Here We Are, Together Again: A New Era of Empire and Action
#172
Welcome to Third Cultured, a newsletter about Queer people in diplomacy, politics, culture and war from the perspective of Kyle Borland (he/they). My goal is to highlight all the ways today is different (and not so) from yesterday.
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Queers in the News & Other Reads
Opinion Essay
When I first started writing newsletters during Trump’s first term, I focused heavily on empire and the resurgence of imperial thinking. It didn’t resonate with many people, and I eventually shifted focus into new iterations that ultimately led to Third Cultured.
Now, in Trump’s America once again, the familiar copium of conquest is back in style. Our contemporary robber barons paraded themselves at today’s coronation, ushering in the peak of the Second Gilded Age. Annoying as they are, I can't blame them for relishing their victory. Though it may have been narrow by the technical margins, culturally and politically, this was a clear triumph for MAGA.
They should enjoy it.
Those who earned it, at least. Trump, obviously, but even Elon deserves to savor the victory, because, well, they won. But the Zucks of the world? I can only imagine the scene in Joe Rogan’s studio when Mark left the room after bloviating for three hours about the importance of masculinity, as if this geek who once built a website to anonymously rate women at Harvard is now the arbiter of manliness.
That said, the central message of my newsletters remains unchanged: we need to create the next evolution of the American Empire and sell it to the American public in a way that resonates. On the left, it’s too easy to mirror the failures of the healthcare system we despise, diagnosing symptoms without any investment in real solutions. However, as we’ve seen with Trump and MAGA, empire is a tool, and its potential is only limited by the imagination of those who wield it.
For better, and for worse.
That means being unapologetically proud of the parts of America that we cherish.
We’ve spent the last 4–8 years fixating on what we hate about this country—Trump and his followers—so much that we lost sight of what we love. Our communities. Our connections. To ourselves, and to one another.
While still acknowledging reality. We are in community with those who stand by us. Who defend us. Who love us. Not those who seek to demonize us. Who want to erase us. Who wish to see us die. To Trump voters, we owe nothing but disdain and the schadenfreude that comes from watching the richest men in the world hijack their movement in a matter of months.
But to each other, we owe everything. Or we fail.
So, over the next four years, I challenge myself—and you—to show up.
For now, though it’s easier said than done, resist despair.
We know what we need to do, especially those of us in the citadels and states where the worst of the Republicans’ impulses will be held at bay. The old way is broken. Frankly, it needed to break. Democrats had three chances (2016, 2020, 2024) to meet the moment, but clung too tightly to the system that made them so comfortable. I completely disagree with the GOP’s diagnosis. It’s an old, tired argument, preying on the insidious plagues we’ve long incubated—but it still works, just the same.
Instead, we’ll suffer through what history has laid before us, because even the journey from our eyes to the ground was too far for American foresight.
Stay safe and give your self grace, beautiful people.
As always, thanks for reading. (And, don’t forget to like and share this post!)
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – I’ve shared a few LGBTQ+ organizations doing critical work to defend, empower and represent our community all over the county and around the world. If you’re able, please consider donating to support their missions.
Queers in the News & Other Reads
3 LGBTQ women made history when sworn in to the 119th Congress (NBC News)
Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress; Rep. Emily Randall, D-Wash., became the first out queer Latina in Congress; and Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas, became the first out LGBTQ person from the South elected to Congress.
7th Person Has Most Likely Been Cured of HIV Following Stem Cell Transplant (them)
24 states file an amicus brief to convince SCOTUS to ban trans girls from sports (LGBTQ Nation)
120 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Filed Across the US Before 2025 Has Even Started (truthout)
700% spike in crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth after Election Day (19th News)
56,000 transgender youth live in states with policies that may restrict their access to bathrooms and facilities. (Williams Institute)
2.5 million LGBTQ adults are parenting children under the age of 18 (Williams Institute)
Anti-LGBTQ+ insults don't just hurt queer kids — Straight boys react worse to homophobia in sports (The Advocate)
California becomes first state to ban forced outing of LGBTQ+ students (Bay Area Reporter)
Cameroon president's daughter says she is a lesbian, pleads for LGBTQ respect (VoA News)
Conservative Assault on LGBTQ Rights Rattles Corporate America (Bloomberg)
Despite Attacks, an Underground Church for L.G.B.T.Q. Africans Thrives (NYTimes)
For L.G.B.T.Q. People, Moving to Friendlier States Comes With a Cost (NYTimes)
Former Teamsters official and LGBTQ ally Allan Baird dies (Bay Area Reporter)
Gay bathhouses could come again. For once, no one is moaning (SF Standard)
Gay People Are Hunted Down and Beaten in Ivory Coast, a Country Once a Refuge (NYTimes)
Illinois police say 11 teens brutally beat men they targeted using a gay dating app (The Advocate)
In boon to LGBTQ families, California to require insurers cover IVF (Bay Area Reporter)
In Defense of the Messy Queers: Why “Good” Representation Isn”t Enough (LitHub)
Introducing the first Fortune LGBTQ+ Leaders list (Fortune)
Judge scraps Biden's Title IX rules, reversing expansion of protections for LGBTQ students (NBC News)
Love Wins: “Two women promised they would see the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time once they were together. They had no idea how long that would take.” (Longreads)
Man accused of organizing LGBTQ+ tours dies in Russian jail (DW)
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs bill banning “gay or trans panic” defense (LGBTQ Nation)
Police carry out anti-LGBTQ raids on some of Moscow's bars and clubs (euronews)
Queer people fighting back on New Year’s made San Francisco the gay capital of America (LGBTQ Nation)
Queering the Map: A year of defiant existence for Gaza’s LGBTQ community (Reckon)
Sectoral Guidance on Integrating LGBTQI+ Communities into Economic Growth Programming (Williams Institute)
South Korea’s Supreme Court recognizes rights of same-sex partners in landmark ruling (AP)
The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost (Elad Nehorai’s Newsletter)
The GOP Is Rewriting What It Means to Be a Person (The New Republic)
The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to extend full citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people, and it undergirds the right of all Americans to be treated equally under the law, no matter who they are or in which state they reside. Yet over the past year, conservatives have been increasingly open in their beliefs that pregnant women, transgender adolescents, affirming parents of trans kids, and immigrants are not legally entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections—all while arguing that fertilized eggs are. Republicans are using strategic litigation to effectively rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment to prioritize conservative white men and embryos above and beyond everyone else. They are warping something used to grant rights into a bludgeon to take them away, and are redefining who counts as a person in the United States.
The hidden struggle of gay men in urban areas across India (thred.)
Vatican Allows Italian Gay Men to Train to Be Priests, if They Remain Celibate (NYTimes)
Why Do At Least Six Anti-LGBTQ Hate Groups Have Special Consultative Status Inside The United Nations? (Uncloseted Media)
World Bank says it aims to protect projects in Uganda from anti-LGBT law (Reuters)
What Trump’s Win Means for LGBTQ+ Rights (TIME)
Why the Christian Right Demonizes Discourse (The New Republic)
Common in evangelical theology is the concept of spiritual warfare: the idea that Satan and/or other demons are ever-present entities seeking to corrupt and destroy humans—especially the faithful. To resist succumbing to these forces requires constant vigilance and protection through prayer and strict adherence to the evangelical interpretation of biblical teachings. In this worldview, demonic possession or influence mirrors the evangelical concept of ideological corruption; both presume human weakness and vulnerability to external forces that can only be resisted through complete avoidance and submission to religious authority. Just as corrupting forces can enter through seemingly innocuous sources, such as reading, music, or even yoga, dangerous ideas can infiltrate through educational, political, and cultural discourse.
The alliance between evangelical Christianity and conservative politics has fostered a cultural paranoia that seeks to limit the range of acceptable ideas.
Today, we see this legacy in mounting campaigns against public education. According to PEN America, documented book banning attempts in American schools rose by 33 percent in 2022–2023 and an incredible 197 percent in the 2023–2024 school year, with over 4,000 titles targeted. This wave of censorship disproportionately targets books by or about people of color and LGBTQ individuals, with 40 percent of banned titles explicitly addressing these themes.
These contemporary battles over education echo historical patterns of evangelical anti-intellectualism. During the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, fundamentalist Christians fought to prevent the teaching of evolution in schools (a cause I now cringe to remember I took up in my eighth grade science classroom 80 years later, when I was still adhering to the church dogma). This battle established a template for future conflicts: Frame scientific or social progress as a threat to religious values, position schools as battlegrounds for cultural warfare, and assert parental and religious authority over educational content. Today’s campaigns against “critical race theory” and LGBTQ inclusion follow this same playbook, treating these ideas not as subjects for discussion and analysis but as dangerous forces that must be exorcised.
The coordinated efforts to ban books addressing racism, LGBTQ identities, and systemic inequality frame these ideas as corrosive forces capable of undermining young minds. They have co-opted the language of inappropriateness that Tipper Gore once applied to explicit lyrics in rock and rap, the better to use it as a smokescreen for creating a white supremacist, heteronormative curriculum. Similarly, the rhetoric surrounding “cultural Marxism”—a decades-old McCarthyesque conspiracy theory revived to stoke fears of leftist infiltration, which has its roots in the antisemitic Nazi campaign against “cultural Bolshevism”—posits that schools, universities, and media are indoctrinating an unsuspecting populace with Communist ideas.