A Republican senator is demanding out musician Billie Eilish return her Grammy because she criticized ICE.
Eilish has faced criticism from the right since this past weekend when she won the Grammy for Song of the Year for “Wildflower.” During her acceptance speech, she asserted that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” a reference to immigration policy.
Now, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is demanding she give up her Grammy as well as her home.
“There can be no Grammys on stolen land, I think,” Schmitt told YouTuber Nicholas Ballasy yesterday. “I think Billie Eilish ought to give the Grammy back and probably her mansion, which, I guess, is on stolen land, too. It’s ridiculous. It’s… These people are completely out of touch, and so, whatever. Yeah.”
Right-wing media spent part of the week criticizing Eilish as “a blithering idiot,” arguing that she should not be allowed to own her home in LA because it was built “where the Tongva tribes once lived.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Tongva Nation of the Greater Los Angeles Basin said: “We do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country.”
The backlash even made it into a Senate hearing when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought it up while questioning Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos about a possible merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, even though it didn’t have anything to do with the merger.
Sen. Schmitt has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights, getting a score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard in the last session of Congress due to his solid opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. In 2019, when he was the Missouri attorney general, he joined a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination despite its ban on discrimination on the basis of sex. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected his argument the next year in its Bostock v. Clayton Co. decision.
Last year, Schmitt attended a fringe right-wing conference that had panels with titles like “Overturn Obergefell” – the case that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states – and “The Bible and American Renewal.” Schmitt gave a speech where he denounced legal immigration and said, “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us.”
“Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness,” he said at the time. So he probably does not believe that the Tongva Nation has a claim to the homes built on their ancestral land and was just saying that to attack Eilish.
Earlier this week, Schmitt too denounced Netflix as having “the wokest content in the history of the world” during a Senate hearing where other Republicans attacked Netflix for having some shows with LGBTQ+ characters.
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Former Sen. and current Alabama gubernatorial candidate Doug Jones (D) has vowed to replace members of the state’s library board who banned trans books from children’s and young adult sections in the state’s public libraries.
The board’s former chairman, John Wahl, who is currently running for Alabama lieutenant governor, has fired back, accusing Jones of wanting to expose young people to “sexually explicit” material and “perversion.”
As AL.com reports, Jones recently posted a video on X in which he answered a question from one potential voter about what he would do as governor to support the state’s public libraries.
Jones, who is vying against five other Democratic candidates to become his party’s nominee, promised to be “a champion of public libraries, a champion of free speech, a champion of making sure libraries are free and [patrons] have access to a lot of information.” He went on to connect book-banning efforts to attacks on free speech and the freedom of the press nationwide, describing all three as “under siege.”
In Alabama, the state Public Library Service board, under Wahl, responded to pressure from anti-LGBTQ+ groups Clean Up Alabama and Moms for Liberty by instituting a tiered system in 2024. Under the system, books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes are banned from children’s and teen sections of the state’s public libraries. The board has blocked state funding to the Fairhope Public Library after it refused to remove several books from its teen section.
In his February 3 video, Jones said the first thing he would do concerning libraries as governor would be to “get rid of a few people on that library board” and replace them with “people with some common sense and not some crazy political agenda.”
“I understand that there are concerns about some books that may be inappropriate for young kids. That can be remedied without removing them. Those things can be fixed without trying to ban books,” he said. Public libraries, he continued, should be responsive to their communities, but policymakers must also realize “that not everybody in that community thinks exactly the same way.”
“We’ve got to have freedom of thought. We’ve got to have freedom of access to the information,” Jones said. “I guarantee you, if not on Day 1, pretty dang close to it, there are gonna be some vacancies on that Alabama Public Library System Board, for sure.”
As AL.com reports, Wahl, who also served as chair of the Alabama Republican Party from 2021 until announcing his run for lieutenant governor last month, responded to Jones’s comments in a statement this week.
“Alabama families don’t want their kids exposed to this kind of trash, and anyone who has actually reviewed these books understands exactly why,” Wahl said. “This just shows the far-left, Biden-loving, liberal elitist mentality Doug Jones stands for. He actually believes that exposing young children to transgender story hour and pushing books filled with sexually explicit passages and graphic images is normal. It’s not. It’s perversion.”
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Trans radio host Ellie Krug is an eyewitness to the chaos the Trump administration has unleashed on Minnesota with its nativist immigration dragnet.
In an interview from her home in Victoria, Minnesota, pop. 10,546, Krug is quick to point out that Trump’s immigration raids aren’t just happening in Minneapolis, but in small towns like hers across the state.
“This is red country,” she says of Carver County, about 40 miles southwest of the Twin Cities. “It’s everywhere.”
Krug is a lawyer by training and the author of Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty and Gender Change and Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life. Her weekly podcast and radio show, The Illegal Trans Woman, airs Saturday afternoons on AM 950, “The Progressive Voice of Minnesota.”
LGBTQ Nation: You’ve described the situation on the ground in Minnesota as dystopian. How so?
Ellie Krug: Well, I mean, it is literally people who are masked, who have arsenals on their bodies, who are literally pulling people from their cars, or if you’re an observer, either spraying you with pepper spray or just pummeling you to the ground. This is like the kind of stuff you expect in a communist country, or a country that’s going through a civil war. It’s not what you would expect here in Minnesota.
Trump thinks that he can get away with it because people think in Minneapolis there are all these radical liberals who accept criminals in their midst and want to coddle them. But what people don’t understand is that ICE is throughout the state of Minnesota, out in greater Minnesota. This is red country. It’s everywhere.
There was a video out of St. Peter, 70 miles south of the Twin Cities. What they did to that woman — they came out of their cars with guns pointed at her for doing nothing other than following them at a respectful distance, right? That is dystopian.
We’ve all seen the images out of Minneapolis: the videos of the two shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the memorials to them, the protests on the streets and at churches, the whistleblowers alerting neighbors to ICE, car windows being smashed by agents, officials like Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino cosplaying jackbooted thugs to strike fear in the heart of your community. Is what we’re seeing in the media and on socials an accurate depiction of the scene?
Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I don’t think the media fully understands the breadth of it. Because out here where I am, all of that stuff is going on, too. I mean, I’m on the school board of my local school district. They’re stopping high school students on the way to school and asking them to produce papers. They’re taking parents at bus stops. I mean, my superintendent and principals of some schools have had to ride school buses to protect the kids.
I went to an MLK breakfast a week ago Monday in downtown Chaska, Minnesota, population 25,000. Half a block from us, they boxed in a car. She tried to get to the police station. She couldn’t make it. They boxed in her car. She was an observer. They smashed the driver’s side window, pulled her out of the car, and hauled her away.
What’s the reaction been like in your town?
So, you’ve seen the protests, you’ve seen people showing up in Minneapolis, but they’re showing up out here, too. My county is a red-to-purple county. We have protests weekly at different locations, from one or two standing on a street corner to, on Saturday, I was with somewhere between 1100 and 1200 people in a town of 25,000, lining a roadway probably close to three-quarters of a mile down towards a Target, where ICE has been staging to go on raids. They’re doing this out here in my county.
It sounds like it’s not possible for the media to grasp just how widespread the actual ICE operation is. I mean, multiply your small town by how many times…
Right? No, they’re not.
How are local officials dealing with the siege?
There was the county sheriff here, who was contemplating signing an agreement with ICE to host detainees. And we launched this movement to prevent that from happening. We met with the county sheriff. We presented him with a petition of 500 names, you know, against this. It was a frank conversation, but he was respectful. It went on for an hour.
So then we went and spoke to the county commissioners, because they kind of control the sheriff. And you know what? On the day that we spoke with the county sheriff and presented to the county commissioners, the sheriff came out and said he didn’t think he had enough capacity to fulfill the ICE contract.
This was very strategic on our part. So, logistically, if you think about it, if you just detained somebody, you’ve got to get them somewhere where they can get processed. If they can bring them to the county jail, then ICE can be in the community longer, because they don’t have to go the 45 miles to drop somebody off in Minneapolis and then come back.
Now I will tell you that the Minnesota County Sheriffs Association, apparently, is talking to ICE about opening up more county jails to be detention places, right? I’m like, uh oh, may all have been for naught. So I don’t know.
What’s the mood like among people you talk to? I mean, Minnesota has been under siege for months. Are people growing weary, or are they growing more outraged as time passes?
More outraged. Not weary at all. The caucuses were last night, both for the Republican and the Democratic Party. I got to the caucus site 10 minutes early. I thought, you know, it’ll be a little bit of a line. It took me 40 minutes to get into the caucus site because of how long the line was. And that line did not get finished until the caucus was already running.
And as I stood in the line — you know, me being me — I’m asking, “Have you ever done this before?” And people around me are like, “Nope, I’ve never done this before, but I’m here because I’m really angry.”
But, no, to answer specifically, people are not worn out. People are angry. They are incredibly angry at what’s happening. And one of the things I noticed at that Saturday protest was the larger number of younger people that I had not seen before. Now, you’ve got to understand that it was, what, 11 or 12 degrees out that day? So I think that the murders of Renee and Alex have activated the younger people in a way that we weren’t seeing before that had happened. You see that happen in your community enough times, then you’re like, “No, this is real.” And then the question is, what’s next?
What could be next?
I mean, we’re already hearing about nationalizing elections, okay, which would mean, you know, we’re not going to have free elections.
I will tell you, on a personal note, within the trans community, what’s next is, we’re going to be the next people they’re going to take. There’s this great fear within the trans community that they’re just teeing everything up to come after us after they’ve done this, after they’ve gotten people used to the idea that people can be taken.
[Attorney General] Pam Bondi put out a paper two months ago about categories of domestic terrorists: being anti-capitalist, being anti-family, being anti-Christian. All could be deemed domestic terrorists. And included in that was people advocating “gender ideology.”
There is an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation called the Oversight Project, which has been angling to get the FBI to designate transgender advocates as domestic terrorists. Their example of domestic terrorism by transgender people would be advocating that transgender people have the right to exist. Publicly advocating for that would be a sign of domestic terrorism. I wish I was making all this up.
It is dystopian, isn’t it?
Well, it is. And me, I’ve been torn about how much that I can do out here. I feel very guilty about not being an observer, about not following ICE around. I mean, yes, I’m doing protests. But common sense, when it filters into my head, is like, Ellie, how much of a target do you want to have on your back? You’ve already got this radio show called the Illegal Trans Woman. I mean, how much more do you want to be a target, you know, and with your face scanned.
Let’s talk a little about the shootings. Pretti’s shooting was a tipping point in the reaction to the siege of Minneapolis. How was his killing different from Renee Good’s?
First of all, it was the second. To the extent somebody could say it was an aberration with Renee Good, obviously, now it’s not an aberration. This is a modus operandi.
But I think that it was also different in the sense that we clearly saw it unfold from multiple angles. And it unfolded after, clearly, Alex went to help someone, a woman who was being beaten, pushed down, and manhandled by ICE. So he’s going to their aid. On top of all of that, because it was overkill. It was with Renee Good, but with Alex, you’ve got two guys shooting, what was it, 10 times?
Then the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They’ve got a warrant from a state court judge that says, “We need to be allowed at the crime scene.” They won’t let them in, and then they just take off. They don’t cooperate. So I think that here in Minnesota, we’ve come to understand that this is all part of a modus operandi and that it’s going to happen again. It’s just a question of when.
Trump has said he’s dialing back Operation Metro Surge “a little bit,” and border czar Tom Homan announced they’re drawing down 700 agents and leaving 2000.
Well, well, hold on. When Homan came in at first, he disclosed that there were 4000 in Minnesota, so now we’re down to 3300. So, Greg, I can’t believe a word coming out of this administration. You just can’t believe anything that they say. Even if they are drawing down, for how long? And are they going to send them back?
One reason Trump claims he’s dialing the crackdown back was the reaction of gun owners to Pretti’s shooting. He had a gun and a license to carry. How else do you think the siege is antithetical to once-core Republican principles?
Well, I think the thing to remember about Pretti is that he did not display the gun. He didn’t brandish it. It came out in the course of him being beaten. So there’s that. Of course, Jeanine Pirro came out this week saying, “You come to D.C. with the gun, we’re gonna arrest you.” Okay. You’ve got multiple problems on the Second Amendment with that.
But I mean, antithetical? They are masked, okay. They have no ID. In some instances, they have nothing on their body other than the tactical vest, okay. They are armed to the teeth, and they are disregarding the Constitution in plain sight. They’re breaking into houses without warrants. They’re breaking windows, pulling people out of cars when they’ve done nothing at all. This is so far afield of what we were taught in school, what we stood for, the thing that you took pride in about America: it’ll never happen here, we have the guardrails, we have the separation of powers. And I think that all of this in Minneapolis has coalesced to show that nothing — nothing — that you believed in is actually true. It’s no longer there, right? And then that leads us back to what is next.
Do you think the siege will change gun rights opponents’ views about the freedom to own one?
Yes, I sure do. Because I think they’ve seen how quickly things can change for them. Because this is an unpredictable government. It’s a — and you can quote me on this — it is a fascist government that cares for no one other than the people who have money.
I read a story recently about a reporter who witnessed his fruit vendor’s arrest. He asked the guy one day why he hadn’t been around as much lately, and he replied, “La migra.” And as the reporter was getting into his car, he heard SUVs pull up behind him, and watched immigration agents immediately hustle the guy into a vehicle without an interview, without asking for ID. That implies that he’d been targeted beforehand. Is there a sense in Minnesota that there are operatives on the street spying on the population, and others snitching on those targets? And does that make you and other Minnesotans paranoid about who you can trust?
Like snitching on your neighbor? I’ve not heard any fear or sentiment about that. ICE using dirty tactics? I mean, apart from what you and I have already talked about, yes.
I mean, there was a report — and I can’t verify this — about them offering food baskets to folks. Putting them on the doorsteps of immigrant families who are not coming out — of course, they don’t have a warrant, so some people are following that rule — and then hoping that people would open the door to get the food baskets.
There have been other reports about ICE trying to get into hospitals. They brought a guy in whose skull was fractured in eight places. They said he ran into a wall. The doctors said it’s impossible that that happened. But they handcuffed the guy to the bed as he was recovering, and then they were going around in the hospital looking for people to pick up.
And there’s the story out of Wilmer, where they went and had lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and then that evening they go and pick up the server and whoever else from the restaurant when it closed.
So these are people who have no moral compass. They obviously really don’t get trained, and they’re just out there armed with pressure from Stephen Miller to just bring people in.
I mean, it is a remarkable sight just to see these guys in regular civilian clothes, like somebody off the street, with all this armor thrown on them, and they’re in Nikes and jeans and a mask.
Well, it is. But I think the country’s becoming accustomed to it. We are not becoming accustomed to it here, though. It’s not becoming normalized here, because it is in our neighborhood, and it’s our people.
Do you think that anything Democrats are doing with holding up the Homeland Security bill is going to have any effect?
No, I don’t. Trump has already learned that you just hold out and they’re going to fold. The only thing that’s going to make a difference is the midterms. And he knows that, and he’s planning for it not to be fair elections. I think he’s angling for that to happen. I’m afraid that he’s going to be able to just declare it like he’s declared so many other things.
I mean, this whole thing about transgender people, okay? There’s no law saying that there’s only a man and a woman, but boy, there’s a whole damn government running with that.
As well as the videos of the Pretti and Good shootings, there’ve been a couple of other notable images among many from the siege, one real and one fake. There was five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador…
Oh, Liam. Oh my God.
…wearing his bunny-eared hat and Spider-Man backpack. He and his father were released from a Texas detention center over the weekend, with a searing ruling issued by the judge, if you’ve read that. The other image was fake: a photo doctored by the White House to show the Black woman organizer of the Cities Church protest in St. Paul, Nekima Levy Armstrong, sobbing as she’s perp-walked, when she was anything but. What does that image say to you about the crackdown specifically, and the Trump administration in general?
Well, I mean, certainly what it says about the administration is it’s both cruel and that it can’t be trusted. But there are millions of Americans who now believe that that is how she appeared when she was arrested. And, of course, it’s a Black woman. Same thing with Don Lemon. He’s Black, and the other journalist, Georgia Fort, she’s Black. And so all of that fits into their white supremacist orientation.
But again, as we’ve been talking about, it’s about breaking constitutional norms. Journalists who cover an event, if they start getting arrested, they’re not going to go to the events. And if you don’t have news about the event, you don’t know what happened.
What lessons can Americans across the country take from Minnesotans’ reaction to the siege?
Oh, that you can fight back.
I think that the major takeaway is that we all care about each other. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing all the time: caring about our immigrant community, caring about our neighbors who are out there on the front lines watching or protesting. You know, caring about, obviously, people who are murdered. Just caring. I mean, the Food Bank has got way too many volunteers. It’s getting too much food, you know, because people want to do something.
And so the major takeaway is, we have not lost our heart in America. We haven’t. We’ve not lost our heart. We’ve lost our way, but we haven’t lost our heart. And we just need to empower people to think that they actually can do something about what’s happening, as we’re proving it here in Minnesota.
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