. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is moving to prohibit it through a ruling by the state board of education.
  • Florida, Georgia, and Texas have all passed laws penalizing local governments that cut funding for their police department. One of the measures approved in Texas stipulates that a county looking to cut police funding must first win voter approval through a referendum—but would apply only to counties with a population of 1 million or more, almost all of which lean Democratic.
  • Over the past year, several red-state governors have issued executive orders or signed laws barring local governments from mandating the use of face masks or limiting local businesses’ hours of operation; Florida and Tennessee have passed laws barring local governments or businesses from requiring residents to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination. Restrictive voting laws passed in Georgia and proposed in Texas explicitly outlaw measures used to increase voter turnout in the states’ largest cities (Atlanta and Houston, respectively).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I was a Jan. 6 juror. What I learned surprised me.

I was a Jan. 6 juror. What I learned surprised me. Trump’s pardons of virtually all of the Jan. 6 rioters left me dejected. Am I safe? When the jury summons for federal criminal court arrived in my mailbox in November 2023, I knew I had to answer it. And not just because I had been deferring and deferring and now I was all out of deferments. I had to answer this one because in my gut I knew it wasn’t going to be just any old criminal case. I remember saying to my partner, “I bet you anything it’s a January 6 case.” Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter At that point, it had been more than two years since a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in the city that has been my home for 16 years. But criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were still making their way through the federal court in D.C. at a pretty steady clip. At the time my summons arrived, roughly 1,200 Jan. 6 cases had already been adjudicated, and there were still many mor...

Feudalism Is Our Future

Feudalism Is Our Future 100+The Atlantic by Cullen Murphy / Jun 3, 2025 at 4:40 AM 8 Companies See Insights Card Judging from news accounts and interviews, numerous people in and around the Trump administration are beguiled by imperial Rome. They see themselves as interpreters of its lessons—beware immigration; uphold masculinity; make babies—and inheritors of its majesty. A banner at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, D.C., depicted Donald Trump in Augustan profile, his brow garlanded with laurel leaves. Elon Musk styles himself “Imperator of Mars” and has named one of his many children Romulus. Steve Bannon keeps a bust of Julius Caesar in his Capitol Hill office. Two decades ago, when maga was just a Latin word for “enchantress,” I wrote a book about ancient Rome and modern America. The book didn’t touch on masculinity or the birth rate, and it didn’t try to explain the fall of Rome; the idea was just to sift through the story of a past society...

Inside the secret greedy deal that proves the Trump summit is a cynical farce

29Alternet.org by Thom Hartmann / Aug 16, 2025 at 5:56 AM Is this article about Opinions? This is what happens when cynical, greedy, amoral billionaires and psychopaths run a country. The Times of London (Murdoch-owned) is reporting that billionaire Steve Witkoff, billionaire Donald Trump, and billionaire Vladimir Putin have worked out a model behind the scenes to solve the Ukraine problem: just make it like Gaza. They’re planning, according to this reporting, to fully respect the borders of Ukraine and the country’s sovereignty, but with one catch. Just like Israel did with Gaza, Ukraine can “self-govern” but all political and economic decisions will be made or approved by Moscow, all funds flowing through Moscow, just like the governments of Gaza and the West Bank are subservient to the whims of Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset. It's essentially a plan to return Ukraine to the subordinate status it had when it was part of the old Soviet Union, which Putin appears committed ...