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Sarah Kate Ellis spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday: “It’s a distraction — they’re grabbing more power.”
By Lily Ford
The President and CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is taking aim at the new Trump administration and tech billionaires supporting him.
NGO boss Sarah Kate Ellis spoke at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, discussing Donald Trump‘s association with X founder Elon Musk and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. — both of whom were sat front-row for the President’s inauguration on Monday.
“Trump’s first administration hit about 280 acts against our community and running for the [most recent] election, he spent over $280 million on ads specifically targeting the transgender community,” Ellis told fellow panel members Ben Fajzullin, Frida Daniela Ruiz, Alexander Cheng, Jin Xing, and Jean Daniel LaRock. “That’s a lot of money that could go to a good cause. That is a ton of money.”
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“At the center of that money was Elon Musk,” she continued (South African Musk has been tapped by Trump as the head of a new department of “government efficiency”). Ellis said: “It’s like the 1 percent who is acquiring all this power and all this money, these billionaires are targeting the most marginalized people in the world.” Ellis said she believes the targeting is a “distraction” and urged people to watch what the media moguls are “really doing.”
“As long as they’re putting us on guard, criticizing us, they’re making money and they’re grabbing more power.” She quoted a GLAAD statistic, in which a recent study showed that 100 million Americans are reached by right-wing media every week. In comparison, progressive media reaches 30 million people a week, Ellis said.
“You have a 70 million person gap, and I think that’s at our at the center of our challenge right now,” she added. “Because the narrative has gone to talking about ideology. They’re creating ideology but being LGBTQ+ [is just] existing.”
Hours after taking office Monday, Trump vowed to roll back on a myriad of Joe Biden’s progressive policies, including ones that support the LGBTQIA+ community. One of his orders demands that the U.S. only recognize two sexes, male and female, as the government is now required to use the term “sex” rather than “gender”.
He also mandated that identification documents issued by the government, including passports and visas, be based on what it described as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
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