Data on gender identity are missing from this year’s data release of the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, published at the end of June, The Transmitter has learned.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health removed these variables—which the study researchers have collected since each participant’s first-year follow-up—“to align with agency priorities,” a spokesperson from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which co-founded and co-funds the study, told The Transmitter.
“Sex and gender are two different aspects of an individual, and ignoring one of those completely essentially adds blinders to us as scientists,” says Amy Kuceyeski, professor of mathematics in radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. “I think the decision to not release gender information that was so carefully collected is unnecessarily restricting exploration of how neuroimaging correlates map to sex and gender together and separately.”
The ABCD Study launched in 2015 to track the brain and behavioral development of nearly 12,000 children, starting at ages 9 and 10, over the course of 10 years. Data are collected annually at 21 research sites across the United States and include MRI scans, neurocognitive assessments, physical health examinations and surveys with the participants and their parents.
A working group within the study that focused on gender identity and sexual health “has been sunset,” but sexual health data will still be available, according to the spokesperson from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The spokesperson did not answer questions about what will happen to the data that have been collected since the previous release. Each release is cumulative and includes data from the previous years; researchers can continue to access archived releases until their data-use certification expires. It is unclear if gender data will be removed from those prior releases.
The removal from this year’s release follows President Trump’s January executive order that denies the legitimacy of transgender and gender non-conforming identities and required U.S. federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.” The National Institutes of Health began reviewing other human data repositories for gender identity terms in March, The Transmitter previously reported.
This is “an arbitrary decision that’s not based on scientific evidence,” says Nicola Grissom, associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. “Pieces of data that have been collected and that represent the important reality of children’s development have been removed, erased from the record” because they do not “happen to fit with a worldview that is not consistent with reality.”
T
he ABCD data on gender identity were collected via surveys. The study participants answered questions about how much they felt like a girl or a boy, how much they wished to be a girl and how much they acted like a girl while playing; parents answered questions about their child’s sex-typed behavior while playing and if the child spoke about having gender dysphoria, or feelings of distress that their gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.
It’s important to collect gender identity and expression data because these factors are part of the reality of adolescent development and can influence young people’s mental health, Grissom says. Excluding those variables counteracts “the goals of the study—which is to try to understand adolescent brain development—by pretending that some aspects of adolescent brain development don’t exist.”
Leaders of the ABCD Study expressed the same sentiment a few years ago. It is “essential” to study “the complexity of gender in adolescent development,” members of the study’s gender identity and sexual health working group wrote in a 2022 paper. “Gender is important across adolescence and advancing understanding of individual differences in gender development will broaden our understanding of adolescent development.”
Elvisha Dhamala, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, previously used the ABCD dataset to study sex and gender differences in the functional connectivity of the brain. Now that the gender data have been removed, her group is focusing on sex differences instead. Many of the reasons why it’s important to study gender differences in brain development are likely still unknown, Dhamala says, because they haven’t been studied much in the past. “Once those data are gone, we just won’t be able to look at [that question].”
One of [America’s] great strengths is that . . . we do not allow the Army, Navy, and the Marines and Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.
— Marine Major General Stephen Olmstead, testifying before Congress in 1989
For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I’ve been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer’s job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it’s supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it’s dangerous to conflate the two.
There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it’s a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it’s a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it’s why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies.
In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.
We are now in territory so uncharted that the framing of the police militarization debate no longer works. Having that discussion requires at least a shared understanding that both police officers and soldiers are obligated to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the years, I’ve had clear, often pointed disagreements with police officials and their supporters over how to balance police safety, public safety, and individual rights, and about whether we do a sufficient job holding cops accountable for abuse and misconduct.
But there has never been a debate over whether the first obligation of law enforcement officers and soldiers should be to defend the Constitution. There has been disagreement over what protecting the public or defending the country ought to look like, but never over whether police and troops serve the public at all. I have never felt the need to argue that the police and military serve the country and their communities, and not a cause, a political party or a single man.
But this is where we are now. Like many politicians before him, Donald Trump doesn’t really appreciate the difference between cops and soldiers. But unlike those who occupied the White House before him, he seems to believe that federal law enforcement and the U.S. military — and really the entire federal government — exist to serve him and him alone. He has never really understood the concept of serving the public or the country because he has never understood the concept of public service in general.
We also know from Trump’s insane “bikers, cops, and troops” social media posts that he has always fantasized about having his own team of thugs who defend his honor and bring pain to his enemies. We’ve seen him openly encourage the crowds at his rallies to beat protesters.
Trump is now in the process of making that a reality. He is obliterating the safeguards in place to keep both the police and the military from turning on the public. He is taking personnel, tactics, and weapons from both institutions to create something utterly incompatible with a free society. What he’s making is more dangerous than either militarizing our domestic police or deploying the military for domestic law enforcement, and it’s something every aspiring authoritarian has done for centuries: Trump is creating his own personal paramilitary force — an amalgamation of border cops, ICE agents, Homeland Security, sheriff’s deputies, Guardsmen, and military (and probably soon, militia and extremist groups). This force is fiercely loyal to Trump, they operate in masks and unmarked vehicles, and they’re wholly unaccountable. Theycelebratebrutality, racism, and cruelty, and they seem believe that they’re on a mission from God.
One of the healthier aspects of American democracy is that for most of our history, the military understood the threat of asking soldiers to engage in domestic policing better than just about anyone — certainly better than elected officials. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration — and many in Congress from both parties — wanted the military to become an active participant in the drug war. And while the military itself has been far too cooperative when it comes to intercepting suspected drug boats, training local police and paramilitary tactics, the 1033 program, and other policies, when the administration wanted to bring U.S. active duty troops into U.S. cities for routine internal drug policing — soldiers conducting stop-and-frisks, Marines waging drug raids on private residences — the top brass at the Pentagon up to and including the Secretary of Defense resisted. The quote that begins this post is a good example.
Trump has never understood this tradition or the important reasons it exists. It’s been well reported now that during his first term, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring the active duty in to violently suppress peaceful domestic protests — which of course themselves were protests against police brutality. He openly asked his military advisors why he couldn’t just bring in soldiers to shoot the protesters. When Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mike Esper told Trump he couldn’t do this, he threw a tantrum. When Milley and Esper later wrote and spoke about it all, Trump accused them of treason and threatened to prosecute them — and to execute Milley.
Trump has never gotten over the fact that his staff wouldn’t let him shoot protesters (that’s a hell of sentence to write). Nearly everything he has done in his second term with respect to the military appears to have been done to ensure that no order he gives will ever be questioned again, no matter how cruel, abusive, or unconstitutional. So he has purged the military of any high-ranking officers who have expressed loyalty to quaint, founding-era principles like the firewall between the military and law enforcement. He terminated the JAG officers who set legal boundaries, prosecute abusive soldiers, and lay out the rules of engagement. He appointed an unqualified Joint Chiefs Chairman who — according to Trump — once said he “loved” Trump and vowed “to kill” for him. Perhaps most importantly, Trump handed the Defense Department over to a man who has declared that the U.S. military should be enlisted in a holy war, who believes Trump himself was sent by God, and who doesn’t believe in holding soldiers accountable for war crimes.
That’s on the military side. On the policing side, we can first point to the times Trump has celebrated or encouraged police brutality. We can go back to the 2020 protests here, too, when Trump and Bob Barr sent paramilitary teams from the Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations, who covered their name tags as they beat protesters and snatched people off the streets and shoved them into unmarked vehicles. And of course, there was the violent clearing of Lafayette Park using federal tactical teams supported by National Guard troops so Trump could pose in front of a church while clutching an upside down Bible.
Since then, Trump and his subordinates have purged federal police agencies of anyone they suspect may be more loyal to the Constitution than Trump himself. Trump has fired inspectors general across the government and effectively neutered those and offices charged with enforcing professionalism and accountability. He has dissolved or defunded offices that protect whistleblowers. At the FBI — and presumably other federal police agencies — the administration is giving polygraphs to assess the agents’ loyalty, not to the Constitution or the rule of law, but to Donald Trump and his subordinates.
Modern police militarization began during the Nixon administration but really ramped up during the Reagan administration. Reagan had declared illicit drugs a “threat to national security,” in order to execute various emergency powers (sound familiar?). Governors called up National Guard troops to assist in the drug war. In Northern California, for example, Guard troops helped patrol wilderness areas to look for pot farms. Guard helicopters invaded hippie communes and music festivals. Other governors called up Guard troops to provide support for drug raids on public housing facilities and entire blocks of some cities.
These were excessive, unnecessary, and indicative of the drug war hysteria that had gripped the country at the time. But they were still nowhere near as radical and authoritarian as what Trump is doing now. The National Guard troops in the 1980s were called up at the discretion of state governors. However misguided those decisions may have been, those governors had at least been elected by the voters of those states, and were still subject to voters’ and state legislators’ ability to remove them.
Trump federalized the California National Guard over the objections of California’s governor. He then deployed them in Los Angeles over the objections of that city’s leadership. This has never happened before. Never before in U.S. history has a president deployed the National Guard in a state without the governor of that state first requesting National Guard help, much less over the governor’s explicit objection.
Trump also federalized the National Guard in a state that decidedly voted against him three times, then deployed them in a city that also rejected him three times, and by huge margins.
Not satisfied, Trump then sent in active duty Marines, too. It’s the first time a U.S. president has sent active duty troops into a U.S. city since the L.A. riots in 1992. It’s the first time a president has sent active duty troops into a U.S. city over the objections of state and local officials since Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation in 1957.
A marine stands guard as Angelenos rally against the ongoing ICE raids taking place in the city in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on Friday, July 4, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA. (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The militarization of the drug war in the 1980s is now widely considered to be a massive overreaction driven by moral panic and culture war anger. But it’s important to keep in mind that there really was a crack epidemic that was killing a lot of people. There also really was a spike in violent crime driven by turf wars as the drug spread to cities across the country. Dumb, counterproductive U.S. drug war policy is partially to blame much of that, and dumb, counterproductive drug war policy likely made it worse, but there was at least a plausible emergency in need of an urgent response.
Likewise, Los Angeles really was burning in 1992. Sixty-three people really did die in the rioting. The Little Rock Nine really were getting death threats in 1957, and the desegregation of Central High School came in the midst of racist terrorism in the Jim Crow south, with lynchings, bombings, and assassinations.
There is no such emergency in Los Angeles today. Trump’s entire justification for deploying the National Guard and Marines is an exaggeration built on a lie.
The thrust of Trump’s entire 2024 campaign was ramping up the fear of foreigners. The claim was that the Biden administration’s border policy had caused a surge in migrant crossings, which brought a spike in crime — and that the same lax policies were responsible for a surge in fentanyl overdoses.
Only the very first part of all of that has any grounding in reality. While there was an increase in asylum seekers in the first two years of the Biden administration, border crossings were falling when Trump took office. And the claim that Biden let in tens of millions of undocumented immigrants is pure fantasy.
The surge in immigration also did not cause a surge in crime. Violent crime and property crime began falling in 2023, and are now headed for historic lows. The evidence we have strongly suggests that immigrants — documented and otherwise — commit less crimes of all types than native-born people. And drug overdose deaths, too, started to decline in 2023.
Moreover, Trump’s claim to need emergency powers to deport drug smugglers, murderers, and rapists aren’t reflected in his priorities. The problem for Trump — and for Stephen Miller — is that it’s hard to find people who don’t want to be found, and undocumented people with violent records don’t want to be found. So to boost deportations figures, they immediately began arresting people who were following the law. One of the first things this administration did this year was rescind a Biden order prioritizing the deportation of people with violent criminal records to target people seeking asylum. This is a repeat of Trump’s first term, when he rescinded a similar order from Obama.
They started arrested undocumented people reporting for their “check-ins” with ICE as they challenged their deportations. Then they started arresting migrants who came here legally and were following asylum procedures as they showed up for court hearings. They started revoking green card and visas for political speech the administration doesn’t like,, then arresting and deporting those people. They started arresting people as they showed up for citizenship hearings.
When none of that was getting Miller to his quotas, he ordered ICE to start raiding places where he thinks undocumented people accumulate — to cast a wide net and see what comes back. So they started raiding churches, community centers, and Home Depot parking lots. Here’s a screen grab from a raid on a Home Depot parking lot in Van Nuys, California.
Here’s a story about a legal resident who says ICE agents pulled him from his vehicle, took him to a cemetery, and beat him.
They started pulling over motorists who looks vaguely Latino and forcing them to prove their citizenship (white motorists were released). They were caught casing a Puerto Rican heritage museum in Chicago. (Puerto Ricans, of course, are American citizens.) Now they’ve started raiding farms (which will only exacerbate fear among farmworkers, who aren’t showing up for work, leaving produce to rot on the vine).
Or just marching through neighborhoods.
Trump also stripped hundreds of thousands of people who were here legally under protected status — the people he falsely accused of eating pets and “taking over” Aurora, Colorado during the 2024 campaign. His administration has now started arresting them too, including Afghans who aided U.S. troops during the war.
They’re also, predictably, detaining and arresting U.S. citizens.
Francisco Galicia, 18, says he was held in filthy, overcrowded conditions where he was not allowed to shower for 23 days, forced to sleep on a cement floor and not given enough food. By the time he was released Tuesday, after word spread about his detention following a report by The Dallas Morning News, he said he was malnourished, having dropped 26 pounds.
“They were not treating us humanely,” Galicia told CNN during a wide-ranging interview. “…The stress was so high, they (detention center agents) were on me all the time. It was like psychological torture to the point where I almost (agreed to be deported). I felt safer to be in the cell than to be with the officers. ”
And Trump is now openly floating the idea of deporting U.S. citizens. Can he do that legally? No. Could anyone stop him if he tried? It’s getting increasingly difficult to say.
To be clear, most of this unconstitutional. You cannot send people to foreign prisons in countries they’ve never stepped foot in without due process. You can’t imprison legal residents because you don’t like an op-ed they wrote. You can’t force every Latino-looking person to carry papers they must produce on demand to prove they’re in this country legally.
But that’s not only what they’re doing, Trump’s “immigration czar” is boasting about it.
A recent Washington Post analysis found that 61 percent of the people Trump has deported had no criminal record at all. Of the remaining 39 percent, half were convicted of traffic or immigration offenses, and another quarter were convicted of drug offenses. That leaves just 10 percent who were convicted of violent or property crimes. A similar analysis by the Cato Institute found that 65 percent had no criminal record, and just 7 percent had been convicted of a violent crime.
It was after these raids on courthouses, Home Depots, car washes, and other public facilities that Angelenos began protesting and pushing back. But if there’s one thing Trump took from his last term it’s that he will not tolerate dissent. So when city residents began interfering with these actions, Trump sent in the National Guard — and then the Marines. A compliant right-wing media quickly disseminated out-of-context images that made the city look like an anarchist hellscape. The city was actually fine, as even the LAPD confirmed at the time.
That was a month ago. Both the National Guard and Marines are still there. In 1992, the federal troops left Los Angeles after seven days.
The real reason Trump deployed the masked mix of ICE, DHI, and Border Patrol agents, and then National Guard troops and Marines was to project power. It’s the same motivation behind his sad sack military parade. Trump has never been shy about his desire to have his own force well-armed thugs he can dispatch to punish his enemies and enforce his will. Over the course of his professional life, he has expressed his admiration and envy for autocrats who do. So he’s now building one.
Don’t expect the courts to stop any of this. The administration has been able to exploit gaps in both the U.S. Code and federal case law to will their aggressively unconstitutional tactics into law. These loopholes exist because we’ve long had a system that presumed the executive branch would operate in good faith — that even illegal or misguided policies would at least be motivated by president whose priority is the public interest. That was a mistake.
For more than a century, for example, the federal courts have operated under a doctrine called the presumption of regularity. The doctrine assumes that government officials discharge their duties in the public interest, and that when executive branch makes an argument in front of the courts, they do so in good faith.
I’m a crazy civil libertarian, but I’ve never really understood the good faith presumption that the courts grant to government. There’s ample evidence that government officials act in their own self interest — particularly elected officials. But it’s an especially dangerous idea now, with an administration whose default posture is to lie. What the “regularity” doctrine means in practice is that we start every challenge to a Trump administration policy — deporting people to foreign torture sites, civil war zones, and places where they’re likely to be murdered; deporting people for First Amendment-protected speech; shutting down government programs for petty, vindictive reasons; I could go on — with a presumption that the administration isn’t lying to the courts, and that its stated actions for these policies are its actual reasons for doing them. The abundantevidence to the contrary doesn’t seem to matter.
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The administration has also exploited loopholes in federal law that allow presidents take extraordinary, dubiously constitutional actions in times of crisis or emergency. There are various versions of this throughout the U.S. Code. Other presidents have exploited these loopholes, too. But they’ve done it under more plausible claims of emergency, or for more benign policies. Biden used the Covid pandemic to suspend evictions or pause student loan payments, for example. Trump is the first to do it for the express purpose of silencing critics, punishing enemies, imprisoning dissenters, and brazenly trampling on constitutional rights.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom challenged Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines into Los Angeles, the administration argued that the federal courts can never review such decisions. The Ninth Circuit shot down that argument, but they did find that Trump’s justification for this particular emergency — that protests and alleged violence were threatening the ability of immigration officers to carry out deportations — was valid.
The problem is that this justification was also a lie. A week before that ruling, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in which she declared that the reason for the deployments was to “liberate” Los Angeles and California from it’s “socialist” leaders — leaders (who are not socialist) who had been democratically elected by the people of California.
Any inclination to think Noem was engaging in rhetorical hyperbole here was dispelled when the administration declined to correct or walk back her comments. Instead it defended them.
This is what historians of fascism call the dual state model. In court, autocratic governments exploit the inherent validity and deference granted to the state to make plausible, legal-ish arguments in defense of sweeping new powers. Meanwhile, they’re using that power in an entirely different manner on the ground. Authoritarian governments have used the dual state model to subvert democracies for generations.
Trump himself has on multiple occasions expressed some version of the idea that he plans to send troops to blue cities to “liberate” them from their leadership. ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service, and DOJ have now arrested, roughed up, detained, and indicted several high-profile elected Democrats, progressive political leaders, and activists. They have threatened to arrest and prosecute mayors and governors. Internal documents show that the ICE-Border Patrol sweep of L.A.’s MacArthur Park last week was intended as a theatrical show of force. There was no public safety objective. The entire point of the display was to terrorize and intimidate the city’s Latino population, along with anyone who might defend them.
Trump has boasted for years about his plans to “unleash” ICE and Border Patrol. His actions since 2020 have made clear that the only transgression for which law enforcement officers will be held accountable is showing insufficient fealty to him and his administration. He has celebrated and encouraged police brutality, and reversed previous administrations’ mild attempts to recognize the dangers of police militarization.
ICE and Border Patrol have also long been among the most abusive police agencies in the federal government, with long records of abuse and little interest in holding rogue agents accountable. They’ve also been among the most feverishly pro-Trump agencies.
The ICE budget in 2024 was $8.7 billion. Under the behemoth bill Trump just signed into law, its operating budget will grow to $75 billion, with another $105 billion to build detention centers and aid in “every state of the deportation process.” The 2024 Customs and Border Protection budget was $20 billion. Under the new bill that will nearly triple. Tens of billions more will go to Homeland Security and to assist state immigration enforcement like Operation Lone Star in Texas.
This new budget will allow this administration to increase the size of Trump’s deportation army several times over. There’s no way to staff up at those levels before Trump’s term is over without lower hiring standards. Imagine the sort of person who looks at the recent stories and videos of ICE agents engaging in racist profiling, weaponizing parents’ love for and desire to protect their children, raiding churches and schools, interrogating children, arresting grandmothers, U.S. citizens, beloved community figures, and the hardworking father of three Marines — imagine the sort of person who looks at all of that and says, “Yes, that’s what I want to do for a living.” This is who will soon comprise the bulk of Trump’s immigration force.
The kicker here is that the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable, even for egregious, willful abuses of power.In 2022, the court slammed shut the last remaining meaningful opening to file a civil lawsuit against federal agents who violate constitutional rights.
That leaves only criminal liability and extra-legal accountability. Criminal liability would require Trump’s own DOJ to prosecute ICE agents. That isn’t going to happen. State and local officials might try to prosecute abusive federal officers in state court, but thus far all the government has had do in such cases is ask a federal judge to remove those cases to federal court, at which point the become DOJ jurisdiction, at which point DOJ drops the charges.
That leaves only extra-legal accountability — shunning, shaming, and the imposition of other social consequences on officers who commit abuses. And this is precisely why the administration is encouraging officers to mask their faces and shield their identities. It removes the last remaining means of accountability.
A masked ICE agent in New York (ABC 7 - New York City)
The administration says the masks are to prevent “doxing,” and has cited a “700 percent” increase in assaults on ICE agents.
Both the defense and the statistic are nonsense.
First, unless they’re operating undercover, it is not illegal to publish or publicize the names of federal agents — nor should it be. They are state employees who have the power to arrest, detain, and kill. Of course their names and identities ought to be public information. Of course the people they stop, detain, arrest, or abuse should have names and badges to seek redress in court.
On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.
For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).
It’s also worth noting that the increase comes at a time when, under Trump, the number of ICE encounters taking place has increased staggeringly—a fact that criminal justice journalist Jessica Pishko said makes the figures “uniquely unimpressive.
Don’t forget that the administration claimed that New York City comptroller Brad had Lander “assaulted” agents when video showed nothing of the kind. So there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of even the already remarkably low figure of 79.
Meanwhile, Trump and his administration have pushed the idea that it should be illegal for anyone who isn’t law enforcement to wear a mask in public, particularly at protests.
The terms of the police militarization debate always rested on the mutual assumption that the police and the military are separate institutions with separate missions and separate safeguards to protect democracy.
Under the new law Trump just signed, his deportation force will become the largest police force in the country — and larger than the militaries of many countries. It will be staffed with agents who have been vetted, hired, and trained based not on their loyalty to the Constitution or rule of law, but to a single man. Their state plan is to use this force to terrorize entire communities, arrest and detain critics, suppress dissent, and intimidate elected leaders into silence. Meanwhile, Trump himself has already followed the pattern set by other authoritarians before embarking on mass atrocities by dehumanizing the people his force will target — calling them “scum” and “vermin” who “poison the blood” of the country.
Thanks to the acquiescence of Congress and the Supreme Court, Trump’s new police force will operate with virtually limitless power. The agents themselves will be shielded form criminal liability. The people who order them to commit crimes and constitutional violations will be protected by Trump. And Trump himself has been insulated from criminal liability by the conservatives on the Supreme Court.
Trump’s paramilitaries will be free to operate anonymously, and will be wholly unaccountable to any person, political entity, or institution — other than Donald Trump.
Back in 2007, the neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen was agitating for war with Iran. At about that time, Reuters published a series of photos from a drug raid in Tehran in which masked police broke into a residence from which alleged drug dealers were distributing cocaine.
Terrifying pictures, to be sure. For me, the most revealing thing about them is that the police feel obliged to wear masks while conducting a drug bust in the capital. Tells you something about the relationship between the people and the state.
Ledeen’s post has since been swallowed by the internet, but you can read my reaction to it at the time here.
As you might deduce from my response, Ledeen was fairly naive about the way drug raids were (and still are) conducted in the U.S. That, or he was just being willfully obtuse.
But his gut response to the Tehran raids is still instructive. The Trump era has this aggravating, gaslighting tendency to wash away widely-shared, baseline democratic principles — concepts like the peaceful transfer of power, the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, due process, that the DOJ shouldn’t be weaponized against the president’s enemies, that the president should not use his office to enrich himself, that concentration camps are bad.
Ledeen, predictably, became an avid Trump supporter. He died in May, and I haven’t seen anything he wrote specifically about the ICE raids. But that isn’t really the point.
There was a time when it was just accepted that secret police forces were a bad thing, a thing we associated with totalitarian governments. There was a broad, overwhelming consensus that masked, unaccountable agents snatching people off the street and hustling them off to secret detention centers, abusive prison camps, foreign gulags, and concentration camps surrounded by alligators was not the sort of thing we associated with a free society. There was a time when it was just understood that “your papers, please” was language East German Stasi might use, but that we’d never tolerate here in the United States.
There was also a time when we understood that, as history has shown over and over, political leaders who expresses a desire to build secret police forces that answer only to them are dangerous demagogues who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
somewhat contrary to the previous post: another pet peeve is people (some classic libertarians, others paleoconservatives) saying that "there is no free lunch".
there are certainly zero-sum, no-win situations that occur in life sometimes. and the phrase is often also used in some fatalistic, eschatological, broad heat-death-of-the-universe sense. sure sure, second law.
but as the great MC hawking put it: the earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun. there's an effectively unlimited massive fusion reactor in space we literally all live off of, and for all practical purposes we always have and always will. it is very much a free lunch! concretely: every lunch you have ever eaten and will ever eat is a free lunch given to earth by the sun.
also like .. any technological improvement that increases efficiency of some work is a metaphorical free lunch. if there were no free lunches to be had from R&D we may as well be banging rocks together as using any later developments.
also any positive-sum games or interactions, social relationships, political organization, economic cooperation .. the list of free lunches goes on and on.
“The failure of the world to unite and collectively face down Trump’s threats has also left the US president more space to pick off individual states. He threatened a 50 per cent tariff on Brazil last week, citing largely political justifications.”
Hopefully there will be unification against the US on this, and soon
For C., the nightmare started as a head-scratcher. While she was making her 11-year-old son an after-school snack on a Wednesday this past April, she noticed that he was idly raking his nails through his hair. C. (who asked that we not use her full name to protect her family’s privacy and her business) wasn’t particularly fussed, but the gesture was unusual enough that she clocked it. She was brushing her teeth before bed when her son poked his head into the bathroom. “He said, ‘Mom, my head is itchy!”
C, who grew up in northern Ontario and now lives in Toronto, has long harboured a fear of all things bug-related. But a few years ago, she made a conscious decision to try to stop being afraid. “So I’m not anymore,” says C., a dedicated mindfulness practitioner. “But because I’ve always dreaded that this day might come, I had lice kits sitting in a drawer.”
The kits came out; her kid’s head went under the tap. At first, there were no visible signs of an infestation. But after she dried his hair, C. spotted them: lice, speckled across the towel. The bathroom became “Lice Central,” as she puts it, effectively a HAZMAT containment unit where C. assiduously picked through strands; meanwhile, her husband strode through the house tossing bedding into garbage bags as a precaution. Her son wept, worried he’d have to cut off all his long hair. C. tried to reassure him. “But internally, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I think we just should all shave our heads,’” she says. The rest of the night was consumed by frantic shampooing and slathering scalps with over-the-counter treatments; at one point, C., her husband, their son, and their 13-year-old daughter swaddled their heads in Saran wrap to help the stuff sink in.
The family spent the next few days in an endless comb-medicate-wash-check-repeat circuit. Nearly a week (and countless thorough nit scans) after the initial sighting, C. eased up on the regimen. But a couple weeks later, while the family was out for pizza on a Friday night, C. idly glanced at her daughter’s hair, “and I just had this feeling in my stomach,” she says. She did a thorough check once they got home, and lo and behold: the lice had come back. C. resumed the regimen, which she diligently kept up through tears (her own and her kids’) for the next 14 days.
Up to that point, C. says, she’d managed to hive off her personal life from her business as a fitness trainer. Lice is spread through hair-to-hair contact—the pests can’t fly or leap from head to head. But the sense of helplessness—and the worry, unfounded or not, that she might become a vector and infect clients—subsumed her capacity for compartmentalization. “I was like, Oh, fuck. All these people are gonna be like, ‘Why can’t this chick get lice out of her house? Is it at the gym?’” She shut down her gym for a week, stating simply that a family matter had come up that required her attention. While C. felt confident she hadn’t put anyone at risk, she was mortified by the idea of others knowing about what she perceived as a dirty little secret, and worried that it might affect her clients’ willingness to work with her. “But I also couldn’t put it out there because I was feeling so alarmed and embarrassed,” she says. It was a deeply alienating experience, C. says, though she recognizes the inherent irony: she was very much not alone.
Head lice, or Pediculus humanus capitis, is a developmental rite of passage. Those of us who are now old enough to have our own elementary school-aged kids may remember squirming under the watchful eyes of our peers as a public health nurse combed through our hair, praying she didn’t spot a rogue nit. Today, those regular checks no longer happen as a matter of course, but that doesn’t mean the bugs have been banished—ask any parent who’s gone numb upon receipt of a formal notice from daycare, or school, or camp.
That reflexive panic is understandable. As C. can attest, contending with head lice is, at best, a major nuisance with the potential to derail one’s life (albeit temporarily). But as sickening as the experience might be, the itchy pests don’t actually make us sick, which has ramifications. The Canadian Paediatric Society’s official position (developed in 2008 and updated several times since) is that head lice are “not a primary health hazard or a vector for disease, but they are a societal problem with substantial costs.”
The issue with a societal problem is that nobody wants to be accountable for dealing with it—or even documenting its existence. Indeed, Toronto Public Health (TPH) responded to my queries with an emailed statement that it “does not collect data on reports of head lice, as they are not listed as a communicable disease under Ontario’s Health Protection and Promotion Act” and, as a result, there “is no requirement/mandate for public health units to address head lice infestations.” When I reached out to Public Health Ontario’s medical and veterinary entomology department (which includes specialists in zoonotic diseases), a media rep suggested I contact “a local public health unit like Toronto Public Health.” My contact at TPH shared a link to the SickKids headlice explainer and a bullet-point list of tips such as encouraging children not to share hats or headphones, vacuuming, and using “individual well-spaced coat hooks or lockers.”
That advice might have been useful back when Millennials were trying to avoid catching cooties, but it seems somewhat absurd in the context of classrooms packed to the gills with students. Similarly, the treatments that might have worked on ‘90s-era nits—mostly topical insecticides from the drugstore like Nix—are no longer effective on their 2025 counterparts, as C. discovered. These tenacious new Pediculus specimens are seemingly unkillable, somewhat stealthy, and quick to proliferate, which is why they’ve come to be known as super-lice.
If you’ve not encountered them in the flesh (or embedded in family members’ follicles), it may be tempting to dismiss super-lice as a sensationalist effort to capitalize on the fears of neurotic parents. That’s not the case, says Jean-Paul Paluzzi, an associate professor in the biology department at York University who specializes in insect molecular physiology. As he notes, there’s a robust (and growing) body of evidence to suggest that this issue is a legitimate concern.
Similar to antimicrobial resistance—a looming global threat—the waning efficacy of lice treatments that used to be a slam-dunk is an example of evolution in action. Specifically, lice that can withstand topical treatments such as Nix, Pronto, and Rid carry a genetic mutation that makes them less susceptible to permethrin (a pesticide used in many conventional lice treatments) and other members of the pyrethrin insecticide family. Paluzzi notes that this phenomenon extends well beyond the boundaries of the GTA, citing several studies conducted over the past few decades. One 2010 survey of lice from cities in Ontario, Quebec, and B.C. found insecticide-resistant mutations in more than 97 percent of the bugs tested; a more recent meta-analysis revealed that lice in Australia, England, Turkey, and Israel had “100 percent resistant gene frequencies.”
Given that the drugs don’t work, the only viable debugging option is mechanical removal and surveillance—that is, adopting a primate’s steely rigour and using a literal fine-toothed comb to tease out both the lice and their future offspring. The first step is extricating the big bugs, which are easiest to spot. The eggs are trickier—they’re whitish-yellow, tear-shaped, and a couple millimetres long, like tiny sesame seeds, and can easily be confused with dandruff. They hatch in seven to 10 days, and then it takes another seven to 10 days for those newly hatched babies to reach maturity, which is why a regimen involves more than a one-time treatment. It’s a painstaking, glacially slow process that must be repeated, often over multiple weeks. The combo of focus, patience, and free hours is daunting for most parents—not to mention the horrifying prospect of having to restart the whole routine if you miss a few stray eggs that hatch into a new colony.
Like so many other mildly unpleasant to downright gross tasks in the personal care/domestic oversight realm (see: waxing, seasonal backyard dog poop removal), this one has fueled burgeoning demand for skilled professionals to just deal with it. In response, expert nit-pickers have set up storefronts, where they offer their services, often using proprietary methods, in spaces that typically have the hygienic, preschool ambiance of a pediatric dentist’s office. Lice removal has become a booming business, catering to harried, suspiciously itchy parents who are willing to pay for relief.
A standard full removal service at a Toronto-area clinic can range from $75 to $95 per head, per hour. Some providers offer complimentary follow-up checks within a week of treatment; some offer free screenings for other family members when one person books a full removal. Depending on the size of your household and the hair volume of the members of that household, the cost can be hefty. But when you find yourself in desperate need of a professional lice-remover’s services, it can feel like the best money you’ve ever spent.
I speak from experience. In the summer of 2019, my family had its first (and, to date, only—knock wood) encounter with lice. By the time an official notice came home from the daycare my children attended, it was too late: the itch had set in. I remember feeling panic, and then a kind of psychological paralysis. Unlike C., we hadn’t proactively stocked up on lice-removal kits, and I had little faith in my own ability to effectively identify and extricate every single bug, nit, and egg. Outsourcing seemed like the only answer.
Within 24 hours, my co-parent, our two kids, then five and two, and I were beelining across the city to the Scarborough strip mall that houses the Toronto clinic run by Nitwits, a lice-removal service. Inside, it was bright and pristine, with well-spaced barbershop chairs facing small vanities, a bit like a minimalist version of the kiddie hair salon Melonheads—albeit with screens in place of the wall mirrors. And other than the exuberant sounds of the Paw Patrol episodes distracting the squirmy kids in those chairs from the spritzing and combing and strand-by-strand surveillance that was happening around their heads, it was relatively peaceful. I lapsed into a sort of meditative reverie once it was my turn in the chair—the deep relief of having surrendered this responsibility to the hands of experts. The total cost for our family of four was $490, which was a significant strain on our daycare-stretched budget. But as we left, with mint-scented essential oil spray, a clear regimen, and the option of a free follow-up check over the next seven days, I recall how grateful I was for that guidance.
The dearth of practical support for families grappling with this issue is what prompted Dawn Mucci to go into the nit-picking business. Mucci, who lives in the Barrie area, got lice “a lot” as a kid, much to the dismay of her single dad, who tried his best with the flimsy combs and chemical insecticides he could find at the drugstore. When Mucci’s own son inevitably brought lice home from daycare, it triggered some core trauma. “I went right back to that negative space of feeling stigmatized and frustrated and scared,” she says. Mucci visited a local public health department, hoping the nurse there could provide some peace of mind—as a single mom, she was desperate to have another adult check her head. “She said, ‘We don’t deal with this anymore because Health Canada says it’s not a medical issue. Go to the drugstore, buy some pesticide, follow the instructions and you’ll be fine.’” Mucci left the office in tears, but her distress resonated with the nurse, who chased her down outside and offered to do a covert inspection in the bathroom. “At that point,” Mucci says, “I realized I would pay any amount of money for someone to just help me with this.”
She began exploring different techniques and aromatherapy-based natural deterrents, figured out how to successfully treat herself and her son, and began offering her services to other Toronto-area parents. This was the early aughts—pre–social media—but the demand was there, and word spread. “I started getting really busy,” Mucci says. “I’d take my little suitcase on the bus and go house to house, helping families.” That bedroom enterprise became Lice Squad, which Mucci founded in 2001; she’s since opened several locations throughout Ontario and has franchised clinics and contractors across Canada.
Personal experience was also what inspired Shawnda Walker to start Nitwits. When her younger daughter, now 20, was sent home from junior kindergarten with lice, Walker tried a slew of at-home lice-removal kits and came up empty–handed. Increasingly aggravated, she threw herself into a research rabbit hole and eventually found the Shepherd Institute, a Florida-based organization with a trademarked lice-removal method. Walker, who was working in corporate marketing at the time, was struck by the company’s approach: “It’s not just teaching you how to get rid of lice, it’s really teaching you the science of lice,” she says. “Once you know the science, the whole process makes sense.”
She went down, got trained, and 15 years later, Nitwits is going strong. In that time, Walker has seen some extreme situations. A female louse can lay 10 eggs a day, and things can get out of control quickly. She’s helped people who’ve come in with thousands of bugs and thousands upon thousands of eggs, which can take as many as 10 hours to fully remove. Still, in a decade and a half, Walker has only had to shave one head.
It’s hard to determine the size of our super-lice issue because, as noted, Pediculus humanus doesn’t fall under the purview of public health, which means there are no concrete numbers available. The Canadian Paediatric Society is oddly dismissive of the super-lice phenomenon. Although its official position statement does touch on non-insecticidal approaches to managing infestations, the organization presents permethrin and pyrethrins as the unequivocal first-line treatments, only recommending other options if those fail—despite noting that “an increasing resistance” to the products has been documented.
If you ask the people on the follicular frontlines, super-lice have been creeping up on us for at least the past decade—it takes some time for treatment-resistant outliers to reach critical mass. Shawnda Walker has seen a significant increase in cases among 12 to 18 year-olds. “Last year, our numbers were 13 percent higher than our busiest year in history.”
In 2001, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) adopted a policy wherein any student found to have lice would be sent home, with the expectation that the problem would be fully treated and the bugs would be banished before they were permitted back in class. From an epidemiological standpoint, that approach seems to make sense—isolate the infectious agent, minimize the spread. But it has its detractors. Since 2008, the CPS has maintained that there is no “sound medical rationale” for keeping kids with lice out of school. One very vocal public health entomologist from Harvard has spent most of the past two decades criticizing lice bans.
This lack of consensus has led to a lack of consistency, even between different school boards in Ontario. In 2012, the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board voted to let students with nits stay at school; the Thames Valley District School Board publicly reassessed its guidelines in 2019, which prompted the TDSB to consider revisiting its own policy. Residual twitchiness from parental backlash to the mandatory absences and shutdowns during peak COVID will likely prompt further changes.
Technically, the TDSB has a Pediculosis Program, with its own designated coordinator, but like many other aspects of the system, the resources hardly cover student needs. A few years back, Walker visited one school less than a week after a roving public-health nurse had screened the whole school for lice. Her team found 15 cases. Recently, she’s noticed more pushback against private companies such as Nitwits coming to do lice checks, even when their services are funded by in-school parent councils. “We’re still doing TDSB schools, but it’s probably 60 percent less than pre-COVID.” Walker is sympathetic to the challenges—unless you’re picking nits all day, every day, it’s easy to miss a few—and recognizes that there’s an equity issue at play: not all schools have parent councils with the capacity to hire contractors.
When someone shows up at a lice removal clinic, they’re looking for a kind of support that extends beyond simply picking nits. As Mucci and Walker point out, people panic about lice because it still carries tremendous stigma, even though it’s incredibly common. C. eventually came clean with her clients, but only once she realized her frazzled mental state would compromise her ability to be present in a professional capacity. “Everyone was like, ‘I’m so sorry—take all the time you need,’” she says. “But that brought up so much self-consciousness and shame,” she says.
Lice can be cultural shorthand for poor hygiene and neglect, even though hygiene has nothing to do with the likelihood that one will become afflicted; it’s freighted with countless racist and classist assumptions. Professional lice-removal services help cut through those assumptions by normalizing the issue and separating it from the haze of flawed associations.
After C. told people about her nit nightmare, they started commiserating. One mom texted in a frenzy one morning to announce that her own kid had lice. C. immediately launched into a litany of what to get, where to stash the combs, how to colour-code the gear for different family members. “She was like ‘Are you insane?’” C. remembers. “‘Why would you decide to take this all on yourself rather than going to see an expert?” It was, C. says, a real “Aha!” moment. Grappling with lice helped illuminate bigger existential challenges. Why didn’t she trust anyone to help her deal with this problem? Was she trying to fix it herself as a kind of absolution for letting it happen in the first place?
“Super-lice is an alarming and important public health issue, but there’s something social and psychological and philosophical happening here on the level of family and the pace at which we live our lives,” she says. “We think we’re so evolved, but all of a sudden something like this happens, and it causes you to rethink who you are, how you live.” Eventually, at the urging of her husband, C. wound up at Lice Squad. “He said ‘You’re a hero for doing this, but also, let’s get a professional.”
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