From the June 22, 2024, edition of MSNBC'S Ayman

AYMAN MOHYELDIN (HOST): There is also another scary aspect to this, another side of the coin if you will, and that is on the legislative front. The ACLU is currently tracking 523 piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation around the country. That's one more than we showed on this map just last week, so this number could keep rising. Do you think there is a correlation between this anti-LGBTQ legislation coming from government officials and the threats and vandalism that are coming from the people?

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SAMANTHA RIEDEL (REPORTER, THEM): I think that there's been a real big push to make these sorts of things, again, into people's political identities in order to shore up support, and we can absolutely draw a correlation between the proliferation of this kind of thing — the idea that it is politically desirable to be anti-queer, to be anti-trans — and these sorts of threats, these sorts of vandalism and damaging incidents. You know, just at the beginning of the month — I didn't even get into this in my article, but the Colorado GOP openly endorsed burning Pride flags, so I think that's about as clear as you can get to linking the political right in the 2020s to exactly this kind of behavior. It's just the mainstream now.