Hey MomLeft readers! This is the last post before a winter hiatus. I’ll be back in mid-January. Be good, I love you!

A little over two years ago, I thought the Republican National Committee had a good idea. While overhauling its strategy to reach racial minorities, the RNC launched a series of community centers that hosted free Easter egg hunts, pizza dinners, and dances. Political messaging was present but not central to operations; a free pizza night might have doubled as a phone banking drive. More important was the visible investment in IRL community where civil society has atrophied.

It takes a village to raise a child, ect., ect. But adults need community, too. And as parents know, that village can be vanishingly difficult to find—sometimes to disastrous ends.

Americans are isolated, atomized, lonely. We spend more time alone and have fewer friends, trends accelerated by the decline of social organizations, the erosion of shared spaces, the rise of smartphones, and the shockwave of Covid. With fewer social ties and mutual obligations, precarity feels more pronounced and antisocial policies grow more appealing. The void left by sociality is filled with weaker, darker alternatives; by fuck-your-feelings masculinity influencers, by the right’s policies of performative anti-empathy. Notions of collective care and survival are supplanted by strategic selfishness and idealized individualism. Family is conceptualized not as a thread in a broader social fabric, but as a closed unit, a fortress against the rest of society. Mantras of “no one owes you anything” sound like self-soothing in a world in which everyone owes each other so much, but few feel adequately cared for.

All this as critical expenses like rent, childcare, medical care, and college balloon to account for ever-greater portions of American incomes. It’s no wonder a lavishly funded political operation like the RNC finds it worthwhile to host regular potluck dinners in swing districts where community life has stumbled. Americans are experiencing a deficit of belonging, and the care that comes with it. If the left can’t adequately address those needs, the right will step in to offer its own simulacra of community, either in the form of RNC-backed social groups, or disseminated through fandoms for politically toxic internet personalities.

In the weeks after Donald Trump’s reelection, several writers have flagged social disintegration as an existential challenge for the Democratic Party. Writing in the Nation, Pete Davis chronicles the left’s long drift away from active memberships and in-person meetings, and toward a system of political mailing lists and short-term “mobilization” around elections. Davis prescribes a more locally oriented Democratic operation, with a greater focus on IRL meeting halls and mutual aid.

“The party should directly care for members and for the broader community,” Davis writes. “Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year. Effective and inspiring community engagement should be celebrated statewide—and turned into multi-chapter efforts. This is especially important in red districts: Trust is earned not through perfectly targeted messaging in the short run but through in-person care over the long run.”

Writer Ned Resnikoff arrives at a similar conclusion on his blog, suggesting that “liberals and the left organize those who can be organized, and then direct those grassroots foot soldiers toward the goal of establishing a larger social formation: one that has a low barrier to entry but that is also connected by longer-lasting bonds than GOTV.”

Among Resnikoff’s suggestions are left-run community hubs that would host family-centric offerings like free meals for children (something that polls ludicrously well), as well as free childcare programs and social gatherings for adults.

This kind of programming has precedent on the right and left. Resnikoff cites the community-building (and certainly identity-building) work of pro-Trump churches, as well as the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program, the latter of which was part of a broader community service program that strengthened local political networks by deploying members into direct service of their neighbors.

In Jacobin last month, Bhaskar Sunkara finds similar precedents in Europe, where social democratic parties have also suffered as their traditional working class bases peel away. Sunkara cites the Workers’ Party of Belgium, which has made electoral inroads by going all-in on programs that immediately support the working class, like providing primary health care services at party-run action centers.

The left needs a recommitment to community because no measure of digital ad spending or get-out-the-vote activism is enough to guarantee a loyal base, let alone electoral victory anymore.

Just look at the 2024 election. The Harris/Walz campaign raised jaw-dropping funds. It had full access to a sprawling empire of strategists and analysts. Yet it struggled to combat poor economic sentiment that arose from real financial hardship and from a degraded information ecosystem that has deprioritized reliable and local news in favor of unaccountable influencers, many of them on the right. In the absence of reliable solidarity or dependable Dem-driven change, the Trump campaign was able to turn resentment into a spectacle, an us-versus-them team sport that’s unlikely to address inequality but might give some of Trump’s followers the sense of belonging to a winning team. Working class dealignment came when personal connection with the Democratic party withered.

During fascism’s first coming, Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism succeeds by redirecting working-class economic discontent into ineffectual, aestheticized performances of politics.

“Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” Benjamin writes in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Benjamin’s essay is concerned with the public’s changing relationship with art and media in the interwar period. Benjamin theorizes that the public’s depth of participation with art is changing, becoming shallower and prone to context-collapse as new technologies flood the art market with cheap offerings and mass reproductions. The result, Benjamin writes in (lol) 1935 is an artistic landscape unmoored from any specific place, and a distracted populace that consumes more content but pays less attention. The effects, Benjamin argues, are political, as people demobilize from meaningful activism, in favor of using their media habits as an outward avatar for political involvement.

Thus as connections to community and place crumble, and digital distractions further atomize Americans from each other, media-savvy strongmen can offer themselves as new venues for identity. People don’t just vote for Donald Trump; they’re Trump fans, not totally unlike how Swifties might construct identity and belonging in relation to Taylor Swift and her extended fanbase.

If now is the moment to suggest major changes for the left, I’ll join other essayists who’ve proposed a renewed Democratic commitment to civic life. I also wish for other, broader, more abstract changes that need to accompany the rollout of free food programs or whatever. I wish for a categorical reevaluation of our digital lives, for the slowing of our media metabolisms, and the development of slower-twitch attention spans. I want deeper connection, longer memory, less consumption; more nature, more mutuality, more generosity, more care. I want the refusal to be streamlined, consolidated, and made efficient. I want the rewilding of our lives and relations, IRL.

The real action is offline. Maybe it’s time to go there.

This is as good an interval as any, ahead of a scheduled recess and amid a much-debated Posters’ Migration from Twitter to Bluesky, to say that I’m not sure the shape of my future on the internet. I got online as a kid when the internet felt stranger, richer with potential. I made a career on here, made friends, made community. I wouldn’t have the life I love today without the internet.

But in recent years it’s bored me to shit. It feels tamed, surveilled, solved-for. It feels optimized for distraction, to reward our worst impulses, and to monetize the worst actors. I find myself thinking about (sorry!) Marxist writings on land enclosure, the medieval process by which feudal landowners seized communally held property, turning sites of survival into sites of extraction. The woods and fields where a peasant might slack off or grow their own food were privatized, giving the masses nowhere to work and exist besides the properties of the very wealthy.

I used to imagine that I lived a lot of my life online, but lately all the old, good websites I loved have been captured by venture capitalists bent on squeezing a few extra dollars out of beloved blogs or half-decent social media sites. The rich have bought up and consolidated the common spaces that were once used for dicking around with your buddies and maybe making a little work that belonged to you instead of your boss. The wilds of the digital world have been robbed of their mystery, homogenized, given over to algorithms that make the internet feel like a casino for dopey, fascist content doled out in 15-second clips at the behest of some channed-up billionaire who thinks he’s a technofeudalist princeling.

There’s no complete logging-off, at least not for me. But lately I’ve approached social media with a sense of revulsion, one that grows in equal and opposite measure to a newfound sense of place and purpose I’ve found in nature: in leading toddler hikes, doing volunteer trail maintenance, or messing around in my garden. It’s not politics, but it feels vital if I’m going to continue working anywhere adjacent to politics without burning out entirely. I’ve been learning the names of plants, and what they like.

I’m not in America at the moment, but Australia, where I’ll sometimes see a plant I know from home. Sage, a friend, hello. Eucalyptus, which I know from carefully curated floral arrangements, here blooming in the wild where it belongs.

I spot other sites for comparison. I visit the main street of a small Australian city, where a pristine public parenting center offers families a place to take free classes, change diapers, nurse babies, receive maternal and child health care, join play groups, receive legal services, and attend holiday parties. None of this is radical, but it’s a glaring absence from American family life, and an opportunity screaming to be met by any political party that cares about building an enduring ground game.

Americans want stability and belonging. These are linked outcomes that we must pursue together in the real world, against the forces that have privatized and parceled out the spaces we once shared.

In the two years before Donald Trump’s reelection, the head of Oklahoma’s public school system conducted a trial run of some of the right’s most ambitious education policies.

Ryan Walters, the superintendent of Oklahoma’s pubic schools, spoke at a Moms for Liberty summit and defended the anti-LGBT group from criticism. He threatened a takeover of a Tulsa school district that defied his directives, ultimately forcing out its superintendent. A veteran of billionaire-backed school privatization groups, Walters has used his post to funnel public money to charter schools, even attempting to establish the country’s first publicly funded religious charter school. He led crusades against inclusive education, and installed “Libs of TikTok” creator Chaya Raichik to a statewide library post even as her channel’s anti-gay content was accused of inspiring a series of bomb threats against Tulsa schools. He has called to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. In recent weeks, he has directed millions—some of it from unaccountable sources—toward the mass purchase of so-called “Trump Bibles” that enrich that incoming president. After Trump’s reelection this month, Walters attempted to mandate that Oklahoma schools show a video in which Walters prays for Trump and accuses “the radical left” and “woke teachers unions” of attacking religious freedoms.

The right’s education policy under a new Trump administration promises to be many things: corrupt, anti-child, anti-secular, and chiefly, very stupid. When I was halfway through writing this newsletter, Trump named Linda McMahon, a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive, as his choice to lead the federal Department of Education—a department Trump and allies have suggested disbanding altogether. We’re talking unvarnished stupidity, the strip-mining of public education by an unqualified cohort that barely cares to hide what it’s doing.

But enraging as the grift may get, education is one of the most viable battlegrounds on which to challenge the right. Public schools are among our last and greatest shared institutions in an era of alienation. And attacks on public schools, in Oklahoma and in nearby red states, reveal how communities can fight and win against prevailing political winds.

When Walters demanded Oklahoma schools air his Trump prayer video this month, leaders for at least seven districts refused outright. Some cited local rules suggesting that, legally, Walters has to shove it. 

This kind of noncompliance can be daunting in a conservative state, especially when challenging a leader like Walters who has proved eager to purge insubordinate school leaders. But as liberal pundits suggest moving rightward on civil rights issues post-election, principled stances from local districts can help stop the ideological retreat. By refusing to air a short (and honestly, stupid) video, schools can refuse to participate in an encroachment on their rights, and ready themselves for future conflicts with higher offices.

Joining that fight are Oklahoma parents and civil rights organizations, several of which filed suit this year to challenge Walters’ demand that schools incorporate the Bible into lesson plans. Those lawsuits will join other cases, like an ongoing lawsuit in Louisiana, contesting the creep of enforced Christianity in public schools. 

The Christian right isn’t just injecting religion into public schools. It’s siphoning resources from public schools into private, religious, and charter schools, even attempting to establish state-backed religious academies like the publicly funded Catholic charter that Walters has championed in Oklahoma. Trump signaled further support for school privatization this week, declaring that McMahon “will fight tirelessly to expand 'Choice' to every State in America.”

But school privatization has been unpopular in practice, even in red states, as voucher programs disproportionately drain the coffers of rural school districts, to the enrichment of private academies. This month’s elections Nebraska, Kentucky, and Colorado featured ballot measures that would have supported the school privatization movement. All three were soundly defeated. Those results were notable in solidly Republican Kentucky, where voters shut down a measure that would have modified the state’s constitution to allow private and religious schools to receive public funding and tax credits. 

In conservative-leaning Nebraska, the anti-voucher outcome was even more dramatic, with voters choosing to outright repeal an unpopular $10 million voucher program that lawmakers had passed earlier in the year. Public schools belong to the people. People—as a matter of pride and survival—do not like to feel as if they are being robbed.

The right’s education policies are appealing to certain subsets of looters, anti-intellectuals, and religious hardliners. They’re appealing to bigots, revisionist historians, and parents who hope to treat children like property. But as exit polls indicate, these reactionary trends were seldom voters’ top issues when they went to the polls this month. Instead, voters tended to voice economic concerns, suggesting a perceived precarity that’s proved difficult to shake after the economic trauma and post-trauma of Covid and subsequent inflation. Many voters appear to have cast ballots for Trump seeking an economic system shock, not culture war. They’re likely to get both, and neither will be very well received.

We don’t need Trump to retake office to see his education vision in action. Politicians like Walters have already previewed it, and revealed it to be hugely unpopular. In Oklahoma this year, Walters polled at a 55 percent disapproval rate, with just 29 percent of respondents approving of his job performance. 

In the lead-up to this month’s elections, I hoped Americans would reject Trump out of memory of how stupid his first term was. The horrors, yes, but also the steady drip of grating, pointless, polemical bullshit. Well it’s going to get really dumb again. The horrors, yes, but also a superintendent demanding that students watch his Trump prayer video.

The right is not striving for academic excellence here. (Walters personally struggles to issue simple press releases without errant apostrophes.) Nor is it striving for electoral popularity. It’s making crude plays for power, at the expense of public institutions. In doing so, it risks backlash from a broader coalition than the one that elected Trump. That strikes me as not very smart.

Hey MomLeft readers! This is the second-to-last newsletter until I take a hiatus through the end of the year. I’ll leave a big roundup of resources and reading material before I go. <3

Last night our rights were on the line and repression won.

I’m not going to pretend to forecast what comes next. Republicans have already published their wishlist for the subjugation of women and the impoverishment of American families. The question of how we react, rebuild, and (please don’t let fear of cringe lingo stop you) resist is up to us.

Donald Trump is a fascist, or near enough to a fascist that the distinction is uselessly academic. But authoritarianism does not take hold in a single election, a single putsch, a single march on Rome. It needs more than a single strongman leader. Fascism demands the reproduction of hierarchical violence, downward, on every rung of every social and economic ladder. Fascism is anti-solidaristic and ruthlessly divisive, pitting caste against caste, friend against friend, and—if we let it—ourselves against our own morals. Fascism demands compliance and complacency. 

We can refuse by caring for each other.

That means going beyond the bullshit, branded “care” of lawn signs and feminism-when-convenient. We need to organize, where politicians will not, around the people who need it the most. Donate to an abortion fund. Defend a clinic. Mobilize against book-banners, protect trans kids, tell a bigot to shut the fuck up. Stand up for student activists, save a tree, keep fascists out of your spaces. Fight for your school’s budget and against the bank robbery of public education by the private “school choice” movement. Petition for better ballot measures. Unionize at work. Hold your bosses to account. Resist the criminalization of protest. Log off. Find what inspires you, beyond the atomizing effects of the internet. Volunteer locally. Organize against school board warfare. Vaccinate yourself and your kids, help a friend who needs it, refuse to retreat into the private sphere.

The right is relying on our fatigue, and I’d be lying if I said this week hasn’t been an exhausting blow. We need to continue caring, anyway. We owe it to each other.

If the 2024 presidential election has featured a November surprise, it was a Saturday night poll of Iowa voters that found Kamala Harris to be leading Donald Trump by three points in the typically red state.

Political observers have issued all the expected caveats. Yes it’s only one poll, albeit a good one. Yes, a Trump Iowa win is within the poll’s margin of error. 

Still: Harris’s gains are monumental in Iowa where Trump held an 18-point lead over Joe Biden in June. What’s changed? A more compelling Democratic candidate, to be sure. But the poll’s crosstabs revealed a stark gender divide, with Iowa women preferring Harris by a 20-point margin. Those numbers include a dramatic pro-Harris shift among independent and older women. And whether causal or coincidental, that shift tracks alongside Iowa’s implementation of a highly unpopular six-week abortion ban at the end of July.

This election is about women. That’s not just my read of countless polls that show the largest-ever gender divide in presidential polling. Both parties have made this election a referendum on women’s role in the world. In rolling back abortion rights, smearing childless women as incomplete, sexually harassing women in public life, and championing retrograde gender roles, the right has offered women a degraded position in the world.

This program stands to impoverish and kill women. To understand the stakes, we need not even revisit recent history, when women were unable to obtain credit or no-fault divorces or legal abortions. The stakes are playing out around us already. As a consequence of America’s first Trump presidency, women are dying of sepsis after being denied medical care. Women and girls who would have obtained abortions are abbreviating their dreams after being coerced into motherhood. They are poorer, with fewer options, and newly dependent on men and relatives from whom they might otherwise have sought freedom. These are not abstractions but real risks to our friends, our sisters, ourselves.

It’s little wonder, then, that in the final hours of the 2024 campaign, leading conservative voices appear less concerned about rallying Republicans writ-large than about stoking male-specific grievance and urging men to the polls. It’s little wonder that a growing babble of conservative voices have flirted with the idea of denying women’s votes or awarding them to their husbands. The GOP envisions an extractive gender hierarchy, by which men are empowered to compel women’s un- and underpaid work. And if women aren’t going to vote for that, the right is counting on men to make it reality.

On the opposite side of the aisle, voters have the opportunity to elect the nation’s first female president. And while Harris is an imperfect candidate, her presidency represents, at minimum, an opportunity to slow the bleed of women’s rights. It represents the forceful refusal of a misogynist platform and the elevation of a woman to the top of a public sphere that is constantly threatening to shut women out.

If Republicans lose this week, it will be because they took women for granted—at the polls and in our private lives.

Tomorrow I’ll take my sons to the polling station with me. They’re young and won’t remember much of the voting process. In a way, I hope there’s little for them to remember. I hope that, as men, the election of a female president will not seem like a watershed moment, but a normal episode in the course of the country’s politics. I hope tomorrow marks the start of something better, for their generation and for mine.

At a campaign rally for Donald Trump last week, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson foretold vengeance against the left via an extended metaphor about a father spanking a teenage girl.

“If you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it,” Carlson told the crowd. 

“There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in them and he’s gonna let them know … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.’”

When Trump took the stage afterward, the crowd chanted “daddy’s home” and “daddy Don.”

When Democrats call the right “weird,” this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. While Republican candidates like Trump campaign on the pretext of protecting children from sexualization by forces outside the family (and by “sexualization,” they usually mean encountering anything to do with LGBTQ+ life), a sizable percentage regard the family as a sexualized project of male domination. Trump and Carlson, both of whom have made sexual remarks about underage girls and their own daughters, typify this trend.

It’s a little tired at this point to note that Trump is gross about girls. During the 2016 election, reporters surfaced clips of Trump speaking to a young girl and remarking that “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

Of his own daughter, Trump has claimed that “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” That’s in addition to Trump’s mountain of substantiated sexual misconduct allegations by adult women with whom he has no relation.

But it’s only tired because those allegations and on-record offenses have been public for decades, with little effect on Trump’s career. Carlson, too, kept his Fox News gig in 2019 when Media Matters rediscovered old radio programs in which Carlson downplayed statutory rape within religious marriages, and made lewd comments about underage girls experimenting sexually at his daughter’s boarding. 

“If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario,” Carlson said.

Conservative men can often weather these indiscretions because patriarchal politics allow (even require) a certain degradation of women and girls. Within the wealthy circles that Trump frequented as a real estate developer, the ability to degrade women can even serve as a marker of status between men. Just last week, a former model came forward to disclose that Donald Trump had groped her in front of influential pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 1993, in what she described as a “twisted game” between two men who “were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together.”

The right’s vision of “family values” doesn’t undercut this abuse. It formalizes it through insistence on male headship over women and children who are regarded, to varying degrees, as property. Just look at how Carlson describes the varying acceptability of sexual abuse within and without families.

In a 2006 talk radio appearance, Carlson condemned felony rape charges against cult leader Warren Jeffs, who had forced children into marriage with Jeffs’ adult male followers.

“I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That's bullshit,” Carlson said.

At the time of Carlson’s remarks, Jeffs had already been sued by his nephew, who said he was five or six years old when Jeffs raped him. The criminal charges that Carlson called “bullshit” stemmed from the case of a 14-year-old girl, whom Jeffs had forced into marriage with an adult cousin. The girl testified that her husband frequently raped her, and that she survived multiple miscarriages. 

Jeffs was later found to have raped a pre-teen girl he forced into marriage. Even after this revelation, however, Carlson continued to defend Jeffs on the grounds that violence within the home was different than at the hands of strangers.

“I am not defending underage marriage at all. I just don't think it's the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child,” Carlson said on a 2009 talk radio program, adding that “the rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let's be honest about it.”

He also deployed similar language about supposed differences between the rape of a sex worker and the rape of a housewife. “It's a little more complicated than if some, you know, housewife claims she was pulled off the street and raped. It's just not the same thing,” he said in 2006.

Carlson’s comments offer a neat encapsulation of the right-wing program as it seeks to categorize family as the property of men. Carlson describes a dangerous public sphere in which women and children can be spirited off the streets by strangers, and in which women who live outside the traditional family order are low-key asking for assault. To complement this supposedly dangerous public realm, the right valorizes the male-led household as a site of protection against the corrupting influence of the outside world.

Within this matrix, sexual assault is reframed as an offense to father figures, and described in terms of theft; of property crime. And if there’s any doubt that Carlson regards wives as akin to property, here’s what he said in 2008 about a Republican political candidate who described his “trophy wife” as his favorite possession: 

“Anybody who answers ‘my trophy wife is my favorite possession’ is my hero,” Carlson said. “I don't give a shit. I'm voting for the guy.”

This system allows for all manner of abuse against women and children within the home, from “duty sex” and marital rape of wives, to corporal punishment of children. As Carlson’s creepy spanking comments suggest, the latter often straddles the line between physical and sexual abuse.

In her new book Wild Faith (excerpted this month in New York Magazine), journalist Talia Lavin interviews adults who experienced childhood spankings as sexual abuse. Multiple women, many of them raised in Evangelical cultures with a strong emphasis on modesty, recalled being made to strip in front of their fathers for spankings. Some said the experiences led to sexual trauma that has endured into their adulthoods.

“Afterwards, once he’d calmed down, he had me lay on my tummy on my bed and exposed my bare ass and spread ointment on the bruised and bloody skin,” one woman said of a beating by her father. “I couldn’t sit in a chair for some time, but the revulsion of him touching my bare ass when I was 11 or 12 years old stayed with me far longer.”

Even if parents claim spankings are unrelated to sexual domination, the adult children interviewed in Wild Faith and Harvard researchers who studied the neurological effects of spanking agreed that spanking children elicits responses similar to those produced by sexual assault.

“You see the same reactions in the brain,” a Harvard researcher said of the findings of a 2021 study on spanking. “Those consequences potentially affect the brain in areas often engaged in emotional regulation and threat detection, so that children can respond quickly to threats in the environment.”

Again, Carlson’s past remarks are clarifying, because he repeatedly invokes spanking as a sexualized punishment for adults. When describing Martha Stewart’s daughter as “cunty” (derogatory) Carlson commented in 2006 that “I just wanted to give her the spanking she so desperately needs.” And when describing a debate victory against an adult man, Carlson declared in 2006 that “I spanked Michael Moore like a bad little girl.”

A significant number of adult men want to assault and humiliate women and girls. It’s not a secret. It’s not a phenomenon that takes place underground, in shadowy cabals, as right-wing sex panics like QAnon falsely allege. It’s a fantasy that they feel comfortable describing at a televised rally. It’s an entire ordering theory of politics for these men. And when they want to threaten violent repression of their political enemies, they point to this scene of acceptable violence: they envision a father spanking a teenage girl.

In conversations with an undercover reporter from the British organization Hope Not Hate, a leader of the so-called “pro-natalist” movement gave away the game.

“I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” said a former head of the non-profit group Pronatalist.org. She went on three times to refer to her work as eugenics. 

The pro-natalist movement, particularly the outlandish couple behind Pronatalist.org, sometimes launders its birth-rate panics through gentler language about improving outcomes for all families, regardless of demographics. Behind closed doors, that language changes. At last year’s NatalCon, for instance, the mostly-male speakers described themselves as engaged in a battle to out-breed their ideological and demographic rivals. 

An ascendant wing of the movement takes the idea of selective breeding to its obvious—if pseudoscientific—ends. Hope Not Hate revealed a dense network of racists and pro-natalists behind an up-and-coming gene-testing company that purports to let wealthy couples screen and select embryos for their potential intelligence. That company joins others, many with links to conservative megadonor Peter Thiel, in suggesting that their technologies can be used to create ultra-optimized babies. And while the science of selecting embryos for intelligence is dubious at best, these companies are helping the pro-natalist movement give eugenics a 21st century rebrand.

“When we talk to reporters we’re very, ‘Oh this isn’t just for the elites,’” Malcolm Collins, one of founders of Pronatalist.org told an undercover Hope Not Hate investigator, “but, in truth, we do target the elites unfortunately.”

Malcolm and his wife Simone, with whom he runs his pro-natalist organization, said they selected their own embryos for potential intelligence through screening from the secretive biotech company PolygenX, which currently only offers services to vetted customers, at a quoted price of $50,000. A second Hope Not Hate investigation found PolygenX to have worked closely with avowed advocates for eugenics, including one who was revealed in a data leak to have purchased Nazi propaganda posters and an anti-immigrant novel by a neo-Nazi singer.

The pro-natalist movement seldom voices these views so explicitly, and many of the people featured in Hope Not Hate’s investigations denied affiliation with the racist right. Nevertheless, a new field of fertility tech companies has attracted far-right funding with wink-wink suggestions of optimizing genetics for the ultra-rich.

Thiel is a frequent presence in these circles. Simone Collins is the former managing director of Dialog, an exclusive, Thiel-founded networking group. Noor Siddiqui, the founder of the embryo testing startup Orchid likewise found her start in Silicon Valley with a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. Though Siddiqui and Orchid publicly deny that the company has claimed to be able to test for intelligence, multiple sources told The Information this year that Siddiqui has privately claimed to be able to measure embryos’ potential IQ.

Thiel has likewise backed Nucleus Genomics, a startup that claims to be able to test genetics for IQ. This fall, Nucleus expressed interest in acquiring 23andMe, the financially embattled DNA testing giant. 

Elsewhere in more explicitly political circles, Thiel has bankrolled the rise of his former employee J.D. Vance, the pro-natalist politician who this year became the Republican vice presidential nominee. And Thiel has dumped money into “28,” a menstrual-tracking company by the anti-feminist magazine Evie, which devotes an inordinate percent of its output to denigrating hormonal or IUD birth control.

The relentless funding of upmarket baby-perfecting tech is by no means a promise that these products work. The menstrual-tracking methods endorsed by Evie, for instance, are far less effective than other forms of birth control.

Instead these funding rounds are investment in an ideology. They assert a eugenicist ideal: that genetics dictate one’s future, and that Some People (here, some but not all pro-natalists might hedge their language) are just destined for superiority.

For ideologues who believe in a society led by wealthy, white men, this pro-natalist program is a bargain deal: one that encourages the elevation of already-powerful men and pushes women of all strata back into the domestic sphere.

Israeli forces bombed a Gaza school on Sunday night, and a tent encampment outside a Gaza hospital on Monday morning.

Both locations were serving as shelters for displaced Palestinians. At least 20 people, including children, were massacred in the school bombing. Footage from Monday’s hospital attack shows a person in the rubble of a hospital bed, burning alive. You can hear children screaming.

One year into Israel’s war on Gaza, there is no apparent upper limit on Palestinian suffering that the U.S. will not merely allow, but enable. In the New York Times last week, 44 medical workers said they had seen multiple cases of Palestinian children, younger than 13, shot in the chest or head. At least 16,480 Palestinian children were killed between Oct. 7, 2023 and Aug. 19, 2024, according to Palestinian officials. At least 17,000 children have lost parents in the war. 

These attacks are facilitated by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, including direct transfers of U.S. weapons to Israel. For the U.S. government, these thousands of children’s lives are not enough to merit even modest measures of restraint, like conditioning aid to Israel. What red lines can possibly remain?

There are, of course, laws against arming countries with clear patterns of human rights violations. The trouble is that top U.S. officials have repeatedly dismissed internal reports that found the U.S. to be breaking those rules. This month, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has waved off three reports from government agencies, all of which argued to suspend weapons transfers to Israel on legal and humanitarian grounds.

One of those reports, written by the U.S. Agency for International Development, concluded in April that Israel was deliberately blocking food and medicine from entering Gaza, leading to a polio outbreak and widespread famine in which dozens of children had starved to death.

The existence of this report, many months and thousands of children’s deaths ago, makes the U.S. government response all the more inexcusable. On Sunday, amid news that Israel has blocked food from entering northern Gaza for the past two weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted that Israel must “do more” to help Gaza logistically.

“The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks,” Harris wrote. “Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need. Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.”

International humanitarian law must be respected… or what?

The Associated Press reports that the two-week food blockade is part of an Israeli policy to starve out northern Gaza: a plan that “could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.” We have long been beyond any pretense of a legal war, and Harris has already indicated that she will not condition military aid to Israel.

At this point, I struggle to write about Gaza. The suffering defies scale, and words feel inadequate. They feel like platitudes. In May, the writer Rozina Ali chronicled the onslaught through the superlative language, month over month, by which experts have attempted to describe an ever-worsening conflict “that has surpassed their records, expectations, and imagination, and a scale of destruction in the face of which comparisons break down.”

By the end of October 2023, for instance, a humanitarian aid group remarked that “the number of children reported killed in just three weeks in Gaza is more than the number killed in armed conflict globally—across more than 20 countries—over the course of a whole year, for the last three years.”

I cannot conjure a clearer moral duty than to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children. I don’t know what is left when words fail.

Happy Friday, moms and honorary moms. Fall is in the air. Leaves are on the ground. School boards are back in session and goddamn are they already producing some bangers.

In the spirit of catching up on reading (October always gives me the nagging feeling that I’ve forgotten a homework assignment), here’s what I’ve been studying from a very busy week in the parentsphere:

-Did you watch the vice-presidential debate? I’m so sorry. The Tuesday night faceoff saw Republican candidate JD Vance deliver a yassified (but materially unchanged) version of Donald Trump’s campaign stump. That meant lying about some of the campaign’s most unpopular stances, especially about reproductive rights. While attempting to portray himself as a compassionate moderate on abortion, Vance claimed to have never supported an abortion ban. This, Vanity Fair notes, is an outright lie.

Per VF: “In 2022, while running for Senate in Ohio, Vance said on a podcast, ‘I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.’ During that same campaign, he stated on his website for all the world to see that he was ‘100 percent pro-life’ and that he was in favor of ‘eliminating abortion.’ In fact, those words were on Vance’s website until July of this year, when Trump announced the senator as his running mate.”

Instead of outright promoting abortion bans on the debate stage, Vance used weasel words like “minimum national standards” for abortion access. As Abortion, Every Day author Jessica Valenti has previously written, the post-Roe anti-choice lobby has increasingly disguised unpopular abortion bans with euphemisms about “limits” and “minimums.” Of course, as Valenti writes in her debate fact-check, a 15-week “limit” on abortions is identical to the type of 15-week national ban suggested by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. Such a ban would be devastating to women’s freedom and women’s health; though abortions after 15 weeks are relatively rare, common reasons for obtaining them include medical risks to women’s lives.

Throughout the debate, Vance took a patronizing approach to people who wish to terminate pregnancies. When describing a friend who obtained an abortion because she was in an abusive relationship and a child “would have destroyed her life,” Vance spoke in bland terms about Republicans earning women’s trust and making it easier for them to have babies. He pulled the same rhetoric when describing people who obtain abortions because they cannot afford children. But no amount of feigned compassion—condescension, really—will change the fact that Vance’s policies would have trapped his friend in an abusive relationship, and would trap poor women in poverty. People who obtain abortions are not misguided. They, better than any candidate, know what’s best for their bodies and their futures.

-But the GOP knows it has an abortion messaging problem. A leaked excerpt of Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir shows the former first lady defending abortion rights. 

“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” reads the excerpt. Melania goes on to argue that “[r]estricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

Exactly, lady whose husband has been instrumental in dismantling reproductive choice. At the Guardian, Moira Donegan gives Melania’s comments a well deserved side-eye.

Donegan writes: “It could well be that these statements from Melania Trump are sincere. But that does not mean that her choice to make them now, at a moment when they are maximally politically beneficial to her husband, is not cynical. The Trump campaign, after all, has been frantically trying to project an image of moderation and reasonableness on abortion rights over the past few weeks, responding both to the overwhelming voter support for the issue in elections held since the Dobbs decision, and to a changed race in which their new Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, is dramatically more comfortable and effective at campaigning on abortion rights than her incumbent predecessor, Joe Biden.”

Want proof that this is conveniently timed messaging? Donald Trump gave his wife’s book a positive blurb.

-As with Israel’s attacks on Gaza, children are among the victims of new Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon. More than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed by the Israeli campaign, and more than a million people have fled their homes. Survivors in Lebanon told New York Magazine of the ongoing campaign’s devastation of entire families. Alaa, a 26-year-old accountant living in an epicenter of bombing told New York:

“On the first day of Israel’s bombings, my cousins were killed. I will never forget the sound of the explosion. My uncle’s wife, their daughter, and my cousin’s wife and her three children were all martyred. They had gone to pick up some clothing before evacuating. They were at the door when the bomb hit. My uncle passed away long ago and my cousin works abroad. The bomb only killed women and children. The house was flattened. Only rubble was left. They were shredded so badly that civil defense found only body parts. They put them in a plastic bag together in a single grave. The same day, another shell hit our neighbors’ house. The entire family was wiped out. That was the most difficult day of my life.”

Israel’s strikes on Gaza—and recently, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—continue amid an outright refusal by U.S. politicians to halt or even place conditions on aid and arms sales to Israel. And despite public comments about working toward a ceasefire, President Joe Biden reportedly told allies last week that he did not believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel’s stated target in Lebanon. (Netanyahu recently rejected one such ceasefire proposal.) 

New reporting from ProPublica on Friday reveals that State Department officials have internally argued to limit or entirely cut off weapons sales to Israel over the past year, citing the use of American bombs in civilian massacres. Last week, ProPublica reported that two leading U.S. agencies on humanitarian aid concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked food and medicine from entering Gaza. Those agencies recommended the U.S. halt weapons sales to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected those findings.

-Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is at it again in his apparent crusade to dismantle his state’s secular public education system. In June, Walters ordered that in grades 5-12, “every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.” The mandate sparked pushback from civil rights groups, as well as from Oklahoma school districts that said they will not alter their lesson plans to shoehorn in bible studies.

Last week, Walters requested $3 million in public funds to purchase bibles. Walters said those funds would join another $3 million that his department had earmarked for bibles. “This would give us the ability to utilize $6 million in less than two years to ensure that the Bible hasn’t been driven out of Oklahoma classrooms, and would be a significant step for the State of Oklahoma to ensure that we’re not allowing the left to censor American history,” Walters said last week.

Okay, a couple problems here: the $3 million that Walters claims to already have is complete AWOL. It’s not listed in any appropriation or budget request, leading Oklahomans to formally inquire what the hell Walters is talking about. On Thursday, four civil rights groups filed a joint open records request to determine the source of the education department’s extra millions, especially when many schools in the state are under-resourced.

Then there’s the matter of where those millions are going. On Monday, Walters opened the bidding process for vendors who might supply the state with 55,000 bibles. The bid documents included some oddly specific criteria. According to a new report from the Oklahoman:

“[V]endors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

“A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters. 

“But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.”

That’s one way for a status-hungry state politician to climb the national GOP ladder.

-Speaking of misuse of public school funds, let’s check in with one of Pennsylvania’s more notoriously anti-LGBTQ+ school board leaderships. York County’s South Western School District has cut a massive window into its gender-neutral bathroom so that people can watch students inside. Seriously, look at this thing.

The South Western School District, which saw far-right school board members win a low-turnout election, consulted with a conservative Christian law group in deciding to cut windows into the gender-neutral bathroom (and only the gender-neutral bathroom). The board approved $8,700 for the project.

Bathrooms aren’t just for toilets. As anyone who’s attended school—or hell, even worked in an open-plan office—knows, a bathroom trip can be a brief, merciful moment to one’s self. School children feel relentlessly perceived, perhaps more so today amid new security theater measures. They might enter metal detectors on their way into school, face strict regulations about backpacks or be made to carry clear bags. Their school might be one of the growing number to use AI security cameras in a technologically dubious attempt to stop school shootings. Sometimes you want two seconds of solitude. Sometimes you want to vent to a friend in relative private. Sometimes you genuinely do just want to piss but you don’t want people watching feet under stalls.

Ideally, kids could use bathrooms that correspond to their gender. The half-measure of “gender-identity” bathrooms (which have sprung up in several politically contentious Pennsylvania districts) has added a confusing calculation to what should be an untroubled bodily function. But cutting a window into a “gender-identity” bathroom is a bold message to the kids who need it. It tells them they are not trusted. It tells them they are aberrant. It tells them they are being surveilled.

-Anti-trans policies are a danger to kids’ lives. A new study in Nature found significant increases in suicide attempts by young transgender and non-binary people in states that have passed anti-transl legislation. In The Present Age, Parker Molloy breaks down the findings:

“The findings are nothing short of alarming. For trans and non-binary youth aged 13–17, there was a 7–72% increase in past-year suicide attempts in states that enacted anti-transgender laws relative to states that did not. For the broader age group of 13–24, the increase was 38–44%. These aren't just statistics; they're real lives being affected by legislation that targets some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

“The study found ‘minimal evidence of an anticipatory effect in the time periods leading up to the enactment of the laws.’ In plain English, this means that the harm isn't just coming from the debates or the introduction of these bills—it's the actual enactment that's causing the spike in suicide attempts. The laws are the problem.

-In the Washington Post, Casey Parks delivers a difficult portrait of one transgender youth caught up in Florida’s anti-trans crackdown. Elizabeth, a 16-year-old transgender girl who was class president and homecoming princess, saw her life upended when a conservative school board member reported her for playing volleyball. (MomLeft readers might remember this school board member, Daniel Foganholi, who participated in Moms for Liberty events and, when he lost his most recent election this summer, was appointed within days to a state-level education position by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.)

-I hope you make time for this new excerpt of journalist Talia Lavin’s forthcoming book Wild Faith, in which she investigates the Evangelical fixation on corporal punishment of children, and how that doctrine of supreme parental authority has dovetailed into today’s “parental rights” movement.

Would abolition of washing machines lead to greater human freedom?

This was the question put forth on Twitter this month by a Dutch scholar, who suggested that degrowth—that is, the program of slowing economic output and capital accumulation, and instead investing in more environmental and human-friendly causes—should involve forgoing certain domestic technologies. Namely, washing machines. The tweet was almost universally dunked on (and if you’ve already read some of those dunks, I apologize, I was traveling and unable to dunk at the time). Environmentalists noted that washing machines produce almost negligible emissions. Feminists and labor scholars recalled that hand-washed laundry ranks among the most backbreaking and time-consuming work typically relegated to women, and that washing machines freed women to pursue their lives. Other degrowth advocates questioned whether opposing washing machines was even a degrowth position at all.

Normally I wouldn’t spend so much time on what is broadly understood as a bad take. But nostalgia for women’s unassisted manual labor is having a moment right now. Its most obvious advocates are right-wing trad influencers who urge women to forgo paid work in favor of highly stylized labor as homemakers. But figures from the self-described left are also getting in on the game. We see it in woo-woo womanhood influencers, in orthodox advocates for “natural” (ie. unmedicated) birth, and yes, in a specific brand of environmentalist who seems a little too concerned with the aesthetics of future women’s work. 

Uniting these ideologues and their ostensible enemies on the right is the desire to return to a mythic past whose foremost quality appears to be a pointlessly brutal and restrictive work life for women.

Control of women’s labor has always been political, as evidenced in the very history of laundry.

David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist, describes women’s labor (and sometimes entire women, themselves) as acting as a unit of financial measurement in medieval Europe. In early medieval Ireland, Graeber writes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, enslaved women (and only women) were referred to as units of account in monetary transactions, used to record finances and debts, even though the actual practice of slavery had long since died off. The reference to women’s forced labor served as a marker of value, which would then be paid off in cows or silver or an agreed-upon substitute.

In early economies like these, which were transitioning from communitarian to more commercial forms, coinage was scarce, informal, or nonexistent. Wealth and power in these patriarchal systems was measured in one’s ability to extract what early legal codes referred to as another person’s honor, often in the form of making that person do one’s most undesirable chores.

Medieval Welsh legal code was even more specific, decreeing that anyone who attacked a bishop or abbot would be forced to endure one of the greatest humiliations: “let him pay seven pounds; and a female of his kindred to be a washerwoman, as a disgrace to the kindred, and to serve as a memorial to the payment of the honor price,” one Iron Age Welsh law read.

“A washerwoman was the lowest of servants and the one turned over in this case was to serve for life,” Graeber writes. “She was, in effect, reduced to slavery. Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot’s honor.”

Laundry, in particular, was viewed as a degrading chore. It’s not difficult to imagine why. The tasks of hauling and heating water, of scrubbing and beating and hot-ironing are lousy and often literally shitty work.

Fittingly, when those with wealth or power can offload laundry to others, they do. This wasn’t just true of medieval men. The U.S. labor movement owes much to Black washerwomen in Mississippi, who kickstarted a wave of strikes and unionization in 1866, journalist Kim Kelly writes in Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor. 

Those women, many of whom had been enslaved just one year earlier, were pushed to wash clothes for meager rates. “The washerwoman’s wages were kept so low that even poor white families could afford to send their laundry out for Black women to clean,” Kelly writes.

The pay and conditions were so intolerable that Jackson’s laundresses formed Mississippi’s first trade union, the Washerwomen of Jackson, in 1866 and went on strike for higher wages, going so far as to storm a notoriously exploitative steam laundry shop, carry out strike-breakers, and board up the shop’s windows and doors.

Coercive laundry jobs with insufficient pay: universally hated throughout the historical record.

Other domestic work is similarly offloaded along lines of gender, race, and class, sometimes with support from legal codes like Welsh law and American chattel slavery, and sometimes from the inertia of privilege. Women are (unjustly!) expected to take on more childcare and housekeeping duties than men. In order to achieve parity with men, women usually have to find someone else (usually of lesser means) to take up their domestic work. It’s something of a pyramid scheme. There’s a reason this month’s New Yorker cover, which depicted women of color working as nannies for white children, raised so many hackles. It’s an uncomfortably accurate depiction of the way childcare can map social and economic hierarchies, even among people who oppose inequality.

Inventions like the laundry machine change the equation. With more time to engage in other pursuits, women can upgrade their ambitions. They can pursue more education, more leisure, and better-paying jobs that they actually enjoy.

It’s conspicuous, then, that the present anti-feminist backlash coincides with calls to abandon the technological tools that freed women’s hands and schedules.

On the left, those calls might look like efforts to deride washing machines as bourgeois indulgence. (The original tweeter behind the washing machine discourse also raised the possibility that communal hand-laundry centers might become social hubs, to which I say no, my social hubs are the places I go with friends when we’re not scrubbing marinara stains out of kids’ shirts.)

On the right, the anti-tech agenda often involves eroticizing obsolete forms of female labor, using images of pastoral bliss to equate homestead-style toil with a kind of essential femininity. Think large broods of home-birthed, homeschooled children, and pointlessly complicated “from scratch” recipe tutorials, all of which leave women too busy to achieve any measure of independence. 

And look, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the degrowth argument. It’s hard to look at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, for instance, and conclude that we’re justified in driving up worker productivity rates and churning out cheap plastic goods in order to juice the quarterly earnings for some corporate conglomerate. Likewise I can find some appealing visual elements in trad TikTok’s vague anti-consumerist aesthetic, even if many trad influencers are just as guilty of selling garbage products designed to help fans cosplay a simple life. 

The throughline of these movements is their appeal to the many people who feel a nagging fatigue with living on the capitalist treadmill; to those doing work that they suspect is pointless, on behalf of people with more money and power than them. 

This is a reasonable fatigue. The trick is not to replicate it in new hierarchies that once again make women’s labor a form of currency under male control. The past isn’t an escape. It’s a palliative. There is no return, only a future that we can shape, if we’re not too busy doing laundry.

On Friday morning, two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio were evacuated over undisclosed threats. A local middle school was also closed for the day on police advisory. Two nearby schools were closed the previous day for bomb threats.

The shutdowns came days after Springfield was thrust into the national spotlight by leading Republican politicians—Donald Trump and JD Vance among them—who falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating Springfield-area pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump alleged in his Tuesday presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Vance expanded the attack on Friday, linking Springfield’s immigrant community to “communicable diseases” and “crime,” in an immigration omen for “every town in our country.” Even from a campaign that built its brand on xenophobia, this is pretty fascist shit. It’s borderline blood libel, and creates a very frightening opening for attacks on migrants in Ohio and elsewhere.

But first, as recent far-right panics go, it’s hurting kids.

The morning after the presidential debate, some Haitian families in Springfield kept their children home for safety, the Haitian Times reports. School closures soon followed as local districts and municipal buildings received bomb threats. 

School bomb threats are not new to America’s political scene. Threats and outright school burnings targeted Black students’ education in the Reconstruction era and again during desegregation. But they’ve seen a resurgence in recent years, especially as part of an anti-LGBTQ+ reaction. Last September I counted at least 47 cases of schools and libraries closing due to violent threats over the previous year. Many of those threats explicitly referenced books (usually for children) about gender, sexuality, and sometimes race.

K-12 schools are probably America’s most visible public institutions. On a purely cynical level, anonymous school bomb threats make some sense from bigots who want to put the public in an ideological stranglehold. A threat to a school is frightening, memorable, and stands to disrupt an entire town’s schedule if classes are canceled for the day.

But there’s something more at play when homophobes shut down a school over a queer-friendly comic book, or even when Donald Trump falsely claims that immigrants will eat your dog. These attacks are corruptions of care that prey on adult notions of protecting one’s charge (one’s child or one’s hypothetical child or even one’s labradoodle). They warp parental obligations into ideas of possession and paranoia. 

School SWATters on the right might claim—and even believe it themselves!—that they’re protecting kids. Their justification comes in describing rival races and ideologies as polluting schools or neighborhoods, just by their presence. Just look at the way Vance describes Springfield’s Haitian community in the terms of an infection, or the way book-banners describe LGBTQ-friendly books as “indoctrination.” The right tells followers that they have a responsibility to fight for children. Conveniently, that crusade means traumatizing and controlling very young people who cannot fight back.

On Tuesday, shortly before the presidential debate, the parents of Aiden Clark spoke at a Springfield town meeting. Clark was 11 last year when he died in a traffic crash with a Haitian immigrant. The boy’s death received renewed attention this month, with Vance claiming on Twitter that Clark had been murdered (he wasn’t).

In brief remarks, Clark’s father condemned “morally bankrupt” politicians who have weaponized their family tragedy. “They have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain,” the boy’s father said.

“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.

“The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate.”

Late on Tuesday, after Vice President Kamala Harris’s fairly indisputable trouncing of Donald Trump in their first presidential debate, pop star Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Harris. In an Instagram post, Swift also supported “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body,” and signed off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” The signature was a nod to GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s weird refrain of denouncing opponents (women, usually) as “childless cat ladies” whose lack of children should (in his arguments) make them less eligible for political participation. 

Good, normal post from Swift. Now let’s see how the most influential freaks on the pro-natalist right responded. 

Shortly after Swift’s Instagram post, Trump supporter Elon Musk tweeted “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

It’s probably telling that a leading figure of the pro-natalist movement regards pregnancy—and let’s be clinical: the act of being inseminated—as degrading. Because that's what's going on with this tweet. Musk is discussing very obviously unwelcome sex acts against a woman, in retaliation for her endorsing a political candidate he doesn’t like. 

I put this kind of tweet in the same category as unactionable online rape threats. Both are regularly deployed to police women’s speech online, and both are reflexively downplayed by misogynists since, ugh, calm down, it’s just words, he’s not actually gonna do it, you hysterical broad. But like a catcall on the street, the primary function is to disturb and demean and to remind women—lest they become too comfortable or too successful—of the ordering system of gendered violence that underwrites a good part of our everyday lives. 

It’s the pointed end of the ideology Musk endorses, which preaches against birth control and for huge increases in reproductive labor, from which men—Musk is a father of at least 12 children by multiple women who have since criticized him as a partner—are overwhelmingly excused. And it’s something of a mask-off moment when pregnancy, which pro-natalists uphold as women’s almost mystical purpose, is invoked as punishment.

Maybe Swift wants to have children someday. That is sincerely none of anyone’s business. But, as I’ve written before, right-wing men are a little psychotic about Swift’s family choices.

I suspect this is because Swift’s celebrity status is such that, in the commentariat's mind, she’s almost a stand-in for young, white heterosexual women. She’s ultra-normative, pretty and palatable. She is what the right claims (at least publicly) to want women to be. She is almost a barometer for social norms. But as she’s aged, she’s stayed true to the demographic she exemplifies and, like many of them, has pursued a demanding career while remaining childless at The Big Age Of 34. 

This frank statement of preferences by a very famous woman—the archetypal millennial woman!—has caused conservative men’s brains to leak out of their ears, especially when Swift makes it explicit in the form of a presidential endorsement. It’s little coincidence that when the right praises Swift, it’s often for what they describe as her modesty (and here we run into some really gross comparisons, whereby Black pop stars are contrasted as promiscuous), and that when the right seeks to discipline her, they immediately attempt to degrade her sexually.

I don’t know if Swift’s endorsement of Harris will swing many voters. But I know that men like Musk view Swift’s choices as a referendum by young women, writ-large.

“Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy,” Musk tweeted Wednesday morning.

He’s talking about a parasitic infection transmissible by cats. Childless cat ladies, in other words, are a danger to democracy. But Musk has also this month shared a 4chan post that argued “people who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men)” are unable to truly think and that therefore they should not be allowed to vote. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

That’s not democracy and Musk doesn’t value democracy, only domination. The same goes for his view of motherhood.

Can the childcare crisis be resolved by prodding family members into staying home with the kids? Well how about by imposing tariffs on imports?

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance offered these suggestions this week when questioned on how their administration would reduce childcare costs. I’m surprised that the GOP ticket’s chosen interviewers even asked about childcare at all, as the right is broadly disinterested in professional care. The conservative worldview encourages women to stay at home with children, and Vance has derided the problem’s easiest solution, universal childcare, as “class war against normal people.” 

Of course they don’t have ready answers to the childcare affordability crisis; they don’t want them. Their platform depends on austerity and women’s economic oppression. But these guys have a very good shot at winning the White House in November, so let’s take their comments seriously for a second. 

Here’s what Trump said on Thursday when asked whether he would commit to legislation that would make childcare more affordable. (It’s long but I’m pasting it in full because editing for clarity really obscures how goofy this is.)

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

"But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.

"Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in.

"We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

So we’re… going to increase tariffs to the tune of trillions of dollars? And use those proceeds to fund childcare? I really don’t think that’s likely, for a host of reasons, including that, to make “trillions” by taxing imports, Trump would need to impose something like a 50 percent tariff on all imported goods. He’s suggested a 20 percent tariff on all imports, and a tariff of 60 percent or more on Chinese goods, which economists describe (I’m paraphrasing here) as catastrophically stupid. (Here’s a good breakdown on what the tax hikes would cost typical American families.)

I also just don’t think Trump is serious about dumping federal funding into childcare, as evidenced by his previous failures to do so. I think this is the word slop of a candidate with rapidly diminishing mental faculties who uses a single, blunt policy proposal as a fallback when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or potentially even where he is.

But Trump’s never marketed himself as a policy wonk. That role falls to Vance, whom supporters describe as something like a Dark Enlightenment Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s what Vance said this week when asked how he would make childcare more affordable.

“One of the things that we can do is make it easier for family models to choose, or for families to choose whatever model they want, right?” Vance told interviewer Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA event. “So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that that, you know, maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.”

Vance also suggested that more people want to work in childcare but that licensing restrictions are dissuading them from doing so. “Don’t force every early child care specialist to go and get a six-year college degree,” Vance said.

This is a bad answer on several fronts. Many children don’t have grandparents willing and able to provide full-time, free childcare, which is genuine work, not merely “helping out a little bit.” And rather than requiring a six-year degree, licensing requirements are actually pretty scant for daycare jobs. The actual understaffing issues in childcare usually relate to the industry’s notoriously low pay, the often-long hours, and the outright difficulty of looking after lots of small children. (I’ve done it and there’s a reason I prefer email jobs!)

After public criticism, Vance had another crack at it in a Twitter reply. Vance wrote:

“1) Many don't fully appreciate how federal (and state) policy penalizes particular family models--particularly in-home care and kinship care--over others. That's true of the Child Care Development Block Grant and the Dependent Care Tax Credit, though in different ways for each. So yes, parents or grandparents might not be able to help, but they might *want* to, and for those families federal policy should not be forcing one particular family model. We should try to encourage whatever is best for each individual family. Right now we don't: we try to force or at least subsidize one model on every family in this country. And if you open up kinship and other options for families, you will relieve some pressure on the daycare system in this country. 

2) If you subsidize something but don't increase the supply of it, you're going to raise prices without getting an increase in quality. This is what's so broken about Kamala Harris's approach to child care. You can't just write a check if there aren't additional providers. So while I obviously support health and safety regulations, there are some absurd regulations out there that restrict the supply of child care providers--from kinship providers to local churches. Just because the interests of the market are not always aligned with families--I agree and have said so myself!--doesn't mean that all government regulations make sense. 

3) Finally, we have to consider the broken educational pathways that exist for a whole host of professions. A consistent thing I've heard is that there is great demand for a lot of jobs, but a totally broken pathway for young people to get into those jobs. It's true of plumbers and advanced manufacturing, but it's also true of child care providers.”

But this isn’t actually suggesting anything tangible, either! Vance’s allusions to “penalizing” policies are just references to public programs that help families afford childcare. He’s not even arguing here to expand those programs to fund family members who care for children at home! He’s just playing the hits by describing daycare as insidious (“force,” lol) while suggesting in-home family care as an uncompensated alternative.

Would it be nice if the government offered more funding for people to pursue childcare training, as is alluded to in Vance’s third point, if you squint? Sure, but again: training requirements for childcare providers are usually pretty relaxed. (I’ll use myself as an example again: iirc, I took a couple days’ courses and was good to go in New York state.)

The best way to increase supply is the same way we keep costs down for parents. We need high-quality, federally funded childcare that pays workers a living wage.

We’ve already seen this experiment play out recently, in small form. Under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, the federal government allocated $24 billion to child care centers, which went on to employ more than 1 million workers and care for as many as 9.6 million children.

Congress allowed the plan to expire in 2023, leading to daycare closures.

Hey gang! Happy early Labor Day! I’ll be on the road until the middle of next week, so this is the last newsletter for about a week and a half. See you in September!

I’m not a math teacher, but maybe someone in education can tell me: is six out of 23 a good test score?

For two years, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped right-wing candidates reshape the state’s public schools, with DeSantis endorsing allies from groups like Moms for Liberty in school board races. In 2022, the first year DeSantis (or any Florida governor, for that matter) endorsed school board candidates, 25 of his 30 picks won their elections. This year, however, DeSantis and MfL appear to have lost their juice. In last week’s elections, only six of Desantis’s 23 endorsements won their races. Those results include incumbent school board members who successfully defeated challenges from MfL candidates, as well as non-MfL candidates who flipped at least one school board that was previously controlled by an MfL majority.

After an embarrassing failed presidential bid by DeSantis, and a sex scandal by an MfL founder, has Florida’s most prominent pro-censorship group lost its juice?

So far, MfL’s best electoral cycles have been its earliest. In 2021 and 2022, the brand-new group launched a national blitz of school board campaigns, rolling out professionalized branding and emotional appeals in often-sleepy local elections. In 2022, the group claimed to have elected approximately half of its 500-plus school board candidates. Florida, where the group was founded and where it maintains its strongest government connections, saw MfL’s best results. According to the group’s self-published data, 80 percent of its Florida candidates won their 2022 elections (their next-most successful state was South Carolina, with a 62 percent win rate).

But subsequent cycles appeared to show MfL slipping. Last November, the group ran fewer candidates, in more hotly contested races against opponents who had specifically campaigned against the divisive right-wing group. Approximately 35 percent of MfL candidates won those races. 

While it’s still difficult to draw clean comparisons across election cycles (MfL strongholds like Florida didn’t have school board elections in 2023, and the full tally of Florida elections won’t be clear until November runoffs), early indicators suggest MfL is in its flop era. And DeSantis’s endorsement—which two years ago was almost tantamount to a coronation in school board politics—appears to have depreciated in value.

MfL might be experiencing some Florida-specific issues. Its founders are Floridians who have remained hyper-visible in the state’s education scene, sometimes for the worse. Founder Bridget Ziegler was accused of hypocrisy when, despite helping found an anti-LGBTQ+ group, she was embroiled in a queer sex scandal. Another MfL founder, Tina Descovich, was appointed by DeSantis to a state ethics board, but had her confirmation denied by the state senate. MfL also became a public face of Florida’s aggressive censorship campaigns, which were enabled by DeSantis’s passage of laws that severely limited students’ access to information on race and gender.

Florida remains MfL’s greatest success story—and possibly its own worst advertising. Most Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools, new polling from the Knight Foundation this month finds. Most Americans also believe school officials are qualified to select appropriate books.

MfL has linked itself to symbols of a politically divisive era—to empty libraries and raucous school board meetings—with which Americans are increasingly fatigued.

That’s not to say MfL is going away. The group is well funded, politically connected, and has established one of the right’s best new ground games, with chapters targeting individual counties. The group still had a prominent place at last month’s Republican National Convention. Their town hall event didn’t draw the biggest names, true, but the group flaunted a close relationship with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative powerhouse behind the Project 2025 plan for a new Republican presidential administration. 

And even as DeSantis faces his own flops (remember when he ran for president? lol) he’s still successfully driving Florida’s education system to the right.

Though only six of his preferred candidates won their races last week, two were in Duval County, handing MfL members a majority on the county’s school board. Even a losing MfL-linked candidate will take office. Daniel Foganholi, who participated in a MfL candidates forum, lost his race for the Broward County school board last week. (Foganholi was previously appointed to the Broward school board by DeSantis, but was not among DeSantis’s 23 endorsed candidates this year.) Three days after Foganholi’s defeat last week, DeSantis appointed him to the Florida Board of Education.

Other changes to Florida’s education system are less dramatic than elections, but no less consequential.

DeSantis’s program of school vouchers has accelerated a drain on rural schools, a new Associated Press report finds. The loss of resources and students means some Florida public schools will close, further eroding the surrounding towns.

“I hate it that it’s closing. This is my heart. This is our community. … This is us,” one fourth grade teacher in a school in Florida’s panhandle told the AP. “Who wants to move into a community that doesn’t have a school that’s close by?”

Last month, Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal tweeted a remix of the “hello, human resources?!” image macro, which is used to illustrate two very similar messages receiving starkly different reactions, based on the person delivering the message. In one panel, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren gets an appreciative response by suggesting tax credits for families. In the other panel, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance elicits alarm by suggesting that childless people should pay more taxes. Look, I’m just going to post the meme, one sec:

It’s a good commentary on Vance’s ability to make reasonably popular sentiments sound like the ramblings of an incel forum. Tone matters, especially when Vance tries courting liberals with more conventionally Democratic policies like child tax credits (he suggested a $5,000 credit earlier this month, but has also suggested that childless people shouldn’t hold office). Strategically, Vance is probably correct to hitch his wagon to proposals like child tax credits, which poll very well across party lines. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is waging a corresponding campaign to sell similar legislation (including a newly proposed $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns) to voters who might otherwise regard her as too liberal.

While Vance sometimes dresses up his right-wing populism with left-sounding terms, Harris and running mate Tim Walz have spent recent weeks rebranding liberal policies with traditionally conservative language. That’s especially true when the Harris campaign talks about family. When Harris unveiled a series of populist economic proposals on Friday, she described them not as combatting income inequality or leveling the economic playing field, but as giving Americans “an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children.”

The question is whether this rhetorical reframing works—and whether it risks ceding argumentative ground in races to come.

In Vox this week, writer Eric Levitz highlights Harris’s careful wording.

“[S]he has made the case for liberal issue positions in philosophically conservative terms — framing her social policies as attempts to safeguard individual freedom from government overreach and her fiscal agenda as, among other things, a plan for helping strivers ‘build intergenerational wealth,’” Levitz writes.

This tactic is not limited to Harris, or even her campaign’s economic platform. Walz has achieved some of his most viral sound bites by defending reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ children with language that one might expect from a get-off-my-lawn libertarian. “Mind your own damn business” is a headtrip of a Democratic slogan, but it’s been one of Walz’s most consistent applause lines on the campaign trail. (The New York Times also pointed to the tonal shift last week, writing that “Democrats are making an aggressive new effort to challenge Republican claims to the language and symbolism of liberty.”)

Democrats have reason to believe this approach might win over center-right voters. As Levitz notes, a 2019 Stanford University study found conservatives to be more accepting of progressive policies if framed in the language of “concerns like patriotism, family, and respect for tradition—as opposed to more liberal value concerns like equality and social justice.”

The Stanford researchers found conservatives to be highly reactive to this superficial reframing—liberals, not so much.

“Among conservative participants, a conservative value framing – as opposed to a liberal value framing – resulted in a 13-point increase in candidate support on a 100-point scale in the first experiment and a 10-point increase in the second. Among moderate participants, the conservative value framing resulted in a 5-point increase in candidate support on a scale from zero to 100 in the first study, and a 4-point increase in the second experiment,” the researchers found.

“There was no significant backlash among liberal participants when a progressive candidate framed their policies conservatively compared with when the policies were framed liberally.”

And okay, lol, sure! Someone please revive the Medicare for All campaign; I think we can make headway by renaming it the “Founding Fathers’ Freedom Eagle Traditionally Healthy Act.” Though I think the left should push Harris on specific policies on the campaign trail (her so-far insufficient stance on a Gaza ceasefire, for example), I’m broadly of a “fuck it, do what works” mindset when it comes to Harris pulling off an unprecedented blitz of a campaign.

But this tactic comes with obvious hazards. Adopting conservative framing, even for liberal proposals, can risk ceding arguments to the right, either in this election or in the future. To take an unlikely hypothetical, if Harris was to propose $10,000-per-child tax credits, explicitly so that mothers could focus on stay-at-home parenting, I would appreciate the cash but argue vehemently against a framework that encouraged women to leave the workforce.

Conservative messaging also risks selling short the people who are routinely demonized on the right. “Mind your own damn business” is an effective refrain against zealots who want to police which books children can check out from the library, but it’s less scalable to instances that require government action, like passing anti-discrimination laws or requiring doctors to provide emergency abortions. 

With some center-left figures already dismissing issues like LGBTQ+ rights as boutique grievances that supposedly distract from populist economic fights, a victorious Harris/Walz campaign would do well to recalibrate its message after Election Day, not let performative populism guide its policy. 

Because the reality is that a $6,000 tax credit isn’t really an adequately liberal proposal at all. It’s a modest measure, the best proposal on offer in this race, but still one acceptable to conservatives like Vance. Democrats are already, out of necessity, playing by some of the right’s rules. They’re just lucky Vance and Trump sound so damn weird.

<HALT, WOMAN: HAVE YOU BIRTHED ENOUGH FUTURE CUSTOMERS TO FULFILL YOUR FIDUCIARY DUTIES THE COSTCO WHOLESALE CORPORATION? PLEASE RETURN ALL KIRKLAND PRODUCTS TO THE SHELVES UNTIL YOU HAVE MET YOUR BIRTH QUOTA>

Conservatives often trivialize care work, dismissing it as women’s duty. But sometimes they slip up and admit, albeit in creepy terms, the essential role mothers play in the economy. In a new letter to brands like Costco and Walmart, an anti-choice coalition tried pricing out parents’ contribution to companies’ bottom line. The letter, spotted by journalist Susan Rinkunas, urged these stores to stop selling the abortion drug mifepristone in their pharmacy departments because aborted fetuses represent a lost customer base.

“Shrinking your customer base is also bad for business,” reads the letter, organized by the arch-conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. 

“The Brookings Institution recently estimated that the average American family will spend $310,000 to raise a child born in 2015. This includes over $50,000 in food and $15,000 on clothes, not to mention furniture, other household and healthcare items, toys and games, or diapers and formula, all things your stores sell. Dispensing the abortion drug will reduce demand for all of these and only make worse the crisis of record low birth rates.”

One of the letter’s signatories made the math more explicit in an interview with an anti-choice publication, noting that Costco could make $200 selling mifepristone to one customer, or it could make $12,000 over 10 years if the customer was made to give birth and provide for a child.

"How in the world can it be for the benefit of the company to kill future customers?" the signatory said. "There's no way that it can be."

This is a revealing sentiment, one that suggests forced birth as an untapped market for companies.

So, okay: assume Costco caves, stops offering mifepristone, helps coerce a person into birth, and makes $12,000 over the first ten years of the child’s life? How do that mother and child fare, financially?

Thanks to reproductive health research, we know that women who are denied abortions and forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term are four times more likely to end up living below the federal poverty line within ten years. That hardship is the result of the significant costs involved in child rearing (the anti-choice group highlighted these as an economic upside for corporations), as well as the employment challenges facing mothers (especially single mothers and those who cannot afford childcare).

Many working mothers, especially those without reliable childcare, are pigeonholed into part-time work or jobs with irregular scheduling. These gigs often pay little and frequently assign workers too few hours, making it difficult for those workers to qualify for benefits like healthcare. This is a profitable dynamic for companies, which rely on a pool of precarious workers whom they can pay little.

Forced birth isn’t economically beneficial for anyone except companies and the occasional man.

It’s ironic, then, to see a different fringe of anti-choice conservatives argue against abortion from a supposedly pro-worker perspective.

In remarks reported by the Christian Science Monitor this week, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed that some companies only support abortion rights because they don’t want workers to have children. In a 2021 speech to a conservative think tank, Vance claimed that “corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don’t want people to parent children.”

One could argue that those companies support abortion rights because most Americans do, and because abortion is an integral part of health care, which companies are tasked with providing in the absence of a strong national health service.

But Vance’s argument doesn’t reflect reality—or a majority conservative consensus. The anti-choice letter to Costco makes clear that the right sees coerced birth not as a drag on employees but as the source of future consumers.

Let me riff off a Twitter thread that’s going just viral enough to make people mad. Responding to a clip of JD Vance disparaging his opponents as “childless cat ladies,” Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper argues that, while the right pushes policies that are hostile to families, some liberals also have a cultural aversion to having children.

“A small but vocal quadrant of the professional class within the democratic base is in the grip of a deeply narcissistic, hedonistic, anti-child ideology that sees kids—theirs and other people’s—as a drain on the good life and a threat to their good times,” Harper tweets. “It’s off-putting.”

I want to respond to this line of thinking without going too long on Harper’s tweets, which would feel a little weird and specific, especially because he’s not the only person making this argument. It’s true that some people don’t want kids. That’s their right, even when those people are annoying about it (and overwhelmingly, people aren’t). But even the most cartoonishly r/childfree people are not really changing the superstructure of American family life. The real barriers to starting and raising a family in the U.S. are political and economic—and largely the work of right-wing policies that imperil and impoverish parents.

The right needs to portray supposed left-wing cultural resistance to parenthood as equal-to or worse-than material obstacles to parenthood, because those obstacles are desirable to the right. 

Conservatives like JD Vance have a vested interest in portraying the right as the last bastion of the straight, nuclear family, and the left as a swamp of hedonistic perverts or sexless “cat ladies.” It’s not that conservatives like children any more than their political rivals do; it’s that the right’s goal for society is a hierarchical system in which women are a social and economic underclass who can have their labor exploited and their mobility minimized. A program of obligatory motherhood, combined with the conservative erosion of the social safety net, is a quick way to frog-march an entire gender into this deliberate disadvantage.

Conservatives struggle to engage honestly with women’s objections to this program because it means acknowledging that this program is, well, objectionable. Instead, they’re often left dismissing childless women as frivolous layabouts who are too attached to their freedoms. (“Freedom” is derogatory in this usage, not to be confused with right-wing freedom as it manifests in the ability to open-carry an AR-15 in Chipotle.) Those dismissals can take the form of mocking working women as aspiring “girlbosses” or deriding their purchases as representative of shallow, femme materialism (if you read Harper’s thread, clock that reference to “espresso martinis” lol).

There is, certainly, a minority of people in all political factions that genuinely dislikes kids and wants them purged from public spaces. These people are annoying and I’ve written about them already. But they are also not the major forces shaping parenthood! I really don’t think about these people unless they’re rude to my kids, and even then, good riddance!

It’s not even accurate to suggest that women are opting out of motherhood en masse. As I’ve written before, much of the decrease in U.S. birth rates comes from a sharp drop in teen pregnancies in recent decades. People still are having children, but fewer and on their own terms, after establishing careers in the 20s in 30s.

As writer Aaron Bady flagged on Twitter (I assume related to this discourse), we’re not seeing a huge cultural aversion to parenthood. We’re seeing people make more deliberate choices about parenthood.

“A lot of people that had kids 50 years ago didn't want them and had them because oppressive social forces gave them no choice,” Bady tweeted. “Now that women have more options--including not having kids--about 5-10% more  women are choosing not to have kids. There are a lot of things in society that I find concerning. That whereas 18 out of 20 women in my mom's graduating class would eventually have kids, only like 16 or 17 will from mine... who gives a shit”

If a childless person, facing political and financial obstacles to parenthood, decides not to have kids and instead drink more espresso martinis, who cares? Their choice doesn’t affect me as a mother. Our shared political challenges do.

I think I can pinpoint the recent moment that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went from an obscure candidate in a packed veepstakes race, to a Twitter fan-favorite for the vice-presidential nomination. Shortly after President Joe Biden withdrew his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Walz gave an instantly viral MSNBC interview in which he criticized Republican policies as “weird.” The insult took off and is now a central refrain in Democratic campaigns.

Democrats have spent the better part of a decade describing Donald Trump’s cohort as dangerous fascists. I agree with those labels. A second Trump presidency is a frightening prospect. But regardless of where you land on the “is Trump a fascist” debate, it’s dishearteningly clear that this emotionally charged messaging was not swaying an electorate already burnt out on fear and grim prognostications.

“Weird” (and Walz’s overall interview) stuck because Walz was able to identify the everyday off-putting quality of Republican policies, especially as they relate to paranoia and division around schools and families. And just as importantly, Walz was able to offer a positive, alternative vision, grounded in shared institutions like public education. 

Walz is hardly the progressive candidate of my dreams. Neither is Harris! But I think the groundswell of Walzmania suggests a genuine appetite for a candidate who can neatly refute the conservative demands for privatization and isolation of education and family life. He can discuss schools, in vitro fertilization, and family food subsidies like a person who is, well, normal.

In his MSNBC appearance, Walz argued that Republican policies “are what destroyed rural America. They’ve divided us. They’re in our exam rooms, they’re telling us what books to read, and I think what Kamala Harris knows is bringing people together around shared values: strong public schools, strong labor unions that create the middle class, healthcare that’s affordable and accessible.”

This is a compelling message that recognizes censorship laws as what they are: not just a headache for educators, but an intrusive, divisive, and weird force. And it offers public education as a unifying institution in a country desperate for that sort of thing. 

Harris would be less able to run with this talking point if she had picked Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose support for school vouchers led labor leaders to pan him as a problematic VP candidate. But Walz (a former teacher) has so far been able to hit Republicans on the inequality of their education policies. 

“Robber barons like JD Vance and Donald Trump gutted the midwest,” Walz said in his MSNBC interview. “They talk about private schools. Where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of 400 people? Those are great teachers out there making a difference.”

Walz, so far, has excelled at plainspoken messaging that emphasizes the material benefits of a Harris presidency. After a Biden candidacy that spent too much time arguing on Trump’s terms, I suspect Walz’s style resonates with voters who are burnt out on Republican culture wars, and would rather hear what a candidate can concretely provide for their families.

Walz has plenty of fodder from his own record, especially where it contrasts with the GOP’s plan for families and children. Where JD Vance has lobbied against policies that would help working mothers, Walz recently signed a law that will give almost all Minnesota workers paid family and medical leave. In 2023, when Republican governors across the country were scrapping a free food program for low-income kids, Walz passed a law giving free universal lunch and breakfast to Minnesota students. Where the right rails against abortion and IVF, Walz is an outspoken backer of abortion rights and has a daughter who was conceived through IVF.

Walz isn’t doing anything radical here. Instead he’s supporting programs like free school lunches and robust reproductive rights that arguably have more support from voters than from politicians. These should be easy, easy wins for Democrats.

The fact that the other side opposes this stuff at all? That’s just weird.

Political conspiracy theories like QAnon draw the most attention when believers storm the U.S. Capitol or shoot up a pizzeria. But behind the headline-grabbing acts of violence is the slower, messier, damage wrought on families when members subscribe to hurtful and baseless beliefs.

NBC News journalist Jesselyn Cook has spent years reporting on conspiracy movements like QAnon, with a special focus on how those fringe beliefs affect families. Cook’s new book The Quiet Damage follows a diverse cast of conspiracy believers and their loved ones as they grapple with their diverging realities.

I spoke this week with Cook about how—and if—family members can pull each other from conspiracy rabbit holes. (This interview has been lightly edited for length.)

Kelly: There’s been so much coverage of QAnon, but what led you to write a book specifically about QAnon and families?

Jesselyn: I really got into reporting on this human side after attending a QAnon rally in 2020. I’d been reporting on mis- and disinformation for a while, but this rally was the first time I really saw it come to life. The rally was in Hollywood, and I wasn’t expecting a ton of people to show up because until that point, it had mostly been confined to the online fringes. But at this rally there were hundreds of people marching down Hollywood Boulevard and waving Pizzagate signs and QAnon banners. It felt so real. 

What struck me at the rally was the people, themselves. I spent a lot of time talking to them and trying to understand how they had come to their convictions. It was a big range of people, not  your stereotypical tinfoil hat-wearing, basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists, but families. There were couples. There were a really disturbing number of children wearing QAnon apparel. I was wondering, what are these kids hearing at home? What are they going to grow up believing? And so that inspired me to do more reporting on that side of it: not just the harm that these theories do to our democracy and to our public health, which I think is very well documented, but the damage that goes on behind closed doors and out of view.

These are such intimate family portraits in your book. I’m wondering how you went about finding your sources and reporting out the years of damage that these people experienced.

Finding sources was actually much easier than you might expect, which I think speaks to the magnitude of this crisis. I had written an article at HuffPost, where I was reporting at the time before going to NBC. I was writing about what it’s like to be a child of a QAnon believer and the experience of trying to teach your own parent right from wrong, true from false. That piece got such an overwhelming response from readers all over the country and far beyond wanting to share their own stories of losing loved ones—not just parents, but siblings, friends, and their own children—to this kind of alternate reality. So I had tons of conversations with people experiencing this from both sides. I also talked to current and former believers, so in a way a lot of the sources came to me. That’s how I met some of the characters in this book, but not all of them.

In terms of reporting their stories, this stuff is deeply traumatizing. A lot of them—not only the believers but the loved ones of the believers—have experienced so much pain going through this that I didn’t want to restimulate any of that. But interestingly, in having conversations with them, multiple people told me that talking about their stories was actually quite liberating because there’s so much stigma and shame associated with these views that they really didn’t feel like they could talk to anyone. Some said that, for example, when they tried to tell a friend ‘my mom thinks Hillary Clinton eats babies,’ the friend would just kind of laugh and say ‘boomers on the internet, right? They’re crazy.’ But they didn’t understand the heartache. And so fortunately, for my experience of reporting, we did get to have those deeper conversations where they felt safe talking to me. They were able to really open up and I traveled all over the country to get the level of detail to do the narrative nonfiction writing that I needed.

You mentioned that when you went to that rally in L.A. that there were lots of attendees with children. I’m wondering how QAnon and related conspiracy theories make a specific pitch to parents or people who feel like they need to protect children.

It’s a powerful message and it gave rise to the term ‘QAMom’ because so many mothers, and I think specifically millennial mothers, were being drawn to this movement that, on its face, seems like it would be completely the opposite of what a parent would want to endorse. But it has this very enticing, emotionally compelling message of ‘save the children, save our children.’ I think it plays deeply into maternal instincts to want to protect children from harm, beyond just wanting to save kids. 

Conspiracy theories fill different holes and different needs for different people. I became a mother while writing this book and my experience of that and of many young moms I’ve talked to is that motherhood can be very isolating and lonely, especially in the early years. You’re stepping away, in many cases, from your career and maybe your in-person hobbies, and you’re spending a lot of time with this little person who you can’t communicate with. For a lot of moms I’ve spoken with, who didn’t all make it into the book, there comes this feeling of loss of purpose, and maybe loss part of your identity. QAnon and other conspiracy theories give that back to people. You get to show up online and preach about the harms of poisonous vaccines, or chemtrails, or whatever it may be. You get to feel like you matter again. You get to feel like you’re part of a community again, and that you’re doing something bigger than yourself, which for a lot of young moms especially, I think holds a lot of power.

I was going to ask you about that, because several of your characters found QAnon in moments when it seemed like they weren’t getting what they wanted from their community.  I’m thinking of your character Emily who got really into conspiracy theories because she was so isolated raising three children. Have you found that isolation plays a role in conspiracy beliefs?

It absolutely does. For several of the characters in my book, it was when they started experiencing prolonged isolation that conspiracy theories drew them in. It gave them a sense of belonging and community. When you’re alone, I think people spend a lot more time online. We definitely saw that over the pandemic, and online is where conspiracy theories really thrive and flourish. We have a lot of algorithms that amplify not necessarily the most trustworthy information, but often the most incendiary. It can pull people into these echo chambers where they’re hearing all these wild ideas being reinforced and exaggerated. At the same time, they’re being lured further and further away from dissent and facts. And so isolation can make people very vulnerable. It can also lead to depression and anxiety, which can feed into conspiracy belief as well. So there are a lot of different factors among isolated people that makes them more susceptible. 

One narrative I really liked in this book was one of the most hopeful. You described how Christopher [not a QAnon believer] was trying to lean into cooperation, not conflict, in talking to Alice [his QAnon-believing fiance] about why she believed what she did. How can people help meet a loved one’s underlying needs when they get drawn into conspiracy beliefs like Alice did?

It’s super difficult. Many of the people I’ve spoken to who have tried to help their conspiracy theory-believing loved ones have tried being rational and calm, to teach them true from false. It has quickly escalated into shouting matches because conspiracy theorists can be extremely defensive. And so when I tell people to lead with compassion, I often get eyerolls because it’s like ‘how can I be compassionate to someone who is calling me evil or a pedophile sympathizer?’ I get that many characters in my book felt that the right choice for them was to walk away from their conspiracy theorist loved one and to say ‘I have to prioritize my own wellbeing. I can’t compromise my own mental health to try to save this person who may be beyond saving.’

But for those like Alice’s family members who do devote themselves to pulling her out, they start by letting go of this compulsion to prove her wrong. So Alice’s fiance and her father take two different approaches that work in tandem quite nicely. Her fiancé uses the Socratic questioning method, and her father uses motivational interviewing. These two strategies, which have been repeatedly recommended to me by experts, are trying to get the believer to patiently and critically assess their own beliefs and look at the potential contradictions, or to try to understand their own biases. The believer and the loved one become partners in uncovering the truth, rather than adversaries trying to force it on each other. 

What that looks like in practice for Alice is her fiancé spent a lot of time just listening to her conspiracy theories and very calmly saying ‘okay, let's think about the claim and how can we try to corroborate some of them?’ Really doing it from a place of no judgment. And again, I’m sure many people reading this have tried that and said ‘this gets nowhere.’ And it is a long road and the most important part is just trying to show compassion and to celebrate any common ground unearthed in the process. Motivational interviewing, on the other hand, is about, in this context, getting the believer to step back and look at the big picture and try to understand whether it’s worth holding onto all these convictions; even if there is some Deep State cabal running the world, what does your involvement in it accomplish, other than damaging your own life? With Alice, she lost friendships, she lost loved ones. She had a lot of people looking at her like she was crazy and hateful. So her father very delicately got her to say ‘maybe it doesn’t matter if this is true or false. Is it worth what it’s doing to me?’ Those two methods together gave her the support and clarity she needed to eventually say ‘if this just isn’t good for me, I need to let go and focus on myself instead of things I can’t control.’

You describe some adult children who are put into the interesting position of sort of parenting their parents. There are also minor kids who maybe don’t have as solid a framework to assess what their parents are saying. Can you explain a little about how these fringe beliefs might affect someone’s young children?

It was so sad reporting this part of my book. There’s seven-year-old Jonah who goes right down the QAnon rabbit hole with his mother. For him, conspiracy theories are just a path into her arms. She spends all day sitting on the couch watching these wild YouTube videos, and he just wants to feel close to her. So he sits with her and watches them, and his world becomes scarier and scarier. QAnon, in particular, really centers children as the victims of these grizzly, horrific crimes. So Jonah comes to believe that lurking around every corner there are bad guys who want to mutilate and eat and sexually abuse little kids like him. For someone his age, this is especially harmful. Kids are very credulous, especially when listening to information presented by a grownup. Mom and Dad know everything, right?

So for Jonah, his aunt who’s trying to pull him away from this sees him being traumatized—not just frightened but traumatized. And the science here is really depressing. It suggests that when kids suffer something called toxic stress, which is prolonged exposure and frequent exposure to long-term stress, it can literally reshape their rapidly developing brains, altering the physical architecture in lifelong ways. This can set them up to suffer from mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, PTSD, impaired memory function, and concentration difficulties. It’s so scary to think about. And when you look at the data we have, polling shows as many as one in five Americans believe some of the core QAnon beliefs. You can only imagine how many kids are hearing this at home and just feeling frightened. It feels like a crisis that’s brewing unnoticed.

I was really taken by part of [married couple] Matt and Andrea’s story. Matt was the QAnon believer in their household and was really into stockpiling. He was investing in precious metals, which he thought would bring the family prosperity after a great collapse. But Andrea was doing something different: she was getting really into multi-level marketing. Something I’ve explored in this blog before is the way that multi-level marketing schemes often prey on young moms who maybe have a tenuous tie to the paid workforce. Could you unpack the parallels between Matt’s more conspiracy-driven purchases, and his wife’s attempts to sell LuLaRoe?

Yeah, that parallel there was kind of striking and very sad. As you said, as Matt is getting pulled deeper into QAnon, his wife is starting to experience the secondhand effects of his identity crisis. He’s trying to find meaning as a digital soldier. She became a young, Christian mom at an early age, and she’s always been his wife but she feels like she’s losing him and part of herself. LuLaRoe and other MLMs often draw in young moms with this promise of creating your own financial freedom, being a provider for your family. They sell them this dream that if you invest your time and money into this, we will give you the power to create a better life for your family. So Andrea does that. She puts thousands of dollars into a lot of LuLaRoe inventory, buying all these colorful leggings and pieces of clothing. Of course, the more she gives to this, she’s still not seeing any results. Her basement is filling up with all this unmovable inventory. 

And at the same time, next to all her leggings, Matt has these end-of-the-world supplies that he’s stockpiling because QAnon keeps telling him he needs to provide for his family. It’s just a very sad scene. But what both of them were deriving from their respective movements was a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, and feeling like they were part of something bigger than themselves. In the end, they both just experienced unrelenting disappointment. 

Most of the subjects in your book are adults, but I’m wondering if you see children approaching their own conspiracy theories online, or whether kids are maybe a little more hip to disinfo.

I think a lot of us would like to believe that kids are a little savvier in this space, especially as digital natives. We would like to think that they could navigate this crisis better than, say, digital immigrants. But study after study is showing that’s just not the case. Kids are having a really hard time parsing real from fake online. It’s a grim outlook, but kids are getting online earlier than ever before. They’re spending more time online than ever before. They’re traversing the most complex information landscape in our history, and I think it’s kind of silly to assume that they’re showing up with the skills they need to understand deep fakes or to understand the economic incentives that compel people to churn out disinformation, or even just how algorithms can pull them into a different version of reality.

This is actually an issue that I’m going to go on to study at Harvard in the coming months as a Nieman Fellow: looking at how children are consuming and even spreading mis- and disinformation. It’s really a crisis that I’d say is not getting the attention it needs. Media literacy is a great start. We’re seeing more schools do that, but I feel strongly that it needs to start early on, like kindergarten level as some schools are doing. That makes a lot of sense because kids are getting smartphones in first and second grades, and the damage can be done so quickly if they don’t have some sort of teaching on how to be skeptical and how to understand how reality can be distorted. 

And so to answer your question, I have a two-year-old and I worry a lot about the world he’s gonna grow up in; the online world that he’s gonna come into when it comes time for him to be part of that. I wish I could have more optimism right now, but just feels hard when you go on TikTok and you can spend an hour scrolling through lie after lie churned out by click-chasing hucksters who understand how easy it is to monetize misinformation.

We know a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for families because an influential coalition of Trump allies have already told us so.

Project 2025, a program by Trump-linked conservative think tanks, aims to upend American life through a series of repressive new policies and a massive wealth allocation to the already-rich. The project’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a nearly thousand-page document, outlines the right’s grim vision for family life, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and financial security.

Here’s what the right is planning for the country’s kids and their parents (with a table of contents because the Mandate for Leadership is long as hell):

The Marriage Plot

LGBTQ Rights

Abortion and Birth Control

Family Finances

Education

The Marriage Plot

Project 2025 purports to put family first. Or at least the Mandate for Leadership opens with a conservative vision of the family, which it describes as fundamentally incompatible with a robust government—especially the kind of government that supports social programs like education and food assistance.

“Promise #1: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” Project 2025’s “conservative promise” reads. 

It goes on to argue that “[i]n many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”

Project 2025 uses this conspiratorial framework when it wants to justify the wholesale scrapping of institutions that support families (more on that later). It argues to dissolve systems of shared responsibility and care, and fall back on isolated fiefdoms of family.

So how does Project 2025 envision its all-important American family? With straight, married couples performing strict gender roles while raising children in an implicitly male-led household.

According to Project 2025, “[f]amilies comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.”

Project 2025’s authors are proposing the repeal of benefits that help single and poor parents, and the end of protections for LGBTQ+ families. They’re attempting to do so by pitting families against each other, describing queer, poor, and unmarried parents as a drain on their straight, married peers.

Project 2025 wants to promote heterosexual marriage by offering it as a solution to other structural problems. Throughout the Mandate for Leadership, the project suggests tying marriage education to programs intended to address issues like food insecurity and unwanted pregnancy.

In a section on plans for the federal Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Project 2025 calls for the office to deal with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies by prioritizing “root-cause analysis with a focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance.”

This is essentially a form of abstinence-until-marriage education, which has been shown to be ineffective and ultimately harmful. (Of course this plan does not acknowledge that married people might experience unwanted pregnancies.) 

Project 2025 repurposes this strategy in a section on cash benefits to the poor. After outlining ways to enact stricter work requirements for federal aid, Project 2025 suggests that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program should be used to track and enforce marriage and premarital abstinence. 

“TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way,” the Mandate for Leadership complains of the cash assistance program. “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.”

Within the heterosexual nuclear family, Project 2025 has some rigid ideas about gender roles, including an allergy to the idea that mothers and fathers can parent equally. In proposing new funding for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs, Project 2025 calls for grant allocations that “protect and prioritize faith-based programs that incorporate local churches,” and calls for those programs to “teach fathers on a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a gender-neutral parent.”

Elsewhere throughout the Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 clarifies its imagined difference between parental duties. 

“For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father,” the Mandate says of parental training courses.

If that sounds like mothers being delegated the majority of childcare work while fathers are expected to pick up, say, Little League duties, it’s because Project 2025 explicitly outlines a system that funnels fathers toward paid work and mothers toward unpaid work.

“Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children,” reads another segment on “promoting stable and flourishing married families.” There is no corresponding section on working mothers. Instead, one paragraph after criticizing universal childcare programs and calling for the prioritization of at-home childcare, the Mandate describes early childhood health as a maternal responsibility. It calls for more education “on the importance of the mother-child relationship in child well-being. This should include relationship education curricula that equip mothers and caregivers to connect with and improve their understanding of their infants, toddlers, and young children.”

The Mandate suggests this training be conducted by a new nonprofit that was founded by a conservative think tank veteran who has previously opined against universal childcare and called for parents to look after young children at home during the work week. (That duty, and the departure from the paid workforce, usually falls to mothers.)

Project 2025 offers a narrow vision of family, and places that nuclear model in competition with other family structures. But within Project 2025’s family model, women operate at a disadvantage, with fewer public resources and a greater expectation to forgo careers and paid work for childcare.

And while divorce goes unmentioned in the Mandate for Leadership, it’s under fire elsewhere in the mainstream GOP. An influential coalition of Republicans have railed against couples’ freedom to separate, with Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance suggesting that married couples should remain in violent relationships for their children’s sake.

LGBTQ Rights

Project 2025’s hype of heterosexual marriage comes alongside an anti-gay agenda that would stifle LGBTQ+ parents and youth. 

The project uses kids as an anti-gay cudgel by wrongly conflating LGBTQ+ existence with “pornography,” and attempting to prosecute adults who make LGBTQ-affirming materials available.

The Mandate describes “pornography” as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”

When the right talks about “sexualization” in this vague way, they often mean discussing gender or sexual orientation with minors. (The Republican “Stop The Sexualization of Children Act,” introduced by House Speaker Mike Johnson, for instance, would ban “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”)

Project 2025 takes this overstatement further, threatening to outlaw porn (which again, it describes as “propagation of transgender ideology”) for all ages.

“It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” the Mandate reads. “Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. should be outlawed. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

Project 2025 describes transgender identity as a “social contagion” in minors, and calls for the next Republican president to forbid teachers from using a child’s preferred name or pronouns without written parental consent. 

The Mandate also calls on the National Institutes of Health to conduct research specifically into the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.” (The latter is often a euphemism for conversion therapy.)

The document calls to scrap laws against LGBTQ+ discrimination in schools. Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive public funding, was expanded in 2021 to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Under Project 2025, the civil rights law would return to its narrower wording, “with the additional insistence that ‘sex’ is properly understood as a fixed biological fact.

Project 2025 also calls for the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ adults, particularly in the fields of adoption and foster care. (Foster and adoption agencies “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage,” the Mandate argues.)

Abortion and Birth Control

Where Project 2025 would restrict some adults’ ability to become parents, it would severely curtail others’ ability to prevent pregnancy.

Project 2025 hails the overturn of Roe v. Wade as “just the beginning” for assaults on abortion rights. The group’s Mandate calls on the Department of Health and Human Services (renamed the “Department of Life”) to “explicitly reject the notion that abortion is healthcare” and “eliminate the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”

The Mandate further argues that abortion is not covered under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which currently requires hospitals provide abortions in emergency medical situations.

In addition to advocating for abortion bans, Project 2025 would make birth control harder to obtain. Without explicitly naming it, the Mandate repeatedly references the Comstock Act, a draconian 1873 law that prohibited the postal service from transporting “obscene” materials including birth control and information on abortion. Project 2025 suggests Comstock is valid and should be enforced again. “Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” the Mandate instructs a Republican-led Food and Drug Administration.

Comstock is just as applicable to contraception as it is to abortion medication. But even without invoking Comstock, Project 2025 would make some forms of birth control harder to access. It proposes revoking certain medications, like a morning-after pill, that block a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus. Project 2025 even proposes to eliminate some public funding for condoms, arguing that they are “exclusively male” and should not be accessible through women’s service programs.

If Project 2025 has a favorite form of birth control, it’s fertility awareness, a non-medical process of closely monitoring one’s menstrual cycle and avoiding unprotected sex during fertile days. While some might prefer that method, it’s hardly foolproof, and relies heavily on a consistent menstrual cycle, as well as a partner’s ability and willingness to do their part. Britain’s National Health Service (and even anti-abortion groups) estimates that fertility awareness methods fail approximately 25 percent of the time, because their perfect use can be challenging. Nevertheless, Project 2025 calls on the CDC to “update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods.”

If that method continues at its average 25 percent fail rate, those are a lot of unwanted pregnancies that would be impossible to terminate under Project 2025’s plan for the future.

Ironically, the project acknowledges “the immensely difficult and often tragic situations” facing people experiencing unwanted pregnancies, and the “heroic choice to become a mother.” 

Family Finances

Project 2025 would leave low-income and middle-class families poorer.

The plan’s tax policy proposes collapsing income tax into just two brackets: a flat 15 percent for households earning less than the Social Security wage base ($168,600 in 2024) and 30 percent for households that earn more.

The result would be tax hikes for the lower bracket, and discounts for the wealthy. A family making $50,000, for instance, stands to pay more than $1,000 in taxes, whereas a household making $200,000 will see a $2,000 reduction and a household making $400,000 will receive a $14,400 tax cut. Those savings only increase for the very wealthy, who currently pay taxes of up to 37 percent.

While working families pay more, their corporate employers also stand to enjoy major tax breaks. Project 2025 calls to cut the corporate income tax rate to 18 percent: a move projected to increase deficits in public funds. (For references, when the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 slashed corporate income tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent, it created a projected 10-year public revenue shortage of $1.3 trillion.)

While corporations get a break, low-income families stand to lose their food assistance. Project 2025 would implement stricter work requirements for programs like TANF and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The plan would also make it harder for low-income Americans to enroll in multiple benefits programs. Project 2025 also calls to “reform WIC” (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) in part by overhauling WIC voucher programs, and by loosening regulations on baby formula.

Repeatedly throughout the Mandate, 2025 justifies cuts to benefits programs by complaining that they “subsidize single-motherhood.”

Education

In keeping with a right-wing campaign against public schools, Project 2025 would strike a blow against education, cutting funding and imposing new forms of censorship while eliminating the programs that make education more affordable.

Project 2025 proposes eliminating the federal Department of Education outright, and effectively dismantling Title I, a federal law that supports low-income schools and students. Nearly two-thirds of public schools receive Title I funding, which helps them achieve equity with wealthier districts.

Title I helps hire teachers to low-income schools. Under Project 2025, schools stand to lose 180,000 teaching positions, experts calculate. That loss amounts to a 5.64 percent reduction in the overall teaching force (which is already facing huge shortages), and even greater losses in states like Louisiana, where more than 12 percent of teaching roles stand to disappear.

Project 2025 calls to end the Head Start program, which provides childcare and preschool for low-income families. The program helps working parents keep their employment, and has contributed to higher graduation rates and income levels for children who are enrolled as preschoolers. 

The Mandate also seeks to restrict free school lunches, describing them as “entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective.” It calls to end the Community Eligibility Provision, a program that allows high-poverty schools to serve free food, and for the USDA to stop supporting summertime meal programs for children “unless students are taking summer-school classes. Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program.”

Project 2025 continues the right-wing program of censoring information about race, gender, and sexual orientation in schools. “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” reads the Mandate’s foreward.

The project calls to pass a federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” a misleadingly titled initiative that would give parents greater veto power over their children’s activities in school. The Mandate lists several potential models for a parental bill of rights, including those that would require schools to notify parents if their children appear transgender.

The Mandate for Leadership applies its “parental rights” language to policies that would erode public schools. “Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue,” the document argues.

Universal school choice refers to plans like one outlined in the Mandate for Leadership that would divert public education funds into private and religious schools. Project 2025 suggests a federal “education savings account” program modeled after those in Arizona, Florida, and West Virginia, where public education money has been rerouted into opaque private institutions and squandered on things like ski passes and Disney World tickets.

These programs enrich private schools while leeching money from the public schools where the vast majority of American children study. Fortunately, if children decide to leave school for the workforce, Project 2025 also makes it easier for employers to hire minors for dangerous jobs. 

Project 2025 calls to overhaul hazard-order regulations that currently prevent minors from working in dangerous fields like mining and manufacturing. Without those child laborers, Project 2025 argues, the U.S. might see a labor shortage in its most dangerous jobs.

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,” the Mandate reads. “Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

But the actual policy that Project 2025 seeks to change has nothing to do with “young adults.” It pertains to children: the same people it deems too fragile to learn about race or express their own identities.

This newsletter could be accused of having a pro-mom bias. I am not beating the allegations! But even considering the source, it feels like motherhood has dominated the headlines this week—especially in political coverage. Let’s do some Friday housekeeping before the news cycle runs away again.

Over the past two weeks, several trends I monitor here at MomLeft have come to a very quick boil: the delegitimization of women without children, the pro-natalist birth rate fanaticism, the rapid-fire erosion of abortion rights. This blog has a bunch of new subscribers (hi! thank you!), so if you’re trying to catch up, I recently published primers about J.D. Vance’s nightmare views on motherhood, and the right’s attempt to smear Vice President Kamala Harris over her lack of biological children.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on a breakdown of Project 2025’s grim vision for American families. That should be up Monday, barring any seismic new political events. Okay, let’s roll those MomLinks:

-If you’re online in mom circles, you’ve probably encountered Ballerina Farm, the social media empire run by mother-of-eight Hannah Neeleman. A new profile by London’s The Times visits Neeleman on her family’s sprawling cattle farm, where her pastoral, conservative-coded lifestyle has made her something like the archetypical trad wife. I’ve written before about the careful illusion of Neeleman’s channel; her father-in-law is the billionaire founder of JetBlue, and without that kind of money, Ballerina Farm fans might be sorely disappointed if they try to follow Neeleman into a life of highly aestheticized domestic work.

The Times undertakes a thoughtful exploration of that tension in Neeleman’s life, revealing the way her old dreams (a promising future as a ballerina) were winnowed by a march to motherhood by the evidently very pushy son of a billionaire who does not believe in hiring additional childcare for the family’s eight children (except on date nights). Seriously: when Neeleman was one of few dancers admitted to Juilliard, her now-husband unsuccessfully asked her out for six months, after which he called his JetBlue-founder dad to arrange a seat next to Neeleman on a five-hour flight, which constituted their first date. From the Times:

“‘Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],’ she continues. ‘So I could finish school and whatever. And Daniel was, like, ‘It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.’’ After a month they were engaged. Two months after that they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And three months after that she was pregnant, the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting ‘in modern history.’”

Maybe she’s genuinely happier as a full-time influencer and parent than she would be as a dancer. But I don’t imagine most readers of the Times profile would dream of the same pressures upending their own lives, especially not with ungodly sums of money to soften the blow.

-Speaking of men who expect women to produce many children for them: Elon Musk recently gave an interview to right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson, in which Musk lambasted his transgender daughter, calling her by a male name and claiming that “I lost my son, essentially,” adding that his 20-year-old is “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” 

This is a horrid thing to say about one’s child for so many reasons: among them, that his daughter Vivian Wilson has very diplomatically avoided addressing Musk’s anti-trans remarks in the past, and because Musk’s first-born son tragically did die.

Wilson broke her silence to publicly refute Musk’s comments. In an interview with NBC News, Wilson said that her father had “relentlessly harassed [me] for my femininity and queerness” when she was a child. Wilson described gender-affirming care, which Musk now publicly opposes, as allowing her to survive and thrive. She also claimed Musk, a “pro-natalist” who has at least 12 children and derides birth control, was an absent father. 

“He was there, I want to say, maybe 10% of the time. That’s generous,” Wilson said. “He had half custody, and he fully was not there.” 

-Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, fertility-tech companies that allow prospective parents to screen and select embryos have attracted attention from power players in the right-wing pro-natalist world, the Information reports. While these companies can help families make informed health decisions, they’ve also reportedly made closed-door claims that they can help parents select for IQ. Experts remain skeptical that intelligence is predetermined in a way that can be measured in embryos. But the narrative of genetic predestination might be more dangerous than the technology.

“I don’t think the problem is that the rich will end up with superintelligent, superior children,” Katie Hasson, associate director of theCenter for Genetics and Society, told the Information. “But the belief that that’s what’s going on, I think, could be incredibly harmful in our society.…The danger is coming to believe that privileges come from genetics, that they’re written into their DNA in some way.”

-Where some on the pro-natalist right want to enable fertility tech, others oppose it for anti-choice reasons. J.D. Vance opposes in vitro fertilization, and also backs a measure that would allow police to access medical records of people who travel interstate for abortion services, the Lever reports. 

-With Kamala Harris re-energizing a lackluster Democratic presidential ticket, young voters will be watching to see whether her Palestine policies diverge from those of Joe Biden. The stakes of that decision are enormous, in the U.S. (where the majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza) and in Palestine, where U.S. weapons are still aiding the slaughter of children. 

In Politico this month, doctors Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa provide a wrenching account of their recent work in a Gaza hospital, where young children in gutted hospitals are receiving treatment for unspeakable injuries, including gunshots to the head.

“We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head,” Perlmutter and Sidhwa write. “They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”

-Texas’s attorney general sued the Biden administration this week over a policy that allows teenagers to obtain birth control without parental consent. The suit is an attack on teenagers’ bodily autonomy, and part of a broader campaign against reproductive choice in the state, which banned nearly all abortions in 2022. Since that ban, the state’s teen pregnancy rate increased for the first time in decades.

-Also in Texas, a police deputy has led a two-year campaign to charge librarians with felonies for stocking library books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, NBC News reports. The deputy, who in 2020 tried launching a chapter of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, has argued that the library books constitute pornograpy.

-Could a President Harris create a better economy for caregivers? I really appreciated this piece in the 19th breaking down the potential of a “Momala economy,” and the promises Harris will have to uphold if she wants to pay more than “lip service” to working families.