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Queen Camilla has teamed up with an all-female production crew in a powerful new documentary, airing next week, in which she vows to eradicate domestic abuse.

“Her Majesty The Queen: Behind Closed Doors” follows Camilla as she meets survivors of abusive relationships, including a member of the UK parliament, a senior police officer and a former Miss England.

According to UK government data, on average, a woman is killed by a current or ex-partner every five days in England and Wales but the 77-year-old royal’s new film stresses that violence may not be part of the abuse until it is too late to save the victim.

The film’s campaigners highlight the role that coercive control plays in domestic abuse, with perpetrators not necessarily targeting the obviously vulnerable. One survivor who can attest to this is Chief Inspector Sharon Baker of Avon and Somerset Police, who features in the documentary.

When the chief inspector decided to share that she had also been in an abusive relationship, her colleague told her, “If this can happen to you, it’s OK that it’s happened to me.” Motivated by this, Baker shared a six-minute video within her police force and was astounded when more than 130 other survivors came forward. They began meeting monthly and still do.

Baker believes the issue is “much more prevalent than we think” and hopes Camilla’s documentary will raise awareness.

“Coercive control is the biggest indicator of future homicide. I didn’t suffer any violence until I tried to leave. The time you see violence could be too late.”

In 2015, coercive control became a criminal offense in England and Wales. Baker describes how her ex sowed seeds of doubt in her personal relationships, slowly isolating her from her support network. “There are red flags everywhere, but your perpetrator gives you rose-tinted glasses,” Baker continued. “You can’t see the red flags.”

She hopes part of the conversation to emerge as a result of the documentary will be around coercive control, as well as helping people to speak up when aspects of their relationships concern them.

For Camilla, she accepts that there has been progress but insists that there is still a lot of work to be done to eradicate domestic abuse.

It’s a promise she makes in the documentary, saying: “And I shall keep on trying until I am able to no more.”

“Her Majesty The Queen: Behind Closed Doors” airs on November 11 at 9 p.m. on UK broadcaster ITV1.

Getting help around the world

If you or someone you know is being affected by domestic violence, a worldwide list of directories is provided by UN Women. You can also find a list of national agencies on The Pixel Project.

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Extreme weather is contributing to undocumented migration and return between Mexico and the United States, suggesting that more migrants could risk their lives crossing the border as climate change fuels droughts, storms and other hardships, according to a new study.

People from agricultural areas in Mexico were more likely to cross the border illegally after droughts and were less likely to return to their original communities when extreme weather continued, according to research this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across the globe, climate change — caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas — is exacerbating extreme weather. Droughts are longer and drier, heat is deadlier and storms are rapidly intensifying and dumping record-breaking rain.

In Mexico, a country of nearly 130 million people, drought has drained reservoirs dry, created severe water shortages and drastically reduced corn production, threatening livelihoods.

Researchers said Mexico is a notable country for studying the links between migration, return and weather stressors. Its mean annual temperature is projected to increase up to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2060, and extreme weather is likely to economically devastate rural communities dependent on rain-fed agriculture. The US and Mexico also have the largest international migration flow in the world.

Scientists predict migration will grow as the planet gets hotter. Over the next 30 years, 143 million people worldwide are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes, according to a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The new migration research comes as Republican Donald Trump was reelected to the US presidency this week. Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and promised mass deportations of an estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.

Researchers said their findings highlight how extreme weather drives migration.

Filiz Garip, a study researcher and professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, said advanced nations have contributed far more to climate change than developing countries that are bearing the brunt.

Migration “is not a decision that people take up lightly … and yet they’re being forced to make it more, and they’re being forced to stay longer in the United States” as a result of weather extremes, Garip said.

The researchers analyzed daily weather data along with survey responses from 48,313 people between 1992 and 2018, focusing on about 3,700 individuals who crossed the border without documents for the first time.

They looked at 84 agricultural communities in Mexico where growing corn was dependent on weather. They correlated a person’s decision to migrate and then return with abnormal changes in temperature and rainfall in their origin communities during the May-to-August corn growing season.

The study found communities experiencing drought had higher migration rates compared to communities with normal rainfall. And people were less likely to return to Mexico from the US when their communities were unusually dry or wet. That was true for recent US arrivals and people who had been there longer.

People who were better off financially were also more likely to migrate. So were people from communities with established migration histories where friends, neighbors or family members who previously migrated could offer information and help.

These social and economic factors that influence migration are well understood, but Garip said the study’s findings underscore the inequities of climate adaptation. With extreme weather events, not everybody is impacted or responds in the same way, she said, “and the typical social and economic advantages or disadvantages also shape how people experience these events.”

For Kerilyn Schewel, codirector of Duke University’s Program on Climate, Resilience and Mobility, the economic factors highlight that some of most vulnerable people aren’t those displaced by climate extremes, but are rather “trapped in place or lacking the resources to move.”

Schewel, who was not involved in the study, said analyzing regions with migration histories could help predict where migrants will come from and who is likelier to migrate because of climate shocks. In “places where people are already leaving, where there’s a high degree of migration prevalence, … that’s where we can expect more people to leave in the future,” she said.

The survey data used from the Mexican Migration Project makes this study unique, according to Hélène Benveniste, a professor in Stanford University’s department of environmental social sciences. Migration data of its scale that’s community specific is “rarely available,” she said in an email. So is information about a person’s full migration journey, including their return.

The finding that return migration decisions were delayed by weather stress in origin communities is “important and novel,” said Benveniste, who studies climate-related human migration and was not involved in the study. “Few datasets enable an analysis of this question.”

But increased surveillance and enforcement along the US-Mexico border make returning home — and moving back and forth — more difficult, said Michael Méndez, assistant professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine. And once undocumented migrants are in the US, they often live in dilapidated housing, lack health care or work in industries such as construction or agriculture that make them vulnerable to other climate impacts, he said. Méndez was not involved in the study.

As climate change threatens social, political and economic stability around the world, experts said the study highlights the need for global collaboration around migration and climate resilience.

“So much of our focus has been, in a way, on the border and securing the border,” said Schewel from Duke. “But we need much more attention to not only the reasons why people are leaving, but also the demand for immigrant workers within the US.”

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Tech tycoon Elon Musk joined a call between US President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the day after the presidential election, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

Zelensky previously said on X that he called Trump on Wednesday and congratulated him on “his historic landslide” win. “We agreed to maintain close dialogue and advance our cooperation. Strong and unwavering US leadership is vital for the world and for a just peace,” Zelensky wrote at the time.

Trump’s victory comes at a precarious moment in the conflict for Kyiv as Russia makes gains in the eastern Donbas region, which Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to capture in full.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump cast doubt on continued US commitment to Kyiv as the war drags on more than two and half years after Russian forces invaded. He has also made comments that suggest the US could pressure Ukraine into an uneasy truce with Russia.

Musk – whose pro-Trump super PAC spent more than $118 million in the 2024 campaign – has pitched himself to lead a broad effort to slash spending inside the federal government. His inclusion on Trump’s call with Zelensky raises questions about what his influence will look like in the incoming administration.

In Ukraine, Musk’s Starlink internet service has provided a significant frontline advantage to Ukraine’s smaller military since the 2022 invasion, permitting its forces to share real-time drone feeds between units, and communicate in areas where combat has disrupted cellphone service.

But there have also been concerns about Musk’s reported links with hostile foreign leaders.

A September Wall Street Journal report said the SpaceX founder and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022, saying they had discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”

It raised national security concerns as SpaceX’s relationships with NASA and the US military may have granted Musk access to sensitive government information and US intelligence.

Musk did not respond to the Journal’s requests for comment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the newspaper that Musk and Putin have only had one telephone call in which they discussed “space as well as current and future technologies.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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No United States leader has handled relations with North Korea quite like Donald Trump.

The former president went from threatening Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” if the North Korean leader continued testing missiles, to becoming his pen pal, meeting him in a series of unprecedented summits, and boasting that the two had fallen “in love.”

Now, that unlikely friendship will be put to the test. The former president is set to return to the White House at a moment of acute alarm among the US and its allies about Kim and the threat posed by his regime.

Pyongyang is believed to have sent thousands of troops and tons of munitions to Russia as Moscow wages war on Ukraine, in what Western leaders see as a major escalation. Days before Trump won the US presidential election, it lobbed another threat – testing an intercontinental ballistic missile with the range to strike anywhere in the United States.

On the campaign trail, Trump said Kim “misses” him and implied the country would not be “acting up” when he returns to office.

But the second Trump administration will face an emboldened and arguably more dangerous North Korean leader.

Kim – and potentially his arsenal – are now bolstered by burgeoning ties with Moscow, and he has hardened his stance toward the US and its ally South Korea after the failed diplomacy of the last Trump era.

That makes reaching an agreement between the two to rein in North Korea’s weapons program all the more challenging – and raises questions of whether Trump, known for his impulsive foreign policy, might seek to shift the goal posts on what the US wants to see from North Korea, experts say.

‘Closest comrade’

A series of 2018-19 meetings between Trump and Kim in Singapore, Hanoi and the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea created unprecedented optics for both leaders.

Then, the president of the world’s democratic superpower was pictured smiling and posing for photos alongside a typically isolated autocrat known for his ruthless rule over his people and drive to build sanctions-defying weapons as a means of preserving his regime.

For Trump, the meetings were a bid to accomplish what US presidents have repeatedly sought to do in other ways – curb Pyongyang’s rogue nuclear program. For Kim, they were both a chance to try to get relief from heavy international sanctions – and a rare opportunity to be granted such prestige on the world stage.

But talks ended without any breakthrough – with an abrupt ending to a 2019 summit in Hanoi amounting to what experts say was a huge loss of face for Kim.

Though the leaders met once more that year, Pyongyang has since refused to reengage with the US, experts say, and restarted weapons testing it had appeared to pause alongside that dialogue. While it has yet to initiate a nuclear test since 2017, Kim has recently vowed to increase the country’s number of nuclear weapons “exponentially.”

“The circumstances in which we must deal with North Korea have changed fundamentally compared to five years ago,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

She pointed to the “higher price tag” on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs due to further advancements since Hanoi, as well as North Korea’s “foreign policy reorientation” after the collapse of that summit “set off a fundamental skepticism within the North Korean leadership circle about the strategic value of the United States.”

Kim over the past year has raised international concern by breaking with decades of policy toward South Korea – classifying it as a “permanent enemy.” He’s called on his army to accelerate war preparations in response to “confrontation moves” by the US – actions that came as the Biden administration strengthened ties and increased military drills with South Korea and Japan.

And then there’s the deepening of ties with Russia. The North Korean leader has met with his “closest comrade” Russian President Vladimir Putin twice since last September and inked a major defense pact in June.

Western officials have also warned of what they see as an emerging anti-West ‘axis’ of China, North Korea and Iran with Russia – a trope that, whether actualized or not, is likely to be welcomed by Kim as he seeks to reduce isolation and gain international clout.

“From Kim’s point of view, he has a lot more to gain economically, militarily, and diplomatically by aligning (North Korea) with China and Russia than by reengaging with the United States when the returns are so uncertain,” said Lee.

New breakthrough

All that raises the stakes for how Trump would engage Kim – and calls into question whether the autocrat would even be willing to sit down again – were Trump looking to rekindle the bromance.

But it was “unclear” how Kim would respond to new talks and if he would “get back to the pledge of denuclearization,” O’Brien said, referring to past pledges that never came to fruition. For the US, asking for anything less than denuclearization would be a “hard position” to take, he added.

In response to Trump’s comments that Kim missed him, North Korean state media over the summer said that they “do not care” who takes office in the US. The official position from Pyongyang appears to be that, regardless of what happens in the US, Kim’s nuclear weapons policy will continue.

Still, Kim’s fundamental goals – recognition by the United States as a de facto nuclear power and sanctions relief for economic development – are seen by many observers to remain.

That means the North Korean leader may look for benefit in Trump’s return.

Despite the Pyongyang leader seeing the US as untrustworthy, “Trump’s reelection is likely to encourage Kim Jong Un considerably – at the very least, it would allow him to reassert his personal friendship with Trump … and communicate with him,” said Eul-Chul Lim, director of the North Korea Research Center at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies (IFES) in Seoul.

Kim “is likely to capitalize on the fact that a stronger North Korea-Russia alliance would be beneficial to his bargaining power with the United States,” he said.

Whether Trump is interested in deal-making – and what kind of deal – is another question.

Some observers have raised concern that he may seek to water down US demands in favor of getting a coveted deal – or else could ramp up tensions again.

“Trump can be unpredictable… and his style during his first term is not an entirely accurate indicator of future behavior. We will have to see if Trump 2.0 still wants to cap and eventually roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program,” said Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“The worst scenario is if Kim convinces Trump 2.0 to scrap denuclearization and even be okay with North Korea advancing its nuclear weapons capability indefinitely,” she said.

Geopolitical fault lines

But hardening geopolitical fault lines since Trump’s last term in office have also fundamentally changed the ground upon which any US-North Korea engagement could be laid.

Putin’s war in Ukraine has driven Russia closer not only to North Korea but also to China – the US’ main geopolitical rival.

Even as Trump has expressed admiration for Putin – and a skeptical view of US alliances such as those with NATO, Japan and South Korea – there are likely to be limits to how far he can reshape those relationships if he seeks to counter Beijing.

Trump will also be dealing with a very different South Korea, where a conservative Yoon Suk Yeol government has emerged as a strong US partner in ramping up deterrence against North Korea – and is unlikely to encourage Trump to meet with Kim without a clear path to Pyongyang’s denuclearization.

“The likelihood of the US abandoning South Korea is low, not least given the gravity of the threat from North Korea, Russia, and, of course, China,” said Edward Howell, a lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who focuses on the Korean Peninsula.

And “even if leader-to-leader dialogue may catalyze some very short-term reduction in tensions – it is difficult to believe that Pyongyang will make any significant concessions on the ‘treasured sword’ of its nuclear program,” he said.

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A seaman who fell off a cargo ship survived almost 20 hours at sea before being rescued off Australia’s southeastern coast on Friday, according to emergency services.

The man in his 30s drifted several kilometers in the open sea before he was pulled from the water by a recreational angler, local rescue authorities have said.

He had last been seen aboard Double Delight, a Singapore-flagged bulk carrier, at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday. Details on how he fell from the cargo ship are not immediately available.

The ambulance service in New South Wales state responded to reports that a seaman had been found at 6:20 p.m. Friday, a spokesperson said. They added that it came from Boatrowers Reserve, near Blacksmiths Beach south of the city of Newcastle.

“The patient, a man in his 30s, was conscious, breathing and alert when assessed by NSW Ambulance paramedics and treated for suspected hypothermia before he was transported to John Hunter Hospital in a serious but stable condition,” NSW Ambulance said in a statement on Friday.

“He was wearing a life jacket, he was conscious, he was able to communicate with us, he was very cold, he was hypothermic and exhausted – he was absolutely exhausted,” she added.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said local officials told them earlier in the day the sailor had reportedly gone overboard the previous evening, about 8 kilometers southeast of Newcastle.

The authority said it had deployed water police and marine rescue units for the rescue, as well as two sea vessels and two helicopters.

Jason Richards from NSW Marine Rescue told 9News that they had no idea how long the man was in the water for in the beginning.

“We later found out he’d been missing since 11.30 p.m., so it sort of increased the search efforts a little bit.” he said, adding that “hearing that he was found alive was just fantastic.”

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A suicide bombing at a train station in southwestern Pakistan on Friday killed at least 24 people, according to a senior local government official.

Another 53 people were injured in the attack in the city of Quetta, Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat said in a statement.

“Explosion at the railway station was a suicide bombing,” the statement said.

The blast happened on a platform at the city’s main railway station at about 9 a.m., Senior Police Superintendent Muhammad Baloch said.

“The explosion happened when a large number of passengers were present on the platform,” he said.

Security forces have cordoned off the area, and investigations are underway. The province’s Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti has ordered an inquiry into the incident.

In a statement, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif strongly condemned the attack.

An insurgency in Balochistan has been running for decades but has gained traction in recent years since the province’s deep-water Gwadar port was leased to China, the jewel in the crown of Beijing’s ‘Belt and Road’ infrastructure push in Pakistan.

The BLA has been responsible for the deadliest attacks in Pakistan this year, most recently in October when it targeted a convoy of Chinese engineers and investors in the city of Karachi leaving two Chinese citizens dead.

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The Prince of Wales will attend next year’s COP climate conference in Brazil, it has been confirmed, as he pushes to “use his platform to spread urgent optimism” around the environmental debate.

It follows Prince William’s week-long trip to South Africa where he celebrated the fourth year of his annual Earthshot prize.

He launched the environmental awards in 2021 to try and counter the pessimism around climate crisis discussions.

Now he wants to take that message to the high-level UN climate conference – due to take place in Belem next November.

A royal source said: “Throughout his trip (to South Africa) the prince spoke about the importance of not losing sight of what needs to be done between now and 2030 – the Earthshot decade.

“His commitment to restoring the future of the planet is unwavering and the prince is determined to do all he can to use his platform to spread urgent optimism.

“Next year, the climate COP will take place in Brazil, and it’s set to be hugely consequential. The Prince of Wales is looking forward to playing a role there.”

Photos taken behind the scenes at Earthshot week show a more statesmanlike side of the prince.

In some, he’s seen wearing bio-degradable trainers and vintage jackets bought from markets, signs of his intention to do diplomacy his way, with an emphasis on reaching out to future young leaders.

The week reinforced how seriously William now takes his role in terms of his significant convening power.

His decision to attend COP can potentially be seen as a sign of his desire to take on an even greater diplomatic role in the environmental sphere.

So far his Earthshot Prize has been held in the UK, the USA, Singapore and Cape Town.

The location for next year’s awards hasn’t been revealed yet, but the prince has spoken previously about wanting to take them to every corner of the planet and mentioned China, India and South America.

It’s understood that Prince William’s decision to fly to Brazil won’t necessarily be in place of the King, who has delivered keynote speeches at a number of COP conferences, and is viewed as a global leader in environmental matters.

But the King’s attendance would be at the foreign office’s request, and under the advice of doctors following his cancer treatment.

Both Prince William and Prince Charles attended COP26 in Glasgow in 2021.

The urgent need to protect the environment is a topic on which father and son are very much aligned.

This weekend they will be seen alongside each other and other family members, including the Princess of Wales, for Remembrance Events.

On Thursday, William described how proud he was of his wife and father after what has been a “brutal” year.

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After a year of ever more extreme weather and continually rising global temperatures, it’s no wonder this year’s UN climate summit has been called – once again – the “last-chance saloon”.

Yet swaggering out through its swing doors goes president-elect Donald Trump.

The timing of his election win, with its promise to withdraw the US from the global climate process, couldn’t be worse.

Next year is forecast to exceed 1.5 degrees of warming for the first time – something the Paris Agreement is designed to prevent from becoming the norm.

Despite that and nearly 30 years of talks, man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are still rising.

Yet just a handful of nations have committed to cut them enough to prevent close to three degrees of warming by the end of the century.

So does America’s sudden departure, at this most precarious of moments, spell disaster?

Under previous administrations, the US was a major diplomatic force at the talks – brokering significant concessions from more recalcitrant states, including the world’s largest polluter, China.

It also set ambition, adopting carbon-cutting pledges and domestic policies like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that sent a powerful message to others that if the US saw a future beyond fossil fuels, everyone could.

As the largest shareholder in the World Bank, the US was also seen as key to brokering a new deal to finance the green transition in poorer countries: the main objective of the COP29 talks in Azerbaijan.

Now, although its negotiating team heading to Baku still serves President Joe Biden‘s agenda, it has lost its diplomatic leverage. In less than three months, they will all be out of a job.

Will the departure of the US galvanise other leaders – threatened by increasingly right-leaning electorates at home – to scale back their ambition too?

Or even follow its lead and ditch the “woke” jamboree of school-shy teenagers, indigenous groups and NGOs some have long perceived the UN climate talks to be?

Not likely – at least according to Jonathan Pershing, former president Barack Obama‘s then-climate envoy.

Mr Trump tried to reverse US climate policies when he last won control of the White House and it didn’t come to much, argues Mr Pershing.

“Even with the shock, not a single other country followed the United States in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement,” he says. “I don’t think anyone will this time either.”

His optimism stems from the fact the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement can ignore climate realities, but not economic ones.

Despite a campaign slogan of “Trump Digs Coal,” more coal-fired power plants closed under Mr Trump’s last administration, for example, than under the climate-friendly one of Mr Obama.

Alternatives to fossil fuels, like wind and solar power, are increasing in popularity and decreasing in price, a trend forecast to continue.

This is the case even more so among America’s competitors like China which, according to Mr Pershing, saw 40% of its GDP last year come from shifting to clean technologies.

“The idea that they would forego that growth just because the US has withdrawn seems not only implausible but highly, highly, unlikely,” he said.

That may be the analysis from COP insiders. However, international agreements have long lagged behind the urgency of the climate crisis.

The talks about to start in Baku were supposed to accelerate action.

Instead, negotiators will arrive knowing that 72 million Americans voted for Mr Trump. It’s unlikely his denial of climate change was a major factor in their decision – but nor was it enough to deter them.

His administration’s plans may turn out to be just another bump along the road towards an inevitable zero-carbon future.

But any climate scientist will tell you that even the slightest delay on that journey is disastrous – and more than half of America just signalled it has no interest in going faster.

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In the final days of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, he honed in on a culture war issue that may have locked in more swing votes and with it the election, a conservative activist instrumental in the ad campaign argues.

‘Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,’ the narrator of Trump’s advertisement said.

The ad, which focused on men in women’s sports and Vice President Kamala Harris’ track record of ushering in sex change procedures for incarcerated people in California, was in part due to the influence of American Principles Project’s president, Terry Schilling, who began pushing out these ads in 2019.

Schilling said back then, the issue was ‘too premature’ to make waves in the conservative movement. But over the course of the Biden-Harris administration, as the gender ideology wars began to make it into the mainstream spotlight, Schilling believed it would be a winning issue for conservatives.

The American Principles Project spent tens of millions on ads highlighting the transgender issue in states across the country, and Schilling went to Mar-a-Lago a few months ago to personally encourage Trump to lean in on the opportunity.

‘The cue of giving sex change procedures to inmates is so radical, it’s so extreme, and it’s one of those issues that touches on not just the culture war, but the economy, too,’ Schilling told Fox News Digital. 

‘You have a lot of families that are hurting, they’re struggling to put food on the table,’ Schilling said. ‘They’re struggling to be able to afford to send their kids to a decent school where they can learn to read and write properly, and they’re scrapping all their pains together, and then they see that their government is paying to give people that committed very serious crimes that are in federal prisons, sex change procedures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.’

‘When you go to prison, you have to lose some rights, and it was an issue that really resonated,’ he continued. ‘Trump gets so much credit. I have heard from several people that that maniac-madman-genius actually came up with that closing line of, ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump’s for you.’ He’s so good at the branding.’

Schilling said there was record-breaking fundraising for his organization this year, noting a 50% increase from the previous year, growing from $12 million to $18 million. He highlighted that this funding has driven extensive research, ad production, and messaging guidance, which has reportedly influenced Republicans to focus on transgender issues in campaign ads. 

According to Schilling, Republicans spent over $215 million on ads targeting transgender issues.

Last year, Schilling’s organization produced an ad featuring women’s activist Riley Gaines advocating for candidate Daniel Cameron against Democrat Andy Beshear for governor in Kentucky. 

In August 2023, APP released a post-2022 election report, titled, ‘The Failed Red Wave: Lessons from the GOP Letdown,’ arguing that Republicans performed poorly in part because they failed to take advantage of Democrats’ cultural extremism on transgender issues.

This summer, APP announced an $18 million ad campaign exposing Kamala Harris and other Democrats’ stances on transgender issues.

‘We spent over seven figures on polling and focus groups and message testing, and we’ve been passing it out, beating our heads against the wall with candidates up and down the ballot. And 2024 was the year that it finally broke through,’ Schilling said. 

The ads came during a time during the election cycle where several actions by the Biden-Harris administration gave the messaging a boost. 

In June, health officials in the Biden administration urged international transgender health nonprofit, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), to omit the age limit in its guidelines for transgender surgical procedures for adolescents – and succeeded – according to unsealed court documents.

More than a dozen states in the U.S. have enacted bans on surgical procedures and hormonal prescriptions for transgender youth. 

Idaho, North Dakota, Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama have passed laws making it a felony to perform sex changes on children. Several blue states, meanwhile, have enacted ‘sanctuary state’ laws in recent years shielding medical providers from facing penalties for conducting transgender procedures on adolescents. 

Trump’s success in reaching people in this issue hasn’t come without its opposition. The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union pledged ‘to combat’ the forthcoming Trump administration’s proposed policies on critical issues such as abortion, border security and LGBTQ rights.

The left-wing civil liberties organization launched 434 legal challenges against President Trump during his first term, and will continue during his second term, according to Romero’s open letter. They plan, for example, to use the courts to ‘invalidate Trump administration policies’ impacting the gay and transgender communities, such as actions that keep biological males out of women’s bathrooms or that prevent them from playing on women’s sports teams.

Fox News Digital’s Alec Schemmel contributed to this report. 

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