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7 24 estb combines clarence 2025 ~ birth control and mifepristone plan b morning after pill

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AN 5 26 VID]

A recent dissent from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has prompted two legal analysts to question just "how far gone" the infamous conservative is.

Last week when the Supreme Court temporarily upheld telehealth access to Mifepristone, a frequently used drug that can expel pregnancies and miscarriages.

Thomas wrote in his own dissent, disagreeing with the majority of the court, claiming that the 1873 Comstock Act blocks the mail delivery and telehealth prescriptions for the drug. The law, however, applied to "obscene" materials and was used to stop the mailing of adult photos, magazines and other items.

“I write separately to note that, as Louisiana argued below, it is a criminal offense to ship Mifepristone for use in abortions,” said Thomas. “The Comstock Act bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug ... for producing abortion.’"

Those pharmaceutical companies, Thomas claimed, "cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes."

He said that they should be "thrown in prison."

"Applicants, which are the makers of these drugs, are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise. They cannot in any legally relevant sense be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes," Thomas continued.

Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern spoke with "Balls and Strikes" deputy editor Madiba Dennie, who called the Thomas opinion "outrageous."

Stern wondered what Dennie made of Thomas "throwing down" and "making the Comstock act great again."

She keyed in on the claim that the companies are part of some "criminal enterprise" as if they were "some guy on the corner selling heroin."

"I'm just like, 'Okay, buddy.' Like it's like somebody's been watching too much crime TV," she quipped.

Dennie went on to say it was "really egregious and just really trying to legitimize what was once a fringe theory that the Comstock Act does apply here, that it is valid, that it's still good law and should be used to prosecute all so many people."

"It's truly something absurd. I think it just shows how far gone Clarence Thomas is," she continued. "The language is on another level."

Stern explained that the language comes from the "crazy far-right anti-abortion advocates."

"They have been saying for years that this is a criminal network and a criminal conspiracy, and Thomas is just like, 'Absolutely. I'm just going to copy-paste that stuff into the U.S. reports, right?'" Stern argued.

Dennie agreed, "I think you have seen this sort of trend for Thomas for a while. Like he always describes abortion as this really nefarious, like racist eugenics-like operation happening across the country. And yeah, he really sees the opportunity to sort of put that put that into into his dissent here and mix in some criminality for good measure."

Stern clarified that she wasn't being hyperbolic, that Thomas did describe it as a racist eugenics program in a previous opinion.

"So, this guy is not pretending to be a neutral judge in these cases. He is like, 'We must outlaw abortion and imprison everyone who participates in it, including quite possibly patients,'" Stern said.

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RWW

04/16/2026

Kiera Butler @ Mother Jones: Tech Billionaires Want Christians to Believe in AI

Much in the way they have shaped culture with social media algorithms, tech evangelists now are attempting to normalize the use and acceptance of AI by wrapping it in a spiritual message.

Adam Kinzinger @ AdamKinzinger.com: Franklin Graham Defends Trump’s Jesus Post. Again.

The pattern is clear: when Trump crosses a theological line, a familiar roster of pastors arrives to explain why it isn't really a line.

Vittoria Elliott @ WIRED: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated with Religion

“From executive orders to agency-wide directives to even early dismissal emails, it is abundantly clear that this administration is not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so.”

Kristin Du Mez @ Du Mez CONNECTIONS: American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom

Rooted in an intense, literalized reading of Scripture, dominionism is animated by spiritual warfare: demons are not metaphors but actors, and demonization becomes both a theology and a tool of political mobilization.

Kylie Cheung @ Abortion, Every Day: How Celebrity Smear Campaigns Are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Contro

Conservative billionaires are weaponizing pop culture news to draw in a new generation of young women

How Celebrity Smear Campaigns Are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Control

Conservative billionaires are weaponizing pop culture news to draw in a new generation of young women

Kylie Cheung

Apr 16, 2026

Throughout March, I was hit over the head with social media posts attacking Chappell Roan, an LGBTQ popstar who’s often labeled as ‘difficult’ or ‘aggressive.’ It’s transparently misogynistic: young women are always ‘difficult’ when they set boundaries or ask for respect, while male artists face none of the same backlash—even after committing abuse.

Predictably enough, a BuzzFeed report showed that many of the users behind sexist content about Chappell were bots or social media accounts quite literally created to drive the online smear campaign. Don’t get me wrong—social media is a sexist cesspool. But these public orgies of misogyny aimed at celebrity women are rarely as organic or innocuous as they seem. And as a fairly online woman in her twenties, I was the algorithm’s perfect target.

The pink pill pipeline, through which young women are exposed to anti-feminist ideologies disguised as ‘lifestyle’ content, isn’t always limited to ‘tradwife’ TikToks. Increasingly, this pipeline revolves around pop culture and celebrity news. Most young women and girls likely don’t even realize that news about their favorite artist or moviestar might just be a Trojan Horse for ultra-conservative horseshit.

While working at the feminist magazine Jezebel in 2022, I had the unique vantage point of reporting concurrently on three seismic feminist stories: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial (including the pervasive online backlash against Heard), and a surging trend of anti-birth control social media content.

The timing was no coincidence: in both politics and culture, bad actors were fomenting anti-feminist sentiment among young women, just as the Supreme Court had more or less relegated us to second-class citizens. We were being primed to disbelieve victims or, worse, believe that we deserved abuse. And we were being primed to accept not just the loss of our right to abortion, but eventually our right to birth control.

Four years later, I’m watching the same phenomenon at record speed—with conservative billionaires and powerhouse organizations weaponizing seemingly harmless celebrity news to draw in a new generation of young women.

In the digital age, there is a playbook to drive targeted, mass harassment against celebrity women. This typically involves astroturfing tactics from paid professionals, who disseminate talking points or specific lines of attack against famous women to influencers, who then set the discourse in motion. Bots and misogynistic, misinformed masses of social media users will take the hate campaign from there.

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xV_i!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb976d170-5d26-4a3a-9494-91af839badd2_1000x200.png)

Media literacy, fact-checking, and critical thinking have become such a rarity that online hate campaigns against celebrity women can go a mile a minute—just look to Blake Lively’s sexual harassment lawsuit against her boss, Justin Baldoni, for extensive evidence of what these coordinated campaigns entail. Or look at the tactics of Johnny Depp’s team against Heard. The public eats misogynist hate campaigns up every time.

You might be tempted to shrug these patterns off as apolitical, irrelevant ‘celebrity news.’ And that’s exactly what conservatives and the anti-abortion movement are counting on: for us to look the other way while they co-opt this very playbook to attack hormonal birth control, abortion, IVF, domestic violence victims, and more—targeting young, female audiences, in particular.

The right’s goal is plainly to get as many young women knocked up as early as possible: the Health and Human Services Department just released a proposed 2027 budget that eliminates the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. A Fox News analyst recently called it “a problem” that the birth rate among teens ages 15 to 19 is down. Former Trump administration official and current female lifestyle podcaster Katie Miller complained the same, tweeting that women and girls’ “biological destiny is to have babies—not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.”

The message here is clear: teen girls and women shouldn’t be in school or pursuing careers—they should be having babies. While GOP lawmakers pass legislation to strip away our ability to choose school or work, influencers like Miller try to convince us that this is what we want.

Consider Evie Magazine—the Peter Thiel-backed, conservative women’s media outlet that goes out of its way to conceal its conservatism beneath flowery language about ‘celebrating femininity.’ Most of Evie’s content isn’t overtly about politics, but seemingly apolitical celebrity news and health and fashion advice. I’ve increasingly encountered Evie’s social media posts organically, out in the wild, sometimes “liked” or shared by young women I know—women who probably don’t realize they’re interacting with content from a far-right political movement that wants to ban birth control.

A young woman my age might come across Evie via their Instagram explore page, should they see the magazine’s posts about how Timothee Chalamet is eager to become a father. They might see Evie’s quote graphics of Katherine Schwarzenegger saying she can’t live without her husband. Perhaps they’ll be drawn in by Evie’s posts about trendy new “raw milkmaid” dresses, or the magazine’s praise for Zendaya saying she’ll take a step back from Hollywood when she has kids. Maybe they’ll be roped in by retweets sharing Evie’s buzzy headlines about how studies show women with bigger boobs face more hate.

Next, they might go to Evie’s website, where they’re likely to see articles smearing birth control with false claims about its safety and side effects. Independent journalist Emily Amrick recently reported that Evie averages around one anti-birth control article per month. Coincidentally, Evie plans to launch a wearable period-tracker that collects data about your cycle. (Thiel also happens to own Palantir, the surveillance conglomerate that works closely with the U.S. government.)

Or, young women may see Evie’s articles arguing that feminism has actually made women’s lives worse, that we need husbands to provide for us, that our lives are meaningless without children, and so on and so forth.

This is the pink pill pipeline.Conservatives know exactly what they’re doing: creating cultural consensus for their repressive political agenda. Through the Heritage Foundation, conservatives have articulated a 250-year plan for the U.S. in which young women will ‘voluntarily’ forgo work and school and pop out an endless flow of babies—because there are no other options.

Evie Magazine is hardly alone. There’s a rapidly growing, million-dollar creator economy of “tradwife” and female lifestyle influencers. Speaking of the Heritage Foundation: researcher Emma Waters—best known as the White House birth rate whisperer—has a new book that she’s promoting with videos on how women can strive to be both a “girlboss” and a “tradwife” in one—by being a “side hustle trad-wife.” (AKA: You can run from an Etsy shop or take on a part-time job—so long as you put your children and husband first, of course!)

And in 2024, far-right influencer Candace Owens launched a media company offering podcasts and hot takes on celebrity news and pop culture, a book club, and a fitness app for young mothers. All of that sounds fairly apolitical, right? But users reeled in by Owens’ fitness app might then start watching her YouTube videos—like her 11-minute video denouncing hormonal birth control as “unnatural.” Or her endless rants about how women belong in the home—even as she herself runs a multi-million dollar business. Perhaps young women who come across Owens’ takes on celebrity news will find her tweets stating, “Can you name one objective thing that has gotten better in American society since women were given the right to vote?”

That’s right: conservatives are increasingly trying to convince young women thatwe don’t wantour right to vote. A growing contingency of conservative women—who first amass their online platforms by posting mainstream, seemingly apolitical content—vocally oppose women’s suffrage. While some conservative influencers openly advocate for threversal of the 19th amendment, others, like Elon Musk, call for “childless adults” to lose voting rights. These implicit and explicit attacks on our voting rights, increasingly being mainstreamed by popular influencers, should terrify us. This agenda is clearly what the right has their sights on next—no matter how radical or unlikely such an outcome might seem right now.

It’s not hard to imagine why they’re targeting women’s suffrage: abortion rights just keep winning at the ballot box, and abortion will continue to win—unless a new generation of voters is convinced that we don’t want our rights.

This playbook—reeling in young women via a pipeline of seemingly apolitical content, then indoctrinating us with anti-feminist messages—doesn’t always lead users to outlets like Evie or Owens’ media company. Users might just see an onslaught of TikToks or Instagram posts, seemingly uncoordinated, but with the same anti-feminist message.

Amrick reported last month on a trend of female lifestyle influencers who don’t outwardly have any connection to each other or right-wing actors, espousing the same wholly baseless claims: that hormonal birth control ruined a generation of women’s fertility, propelling the demand for IVF today. Per Amrick, this is the uniform message that hordes of female lifestyle influencers are sharing: “Isn’t it just a coincidence that we handed out the birth control pill to an entire generation of women—and now those same women need IVF?”

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4ZmK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F81787c41-c475-4a78-bce0-618e16738971_2295x2869.png)Courtesy of Emily in Your Phone

I’ve been reporting on anti-feminist smear campaigns, anti-abortion lies, and right-wing media strategies for years now—so I can see through these posts as the astroturfed slop that they are. The problem is, many young womenaren’tjournalists or aware of the pink pill pipeline. Many will see the sheer volume of posts about the supposed dangers of birth control and conclude birth control is unsafe, or that IVF is an exploitative, predatory industry.

The goal is to flood the zone with so much anti-birth control content that young women believe we’re encountering this content organically. In reality, what we’re experiencing is a coordinated effort by right-wing actors, steadily manufacturing our consent to ban birth control—and more. The result? More and more women self-reporting worsened experiences with birth control as a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to researchers, or changing their contraceptive method based on what they’re hearing online.

Think of all the viral TikToks and Instagram reels over the last few years, featuring female lifestyle influencers who warn that birth control is over-prescribed, that hormonal birth control is unsafe and we should try these ‘natural’ alternatives. Now look at the language of the Trump administration’s new guidelines for future Title X grantees, claiming birth control is over-prescribed and emphasizing “natural family planning.” Even before these guidelines, in recent years, Congressional Republicans have blocked several efforts to codify a federal right to birth control. Growing online sentiment against birth control is meant to manufacture consent to these rising political attacks.

The strategy has been a long-time coming. I remember reporting on the seemingly organic online campaign against birth control as early as 2021 and 2022: anti-birth control videos—on TikTok in particular—were suddenly everywhere, sweepingly demonizing IUDs, recommending that young women switch to “natural birth control,” and even warning young women that birth control pills could make them gay. In 2022, Duke University researchers found 38% of the most viewed TikToks tagged #IUD had a “negative tone,” 28% expressed distrust of health workers, and a quarter promoted “moderately or highly inaccurate scientific claims.”

Videos I tracked at the time featured young women gushing about their experiences avoiding pregnancy without hormonal birth control, sometimes racking up millions of views and shares. Birth control-free family planning is “a lot easier than you might think,” one TikToker said. Other TikTokers recounted trauma and severe pain from IUD insertions, also garnering millions of views: “i need anyone who wants to get an iud understand it can be traumatic,” the caption of one such video reads. “it was traumatic for me.”

To be clear, much of this content has capitalized on legitimate experiences with birth control side effects. I’ve been on different birth control methods for over a decade now, and struggled for years to find the right method for me—I can see why TikToks like this appeal to women with similar experiences. But these videos fundamentally oversimplify the nuanced realities of birth control, and erase that on the whole,birth control is a public good. There’s good reason feminists fought for the right to contraception over the course of generations.

Everyone has different experiences with different birth control methods, and our health system has failed many young women as they search for the right method for them. But online, anti-birth control narratives flatten all of these complexities. Taken together, these social media posts are meant to convince young women that birth control is bad and, consequently, banning or restricting birth control is good.

All of the seemingly organic posts that are fearmongering about birth control, IVF, or other reproductive health resources are part of a broader political agenda—whether any of the influencers behind the posts outwardly identify as flagbearers for the Republican Party or not.

A 2021 Media Matters for America study revealed how quickly violent, far-right content can swallow up your entire “for you” or “recommended” feeds if you watch a single ‘manosphere’-adjacent video. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, told me for my reporting in Jezebel in 2024 that misleading, dangerous products have always existed—“but you used to have to look for them. Now, they’re just being served to you in an endlessly refreshing feed.”

This phenomenon isn’t limited to the manosphere, which attracts young men first with ‘apolitical’ content about weightlifting and dating. Young women are also being radicalized in digital spaces. They’re also being lured by seemingly apolitical content—like celebrity gossip—and being steered to the likes of Evie Magazine or Candace Owens, who rail against feminism, abortion, birth control, and even voting rights.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to draw all of these connections—how Evie’s Instagram posts about Zendaya are part of a broader effort to ban birth control, for instance—without sounding like a deranged conspiracy theorist.

Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for it, alone: you can take the word of the right-wing architects behind these efforts. Look no further than the Heritage Foundation’s detailed, 250-year plan for America, an effort to further embed conservatism into mainstream culture and prime us all to accept a slate of violent, dehumanizing legislative attacks on our bodily autonomy.

The right knows exactly what they’re doing—and they aren’t even a little shy about it.

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RWW

03/12/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

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MMA

####Right-wing media are poised to escalate attacks on women as MAGA cracks emerge}:

As MAGA begins to fracture, elements of the coalition may seek to rally behind anti-feminism

Special ProgramsAbortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by John Knefel

Published 12/10/25

The right-wing media and policy ecosystem appears poised to escalate its attacks on the basic rights of women as a weakened President Donald Trump lurches toward the end of the first year of his second term. The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world, and it could serve as a rallying point for an increasingly fractured MAGA movement.

Perhaps no event better exemplifies this trend than a recent hire by The Heritage Foundation, which has been in crisis for months after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended a friendly interview Tucker Carlson conducted with white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.

On the back of that scandal, which Roberts seems to have made worse with every attempt at cleaning it up, Heritage has now brought on Boise State University professor and anti-feminist crusader Scott Yenor to head up its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. As conservative pundit Henry Olsen notes at The Atlantic, the decision “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”

New Heritage hire pushes birth control restrictions and rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act

Olsen runs through some of Yenor’s lowlights, including pushing for laws that would let businesses “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage,” and his belief that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

Yenor has repeatedly attacked the Civil Rights Act — a distressingly common phenomenon in conservative media — telling a Mother Jones reporter that the landmark 1964 law “made it impossible and, in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.” Yenor’s opposition to the law extends to racist grievances too. A blog he co-wrote argues that “the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.”

Heritage’s decision to bring Yenor on has generated significant support from right-wing media, suggesting that he’s more of an opening salvo than a random misfire.

Fellow Heritage staffer Emma Waters wrote that it was a “huge win for@Heritage to have Scott on board, and I'm glad he's here.” Her colleague Genevieve Wood reacted to The Atlantic article by writing: “The entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous.” Anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo argued: “Scott's idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate, and, in fact, it's absurd that individuals cannot hire whomever they want in their own companies, with their own money.” (The Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.)

The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world

Given Yenor’s recent output at Heritage — his author page currently hosts two pieces of writing — The Atlantic’s premise doesn’t seem invalid in the least. An October 29 blog headlined “RFK Should Grill the Pill” argues that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should consider imposing restrictions on hormonal contraceptives and that his seeming reluctance to do so is “to the detriment of women across the country.” Yenor and his co-author write that the “proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.”

The blog is hardly the first time Heritage has gone after birth control. Roberts took aim at the pill in his own book, writing: “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” As Media Matters previously reported, Heritage’s sprawling presidential transition effort, Project 2025, “suggests restoring Trump-era ‘religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate’ through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage.” A separate Media Matters analysis found that at least 34 of Project 2025’s partner organizations “have spread misinformation about contraceptive methods or championed limiting access to contraception, largely on religious grounds.”

Myths about the supposed dangers of birth control have found purchase in social media and podcasts as well. By early 2024, right-wing influencers spreading misinformation about birth control on TikTok had racked up millions of views. Now, some elements of the Make America Healthy Again movement — which is closely associated with Kennedy — are turning against hormonal contraceptives, illustrated by prominent MAHA podcaster Alex Clark referring to birth control as “poison.” The rejection of safe and proven forms of health care extends to so-called tradwife influencers, who have advised young women to embrace not only a far-right definition of proper gender roles, but also “a general distrust of the government and modern medicine.” One prominent tradwife figure used social media to spread “anti-trans bigotry, opposition to sending women to college at 18, and disturbing messages like ‘any wife who denies her husband intimacy is acting against her marriage.’”

Right-wing media figures urge women to leave the workforce

Yenor’s other piece at Heritage argues that prohibiting single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute and beyond has harmed the school and society at large, suggesting that sex segregation in schools can “be wholesome per se, serving the innate differences between men and women and their somewhat different social destinies.” Elsewhere, Yenor’s writing details those “somewhat different social destinies" a bit more clearly; as Olsen noted at The Atlantic, Yenor has argued: “​​The Mrs. Degree, with additional credentialing for work, is all you want by graduation day.”

The position that women should largely, or perhaps entirely, eschew careers has become increasingly normalized in right-wing media. The late Charlie Kirk — who also railed against the Civil Rights Act — told a young woman with ambitions to be a surgeon that between her career and a potential family, “you’re going to have to choose which one matters more.” On the off chance his advice wasn’t clear, he added: “There are a lot of successful, 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats, and not kids, and they’re very miserable."

Not only do many right-wing media figures want women to exit the workforce — they also want to make it much more difficult for them to leave a failing marriage.

Not only do many right-wing media figures want women to exit the workforce — they also want to make it much more difficult for them to leave a failing marriage. Conservative pundits have attacked no-fault divorce, seeking to reduce women to a second class status and exposing them to greater risk of violence from their husbands.

And over the last year, and especially following Republican losses in November, right-wing media figures have called into question the very right of women to exist as political agents. Fox anchor Martha MacCallum reacted to women voting for Democrats by saying: “I find that very frightening.” Similarly, Newsmax host Rob Schmitt told his audience that “young women in this country have become a very scary demographic.” This impulse is expressed in its most extreme variation by Fuentes, who said that if he were president: “I would just take away the right to vote for tons of people. Women for sure.”

Yenor’s new role at Heritage suggests that the larger right-wing media broadside against feminist gains is likely to intensify, as conservative pundits look to restore long-outdated forms of gender domination. Largely agreed upon pillars of social life in the United States — like the Civil Rights Act and relatively open access to birth control — are now contested fronts in the so-called culture wars, and Heritage is helping to provide the ammunition.

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Right-wing media and anti-abortion groups are using a “seriously flawed” study on medication abortion to claim it’s not safe

In reality, mifepristone is a “safe and effective method of terminating pregnancies in the early stages”

Special ProgramsAbortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by Chloe Simon

:{:{Published 05/08/25 mma}:

A recent study released by the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center claimed that “one in ten” patients using the mifepristone abortion pill experiences a “serious adverse event.” Doctors and women’s health care experts criticized the report, arguing that the study is based on faulty methodology and is “highly questionable.”

Despite criticism from the medical and health care field, anti-abortion groups and right-wing media have glommed onto the study’s findings to back up their claim that medication abortion is “poison” and “dangerous,” insisting that the Food and Drug Administration should “revoke” approval for or “investigate” the mifepristone abortion pill.

The report claiming “serious adverse effects” from mifepristone has been criticized by medical professionals and health experts}:

//

mma

  1. ### Anti-abortion figures attack ProPublica stories about two women who died seeking care for their miscarriages under Texas’ abortion bans

11/05/24 11:37 AM EST

  1. ### How Fox News has been misinforming its viewers about abortion

11/04/24 1:34 PM EST

  1. ### Inside Project 2025's attack on reproductive rights: Mifepristone and alternative abortion pills

06/24/24

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an 5 25

On May 7, President Donald Trump nominated 37-year-old Casey Means — an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and supporter of his Make American Health Again (MAHA) movement — for U.S. surgeon general. Means is known for her new age-like views and shares some of his more controversial opinions, including being a promoter of raw milk.

Neither Means nor RFK Jr. are known for having a longtime association with far-right evangelical Christian fundamentalism. Kennedy was a Democrat until 2023, and Means' father Grady Means was an assistant to the late Nelson Rockefeller — who epitomized the moderate northeastern Rockefeller wing of the GOP during his years as governor or New York State and later, vice president under President Gerald Ford.

But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in an article published on May 19, explains why RFK Jr. and Casey Means have become useful to the evangelical Christian Right agenda.

READ MORE:'I made a mistake': Here's what moved the bar for one former Trump supporter

"At first blush," Marcotte explains, "Casey Means seems like the last person Christian conservatives would want as the surgeon general. Donald Trump's new pick for the nation's top doctor, though she does not have a medical license, favors the occult-speak popular in the 'wellness' influencer world where she makes her money. As Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan at Mother Jones documented, Means veers 'in a more new age direction' in her 'medical' writing."

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

But Casey Means, Marcotte emphasizes, "is aligned with" the Christian Right "against an enemy they hate far more than Satan: feminists."

"Along with her shrines-and-moons talk, Means also wrote that she had shed 'my identity as a feminist,' giving up on wanting 'equality in a relationship' to instead embrace 'a completely different and greater power: the divine feminine," Marcotte observes. "It's woo-woo, but ultimately no different than the message promoted by conservative Christians: that a woman's role is as a man's helpmeet, not his equal."

Means and RFK Jr., according to Marcotte, have become unlikely but useful allies of the Christian Right and Trump's MAGA movement. And the Salon journalist points out that the Christian Right has been "getting witchier" in recent years because of "the rise of charismatic Christianity."

READ MORE:'OK, seriously. Come on!': MSNBC panel laughs off Trump accusation against ex-FBI director

"Casey and her brother, Calley Means, are tight with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy, which is why she got the surgeon general nod and her brother got a position as a 'special government employee' assisting Kennedy," Marcotte observes. "Kennedy has exploited the false perception that he's a liberal Democrat to bamboozle some people into thinking far-right health policies, such as slashing Medicaid, are 'moderate' positions. Like the Means siblings, he's also using his appeal to people outside the Religious Right as a way to launder Christian Right views."

Marcotte continues, "Last week, Kennedy ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to 'review' the legality of Mifepristone, a drug used to abort pregnancies. He said this was necessary due to 'new data,' which is actually a non-reviewed 'study' by a Christian Right organization falsely claiming abortion pills are dangerous — a 'study' that was immediately debunked by experts. Kennedy has a long history of embracing fake science while ignoring real science, but this is his first foray into doing it to cape for a cause that's primarily, if not exclusively, associated with the Religious Right."

READ MORE:Critics worry new Trump proposal would make it easier for him to exercise retribution

*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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alternet

It's not just social media that's giving violent white supremacists a pass

Thom Hartmann January 11, 2025

— The fossil fuel industry is apparently paying off Republicans — in a practice legalized by Republicans on the Supreme Court — to make sure Congress never passes legislation to hold them accountable for all the death and destruction they’ve caused by lying about climate change for the past 50 years. }:

Here, for example, are the biggest recipients of their largesse, according to OpenSecrets:

Romney, Mitt (R-UT) $8,291,262; Cornyn, John (R-TX) $4,678,062; Cruz, Ted (R-TX) $4,138,421; McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) $2,852,107; McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA) $2,581,832; Hutchison, Kay Bailey (R-TX) $2,332,021; Inhofe, James M (R-OK) $2,320,139; Pearce, Steve (R-NM) $2,236,714; Barton, Joe (R-TX) $2,211,987; Brady, Kevin (R-TX) $2,087,396; Scalise, Steve (R-LA) $1,847,013; Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK) $1,792,602.

If you haven’t yet noticed the trend, just check out the party affiliation of each…}:

— Convicted Felon Trump now has the “Scarlet F”: Our first felon President. There was a time that many of us remember when America — for all our faults, history, and stupid international meddling — was seen around the world as a beacon of morality and the staunchest defender of democratic values. Now, we’re the laughingstock — or the terror — of the developed world, since a grifting adjudicated sexual abuser, Putin lackey, and chronic liar is about to become president again. Alexander Hamilton warned us, but our media was far too busy fluffing Trump’s ego and sanewashing his BS to remind us that our first Secretary of the Treasury and the main author of the Federalist Papers wrote, in 1792:

“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy... When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day

It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” (Emphasis added)}:

And “directing the whirlwind” of racial hate, fear, and bigotry — as I regularly point out here on Hartmann Report— is exactly what Trump thinks he can do to reverse the Civil Rights movement and the New Deal (I’m skeptical he can pull it off). The Founders — and FDR and LBJ — must be rolling in their graves…

— It's not just social media that's giving violent white supremacists a pass... Without telling us, so far as I can tell, Bloomberg is reporting that the FBI (and the DHS more generally) stopped seriously monitoring and infiltrating violent white supremacist groups two years ago, around the time they were being trashed for such investigations by sedition-, Putin-, and Trump-loving Republicans in the House. The pressure seems to have worked.

“In 2022, DHS closed its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to offer best practices in countering viral conspiracies,” reports Bloomberg, adding that, “DHS also recently shuttered a unit that swept the internet for threatening materials in public posts, social media messages and online forums…”

Putin’s internet trolls, operating with huge budgets and the resources of the Russian state behind them, have since become a major force on the top social media sites, and both X and Meta are no longer suppressing their lies and attacks on democracy. Is it fossil fuel billionaires or social media billionaires who are the greatest threat to the future of world peace and democracy? Hard to choose…

— Greedy insurer interrupts cancer surgery in shocking mid-procedure call... Dr. Elisabeth Potter was in the middle of surgery on a breast cancer patient when a nurse ran into the operating theater to say that UnitedHealthcare was on the phone demanding to speak with her. She interrupted the surgery, leaving the unconscious patient whose chest was cut open on the table, to take the call. Here’s her story in her own words, as she told it on Instagram and later confirmed with Newsweek:

“So, I scrubbed out of my case and I called UnitedHealthcare, and the gentleman said he needed some information about her. Wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her inpatient stay should be justified. And I was like, ‘Do you understand this? She's asleep right now and she has breast cancer?’ And the gentleman said, ‘Actually, I don’t — that’s a different department that would know that information.’ And I was like, ‘Well, she does need to stay overnight tonight, and you have all the information with you because I got approval for this surgery, and I need to go back and be with my patient now.’ But, yeah, it’s out of control. Insurance is out of control. I have no other words.”

I can think of a few words: Parasitic, thief, malefic, heinous, flagitious, depraved, monstrous, mephistophelean, godless, loathsome, psychopathic, cruel, sadistic, maleficient, and vile for a start… Feel free to add your nouns or adjectives in the comments below.

— Indiana Republicans want to threaten rape victims with felonies if they try to get an abortion. Over at her brilliant “Abortion Every Day” substack newsletter, Jessica Valenti tells us that Indiana State Senator Mike Young has proposed legislation that would subject a woman in that state to 2.5 years in prison if she were to claim rape to get an abortion (about the only way to get an abortion in Indiana, unless your life is in danger) and then can’t subsequently prove to the satisfaction of the state’s GOP that she was actually raped.}:

The bill also makes it a crime to possess the abortion drug mifepristone, evoking the possibility of midnight raids with Indiana police kicking in the doors of women who Indiana Republicans think may have purchased the drug from an online telehealth physician. Freedumb!!}:

— Wondering why Trump is on a jeremiad against Panama? Some suggest his rant was timed to coincide with Jimmy Carter’s funeral to give rightwing media an excuse to trash Carter’s signing the Panama Canal Treaty that Nixon first started negotiating. But consider this story from Newsweek titled “Trump Organization Accused of Tax Evasion in Panama.” Just like the way he scammed New York State out of tax dollars (for which he was adjudicated and sentenced last year) his failed hotel in Panama hadn’t been paying its taxes either. Trump’s involved in a huge lawsuit down their right now, and some speculate that toppling the Panamanian government might work out well for his personal interests. Keep an eye on this one!

— James Carville suggests Jeff Bezos is trying to buy Trump via Melania. Amazon has just announced that they’re going to spend $40 million on a documentary about Melania Trump, who got her legal status in the US with a “genius visa” that’s typically reserved for the world’s top scientists and Nobel Prize winners (there are only around 3,000 issued every year). Carville, who was himself the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, implies that this number stinks of a payoff:

“This is something I’m going to claim some expertise in, the subject of documentaries because I’ve been the subject of two and I’ve been the subject of a recent one… You can produce a world class documentary for $2 million. I know it. You couldn’t spend $40 million on a documentary if you tried 10 times harder to do it, so where’s the money going? Well, we know where the money is going.”

Why? Well, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorneys general are suing Amazon for allegedly maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices, and Bezos apparently hates unions and might want help stopping them in his warehouses…

— Crazy Alert! Greenlanders really hate Trump, so Don Jr. had to hire homeless people to make it look like somebody was welcoming him. Danish Radio (which once loaned me a studio for two weeks to do my show: great people!) is reporting that after having Greenlanders give him the finger in the airport and post “Yankee go home” on Facebook, Don Jr. had to hire a few local “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people to pretend to be Trump supporters for his recent stunt visiting that country. As one local, Tom Amtof of the town of Nuuk, told DR News: “All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful.” Yeah, distasteful. Again, there are other words…

NOW READ: Trump and his minions attempt to make America small, stupid and mean

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MSNBC's Joy Reid has often compared Christian nationalist ideology to "Gilead," the Christianist theocracy depicted in author Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel "The Handmaid's Tale." Christian nationalism is a major part of former President Donald Trump's game plan for a second term if he wins the 2024 election, and in a report published by Politico on February 20, journalists Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla describe the role that MAGA Republican Russell Vought would play in Trump 2.0's Christian nationalist agenda.

Ward and Przybyla explain, "An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by Politico…. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term."

Christian nationalists, Ward and Przybyla note, "believe that" the United States "was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life."

READ MORE:'Each person' will 'serve' Jesus: Embattled Republican’s Christian nationalism revealed

"As the country has become less religious and more diverse," the Politico reporters explain, "Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response. One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term."

Ward and Przybyla continue, "'Christian nationalism' is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era."

Although he has had a close alliance with far-right white evangelicals, Trump himself is not an evangelical but rather, was raised Presbyterian and comes from a Mainline Protestant background.

Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias, tweeting Politico's report, posted, "Trump is not personally religious but the Trump/Heritage Project 2025 plan is to staff the government top to bottom with right wing psychos who'll do everything possible to ban abortion, restrict birth control, etc."

READ MORE:['Wrong answer': Ex-RNC chair schools Lara Trump on 'number one responsibility' of GOP organization

Project 2025 is Trump and his allies' plan for giving the United States' federal government a top-to-bottom MAGA makeover if he wins a second term.

Ward and Przybyla report, "The documents obtained by Politico do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person's background doesn't define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person 'accept(ed]) Israel's God, laws and understanding of history.' Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump Administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives."

READ MORE:[Mike Johnson’s 'Christian nationalism' is 'a greater threat to America than al-Qaida': strategist

*Read Politico's full report at this link.

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— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail.

They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’”

They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”

— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…

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Less than four months after becoming Iowa Attorney General, Brenna Bird ordered her office to stop paying for emergency contraception for rape victims. The attorney general’s office had previously covered the cost of Plan B pills, and in some cases abortions, for rape victims since 1990 as part of Sexual Abuse Examination Program. The program was created by the Iowa Legislature in 1979, and moved into the attorney general’s office 11 years later.

In April, when Bird’s order was first reported by Iowa Public Radio, a spokesperson for her office characterized it as just a delay in payment during an audit of all victim services provided by the attorney general’s office.

“As a part of her top-down, bottom-up audit of victim assistance, Attorney General Bird is carefully evaluating whether this is an appropriate use of public funds,” the spokesperson told IPR’s Natalie Krebs. “Until that review is complete, payment of these pending claims will be delayed.”

The audit is still not complete, but unsurprisingly, Bird appears to have already decided to not restart payments.

The attorney general was asked about her refusal to pay for the cost of emergency contraception for rape victims during this weekend. Responding to a question from moderator O. Kay Henderson, Bird acknowledged that “we did pause payments to entities like Planned Parenthood and others that were being reimbursed for abortions and for Plan B.”

Bird seemed to dismiss the idea that this may cause hardship for victims or be a problem for healthcare providers who assist them, saying “those services still remain available under Iowa law to victims. It’s just whether public funds will pay for them.”

Asked by Henderson if she intends to make the current refusal to pay a permanent policy after the formal conclusion of the audit, Bird replied, “I do, yes, once it’s done.”

Bird has made opposition to reproductive rights a priority since becoming attorney general in January. On Feb. 1, Bird joined 19 other Republican state attorneys general in an attempt to intimidate Walgreens and CVS by threatening the pharmacy chains with unspecified legal action if they followed new FDA regulations and made a prescription drug commonly used in medical abortion readily available. The next week, Bird and 21 other Republican state attorney generals submitted an amicus brief in support of a federal lawsuit by anti-abortion groups seeking a nationwide injunction on distribution of the same prescription medicine.

Democrat Tom Miller and Republican Brenna Bird — Emma McClatchey/Little Village

Bird ran on a strictly conservative platform in 2022 when she defeated Democrat Tom Miller, the longest-serving state attorney general in the country. It was her second time running for the office. In 2010, she was the Republican nominee for attorney general, but lost to Miller.

Bird grew up on her family’s farm near Dexter, Iowa. She was homeschooled before attending Drake University, and later the University of Chicago Law School. Her first job in politics was with Steve King. She worked for the then-congressman for seven years, starting in 2003 as his deputy chief of staff before being promoted to chief of staff.

During her Iowa Press appearance, Bird said believes the Iowa Supreme Court will uphold the severe abortion ban passed this month during a one-day special session. Although it is essentially identical to a 2018 ban struck down as unconstitutional, Bird said she believes what she misleadingly called the “heartbeat law” (the law would ban abortions prior to a heart being formed), because of “big changes since 2019 at the national level, notably the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case,” which overturned Roe v. Wade.

“So, we will be arguing to uphold the heartbeat law in Iowa’s Supreme Court in light of that new federal case law,” Bird said.

The ongoing legal challenge to the current ban relies on the right guaranteed by the Iowa Constitution, not federal law. So did the decision that imposed a permanent injunction on the previous version of the abortion ban.

Three days after Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the new abortion ban into law, a state district court judge issued a temporary injunction stopping it from being enforced. Abortion up to 20 weeks remains legal in Iowa. The Iowa Supreme Court has agreed to hear the governor’s appeal of the temporary injunction, but no date for a hearing has been set.

*This story originally appeared in LV Daily, Little Village’s Monday-Friday email newsletter. Sign up to have it delivered for free to your inbox.

*To suggest an update, email editor@littlevillagemag.com.

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A controversial campaign tactic is backfiring on former President Donald Trump as powerful celebrities warn of an imminent authoritarian regime that could put an end to "recreational sex" as part of a "fascistic game plan," according to a new political analysis.

Actors Taraji P. Henson and Mark Ruffalo, and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver have managed a novel political feat this summer with warnings about Trump's potential return to the

White House: they've made millions of Americans care about campaign platforms, Salon reported Friday.

"Swing voters and people who aren't sure yet if they're going to vote are starting to hear about this 'Project 2025' — and they do not like it," writes columnist Amanda Marcotte.

"Trump's campaign likely went with scary-sounding names on purpose, both to thrill their sadistic foot soldiers and to cause liberals to react fearfully. But those monikers also make them memorable enough to break into the consciousness of people who aren't paying close attention."

Project 2025— a platform crafted by the Heritage Foundation whose president this week delivered veiled threats of bloody revolution — is described by Marcotte as "a laundry list of the far-right's most politically toxic ideas" that includes a nationwide abortion ban, mass federal firings and the dismantling of the Education department.

It was unusual for Trump's campaign to come forward with so blatant a policy shift, but not that surprising, writes Marcotte. She likens MAGA to a man who pinches a woman's butt at a bar then calls her hysterical when she reacts.

"Authoritarian thought leader Christopher Rufo is the most prominent example," says Marcotte. "He frequently speaks loudly of his machinations, such as boldly announcing on Twitter that the right is trying to take away birth control, claiming women should not have 'recreational sex.'"

The benefit, Marcotte argues, is that it fires up Trump's base while making his nay-sayers sound deranged — and she points as proof to one of the former president's favorite phrases: "Trump derangement syndrome."

There's just one problem, argues, Marcotte: It only works if Americans don't pay close attention.

"However, there are promising signs that people who aren't political junkies are starting to hear about Project 2025," writes Marcotte. "Even better, those folks aren't immediately dismissing it as progressive theatrics but may be genuinely alarmed."

Marcotte credits Henson and her viral speech at the BET Awards last weekend for the sudden focus on Trump's policy promises.

"The Project 2025 plan is not a game," Henson told viewers. "Look it up!"

Ruffalo shared Henson's speech on X and added, "Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism. It is the Sharia Law of the “Christian” crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life."

The fact-checking team Snopes reports it has received a "flood" on inquiries about Project 2025 — which has begun to surge on Google Trends.

"One of the most telling signs that this is beginning to backfire on Trump, however, is the way the MAGA forces on social media are starting to freak out," Marcotte writes. "As Democratic activist and researcher Will Stancill pointed out, the MAGA people who pretend to be leftists to sow confusion online are busy at work trying to pretend Project 2025 is, uh, a Biden thing."

The freak out stems from the fear that Project 2025 could prove fatal to Trump's campaign, Marcotte concludes.

"Trump cannot win without a large percentage of voters backing him under the false belief he's 'not so bad,'" she writes. "The more they find out about what he intends to do in office, the more will have second thoughts about risking another Trump term."

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