I am virtually watching the Netroots Nation conference this weekend. I will return with electoral strategies.
Netroots Nation 2022
Climate heroes
Including Rosemary Mosco herself.
A lot of online climate change talk focuses on villains, and it can be so isolating. But there are many, many amazing people who are taking action. Here are 16 of them. pic.twitter.com/vEivvja20M
— Rosemary Mosco (Bird And Moon Comics) (@RosemaryMosco) August 16, 2022
What patriarchy looks like in everyday life
Beaten for no reason, dragged off the street for violations of modesty laws, subject to torture in those detention centers, refused school and work choices—this report shows exactly how women in Afghanistan are treated by the Taliban. Women who dare to protest, and some women do dare to, are treated even more harshly.
In the New York Times (gift link, no paywall) another report shows the same brutal situation.
Taliban Rewind the Clock: ‘A Woman Is a Helpless and Powerless Creature’
Girls are barred from secondary schools and women from traveling any significant distance without a male relative. Men in government offices are told to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothes and prayer caps, and stop work for prayers.
Music is officially banned, and foreign news broadcasts, TV shows and movies have been removed from public airwaves. At checkpoints along the streets, morality police chastise women who are not covered from head to toe in all-concealing burqas and headpieces in public.
A year into Taliban rule, Afghanistan has seemed to hurtle backward in time….
“Now it’s gone — all of it,” said Zakia Zahadat, 24, who used to work in a government ministry after she earned a college degree. She is mostly confined to home these days, she said. “We have lost the power to choose what we want.”…
This is the world the men in charge of the Taliban want. My heart goes out to the Afghani people, who cannot yet find the power to break these chains, and to the women who want things to change so much, and who put their lives on the line to make it so.
I am not expert enough to have any idea what can be done, though it’s clear the American occupation did not resolve the situation one bit. This has been generations in the making, and I fear it will take generations yet to come before women’s rights are once again respected.
Medication abortion – will we lose that too?
We certainly will if the antiabortion groups get their way. They are working now on legislation to ban medication abortions, even if the pills come from a state where abortion is legal. (gift link, should get you past the paywall)
Most abortions are done at home. Antiabortion groups are taking aim.
Two top antiabortion groups have crafted and successfully lobbied for state legislation to ban or further restrict the predominant way pregnancies are ended in the United States — via drugs taken at home, often facilitated by a network of abortion rights groups….
The groups are pursuing a variety of tactics, from bills that would ban the abortion-inducing drugs altogether to others that would allow family members to sue medication providers or attempt to shut down the nonprofit groups that help women obtain and safely use the drugs.
Their strategy reflects the reality that abortion access today looks vastly different from that of the pre-Roe world, one without easy access to abortion medications from out-of-state or overseas pharmacies….
National Right to Life, meanwhile, released a “model law,” a week before the overturn of Roe v. Wade that seeks to outlaw a coalition of nonprofit groups that assist women with self-managed abortions. Last month, Republican lawmakers in South Carolina became the first to introduce the legislation.
The efforts illustrate how the antiabortion battlefront now reaches beyond traditional bills seeking criminal penalties for doctors who provide surgical abortions in hospitals or clinics, instead targeting organizations that assist women with mail-order abortion prescriptions and safety protocols for self-managed abortions….
I continue to update my Abortion Resources page, and will try to pin down more location data for the various groups. Most of the groups, at least the U.S. ones, will face legal challenges as the antiabortion groups try to move their legislation through the various state authorities.
You will not be surprised to hear they wish to ban even informational pages like mine. They do not want even the knowledge of abortion options to be available to women.
Call, write, protest, donate, group with your allies—you know what to do. Stand up for your rights, or lose them.
Violence
I know I have said here more than once that I believe the right-wing patriarchy, the white supremacist movement in this country wants me and everyone like me to be dead so long as we refuse to conform to their ideas of how human culture should be structured.
They don’t want feminists to exist, or queers of any variety. They are uncomfortable with creative artists and free-thinkers. They don’t like science because they can’t control it. They definitely hate people of color and immigrants who come from non-Western countries. Even a whiff of social democracy as it exists in European countries, which threatens the supremacy of rich white men, drives them into frothing rage.
They want a society where those white men rule, where women and children are property (which, through laws or norms, was much the case when I was born in 1953), and the rest of us fall into the slots they have decreed we live in. And when we refuse to do so, when we push them out of power and insist on power of our own, they often respond with violent anger.
While this struggle is not unique to the United States, there are strong roots to patriarchy and white supremacy in the US. It’s a strand of American culture that has existed since the founding of our nation. It does not hesitate to strike out when threatened, and it perceives threats almost everywhere. Thus we have seen the continuing rise of right-wing militias in the modern era, which culminated in the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021.
This week the threat came in the form of the Department of Justice, which conducted a search of the Trump property in Florida, ostensibly to seek some range of classified papers that were in Trump’s possession. This threat is apparently so severe that the almost-instant response was a wide range of conservatives calling for violence and revenge.
Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner reports on their reaction.
Now They’re Calling for Violence
Trump loyalists have reacted to the search of the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago residence with unhinged fury.
…MAGA-world denizens have called for violence and civil war, so much so that the phrase civil war was trending on Twitter Monday night. One user on Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, said, “Fuck a civil war, give them a REVOLUTION. We out number all of the [sic] 10 to 1.”…
Ben Collins, who covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet for NBC News, wrote on Monday evening, “The posts on these pro-Trump forums tonight are as violent as I’ve seen them since before January 6th. Maybe even moreso.”
Commentators in right-wing media, meanwhile, have been using extraordinarily reckless and inflammatory language.
The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet, wrote “This. Means. War”—which was “quickly amplified by a Telegram account connected to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political adviser,” according to The New York Times. Bannon called the FBI “the Gestapo” and said, “We need to choke down the FBI and choke down the Justice Department.”…
Wehner continues with many other examples, so see it all at the link. He believes there may well be worse to come, and I have to agree.
I certainly hope we aren’t going to descend into ever more violence. My own training is in mediation and cooperative decision-making, and my impulse when confronted with anger is to respond with a very light touch. But an awful lot of my lefty friends have guns—more than you probably imagine—and in fact think that guns are essential for their own safety at this time.
We already know the incredible level of individual violence which exists in the United States. I can certainly imagine we will see individuals and small groups lashing out even more often, with bursts of violence like the attack on an FBI office yesterday. How this will play out over time is completely unclear to me.
For now, I continue to live a peaceful life, and I wish the same for all of you. Please don’t take that peace for granted. It could change in an instant.
Workers of the World, Unite!
Starbucks workers are unionizing all over, but Starbucks is fighting the trend by firing union organizers.
As we see in the video below, the ultimate power belongs to the workers. Without us, they have nothing but an empty store.
Starbucks fired an @SBWorkersUnited union leader in Buffalo.
The whole store walked out in protest.
This video has over 17 million views on TikTok. pic.twitter.com/WgObqa2ZAN
— Josh Miller-Lewis (@jmillerlewis) August 10, 2022
A reminder
Colorado isn’t the only state where abortion providers are stressed right now.
From Public Notice:
“Travel patterns have shifted”: the Chicago Abortion Fund on being a Midwest oasis of reproductive care
“People are just afraid, they’re faced with a lot of misinformation.”
…The current crisis is new in its intensity and danger. But abortion rights have been under assault for a long time. Advocates and activists have put in place extensive networks and institutions designed to help those who need care and to protect abortion rights.
One such institution is the Chicago Abortion Fund. Founded in 1985, the fund’s mission is to provide “financial, logistical, and emotional support to people seeking abortion services.” It fields more than 500 calls a month from people seeking reproductive health care throughout the Midwest. Recently it has been working with people as far away as Texas and Arizona.
…I spoke to Alicia Hurtado, communications and advocacy manager at the Chicago Abortion Fund, about how the organization’s work has been affected by the Supreme Court decision, and how they plan to continue to fight for reproductive justice.
The post continues with a transcript of the interview, where Ms. Hurtado describes their work and how it has changed since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Read the whole thing!
And remember too, that all abortion funds are still stressed as well. You can help through the National Network of Abortion Funds.
More on the IR Act
Vox has an explainer: The Inflation Reduction Act, explained
The climate bill is also a health care bill (and it does a few things on taxes, too).
Useful legislation
No, it doesn’t go far enough. And yes, we still have more work to do—we must keep pushing. But this is a real victory, especially on climate change.
For details on the likely effects of the bill, listen to this podcast at Dave Roberts’ Volts, where he discusses the impact of this bill with experts.
And I’ll re-up this post from Bill McKibben, which outlines what our next steps must be if the bill does pass: Making Momentum Matter! – Post-Manchin, the climate fight morphs in many ways.
I’ll post more analysis as I can.
This energy is what we need…
…to win in the mid-terms.
These organizers in Kansas walked door-to-door, day after day, getting out the vote to defeat Kansas’s abominable abortion law. They raised tons of money to support the effort. They coordinated with Indivisible and never gave up. Every one of us has to match their heart and their efforts to win this fall.
This is an interview with community organizer Yazmin Bruno-Valdez, and with Olivia Julianna of Gen-Z for Change. You may have heard of Olivia. She was attacked by Matt Gaetz, body-shamed publicly, and she used that attention to raise more than two million dollars for the effort.