AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We look now at how Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars, something like over $60 million, to flood the airwaves and social media with political ads that attack transgender rights. The Trump campaign is running the first-ever presidential campaign ad on the topic, and the Senate Leadership Fund, backed by Mitch McConnell, is running ads in key Senate races in swing states, often during major football games.

NARRATOR: Kamala was the first to help pay for a prisoner’s sex change.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: The power that I had, I used it in a way that was about pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.

NARRATOR: Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.

NARRATOR: But Brown voted multiple times to allow transgender biological males to participate in girls’ sports.

NARRATOR: Baldwin supported providing puberty blockers and sex change surgeries to minor children. She even supports forcing Wisconsin women’s domestic violence shelters to admit biological men who claim to identify as women.

AMY GOODMAN: Anti-trans attacks are a key part of Trump’s message. Some say it’s his closing message. At a Bronx barbershop campaign stop aired on Fox last week, Trump pivoted back to trans kids when asked how he would improve schools.

DONALD TRUMP: I say reading, writing and arithmetic. No transgender, no operations. You know, they take your kid. There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. OK? Without parental consent. What is that all about?

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media, host of its investigative podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, which just launched a new season about how paramilitary groups have weaponized transphobia to forge ties to Republicans and stoke political violence. Imara Jones’ new piece for Newsweek is headlined “What’s at Stake for Trans People in This Election” in national, state and local races.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Imara.

IMARA JONES: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about the overall climate? I mean, I listened to almost every speech on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Almost every speaker, including Robert F. Kennedy, talked about trans issues. I think his line was “We’re going to protect women’s sports.” But if you can talk about the overall climate, the tens of million of dollars being put into ads?

IMARA JONES: Well, I’m sorry that you did that to yourself, Amy, and watched for six hours.

I think that what we have to be very clear about is that transphobia is not just a plank, but a key pillar of the Republican Party. It has staked a large part of its argument as to why it should be in power and why it should return to power due to transphobia and due to its campaign against trans people. It’s sort of that and immigration are essentially the reasons why they say that they should be reelected.

And I think that, for them, anti-trans hate does a couple of things. I think the first thing that it does is that it helps them continue to animate their base and to essentially give them something to focus on after abortion. For several years, they’ve known that abortion was going to be on the chopping block and that they had a key part of their constituency that was engaged on gender, and so they have to give that group of people something to do, essentially.

Secondly, it allows them to have inroads into places and people that they would never be in conversation with. They normally wouldn’t be in conversation with suburban moms, who they had been turned off to. They wouldn’t be able to be in conversation with certain Black religious people and Latinos who are evangelicals, or even some gay people — right? — who are anti-trans, the so-called TERFs. So, what this does is that it allows them to be able to shave off just enough votes in marginal races to eke out a win. And that’s what they look at this issue as. And I think the fact that they’ve dropped so much money on these ads tells us that they believe that this race is extremely close or they’re behind. And so, what they’re trying to do is to pick up one or two votes per precinct in order to win, which was Donald Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016, for example.

And the last thing that it does for them is that it cements them as a Christian nationalist party. It is the imprimatur of the fact that the Republican Party has become an extremist movement that has been taken over by the Christian nationalist movement and brands them as such and puts them in league not only with political extremists, but also paramilitary extremists, in a bid to destabilize democracy from the ground up.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Imara, I wanted to ask you — The Wall Street Journal's editorial board recently ran a piece titled “Transgender Sports Is a 2024 Sleeper Issue,” and they especially focused on Senate races in Ohio, Montana and Wisconsin. I'm wondering your response and why particularly these states that they’re focusing on.

IMARA JONES: Well, those states are Republican-leaning states where the Senate candidates in those states have to rely on a lot of Republican votes, or independent voters who lean Republican, in order to be able to win. Those are also all tight races — right? — which is where you want to deploy, from their perspective, anti-trans issues and anti-trans hate or discomfort at a minimum. And so, it is a part of that strategy of eking out votes, getting just enough, and playing to Republicans and reminding them that the candidates that they might be inclined to vote for in this race might be strange or somehow anti-American or, in some ways, just, you know, weird people, to turn the phrase back on Democrats. So, it’s an otherization that’s happening with this issue. And again, it’s in these tight Senate races where these Democrats have to rely on Republican votes.

And the Republican Party, in a really short amount of time, has primed its entire base to be concerned and to be focused on anti-trans issues. So, they’re ripe for it, you know? In the last four years, they have passed anti-trans laws in half of the country. And just this year, 600 anti-trans bills have been introduced, becoming more extreme each year. So, this is just something that Republican voters are naturally inclined to focus on. And so, if you’re in a tight race and you have to rely on some Republican votes, and as a Republican, you see the Democrat is doing that and maybe making inroads, then you want to deploy this issue as a way to bring those voters back home.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you’ve also looked into how paramilitary groups have used anti-trans politics to forge closer ties to Republicans. Could you talk about what you found?

IMARA JONES: So, essentially, anti-trans issues acts as an affinity point between paramilitary groups and the Republican Party. And one of the things that happened after January 6th is that these paramilitary groups saw that if you do one big thing against the national government, the national government deploys its power. But what these groups decided to do was to atomize themselves, to go local, in the words of Gavin McInnes, who told me in an interview that that was their strategy.

AMY GOODMAN: The founder of Proud Boys.

IMARA JONES: The founder of Proud Boys. And what he was alluding to is the fact that these groups have kept their members engaged, recruited new members, forged relationships with local politicians, Republican politicians, all across the country, and continued to develop their brand by focusing on Drag Story Hours and protesting LGBTQ events across the country. And so, it seemed as if the Proud Boys and the other groups had gone away, but all they’ve done is gone to ground. And because they’ve focused on LGBTQ issues, local authorities and other politicians and even the mainstream media have ignored their continued development and growing strength, because they see, “Oh, they’re just protesting, you know, Drag Story Hours.” But what they’ve been doing is exercising themselves and getting ready for sort of the next big events.

And one of the things that we need to focus on is that SPLC last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and extremist groups, last year did a study, and in that study, they counted more extremist groups in the United States than ever, than since they’ve been counting. And half of white supremacist groups, half of those groups last year engaged in anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans actions and protests and some form of violence. So these groups have used these issues in order to grow strength below the radar for whatever comes next.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the trailer for season three of your podcast, TransLash’s Anti-Trans Hate Machine. It follows up on this point, “Paramilitary Groups Stoke Political Violence.”

IMARA JONES: Hi. I’m Imara Jones. I’ve spent years investigating authoritarian and far-right movements. And lately I’ve been alarmed by the rise in dangerous political violence across the United States. It’s at levels not seen since the 1970s. And an unprecedented amount of this violence is being directed at queer and trans people.

NOELLE BELLOW: Drag queen story time interrupted at an East Bay library, a hate crime investigation now underway.

IMARA JONES: So, on this season of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, I’m going to show how the anti-trans ecosystem has expanded its fight from legislatures and courtrooms to the streets, and what this means for all of us.

ELI: Everybody was armed that day. Everybody was carrying sidearms. Everybody had knives on display. Everybody was putting their hands on their pistol grips.

IMARA JONES: Paramilitary groups have seized upon anti-trans hate to solidify their alliance with supposedly mainstream conservatives. I’ll show you how these attacks are part of a coordinated strategy to bring about a patriarchal, fascist regime in America, one where queer people would be erased from public life.

ANITA PARISOT: If the bullets start flying, I’m covering her up. And I’m taking the bullet for her, and she’ll survive. So she has to be with me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the trailer for the new season three of Anti-Trans Hate Machine. You talk about a lot of specifics here, groups in Idaho who are using the state as a testing ground for a new wave of extremism. Episode three, “No Such Thing as a Lone Wolf,” looks at the responses and solutions to terrorist violence fueled by anti-trans hate. You’re looking at Wadsworth, Ohio. Tell us some specific stories and also how they relate to down-ballot races.

IMARA JONES: So, one of the things that’s happening in Idaho — there’s so many examples, but in Idaho is the fact that extremist groups, paramilitary groups have found common cause with an organization called the Idaho Freedom Foundation. And the Idaho Freedom Foundation acts as sort of this connective tissue between paramilitary groups, extremist politicians and the promulgation of laws to make the state more extreme.

And essentially, what they are all doing is working to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation at the local level, transforming what was once a right-leaning “mainstream,” in quotes, Republican Party into one dominated by people who want to do things or are promoting to do things like make paramilitary groups legal in the state, to literally legalize them. And this air of intimidation means that people who are considering running for races, who may not be extremist politicians, come under threats, people who put LGBTQ signs or pro-anything other than what Christian nationalists want in their yards. One person drove up to a person that we interviewed and told her when she put an LGBTQ sign in her yard, “Thanks for putting that sign in your yard, because we know where to shoot when the bullets fly.”

And so, what this is doing is using the paramilitary groups as a way of shifting the comfort level with democracy, with making your voice heard at the democratic level, and therefore getting more and extreme politicians there. And they’re working and also signaling with places like Libs of TikTok, which put out a call around an LGBTQ event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. And that event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, drew in Patriot Front, who was there to stoke violence that day as a part of what an Idaho Freedom Foundation politician had called for in terms of protesting that event.

And the problem with Idaho is that it’s a Petri dish for these conditions, where we are starting to see it occur in other places, like Tennessee, where Patriot Front is beginning to make more and more of a show of force. It’s passed more anti-trans laws than any other state in the country. And so, what we’re seeing is this affinity, I mean, even in places like New York City, where the Proud Boys are increasingly allying with certain, believe it or not, Republican members of the City Council around Drag Story Hour events here. So, what is happening is that being anti-trans is a signal for extremists as to who’s on their side, and that signal then allows them to work together to push the country more and more to its extremes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Imara, I wanted to ask you: There’s been a lot of attention focused on Project 2025 by the Democrats, but could you talk about the central place that anti-trans ideology plays in Project 2025?

IMARA JONES: You can’t understand Project 2025 without understanding or grasping the Republican Party’s obsession with trans people and with transphobia. As a matter of fact, anti-trans sentiment and anti-trans, you know, ideas are on page one of Project 2025, going into page two. It’s literally on the first page. And essentially, Project 2025, with its weaponization of government, is essentially taking all of the learnings that the Trump administration garnered from its anti-trans policies, where it learned how to weaponize the government against a group of people, in healthcare, in the military, in education, attempted in housing, and essentially then took those learnings and then applied them to Project 2025. As a matter of fact, one of the key architects of Trump’s anti-trans policies, Roger Severino, is one of the key people who drafted and wrote Project 2025. And to close the loop, you know, he and other people were at the Heritage Foundation, came into the Trump administration with these policies and are now carrying them through, applying them to many people through Project 2025.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Also, this is a case we’ll look at in the coming days. The Supreme Court will soon hear a landmark legal challenge brought by the ACLU against a ban on hormone therapies for transgender youth. It will be argued by Chase Strangio, making Chase Strangio the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court. Imara Jones, thanks so much for being with us, founder and CEO of TransLash Media, host of its investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.