Authoritarianism / Fascism

Dr. Maggie Carpenter was indicted today on charges of “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If Dr. Carpenter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was also recently targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

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But Louisiana district attorney Tony Clayton didn’t just bring charges against Carpenter—he also arrested and indicted the patient’s mother, who obtained the pills. Clayton claims the woman coerced her daughter into having an abortion, but as the Louisiana Illuminator points out, “coerced abortion” was not cited in the indictment.

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This case really does have precisely what conservatives have been looking for—and everything I’ve warned about since Roe was overturned. I started raising the alarm over anti-abortion messaging around ‘coercion,’ for example, in 2023. That’s when the Charlotte Lozier Institute started to suggest Republicans use ‘coercion’ in their policies and cases because “no one is openly in favor of coerced abortions.” The tactic has only grown since.

Similarly, Republicans have been especially eager to restrict teenagers’ access to abortion: Both Tennessee and Idaho passed laws recently that made it a crime to help a teen obtain an abortion in any way. And when three Republican AGs brought their most recent case against the FDA over mifepristone, they focused in on revoking access for teens, out of supposed fear for their “developing reproductive systems.”

Finally, Republican AGs have been on the lookout for a case with an unsympathetic defendant. A mother who coerced her daughter into an abortion is a perfect victim for conservatives’ anti-abortion agenda. (Whether she actually coerced the teen or not.) We also saw this tactic in Idaho, when the state brought its first ‘abortion trafficking’ charges against a mother and son who had coerced the son’s girlfriend into an out-of-state abortion.

In short: The Louisiana AG clearly thinks she has found a winner of a case that she can bring to the Supreme Court to target out-of-state abortion providers. And I think if we do a little bit of digging, we’ll find that it isn’t just Murrill behind this move—but a national anti-abortion strategy backed by extremist billionaire dollars. 

It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant to a workforce of millions of people who have suddenly been asked to agree to be “loyal” and work under the quasi leadership of the world’s richest man, have been asked to take a buyout that may or may not exist, have had their jobs repeatedly denigrated and threatened, have suddenly been required to return to office, have been prevented from spending money, have had to turn off critical functions that help people, and have been asked to destroy years worth of work and to rid their workplaces of DEI programs. Maybe it's worth wondering why the most popular post in a subreddit for federal workers is titled “To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war.” 

Republicans for years have tried to legislate their personal beliefs about life beginning at conception. They’ve introduced versions of a bill called the Life at Conception Act 13 times since 2011. These efforts have almost certainly influenced the “conception” language in Trump’s latest executive action.

Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”

Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.

Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”

The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”

I have had the notable displeasure of witnessing the evolution of anti-trans bills and the relentless attacks on transgender rights over the past five years. For much of that time, Republicans, buoyed by anti-trans organizations funded by billionaires and amplified by media outlets like The New York Times, have operated under the guise that their efforts were not “anti-trans.” Instead, they claimed to be “just asking questions,” “questioning the science,” or “engaging in a debate” about transgender people—as if these debates were somehow divorced from the rampant anti-trans animus that is undeniably pervasive in those circles.

They never truly were, of course, but to gain a foothold in American politics, they maintained a façade of concern for the welfare of transgender people. This is why, when reading the original Arkansas trans care ban, you won’t find overt charges that transgender people are lesser human beings who deserve to be erased in the purpose section. Instead, you’ll encounter pseudo-scientific statements like “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefits” and “the majority come to identify with their biological sex.” Both are demonstrably false, but carefully crafted to carry a veneer of scientific credibility—providing a shield against accusations that such bans are rooted in hatred toward transgender people.

That all changed yesterday. President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

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This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

So how would anyone know whether an embryo belongs to a sex that produces eggs or sperm at conception?

Anti-abortion rhetoric defines conception as happening at fertilization. [The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the leading US authority on reproductive health, defines “conception” as happening when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus.] We’re not even a multicelled embryo yet at fertilization. At that moment, does an embryo have sexed chromosomes? Yes. Are they knowable with our current technology? No. In IVF, for people who do pre-implantation genetic testing, we typically wait until at least day three, if not day five, until the sex chromosomes are even measurable. And is it a point at which the embryo is even producing gametes? No. That’s still months away.

But the executive order says these definitions should be used to determine which sex marker should go on a passport or whether a prisoner should be incarcerated in a men’s or a women’s prison.

This is what’s so stupid about it, but also what’s so dangerous. What is the enforcement plan? Are we going to test people’s gonads to see what type of gametes they produce? Because if the obsession is at the level of gametes, the tests are much more invasive than a sex chromosome test.

Nor will there be an actual way to logically enforce it, because it’s an illogical order. I think what will happen is it will be basically about punishing people in the worst way possible, treating people as poorly as possible, and creating as much discord and mayhem as possible.

This is mostly going to be around one sex category: the female sex category. They will only be doing this toward anybody who might fall into the woman category or might self-report as being in the woman category. I think Trump, in whatever terrible language is available to him, is trying to control women and control people he perceives to be in the woman category. A lot of this is keeping the category of women “pure”—and also, obviously, about doing immense harm to trans people.

There’s also a very racial, white supremacist thing going on here with this “defending women.” It’s a very old idea—it appears in travelogues, early writings of Europeans, as well as in the United States when they started encountering North American Indigenous folks, and the way that they thought about enslaved peoples. There was this belief that in the “lower races,” men and women were less different, and that in the “higher races,” there were more differences between women and men. This was about saying men and women are differentiated, clear, nonoverlapping categories because that makes us a more evolved people.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

Most headlines I’d seen in the news report only that he warned of national decline and bore “no ill will toward Mr. Trump,” in the words of one of the investigators. That gloss on Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement, as you can see in these excerpts.

There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.

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Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.

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This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.

The massive programme of cuts and deregulation that Musk and Ramaswamy seek extends the sadomasochistic politics now ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Demagogues have found that it doesn’t matter how much their followers suffer, as long as their designated enemies are suffering more. If you can keep ramping up the pain for scapegoats (primarily immigrants), voters will thank you for it, regardless of their own pain. This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs, led by Musk himself: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they are doing in relation to designated out-groups.

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Why has the class war been unleashed now, not just in the US, but in much of the rest of the world? Because the democratising, distributive effects of two world wars have worn off. We fondly imagine that the semi-democratic era (exemplified in rich nations by the years 1945–1975) is the normal state of politics. But it was highly atypical, and made possible only by the wars’ erosion of the power of the ruling classes. The default state of centralised societies, to which nations are now reverting, is oligarchy.

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In nations that have not yet fully succumbed to oligarchy we need to recognise, and recognise fast, that democratic politics do not emerge spontaneously. Our systems achieve a quasi-democratic character only with an active citizenry, whose engagement is largely defined by protest, and an independent media. But, at the direct behest of capital, governments are criminalising peaceful protest, while many independent media, such as the BBC, shut out dissenting voices.

Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”

“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.

The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.

But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.

“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. […]  At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the “breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”.

So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, it’s not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banks’ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that don’t. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 – after the group was formed.

But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?

The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBA’s founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against “woke capital” and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.

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In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing “any financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participate” and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to “mobilise” climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these “targets” and “disclosures” never meant much at all.