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    The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way of his agenda? | Moira Donegan

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    Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health department is conducting a new review of mifepristone, the drug used in the majority of American abortions, claiming that a new study from a conservative thinktank has raised concerns about its safety.Mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA 25 years ago this month, has repeatedly been proven safe and effective for use terminating pregnancies in both multiple medical trials and in widespread patient use over the past quarter of a century. The report cited by Kennedy, meanwhile, comes from the Ethics and Public Policy Center – a group that applies “the Jewish and Christian traditions” to modern law and pushes back “against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives” – and was not peer reviewed. The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data. The report appears to have dramatically inflated the rate of serious adverse health outcomes in patients who took mifepristone – in part by seemingly conflating the bleeding that occurs in the normal course of a medication abortion with hemorrhaging, and in part by relying on unclear terminology. The Ethics and Public Policy Center report classified “serious adverse events” as occurring in almost 11% of mifepristone patients. More reliable studies, subject to data transparency, peer review, and a more rigorously honest set of definitions, have found that such adverse health events happen in fewer than 0.5% of users. In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, the vast majority found that more than 99% of people who use mifepristone have no serious complications.Mifepristone is safe. But why let the facts get in the way of the Trump administration’s political agenda? The review of mifepristone marks the second time in less than a week that the Trump administration has marshalled false medical claims and junk science in an effort to constrain the freedoms of pregnant women and curtail their access to relief. On Monday, in a bizarre, rambling and frequently nonsensical press conference, the president appeared alongside Kennedy Jr to claim, falsely, that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism in the resulting children, and to instruct pregnant women to avoid the painkiller and instead “tough it out”.The Trump administration has long been under pressure from the anti-abortion movement – which, not satisfied by the end of Roe v Wade (in a decision delivered to them by Trump’s appointees, hand-selected for the purpose), has continually pushed the administration to further limit access to abortion. Donald Trump has seemed unwilling to directly attack abortion, appearing to think that the issue is a political loser for him. But his administration has already curtailed access nationwide. His massive domestic spending bill included a provision barring most abortion providers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for any services they provide – abortion related or not – for a year, a move that makes it dramatically more expensive for clinics to offer abortion services. As a result, clinics are already shutting their doors in Democratically-controlled states like California. In Wisconsin, where the battle for abortion legalization led to a fantastically expensive state supreme court race and massive voter mobilization, the state Planned Parenthood affiliate made the decision to stop providing abortions in order to retain access to the Medicaid funding they need to stay open – even though that enormous political effort succeeded in re-legalizing abortion in the state.But that’s not enough for the anti-choice right. Three Republican-controlled states – Missouri, Idaho and Kansas – are suing the FDA, seeking to reverse changes to mifepristone regulations that allowed the drug to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail, and to restore other restrictions on the drug. Texas, Florida and Louisiana are seeking to join and expand that lawsuit to further restrict mifepristone. The new regulations, which have been endorsed by leading health experts, have made mifepristone dramatically more accessible in the years since the Dobbs decision, as women living in states that ban abortion seek out ways to have the medication prescribed and mailed to them by physicians abroad or in Democratically controlled states.Kennedy’s move against mifepristone could restrict access even further. Compared with surgery, the pill is a more accessible, safer and less resource-intensive way for clinics to provide abortions. It does not require a surgical room or very much of a provider’s time; patients can take the pills and have their abortions in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Getting rid of the abortion pill, or making it harder to access, would put even more strain on abortion providers who are already having a difficult time keeping their heads above water.Even more tragically, the move could be devastating for women’s health and lives. In the pre-Roe era, when abortion was illegal and mifepristone had not yet been invented, many women in need of abortions sought out surgical procedures on the black market. But surgery is much riskier than taking a pill, and many of these women experienced injuries and infections that killed or permanently maimed them. There is exactly one reason why the US has not yet seen a return to those bad old days of unsafe surgical abortions and mass female death: that reason is mifepristone. The drug saves women’s dreams and dignity by allowing them to control their own reproduction; it saves their lives by allowing them to avoid a dangerous surgery in an illegal market. Even in liberal states, abortion has become much harder to access than it was before Dobbs; that alone is an injury to women’s citizenship and status. With mifepristone under threat, it looks like the Trump administration is threatening their lives, too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump’s war on Tylenol is also very much a war on women | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Trust-fund-Trump wants women to “tough it out”Donald Trump is a man with no medical training. However, that’s never stopped the very stable genius from inflicting his unhinged health views on the rest of us, has it? Back in 2020, for example, Trump memorably mused that injecting disinfectant could help fight the coronavirus – which forced the maker of Dettol and Lysol to put out an urgent statement explaining that this was a very bad idea.Now the president, who once vowed to be a protector of women “whether they like it or not”, has turned his attention to prenatal care. “Taking Tylenol is, uhhhh, not good,” Trump said on Monday, with his trademark eloquence. He was flanked by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, the guy who told Congress this year that “people shouldn’t take medical advice from me”.Trump went on to link autism to prenatal exposure to acetaminophen, which is the active ingredient in Tylenol. If you’re feeling poorly while pregnant you should “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol to relieve your pain, the president instructed. Which basically means suffering instead: ibuprofen, for instance, is generally not recommended after week 20 of pregnancy.“If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’d have to do,” Trump continued. “You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. Can be something that’s very dangerous to the woman’s health, in other words, a fever that’s very, very dangerous, and ideally, a doctor’s decision, because I think you shouldn’t take it and you shouldn’t take it during the entire pregnancy.”Like everything Trump says, this incoherent quote makes zero sense. But the bottom line here is that the Trump administration is advancing wildly irresponsible guidance. There is no evidence for a causative link between acetaminophen and autism and many experts were aghast at Trump’s statements. Indeed, even the moral vacuum that is JD Vance balked at repeating Trump’s advice, instead urging women to lean on their doctors. And while Trump claimed that there is “no downside” in avoiding Tylenol, an untreated fever during pregnancy could cause problems for the baby.Trump’s demand that pregnant women “tough it out” is also deeply misogynistic and a reminder of how women’s pain is often misunderstood or ignored. Numerous studies show that the medical establishment takes men’s pain more seriously. A 2022 study from the Journal of the American Heart Association, for example, found that women who visited emergency departments with chest pain waited 29% longer than men to be evaluated.This sudden Tylenol scare is also yet another example of mom-shaming. “ We really have a long history of blaming mothers in this country, and we’re seeing that reinforced through the narratives around autism’s causes right now,” Martine Lappé, a sociology professor, told NPR.Women are shamed for not getting pregnant or waiting “too long” to get pregnant. They’re shamed (and, increasingly, criminalized) for losing a pregnancy. They’re shamed for everything from the size of their baby bump to what they eat while they’re pregnant. They’re called out for exercising while expecting – or not exercising enough. And if they give birth to a baby that isn’t able-bodied or neurotypical, women are often told it’s probably because of something they did. It’s their fault.While pregnant women are often treated like public property, expectant fathers are not treated with the same scrutiny. About 15% of couples in the US have trouble conceiving, and, by one count, over 50% of the time a male infertility issue contributes. Yet women are traditionally blamed. Indeed back in the 1940s researchers even posited that women’s unconscious hatred of their husbands was what stopped them from conceiving. We’ve moved on from that a bit, but infertility is still widely thought of as a woman’s problem.Studies have also found a link between advanced paternal age and autism. But does society constantly shame men for having kids later in life? Of course not. When a 59-year-old Trump fathered Barron, he crowed to the press about his virility. “I continue to stay young, right? I produce children, I stay young,” said Trump at the time.No doubt there are numerous things motivating this sudden Trump administration obsession with Tylenol, including a need to distract people from those pesky Epstein files. However, a concern for women’s health is absolutely not at the heart of it. Rather, this is yet another way to control women; another way to reduce us to walking wombs rather than multidimensional human beings. This war on Tylenol is also very much a war on women. Now, if only there was a pill we could take to help deal with this Maga-induced malaise. As it is, we are all just going to have to tough it out.Elon Musk’s father accused of sexually abusing his children and stepchildrenConsidering it is common knowledge that Errol Musk fathered at least one child with his former stepdaughter, who was only four years old when he married her mother, these new accusations, reported by the New York Times, are not a huge surprise. Errol, meanwhile, has dismissed the allegations as “nonsense” and “rubbish.”75-year-old weightlifter heading to world championshipsKate Evert got into weightlifting when she was 69 after her kids nagged her to go to the gym. Now she’s getting ready to travel from Missouri to Cape Town for the World Masters Powerlifting Championships. There are some excellent videos of her deadlifting in this Guardian piece.Slovakia rolls back LGBTQ+ rightsOn Friday the Slovak parliament voted on steps that will lead to the recognition of only two genders, restrict sexuality education, and limit adoption to only married heterosexual couples.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDrug traffickers livestream torture and killing of Argentinian women and girlTwo young women and a 15-year-old girl were lured to a house by suspected drug traffickers and then murdered on a livestream that went out to a closed Instagram group.Maga dentist says she gives different care to DemocratsA Santa Clarita dentist joked two years ago that she cuts back on pain relief for patients who aren’t Trump supporters. Now the video has gone viral and the dentist is reminding us it was just a gag. Hilarious!What it’s like to be married off at 13“I was about 13 when my family decided to marry me off to a man of 29,” an anonymous Iraqi woman writes in the Guardian. “Any attempt to refuse this groom in front of him or his family, I was told, would end in my death… My experience was not an isolated incident, but an early glimpse of what Iraq’s new law legalising marriage from the age of nine may mean.”Israeli minister says she’s optimistic about ’voluntary migration from the West Bank’Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel of the ruling Likud party told Israel’s Channel 12 that Gaza is being made unlivable. “There must be voluntary migration in order for us to fulfill the war aim of ensuring that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel in the future,” she said, according to the Times of Israel. “I am even optimistic that [there will be voluntary migration from] Judea and Samaria and not just from the Gaza Strip,” Gamliel added, referencing Israel’s name for the occupied West Bank. Israeli government officials have repeatedly made clear that ethnic cleansing is the plan. Mainstream western media outlets have not covered Gamliel’s remarks.The week in pawtriarchyWhat do you call a bear in winter? A brrrrr! OK, OK, I apologize profusely for that and offer this link to the Fat Bear Week tournament to make it up to you. The fur-midable challenge, run by a national park in Alaska, is meant to find the bear that “exemplifies fatness and success” best, as the animals ready themselves for hibernation. It’s a little bit of cuteness amid an unbearable news week.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      They fled war and sexual violence and found a safe space in Athens. Then the aid cuts hit

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      The night of 29 May was sombre at 15 Mitsaki Street, a women’s shelter in the centre of Athens. Shoes, winter coats, shampoo bottles and sheets lay strewn around: belongings the 30 refugee women and five children living there had worked hard to acquire, and would now have to abandon. The next day, the shelter would be shuttered for good.“I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep,” says Oksana Kutko, a Ukrainian. “I knew I had nowhere to go.”Operated by the Greek aid organisation METAdrasi since 2020, the shelter’s closure came as a shock.Kutko, 51, had been living there for three years after fleeing Russian bombs in Kharkiv. She hauled what she could carry to a nearby church.Residents could not find alternative accommodation in the short time they were given to leave. A Congolese woman with a seven-year-old son simply laid out a sheet on the pavement outside.By evening, everyone had vacated the refuge, except for one woman.Évodie*, a woman in her 20s who fled severe sexual abuse and violence in the Republic of the Congo, refused to leave. For days after the other women had gone, Évodie clung to the place: the last semblance of stability in her life of uncertainty.Already in a fragile mental and emotional state, losing her place at the shelter cast her back into memories of horrific abuse. Eventually, the police evicted Évodie. She spent the next month homeless.The shelter’s closure is the new reality brought by governments’ overseas aid funding cuts, people with fragile lives being left without lifelines, struggling to stay afloat.“These women’s need for a safe place, their need for hope for the future, their need to heal the past – all these things are connected,” says Thaleia Portokaloglou, a psychologist who knows Évodie from the Melissa Network, an organisation for refugee women in Athens.As support is withdrawn, Portokaloglou is seeing women unravel. How do you ask a person pulled apart like that to keep functioning, she asks.The closure of the Mitsaki Street shelter can be traced back to 20 January 2025, when President Donald Trump, froze the US foreign aid budget hours after his inauguration. Contracts with humanitarian organisations were terminated and over the following months support networks in many countries, including Greece, were gutted; METAdrasi lost a third of its budget, resulting in the shelter’s closure.Greece has received nearly 1.3 million refugees and migrants since 2014. The wait to be granted asylum can take years, leaving many people dependent on humanitarian organisations while their cases are being processed.View image in fullscreenEuropean governments have also been steadily slashing their overseas aid budgets, diverging sharply from the postwar global consensus on humanitarian relief.Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the Greek Council for Refugees, says: “We are losing the whole of the international protection system that has been in place for the last 80 years in six months.”Meanwhile, Athens has hardened its stance on migration – parliament suspended asylum applications from north Africa in July and instigated laws this month that could mean rejected asylum seekers receiving prison terms if they do not leave within 14 days.Around the world, humanitarian networks have been thrown into chaos. Dimitra Kalogeropoulou, director of the International Rescue Committee in Greece, says: “We are facing an unseen crisis where people are really suffering.”On 30 June, between walls hung with Afghan tapestries, officials from Greece’s migrant-support organisations held an emergency meeting at the Melissa Network.The NGO leaders were visibly shaken. Minutes earlier, they had left an interagency meeting of the Greek branch of the refugee agency, the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).“All of us are facing an existential crisis,” says Nadina Christopoulou, director and co-founder of the Melissa Network.Before January, 90% of the UNHCR’s funding in Greece came from the US state department, says Papagiannakis. Now, half the funding and half the staff are gone. “Unfortunately, Europe is not stepping in,” he says. “They say, ‘Ah, that’s a good opportunity! We’ll stop too.’”The cuts mean aid organisations have been forced to make hard decisions. Funding for victims of sexual violence has been cut across the board.Christopoulou put it in simple terms: 970 asylum seekers would be stranded without assistance. At least 100 survivors of sexual violence would lose essential services, including emergency housing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“People will no longer come to our centre because they feel it is undignified to come without having taken a shower, without having slept on a bed – and perhaps having been raped overnight,” Christopoulou says. “Because that’s what happens when you sleep in a park.”After her eviction from the METAdrasi shelter, Évodie slept rough in parks and squares for a month. Christopoulou knows from Évodie’s case worker, Irida, that homelessness plunged her into a devastating mental spiral. She has since found a space in a new refuge, but remains uncertain how long she will be able to stay there.When Évodie first came to Melissa in 2023, traumatised by her experiences in the Congo, she did not speak and, unable to find housing, spent nights in a park where she was further harassed. Eventually, Melissa secured a hostel place for her, before she moved into the METAdrasi refuge.Initially, she sat in a corner, without saying a word. It was a surprise, then, when she decided to join Melissa’s choir.On 8 March last year, Évodie stepped on stage and started to sing. Those in the audience who knew her were stunned. “I was crying,” Christiana Kyrkou, a project manager at the Melissa Network, says.“It was one of the first times I heard, loudly and clearly, her voice,” Christopoulou recalls. “Everybody was happy, but Évodie was Oscar happy!”View image in fullscreenWeekly self-defence training sessions offered a space for Évodie to open up. The class instructor, Konstantinos Koufaliotis, says she was his most frequent participant.One day, after Évodie mastered the basics, Koufaliotis taught her how to throw him to the ground. He landed on the foam mats with such a bang that Christopoulou rushed to the room asking if everything was OK.“Évodie laughed and laughed, because she created this,” Koufaliotis says. “She owned that moment.”Over the summer, she opened up to Koufaliotis about her difficulty in trusting those around her. When the conversations were too much for her, Koufaliotis would put up his boxing mitts and they would go back to training.Victims of sexual violence have every reason not to trust people. “Even if you do manage to get out of the circumstances that have created trauma, it’s such a fragile edifice,” Christopoulou says. “What you’re building is so fragile that it may easily fall apart into pieces again.”Now, as funding dries up, and services from therapy to housing face being wrenched away in an instant, hard-earned trust that NGOs have taken years to build up vanishes with it.The shelter’s closure left Évodie once again sees everything as a threat and everyone as an aggressor. She is distrustful of those trying to help her. Melissa’s staff believe this will be a commonplace reaction as since the funding cuts began, needs have turned from healing to survival.“There’s a shift from more psychological requests to more practical, more urgent ones,” Portokaloglou says. “We’re going back to those very primal, basic requests.”The prospect of future funding cuts now risks the survival of the whole Greek humanitarian network. The only certainty is that no programmes will be left unscathed. “It’s vertical, horizontal, diagonal,” says Christopoulou. “Everybody’s impacted.”* Name has been changed to protect her identity More

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      Trump’s absurd Tylenol claims heighten the suffering of pregnant women in the US | Moira Donegan

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr continued his futile search for a single pharmaceutical cause of autism on Monday, when the Trump administration claimed that distorted recent studies and misstated scientific evidence to allege a link between women’s Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism in children. Kennedy has long spoken with disturbing disgust about autistic people, claiming at one press conference that autistic children “destroy families” and “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” He had previously pledged to find the cause of autism by this month.As part of his apparent quest to eliminate this vast and varied group of people – who do, in fact, pay taxes, hold jobs, play baseball, write poems, go on dates, and function as beloved and caring members of functional families – Kennedy has already sought to restrict access to common vaccines. In June, he fired every member of the advisory committee on immunization practices, an influential group of vaccine experts whose recommendations had long shaped policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In place of the experts, he reconstituted the panel with a number of vaccine critics and cranks, whose incompetence has led to chaotic meetings and bizarrely changing vaccine recommendations. Donald Trump has recently joined his health secretary in casting aspersions on childhood vaccines – safe and effective treatments that have saved countless lives and are among the more wonderful miracles of human innovation. “It’s too much liquid,” the president said of the early childhood immunizations on Monday. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing, when you look at it.”Trump’s remarks came at what was supposed to be the debut for Kennedy’s new tactic: discouraging pregnant women from taking a common over-the-counter medication to ease pain or reduce fevers. At a rambling and shambolic press conference issued from the White House, Trump was unambivalent in his unproven assertions of the drug’s dangers. “Taking Tylenol is, uh, not good,” Trump said, flanked by Kennedy and Dr Mehmet Oz. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.” The president also offered his opinion that the weight-loss drug Ozempic doesn’t work, offering that his friends who take the drug are still fat. Kennedy, his face an uncanny color, stood awkwardly behind Trump, wearing a suit jacket that was visibly too small and with his head hanging slightly to the side; he looked a bit like a bored child at a prep school assembly. “Don’t. Take. Tylenol,” Trump continued, addressing pregnant women. “And don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born.”There is no evidence suggesting that Tylenol causes autism. A small number of studies have shown a correlation – not a cause – between acetaminophen use and incidents of neurological development disorders in early childhood. But these studies, aside from being inconclusive in their results, are also flawed in their methodologies: because pregnant women cannot be easily or ethically sorted into control groups, it is impossible for researchers to isolate Tylenol as a causal factor in the ensuing health of their children. There is as much evidence to suggest that those women whose children later developed autism got it from the Tylenol they took as there is to suggest that they got it because of a gust of wind, or because their mothers wore the color green. Fevers, however – which Tylenol is used to treat – pose proven risks to a fetus, and have been linked to cleft lip and palate, spina bifida, and congenital heart defects. “The conditions that people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” Dr Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.Pregnant women do not lack for judgmental, frightening and dubiously factual instructions about their health. Everywhere, they are told that they risk the health of their fetus by partaking in a series of banal everyday activities – be it jogging or having coffee or eating a certain cheese – that they are told will lead, by obscure mechanisms that are never quite explained, to impossible and devastating health outcomes for their children-to-be. The admonishments are multiple and often contradictory, but they all tend to agree on one thing: that it is always good for women to deprive themselves of joy and relief – and to suffer more – for the sake of their fetuses.Health misinformation has thrived on the ignorance in which most women are kept about their bodies, particularly during pregnancy, and it feeds on the cruel combination of neglect and lack of interest with which many women have been treated by the medical system and the maximally judgmental and punitive treatment that they receive from others while pregnant. Frightened women, scared both for the health of their pregnancies and for the ways they will be blamed if something goes awry, seek out a way to secure a good outcome, and are met by charlatans, grifters and quacks who are happy to tell them lies in exchange for their attention and money. It is this very dynamic, fed like a sourdough starter in the damp and fecund social media environment of the pandemic, that Kennedy used to revive his own career after decades of scandal and disgrace.Now, this cynical exploitation of pregnant women’s fears, deployed to them at a time when they are most vulnerable, is coming from no less a place of authority than the White House itself.At the press conference, Trump advised pregnant women to simply endure their suffering. “A mother will have to tough it out,” he told them. Readers will forgive me if I posit that perhaps pregnant women in the US are already suffering enough. Six justices of the supreme court, three of them appointed by Trump himself, ruled in 2022 that they no longer have the federally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. The laws that have gone into effect since have cost several pregnant women their lives, as laws prohibit the medical interventions that could easily save them and allow them to die painful, premature and needless deaths. Other women have had their corpses desecrated for the sake of Trump’s anti-choice agenda, as hospitals and lawmakers use them as incubators against their will. Others are being forced to wait for care while they bleed and develop sepsis, risking their organs and their lives. The Trump administration has cut off Medicaid funding to some of the largest providers of sexual and reproductive healthcare, meaning many of the clinics that pregnant women rely on will now have to close. With doctors who provide gynecological and obstetric care fleeing states with strict abortion bans, many pregnant women in the US do not have access to competent medical care at all. As a result, more babies are being born sick, and more of them are dying. Women from states such as Florida report being forced to carry fetuses that have no chance of surviving, and then being forced to watch those infants suffer and die in the moments after birth. As Kennedy continues with his search for the causes of autism, his eugenic project will inevitably extract more and more coercion and violence on the bodies of pregnant women. Today’s fearmongering about Tylenol is only the beginning.It can seem darkly comedic at times how laughably incompetent Trump and his administration are. Kennedy’s ill-fitting suit; the president’s ramblings about his fat friends; the brazen indifference to truth in the absurd claim that Tylenol, perhaps the paradigmatic over-the-counter drug, is somehow this lurking danger. Trump’s idiocy and vulgarity give the lie to the pomp and dignity of his office; his now near-total capture of American political life mocks the promise of democracy. But pregnant women are not a punchline. Their hopes for their families, their fears for their bodies, their health, their comfort and their dignity – all of these are things Trump is willing to sacrifice at the altar of his own ego. Tylenol isn’t dangerous, but he is.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?

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      The streets of Washington DC are unmistakable. In addition to noting the city’s signature architecture and public monuments, one will know they are in the nation’s capital when they can barely go half a city block without spotting a US flag. Two weeks ago, those flags were flying at half-staff, but not in recognition of the passing of a high-ranking public official, as would be customary. Instead, the half-staff was ordered by the White House in a highly politicized effort to memorialize the 10 September killing of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old podcaster, hard-right party operative, and Maga youth influencer, as an event of national tragedy.Kirk ruled over an online fiefdom peddling his signature brand of rage-baiting racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic commentary. It wasn’t just his vitriolic style, but also his popularization of cruelty, humiliation and dehumanization of political opponents – especially college students – that attracted millions to his audience. He famously said empathy was “a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage”.As a Black woman, I felt no sorrow watching these flags hang limp and lifeless from chrome posts in the stiff, humid summer heat that, even on the eve of autumn, will not unhand a city already stifled by federal threats of military occupation. I felt the same when, just hours after the shooting, the speaker of the House of Representatives called for a moment of silence on the floor for a private citizen who had never held office nor served in the military. (The brief silence erupted seconds later into a shouting match melee when congresswoman Lauren Boebert requested that members hold an open prayer for Kirk from the floor). Just nine days later, the House passed a Republican resolution eulogizing Kirk’s life with a sweeping 310-58 majority.I felt no mourning when seven teams in the National Football League – the very organization that has long been criticized for its inconsistent and often hypocritical stance on the place of politics in sports – held in-game memorials for Kirk, who never played any professional sport nor held a role within the league. In the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas, Jumbotrons featured a statesman-like image of Kirk, what one might expect for the passing of a former president or a longtime team affiliate. The grand gesture was drenched in hard-to-miss hypocrisy: forced silence from Black players who were punished for advocating for social justice in 2020, while, in the endzone, a painted astroturf read “End Racism” – a relic of just how fleeting the league’s lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement just a few years ago proved to be.I feel no grief because these memorials to Kirk are not created for me to grieve. Instead, they seek not only to enshrine Kirk into the national consciousness, but also to foster national memories about what he represents ideologically and culturally. The lionizing is an official effort to coalesce the state into his movement – a brazen proclamation that his consistently hostile white nationalist, homophobic and misogynistic convictions represent the federal government’s interests, and thus, what the presidency believes should be the national priority.It’s reminiscent of the long aftermath of the civil war, when Confederate memorials were fashioned well into the 20th century not by those seeking to grieve any one individual, but rather by those who wanted to send a message about racial politics in the present. Some people have settled comfortably into a belief that the recent years of anti-racism protests and organizing have successfully toppled enough of these Confederate monuments, that their white-washed histories collapsed with them. But memorials to Kirk conducted by the country’s most powerful institutions are evidence of the revival of a new iteration of neo-Confederate memorialization.Like the Confederate tributes and monuments of the past, current memorials to Kirk function to throttle any interrogation of their subject. Those who are elevated to the esteem of official national memorializing are commonly – although with notable exceptions –figures that the public agrees are beyond reproach. In honoring Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, for example, Bill Clinton sought to canonize the entire Civil Rights Movement for which she fought. It cemented the era as worthy of national honor because it telegraphed the meaning of democracy and freedom for all Americans.In contrast, with the insta-extolling of Kirk, Donald Trump, who has announced that his late close personal friend will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom, echoes the intentions behind Confederate memorials of yore. Instead of public recognitions that reflect the long march towards a national reckoning with our past, memorials like those for Kirk elevate his consistent record of hard-right extremism above the reach of public questioning.Kirk’s style of seizing upon those who challenged his ideologies and punishing his detractors is an agenda that has expanded well beyond Trump’s track record of punishing his personal and political enemies. Though I, like the majority of Kirk’s critics, do not condone his shooting, Kirk himself said gun deaths were “worth it” to maintain gun rights. While rhetoric this extreme, including his claim that Black women in government and media lacked “brain processing power”, is being euphemized in tributes as his “advocacy for free speech”, media figures and government employees who openly question if he should be publicly lauded are being fired from their jobs.Additionally, hundreds of college professors were doxed, harassed and threatened by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its notorious “Professor Watchlist”, which published the names and information of any academics with views Kirk construed as incompatible with his own. It’s curious how a virtue like “doing politics the right way” can be afforded to someone who sought to devastate the lives of scholars and intellectuals.The aggrandizing of Kirk shares yet another, more lasting legacy with Confederate memorialization. The historian David Blight notes that in the aftermath of the civil war, the call for reconciliation between white northerners and southerners was achieved at the expense of erasing the legacy of slavery from the postbellum narrative. Thus, the reunification of the white citizenry was done wholly on southern terms and exacerbated the racial atrocities that were never addressed in the postwar era, leaving Black Americans to be wholesale lynched and terrorized throughout the south.Further still, reunification campaigns exonerated and elevated rebel insurgents who were, by definition, traitors and enemies of the state, to a status otherwise reserved for senior statesmen and decorated US veterans. It was a damning declaration that even those who sought to overthrow this country would be celebrated as its heroes before Black Americans would be treated as its citizens. The same tone is struck in the tributes to Kirk that exalt a highly controversial private citizen as though he were a national hero.Elected officials, journalists and public figures on the left who stress calls for unity do so on the right’s terms, and are reminiscent of the kid-gloved white northerners who sought to rebrand a war fought expressly over human trafficking and bondage into a national moment for celebration of duty, honor and valorous military service on both sides. Those who call for us to honor the life of a man who said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”, and who described Martin Luther King Jr, as “awful”, have betrayed those of us who heard Kirk espouse eugenics and replacement theory loud and clear, with such vast online influence that it prompted a 2024 investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The valorization of Kirk by his far-right defenders is an insult to millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived every day in the crosshairs of his rhetoric. Kirk’s memorialization by his supporters and apologists is but a new opportunity to announce an old message about whose country this is and whose it isn’t.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      Black women are being hit hard by the Trump layoffs and firings: ‘It chips away at morale and self-worth’

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      On 30 May 2025, Dr Ravon Alford received an email from leadership at her job that the federal government had chosen to revoke the organization’s active federal grants. At the time, Alford, who’s 33, had been working as a senior policy analyst at a criminal justice reform non-profit organization in Detroit. As a result of the budget cuts, all work related to projects that were funded by these grants were ceased. Organization-wide layoffs followed, affecting Alford and 75% of the staff.Alford is among the nearly 300,000 Black women who exited the US labor force in just three months – a shift tied directly to federal policy decisions. The most immediate cause has been sweeping cuts across public-sector agencies, historically one of the few reliable pathways to middle-class stability for Black women. Though they make up just more than 6% of the overall workforce, Black women account for more than 12% of federal employees. These positions have long offered pensions, benefits and more equitable pay than the private sector, where wage disparities remain stubbornly fixed.“It was an extremely traumatic experience for me because this was my first time ever being laid off,” said Alford, who once viewed the public sector as a stable industry. “Had I been laid off because of my own merit, then it would’ve been easier for me to deal with. But it was just the fact that this administration chose to not prioritize something that we actually were aligned with in the last administration cost me my job.” Since the layoffs, Alford has witnessed some of her Black female former co-workers exiting corporate America all together and pursuing entrepreneurial paths. The experience has changed Alford’s view on how to navigate the workplace as well: “Now I’m taking care of myself and not allowing my identity to be fully within a job.”Working under the constant threat of job loss can create a psychological climate of fear. “For African American women, that fear isn’t just about employment. It’s about identity, safety and dignity in spaces where we’re already underrepresented and under-resourced,” said Dr Rajanique Modeste, an industrial and organizational psychologist and author of After the Layoff: Reclaiming Power When Stability Disappears. “It shows up in how we engage, or don’t engage, with leadership, and influences how safe we feel speaking up.”In unstable work environments, self-advocacy is often the first casualty, Modeste says. When job security feels shaky, most employees retreat into survival mode. “It becomes a heads-down situation,” explained Modeste. “People avoid drawing attention to themselves out of fear they might be next on the chopping block.”Even for Black women who have been spared from layoffs at their organization, the sense of belonging and psychological safety might wither. “For Black women, connections at work often serve as more than just friendships. They can be a crucial part of navigating the workplace,” said Modeste. “When others are let go, it often means the loss of community, a safety net and a sense of stability. Suddenly, you may find yourself alone in spaces where you once felt supported.”For Duke, a 28-year-old account supervisor in Washington DC, who survived three rounds of company-wide layoffs at her advertising agency after the current administration ended federal contracts with the organization, the months since April have been marked by constant anxiety and feeling a need to overperform. She described waking in the middle of the night, bracing herself for an email from HR or her manager signaling she’d be next. “Every Sunday I was checking my emails to see if I had an invite,” said Duke, who’s using an alias because she is still employed at her company. “Going into the office, the morale was low. You couldn’t really plan ahead, because you didn’t know if this would be your last paycheck.” That uncertainty seeped into her personal life as well. When her lease was up for renewal, she delayed signing until the very last minute. “I just didn’t know if I was going to have a job,” she explained.As a first-generation college graduate, Duke had grown up believing higher education would provide stability. “You’re told to get your degree and you’ll be set for life,” she said. But the reality she’s facing in corporate America has been far different: “One minute you’re on top and doing great, and the next you’re laid off. We’ve seen that across every sector: tech, healthcare and now even the federal space.” In June, Black women faced the longest job searches of any group, spending an average of more than six months unemployed before securing new work.For Black women like her, that volatility doesn’t just undermine career expectations; it chips away at a sense of security they were told was within reach. Similar to Alford, Duke had once considered the public sector a safe haven. “I was so excited because you always hear that the public sector is the safest. Once you’re in, you’re in for life,” she explained. The sudden unraveling of that assumption was devastating: “To have that ripped away is jarring.”The rupture goes beyond lost income; it disrupts mental health and future planning. Instead of imagining long-term career growth, many Black women are recalibrating around avoidance. “From what I’ve seen, and what I agree with, a lot of people are going to stay away from the public sector for at least the next three years because it feels so unstable,” Duke said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven when companies insist that a round of layoffs has ended, the residue of fear lingers. Workers understand, deep down, that performance alone cannot protect them from business decisions. “That uncertainty creates silence,” Modeste said. “People stop asking for promotions, raises or accommodations – not because they don’t want or deserve them, but because they’re trying not to make waves. Staying under the radar starts to feel safer than speaking up.”That silence can be especially fraught for Black women. The pressure to prove they belong, to avoid being labeled “difficult” or “demanding”, compounds the risk of speaking out. “In moments when self-advocacy is most needed, fear of retaliation or being misunderstood can keep people quiet,” Modeste noted. Over time, that quiet takes a psychological toll. “It chips away at morale and self-worth. It reinforces the idea that your needs don’t matter, or that asking for more puts your job at risk.”The stress of layoffs isn’t just about surviving the present – it’s about facing a future that feels increasingly unpredictable. Even as Black women push through the daily strain of keeping their jobs, the prospect of losing one carries its own spiral of uncertainty. “It all takes a toll on your mental health,” Duke said. “There’s only so much you can do when it feels like the whole system is set up to have you fail.” At the end of this month, Duke will find out whether her team’s federal contract will be renewed. More

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      Texas bill allowing residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers reaches governor

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      A measure that would allow Texas residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers advanced to the desk of the governor, Greg Abbott, on Wednesday, setting up the state to be the first to try to crack down on the most common abortion method.Supporters say it’s a key tool to enforce the state’s abortion ban, protecting women and fetuses.Opponents see it not only as another way to rein in abortion but as an effort to intimidate abortion providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states – and to encourage a form of vigilantism.If the measure becomes law, it’s nearly certain to spark legal challenges from abortion rights supporters.Under the measure, Texas residents could sue those who manufacture, transport or provide abortion-inducing drugs to anyone in Texas for up to $100,000. Women who receive the pills for their own use would not be liable.Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sued could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.Lawmakers also added language to address worries that women would be turned in for seeking to end pregnancies by men who raped them or abusive partners. For instance, a man who impregnated a woman through sexual assault would not be eligible.The measure has provisions that bar making public the identity or medical details about a woman who receives the pills.It wasn’t until those provisions were added, along with the limit of a $10,000 payment for people who aren’t themselves injured by the abortion, that several major Texas anti-abortion groups backed the bill.The idea of using citizens rather than government officials to enforce abortion bans is not new in Texas. It was at the heart of a 2021 law that curtailed abortion there months before the US supreme court cleared the way for other state bans to take effect.In the earlier law, citizens could collect $10,000 for bringing a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. But that measure didn’t explicitly seek to go after out-of-state providers.Pills are a tricky topic for abortion opponents. They were the most common abortion method in the US even before the 2022 supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.They’ve become even more widely used since then. Their availability is a key reason that the number of abortions has risen nationally, even though Texas and 11 other states are enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.The pills have continued to flow partly because at least eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws that seek to protect medical providers from legal consequences when they use telehealth to prescribe the pills to women who are in states where abortion is illegal.Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, said the measure is intended to threaten those out-of-state providers and women in Texas.“This is about the chilling effect,” she said. “This is yet another abortion ban that is allowing the state to control people’s health care lives and reproductive decisions.”Earlier this year, a Texas judge ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for providing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.The same provider, Dr Maggie Carpenter, faces criminal charges from a Louisiana prosecutor for similar allegations.New York officials are invoking their state’s shield laws to block extradition of Carpenter and to refuse to file the civil judgment.If higher courts side with Louisiana or Texas officials, it could damage the shield laws.Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Texas and Florida are seeking to join Idaho, Kansas and Missouri in an effort to get courts to roll back US Food and Drug Administration approvals for mifepristone, one of the drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions, contending that there are safety concerns. They say it needs tighter controls because of those concerns.If the states are successful, it’s possible the drug could be distributed only in person and not by telehealth.Major medical organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the drug is safe. More

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      Texas threatens to sue organizations and doctor for increasing abortion pill access

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      The heated US war over abortion pills warmed up another degree on Wednesday, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sent cease-and-desist letters to two organizations and an individual that he accused of mailing abortion pills to Texans or facilitating their shipment. Paxton threatened to sue if they do not stop their alleged activities.“These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said in a news release announcing the letters.The state of Texas bans virtually all abortions.Paxton sent the letters to Plan C, a website that provides information about how to obtain abortion pills; Her Safe Harbor, an organization that provides abortions through telemedicine; and Rémy Coeytaux, a doctor who has been accused of mailing abortion pills to a Texan.Debra Lynch, a nurse practitioner who works with Her Safe Harbor, said that Paxton’s letter would not stop the organization from sending abortion pills to people. If anything, Lynch suggested, it would spur the group on.“None of our providers are primarily concerned with our own wellbeing or our own legal status,” Lynch said. “All the horrors that women are facing because of these ridiculous bans and restrictions outweigh anything that could possibly happen to us as providers, in terms of a fine or a lawsuit or even jail time, if it were to come to that.”Lynch said that in the hours after news of Paxton’s letter broke, Her Safe Harbor received more than 150 requests from Texans who were afraid about abortion access and want to obtain pills that they may use in the future. Normally, Her Safe Harbor has around four to five providers taking calls from patients. Now, they plan to have at least 10 working “until this wave of fear subsides”.Neither Plan C nor Coeytaux immediately replied to the Guardian’s request for comment.In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and unleashed a wave of state-level abortion bans, abortions have surged in the United States. This rise is due in large part to the availability of abortion pills and the emergence of “shield laws”, which have been enacted by a handful of blue states and aim to protect abortion providers who mail pills across state lines from out-of-state prosecution.By the end of 2024, clinicians working through shield laws were facilitating an average of 12,330 abortions per month, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.Enraged by this development, anti-abortion advocates have in recent months stepped up their campaign to crush abortion pill providers. In his cease-and-desist letters, Paxton – a Republican who is running to become a US senator – repeatedly cited the Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-vice law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. Although legal experts have long regarded the Comstock Act as a dead letter, several anti-abortion activists now believe that the fall of Roe has left the federal government free to fully enforce the act.Alongside 15 other state attorneys general, Paxton earlier this summer signed onto a letter imploring Congress to pass a law that would pre-empt states’ shield laws. He has also sued a New York-based doctor whom he accused of mailing abortion pills into Texas. Then, after a New York county court official said that the state’s shield law prohibited New York from enforcing a fine against the doctor, Paxton sued the official.Paxton’s cease-and-desist letters also follow similar letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general, Republican Tim Griffin. In July, Griffin sent a cease-and-desist letter to Possibility Labs, the parent company of Plan C, and to Mayday Medicines, the parent company of Mayday Health. Like Plan C, Mayday Health offers information about abortion pills, but does not directly sell them.Other anti-abortion activists are going after abortion providers through other legal avenues. A Texas man who said that Coeytaux supplied abortion pills to aid his female partner’s abortion has also sued Coeytaux in a federal wrongful death lawsuit. The man is being represented in court by Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion attorney who masterminded a six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021.Last week, Mitchell filed another federal wrongful death lawsuit against a different abortion provider. More

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      Maga star Katie Miller’s new podcast reeks of toxic femininity. I listened so you don’t have to | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Want to hear a cute little story about JD Vance and a Dutch baby? Don’t worry, he didn’t deport it, he cooked one for breakfast. Then he sat down with Katie Miller to tell her all about his baking skills in the very first episode of her brand-new podcast. Which, by the way, I have heroically listened to all 44 excruciating minutes of so that you don’t have to.Miller, for the uninitiated, is a Maga bigwig and married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s far-right chief of staff and a man so odious his own uncle once wrote an article calling him a “hypocrite”.A Trump loyalist, Miller has form when it comes to surrounding herself with odious men: she held top communications jobs during Trump’s first term and, earlier this year, became a spokesperson for Elon Musk’s pet project, the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In May, she absconded to a mysterious role at Musk’s private ventures. I imagine that she was attracted to Musk’s views on free speech (summed up as: I can say whatever I fancy but you can’t) because it’s been reported that when Miller was in university she once stole and threw away student newspapers because she didn’t like the politician they endorsed.Now, she’s launched the Katie Miller Podcast, the first episode of which came out on Monday. Why jump from the highest echelons of government into podcasting? According to Miller, it’s because “as a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full-time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself”.In a promo video, in which she sits cross-legged on an armchair (with shoes on!) in front of a bookshelf with three books on it, including The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, she explains that “there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online” and she wanted to create a space to have “real honest conversations” about what matters to women.Apparently what matters to women is the minutiae of vice-president Vance’s life: the first 44-minute episode, which I suggest she rename Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was devoted to fawning over a man who has said professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over children.Miller, who is not a natural host, awkwardly serves softball questions (“is a hotdog a sandwich?”) while Vance drones on about what a great daddy and vice-president he is and how much he loves ice-cream and joking around with Marco Rubio. The closest they get to a controversial topic is Vance talking about all the memes he’s inspired and saying that one of his favourites features the pope, Usha Vance and a couch. (There have been online jokes that Vance was intimate with a couch and that he killed the pope.) There is also light mockery of Late Show host Stephen Colbert, whose show recently got cancelled.Other than the memes, the most memorable moment of the episode is when Miller seems to imply that her husband subsists entirely on a diet of mayonnaise, like some sort of anaemic vampire. Stephen Miller also apparently runs around his house with his shoes on, as does JD. Usha, sensibly, takes her shoes off at the front door. All of this is exactly the sort of content I’m sure the busy mums are desperate for.Miller has said she thinks there is a gap in the market for podcasts aimed at conservative women, but the market says otherwise. While young women in the US tend to be progressive, there is a thriving “womanosphere” of anti-feminist media aimed at conservatives. Some of these outlets don’t explicitly cater to young conservative mums in the way that the Katie Miller Podcast says it does, but they’re still aiming for the same general demographic.Gen Z commentator Brett Cooper, for example, who has 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, looks at pop culture with a rightwing slant and her show attracts conservative female listeners. In between hot takes on Justin Bieber, Cooper argues that feminism’s goal is to “make men angry and dominate them”, a worldview that recently got her a gig at Fox News. Then there’s Candace Owens, a conservative conspiracy theorist who recently turned on Maga over the Jeffrey Epstein files fiasco. Owens has 4.57 million subscribers on YouTube and her streams get millions of views. Bari Weiss also has a successful podcast and is currently in talks to sell her “anti-woke” media startup The Free Press for more than $200m to CBS News. The Financial Times recently reported: “Weiss has won over [CBS owner David Ellison] partly by taking a pro-Israel stance … as well as her ability to build a younger, digitally savvy audience.”Then, of course, you’ve got all the trending “tradwife” content on TikTok, where creators such as Estee Williams and Gwen the Milkmaid glorify traditional gender roles. Beyond tradwives, there’s an ecosystem of lifestyle content aimed at young women that camouflages rightwing messages. Think: makeup tutorials with a running commentary about how feminism will make you miserable. Canadian media outlet Global News recently obtained a report prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre that warns female “extremist influencers” are using popular online platforms to radicalize and recruit women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A body of open-source research shows that women in extremist communities are taking on an active role by creating content specifically on image-based platforms with live streaming capabilities,” the report says. “These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric.”While Miller’s podcast may not exactly be revolutionary, it is yet another reminder that Republicans are doing a far better job of spreading their talking points on new media than the Democrats. Sure, the Katie Miller Podcast isn’t an “official” White House podcast, but the humanizing interview with Vance, along with Miller’s deep Maga ties, suggest it is very much Trump-approved. In an interview with the Washington Post published on Tuesday, Miller also insinuated that her podcast is a voter recruitment drive for 2028. “In order to cultivate the future of Maga, we have to talk to women,” she said.As the Republicans stretch their tentacles further into the world of podcasting and TikTok, Democrats are still desperately jumping on cringe memes to appeal to a younger audience while flailing around writing long policy documents about how they can spend millions of dollars manufacturing a “Joe Rogan of the left”. The Katie Miller Podcast may not end up being a hit, but it’s just one small part of a very effective Republican messaging strategy.Of course, the really important issue here – the question I’m sure you’re pondering right now – is whether the veep thinks a hotdog is a sandwich? The answer is: definitely not. Which, coincidentally, is also my answer to the question: will you ever voluntarily listen to the Katie Miller Podcast again? More