Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage.
"Birth control like really screws up female brains," he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill "increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation," he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. "It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women," Kirk argued. "Then that bitterness then manifests into a political party that is the bitter party. I mean, the Democrat Party is all about 'bring us your bitterness and, you know, we’ll give you free stuff.'”
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As the Washington Post reported last month, right-wing activists have been flooding social media with the same lies that Kirk was echoing in this video. It's a well-financed disinformation campaign, getting a major boost from MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, who has aggressively financed teams of messengers to falsely claim that hormonal birth control "tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain." Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who "come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control."
In Salon
One of the public health doctors that I focus on is a young woman named Alison Berry who was the public health officer for Clallam County. She was effective and smart. She came to grips with the local pandemic. When the state reopened for business, she noticed that there were these huge spikes in infections and that the spikes in infections were concentrated around bars and restaurants. And so she came up with this idea to impose a temporary vaccine mandate to sit indoors at a restaurant or a bar. Very rapidly the infection rates went down. It was a public health success, but it aroused a tremendous local backlash. Because of social media, the opponents were able to coordinate with people all over the world. And so Alison Berry, this anonymous, local public health official, suddenly was getting death threats from 10,000 miles away. You had the local anger. And then you had it amplified on bigger channels like Fox News. And then you had it amplified even more on social media. This is a toxic environment. Unless we get a handle on these technologies, unless we learn to use social media more responsibly, we're heading into a dark period where rumor replaces fact and that makes democracy extremely hard to function.
It's remarkable how swiftly Moms for Liberty became such an albatross organization. As many Pennridge parents complained to Salon, much of the initial media coverage of the group was credulous, buying into the false narrative that it's a grassroots group of normal parents who are simply "concerned" about liberal "excesses." In reality, the group was founded in 2021 by the wife of the chair of the Florida Republican Party and was immediately so well-resourced and fully staffed that it could only be they were propped up by secretive, wealthy donors.
The suspicious aura of money around the group was interesting to journalists, but what really damaged Moms for Liberty was that they underestimated the intelligence of the people in the communities they were targeting. The parents of Pennridge were not fooled by attempts to characterize literary fiction as "pornography." Local residents also feared that rewriting history classes to adhere to right-wing mythologies would ultimately harm the school's reputation, which could hurt both their property values and the ability of their kids to get into good colleges. Above all, multiple parents expressed a belief that schools should be preparing kids for the real world. They worried that right-wing whitewashing of history, social studies and other courses would leave kids without the basic skills necessary to thrive in a diverse, dynamic society.
If wet bulb temperatures exceed 31°C (88°F), people cannot consistently perform physical labor without endangering their lives; in temperatures that exceed 35°C (95°F), a healthy human can die within a few hours without access to water or shelter. The authors of the PNAS study analyzed "wet-bulb temperature thresholds across a range of air temperatures and relative humidities" using bias-corrected climate change models. Their conclusions were sobering.
"Some of the most populated regions, typically lower-middle income countries in the moist tropics and subtropics, violate this threshold well before 3°C of [global] warming," the authors write.