₦airaland Forum

pocohantas:
As in, people cannot use these words anymore?

accessible
activism
activists
advocacy
advocate
advocates
affirming care
all-inclusive
allyship
anti-racism
antiracist
assigned at birth
assigned female at birth
assigned male at birth
at risk
barrier
barriers
belong
bias
biased
biased toward
biases
biases towards
biologically female
biologically male
BIPOC
Black
breastfeed + people
breastfeed + person
chestfeed + people
chestfeed + person
clean energy
climate crisis
climate science
commercial sex worker
community diversity
community equity
confirmation bias
cultural competence
cultural differences
cultural heritage
cultural sensitivity
culturally appropriate
culturally responsive
DEI
DEIA
DEIAB
DEIJ
disabilities
disability
discriminated
discrimination
discriminatory
disparity
diverse
diverse backgrounds
diverse communities
diverse community
diverse group
diverse groups
diversified
diversify
diversifying
diversity
enhance the diversity
enhancing diversity
environmental quality
equal opportunity
equality
equitable
equitableness
equity
ethnicity
excluded
exclusion
expression
female
females
feminism
fostering inclusivity
GBV
gender
gender based
gender based violence
gender diversity
gender identity
gender ideology
gender-affirming care
genders
Gulf of Mexico
hate speech
health disparity
health equity
hispanic minority
historically
identity
immigrants
implicit bias
implicit biases
inclusion
inclusive
inclusive leadership
inclusiveness
inclusivity
increase diversity
increase the diversity
indigenous community
inequalities
inequality
inequitable
inequities
inequity
injustice
institutional
intersectional
intersectionality
key groups
key people
key populations
Latinx
LGBT
LGBTQ
marginalize
marginalized
men who have sex with men
mental health
minorities
minority
most risk
MSM
multicultural
Mx
Native American
non-binary
nonbinary
oppression
oppression
oppressive
orientation
people + uterus
people-centered care
person-centered
person-centered care
polarization
political
pollution
pregnant people
pregnant person
pregnant persons
prejudice
privilege
privileges
promote diversity
promoting diversity
pronoun
pronouns
prostitute
race
race and ethnicity
racial
racial diversity
racial identity
racial inequality
racial justice
racially
racism
segregation
sense of belonging
sex
sexual preferences
sexuality
social justice
sociocultural
socioeconomic
status
stereotype
stereotypes
systemic
systemically
they/them
trans
transgender
transsexual
trauma
traumatic
tribal
unconscious bias
underappreciated
underprivileged
underrepresentation
underrepresented
underserved
undervalued
victim
victims
vulnerable populations
women
women and underrepresented

President Donald Trump’s administration is pausing military deportation flights and rethinking its use of Guantánamo Bay as a migrant detention center after realizing the financial and logistical toll involved.

In late January, Trump decided he liked the optics of using the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—which was created to hold prisoners accused of terrorism —and signed an executive action instructing officials to maximize the site’s holding capacity.

The administration also decided to send a tough-on-immigration message by using military aircraft to fly detained migrants to Guantánamo and to deport them to India, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, and Panama, among other countries, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“The message is clear: If you break the law, if you are a criminal, you can find your way at Guantánamo Bay,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a visit there last week. “You don’t want to be at Guantánamo Bay.”

Since Trump took office in January, officials have dispatched about 30 flights of migrants aboard C-17 aircraft and about a dozen flights using C-130s, the Journal reported. But they’ve found the military flights take longer routes, transport fewer migrants, and cost more than deportations on civilian aircraft.

Three military flights to India cost $3 million each, and some of the flights to Guantánamo cost $20,000 per migrant, the Journal found.

It costs $28,500 per hour to fly a C-17, compared with $8,500 to $17,000 per hour for a standard deportation flight

Even standard flights are a major logistical and financial effort compared to keeping detainees on U.S. soil, NBC News reported. In addition to the flight crew, each flight needs at least one Immigration and Customs Enforcement official per migrant, plus a medical team.

The administration suspended the military deportation flights this month, according to the Journal, and officials are reconsidering whether it’s feasible to use Guantánamo at all, NBC reported.

The tents built at Guantánamo to house migrants don’t have air conditioning or running water, and they don’t meet ICE’s standards for detention, according to NBC.

Three prosecutors have been placed on leave by the Trump administration's Department of Justice, including one who worked on the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and successfully prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell for crimes committed in collaboration with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew Rohrbach and Celia Cohen were two of the prosecutors placed on leave, both of whom worked on prosecuting Adams. Rohrbach worked on the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, former crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried and lawyer Michael Avenatti, reported ABC News.

The third prosecutor placed on leave allegedly posted about Ed Martin, a Trump supporter and leader of the Stop the Steal movement who was then nominated by the 47th president to serve as US attorney in Washington, DC.

Multiple Senate Democrats alleged that Martin "abused his position in several ways, including dismissing charges against his own client and using the threat of prosecution to intimidate government employees and chill the speech of private citizens."

Earlier this year, the Justice Department motioned to dismiss corruption charges against Adams. Multiple prosecutors resigned following this action, including Danielle Sassoon, a Republican serving as the Interim United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Sassoon accused the Justice Department of negotiating a quid pro quo with Adams, dismissing his corruption charges in exchange for his cooperation in furthering the Trump administration's immigration goals.

GloriousGbola:
That is why musk is trying to kill all the regulatory agencies.

IjeBos:
Waiting to hear more facts on this, but right now looks like Tesla is engaged in terrible fraud.

This extraordinary surge in sales conveniently coincided with Canada’s impending end of its electric vehicle subsidies, and it led to Tesla filing for C$43.1 million (US$30M) in rebates. This sum represents more than half of the remaining C$71.8 million (US$50M) allocated for EV rebates. Naturally, these details have left officials scratching their heads, wondering just how Tesla managed to pull it off.

Read: Trump Tariffs Go Into Effect, Canada Responds With 25% Retaliatory Tariff

Keep in mind that Tesla is struggling when it comes to sales in Canada right now. According to the National Post, deliveries nosedived some 70 percent between December 2024 and January 2025. When the Canadian government announced that it would soon end electric vehicle subsidies, it was expected that Tesla would see a small bump up in sales. However, a giant spike like this is a different ballgame altogether.

In total, it reportedly sold 8,653 cars in three days across four stores in Canada. The sales figures come from Transport Canada, which is the body that accounts for the rebates. According to the The Star, an official from that governmental body openly said “Tesla didn’t sell those cars that weekend.”

Friends,

I remain optimistic about the longer term, but I still awaken each morning with a sense of dread. I’m sure some of you do, too.

Start with Elon Musk’s bonkers comment that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

In a Ponzi scheme, a con artist lures investors into a fake investment project, pockets the cash, and then gets new “investors” to funnel their cash to the earlier investors — until there are no new recruits and the whole thing collapses. The last ones in are suckers left holding worthless bags.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s a high-functioning, universal, and exceptionally efficient part of the American social safety net — the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. Which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cutting it.

Social Security is a simple “pay as you go” program. Current workers, via the payroll tax, fund payouts for retirees and disabled people. In 2024, about 1 in 5 U.S. residents received Social Security.

I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. I know what I’m talking about.

As the Social Security Administration explains, “In 2025, when you work, about 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund. This fund pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died. About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.”

The only reason that the Social Security trust fund is slowly running out of money is the trustees never anticipated that so much of the nation’s total income would be in the hands of so few people (such as Elon Musk).

The simple way to fix this is to lift the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, which is now $176,100.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg fulfilled their 2025 Social Security payroll tax obligations a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Most Americans continue paying payroll taxes all year.

If you want to see a real Ponzi scheme, look no further than the crypto investments Musk and Trump have hyped.

Trump’s new cryptocurrency, “$Trump,” soared and then crashed, just like every other Ponzi scheme. It generated enormous profits for insiders like Trump, but a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors.

Trump claims ignorance. “I don’t know if it benefited” me, he said. “I don’t know much about it.” (The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coin.)

Musk has been promoting “dogecoin” since 2019. In the days following Trump’s announcement of the launch of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the value of dogecoin soared over 70 percent. Since then, it’s dropped like a rock. Another classic Ponzi scheme.

With Trump now in office, crypto is back to its Ponzi ways. It’s emerging from a four-year federal crackdown on crypto fraud, market manipulation, and other scams following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX in 2022 — one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in recent memory.

Today, Trump even held a “crypto summit” at which he promoted the idea of a federal crypto reserve that will give crypto schemes a temporary boost by increasing demand for them.

But why should American taxpayers foot the bill for a crypto reserve? The most obvious winner will be Trump, whose own crypto venture carries millions of dollars in tokens that are to be included in the reserve.

Other winners will be crypto executives, many of whom donated extensively to Trump’s reelection effort. One example: Ripple, whose XRP token is one of the five that Trump said would be included in the reserve — and which donated $45 million to an industrywide PAC that sought to help elect Trump and other Republicans.

Trump’s crypto efforts are ways to curry his favor by paying him off.

Consider Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with securities fraud in March 2023.

After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, Sun has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission just dropped its prosecution of Sun.

The SEC also dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

To top it off, the SEC just ruled that “memecoins” aren’t securities, meaning that Trump’s novelty crypto tokens won’t be subject to any regulatory oversight. An open invitation to more Trump Ponzi schemes.

My real dread has to do with the much bigger Ponzi scheme that Trump and Musk are peddling.

They’re promising huge “savings” from destroying the federal government — including programs like Social Security and Medicaid — savings that will go to America’s wealthy and big corporations in the form of tax cuts.

At Musk’s urging, the Social Security Administration recently announced it will consolidate the current 10 regional offices it maintains into four and cut at least 7,000 jobs from an agency already at a 50-year staffing low.

The Republican budget recently pushed through the House cuts over $880 billion out of Medicaid.

Who will get left holding the bag? Most Americans.

Zoom out and you’ll see the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all — the entire Trump 2 regime.

Trump is promising to “make America great again” by raising tariffs, deporting more than 11 million people, taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, pulverizing democracy, and joining Putin and other global dictators.

Trump is the con artist behind this giant Ponzi scheme. He lured voters into this fake MAGA project, pocketed some of the cash and rewarded his billionaire backers and friends (including Musk) with more, and will leave most Americans with a corrupt and decimated society.

I’m still optimistic about our power to overcome this and our resilience in bouncing back from it. But the dread I feel when I open my eyes in the morning concerns the sheer magnitude of the largest and most cynical Ponzi scheme in history.

What are your thoughts?

God1000:
Sycophants, I don't know why women don't like supporting each other

Maeve7:
Popcorn anyone?

GloriousGbola:
by the time they are done, americans will be like nigerians who shout up nepa when there is power
or who are religious largely because so many things in life are out of their control

GloriousGbola:
if jk rowling was not transphobic the nutcases would say polyjuice potion was a trans spell

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following President Donald Trump’s executive order ending those programs across the federal government.

The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months — such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.

But a review of the database also underscores the confusion that has swirled among agencies about what to remove following Trump’s order.

Aircraft and fish projects are flagged

In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word “gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

Several photos of an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California were marked for deletion, apparently because a local engineer in the photo had the last name Gay. And a photo of Army Corps biologists was on the list, seemingly because it mentioned they were recording data about fish — including their weight, size, hatchery and gender

Unlimited22:
Father Lord in heaven.

We are dealing with people who are equating transgender and transgenic.

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule
of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."
- Hannah Arendt
(14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) German historian and philosopheR

Ijaya123:
What exactly is Trump's business with South Africa? I thought his campaign slogan was America first!

So what has changed? He's now behaving like a bull in a China shop.

Comments from a member of President Trump’s cabinet over the weekend have renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics — especially if they start to show that the economy is slipping into a recession.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, suggested that he planned to change the way the government reports data on gross domestic product in order to remove the impact of government spending.

“You know that governments historically have messed with G.D.P.,” he said. “They count government spending as part of G.D.P. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Mr. Lutnick meant. The basic definition of gross domestic product is widely accepted internationally and has been unchanged for decades. It tallies consumer spending, private-sector investment, net exports, and government investment and spending to arrive at a broad measure of all goods and services produced in a country

Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because changes in taxes, spending, deficits and regulations by the government can impact the path of overall growth. GDP reports already include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists.

Musk’s efforts to downsize federal agencies could result in the layoffs of tens of thousands of federal workers, whose lost income could potentially reduce their spending, affecting businesses and the economy at large.

Comments from a member of President Trump’s cabinet over the weekend have renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics — especially if they start to show that the economy is slipping into a recession.

In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, suggested that he planned to change the way the government reports data on gross domestic product in order to remove the impact of government spending.

“You know that governments historically have messed with G.D.P.,” he said. “They count government spending as part of G.D.P. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what Mr. Lutnick meant. The basic definition of gross domestic product is widely accepted internationally and has been unchanged for decades. It tallies consumer spending, private-sector investment, net exports, and government investment and spending to arrive at a broad measure of all goods and services produced in a country

feedthenation:
---or he's purposely manipulating the markets to enrich himself and his friends, under the guise of "being tough on Canada and Mexico"---

PDPGuy:
Wowzers!!

Maeve7:
So much winning.

He wants to be a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.

happney65:
Na so sha. No wonder Trump loves the poorly educated

happney65:
BREAKING: President Trump is ready to sign an executive order that calls for the closure of the Department of Education, according to a draft of an executive order obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Some of you that are Trump supporters. You can like Trump for whatever. But you should be using your brains at times. Even in Nigeria,The Federal Government has a ministry and department of Education. It is simple basic common sense

Or is Trump on a mission to purposely destroy the US? As in I dont understand

Ibime:
Only mumu go think say Canada dey supply Yankee and not Yankee supplying Canada

In the Americas, production of drugs is in the South and distribution flows North . . . . South America to Mexico to Yankee, then some flow on to Canada

IjeBos:
I guess Trump finally realized what everyone outside of MAGA knew.

pocohantas:
I didn't even check the heading o. I just followdd Maeve's comment into lion's den.😂

pocohantas:
She dey try abeg.😂😂😂

armyofone:
I agree with Maeve.

Doing the back and forth thing in real life is shege pro max with friends. I don't know where they dropped their humanity.

Maeve7:
I just don’t need conversations which leave me feeling like someone raped my brain.

Maeve7:
Once again, I admire your patience. You would make a wonderful teacher. Your patience levels are really high. Keep up the good work. Maybe one or two will learn something even if most of them are too stvpid to understand they are stvpid. They will form expert opinions on everything. Doctors, scientists, economists, historians and astrophysicists all in one person.


Some days ago a Trumpazee was telling me that there is already cure for cancer justifying Trumpo’s decision to cut cancer research.

budaatum:
The wonderfully amazing tariffs.

https://www.nairaland.com/8359890/trump-reverses-self-again-tariffs#134414136