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The most effective weapon Republicans currently have in the midterm messaging war isn’t individual terms such as “groomer,” or “pedophile,” or “cancel culture.” Nor is it the wave of legislation they are pushing through chambers across the country to supposedly “protect” parental rights from so-called “woke” liberal policies.

Rather, it’s the fact that they have trained GOP and conservative-leaning voters to think of everything Democrats do as a threat to their way of life. Supporting LGBTQ rights, supposedly sexualizing children, purportedly importing immigrants, infringing on personal freedoms with mask mandates—it’s all of a piece. It’s shorthand for Democrats being scary because they want to destroy everything you hold dear.

Democrats often call this out as examples of the GOP using dog whistles or fearmongering to convey their message. That’s true, and it is particularly compelling for the racist contingent of their base. But fearmongering isn’t actually the point in and of itself. Republicans’ real endgame is to get voters so incensed about change, about their loss of status or way of life, that they don’t actually pay attention to the real GOP agenda. 

And what exactly are Republicans up to? They are making sure all of America’s financial spoils continue to accumulate at the top. Under Donald Trump, Republicans passed tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit wealthy individuals and corporations to this day. Now, they are promising to raise taxes on 100 million working families across America if they regain control of the Senate.

Yet, they have articulated no plans to help struggling Americans, bring down gas/food prices, lower health care costs, etc. None of it.

Instead, Republicans are just constantly jingling their culture-war keys, enraging their base, and hoping no one catches on to the trick.

Democrats need to start naming the trick. Moral outrage is good, and Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow channeled her righteous rage to great effect in her viral speech defending marginalized people. But moral outrage isn’t enough to lay the groundwork for November. Because even though liberals are sickened by GOP scapegoating of gay and transgender Americans, Black and brown Americans, undocumented immigrants, and others, not every voter—even some of the ones Democrats need this fall—is inherently outraged by it.

In short, moral outrage works with progressives but it lets Republicans off the hook with other voters who could prove critical to Democratic success at the ballot box.

If Democrats really want Republicans to pay at the polls for their reprehensible targeting of marginalized groups, they must take a page from the playbook of Sen. McMorrow. Yes, McMorrow took an impassioned stand against GOP hate, but she also very clearly named the trick Republicans are playing on voters.

“People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment, or that health care costs are too high, or that teachers are leaving the profession,” McMorrow explained, touching on several of voters’ key concerns.

“We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives,” she later added.

Go ahead and answer for that, Michigan Republicans. Why are the roads crap? Why are health care costs soaring? Why is there a teacher crisis? Why—particularly when Republicans have dominated control of the state legislature for the past 20 years.

Nationwide, Republicans are practicing the art of distraction, and they’ve created a shorthand for it that is one size fits all. It allows them to move seamlessly from outrage to outrage. Once “cancel culture” loses its edge, they can move to “pedophiles,” and then scrap that for “groomers” because it’s stickier.

So when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes on Disney and explains, “I’m just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special treatment in my state,” Republican voters know “that type of agenda” is coming for their way of life. And they are immediately riled about it.

In fact, that’s precisely why Republicans think they can do something as politically fraught as target Disney, which has spent nearly a century bringing joy to kids the world over. GOP voters don’t need to think critically about anything anymore—they merely react to the latest input.

If Democrats want to have any chance of competing with Republicans on equal footing in 2022 and 2024, they must offer voters a similar framework through which they can process the GOP’s endless stream of outrages. 

That way, the next time swing voters hear about the latest Democratic outrage, they can stop and think, why are Republicans telling me this?

But it’s a process of repetition—it must become the automatic next question. Democrats have got to couple their indignation with an immediate question, “Why do you think Republicans are doing or saying such an outrageous thing?” And then they can tell voters why, which is really quite beautiful since Republicans haven’t had a fresh idea among them since the ‘80s.

Related Stories:

• Here’s why a Michigan State senator’s fiery response to GOP ‘groomer’ smears went viral
• Watch what happens when you pick the wrong Democrat to lie about
• Rick Scott made the mistake of telling voters what Republicans stand for. It’s a polling disaster

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Greg Sargent / WaPo:

The other big question raised by the leaked Kevin McCarthy audio

McCarthy told Cheney he thought the resolution might pass the Senate, meaning it would have some GOP support, and suggested he might prod Trump to resign.

“I’m seriously thinking of having that conversation with him tonight,” McCarthy said on the audio, which Rachel Maddow aired on Thursday night. Then McCarthy said this:

This is one personal fear I have. I do not want to get in any conversation about Pence pardoning. Again, the only discussion I would have with him is that I think this will pass. And it would be my recommendation that you should resign.

McCarthy seriously considered telling Trump he should resign, perhaps before a 25th Amendment resolution passed with some GOP support. This contradicts McCarthy’s denial of a New York Times report by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin that McCarthy had done this. After this denial, they released the audio.

Maybe lying about everything, always, isn’t the smartest approach.

Dr. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds / Royal United Services Institute (UK (.pdf):

Operation Z: The Death Throes of an Imperial Delusion

Although Russia has clearly been weakened by its battlefield setbacks in Ukraine, the combinationof its imperial ambitions and significant coercive power risks destabilisation further afield.Moldova is the most prominent example, but as the conflict protracts, Russian operations couldpose threats in Serbia and beyond. Coordinated efforts to curtail Russian malign influence in thesestates – and further afield – will be critical if the crisis in Ukraine is to be contained. Further crises,risking further economic disruption, will prove politically difficult to bear.

Finally, the Russian decision to double down is a high-stakes gamble. If Russia mobilises andeventually overcomes Ukrainian resistance then NATO will face an aggressive, isolated andmilitarised state. If Russia loses then President Putin has now begun radicalising the populationin the pursuit of policies that he will struggle to deliver. Failure to defeat the Ukrainian state afterrelentlessly comparing it to the Nazi regime may have serious consequences for Putin and thosearound him. To frame a conflict as existential and to lose must necessarily call the suitability of aleader into question among Russia’s political elites. NATO states therefore need to consider how tomanage escalation pathways that follow if Russia is not only defeated in Donbas but finds its newlymobilised and poorly trained troops, with few remaining stocks of precision munitions, unable todeliver a victory in the summer. The death of Putin’s political project is plausible, but it has alreadyinflicted immense damage internationally and risks doing considerably more.

BBC:

French election: A battle of bad reputations for Le Pen and Macron

In fairness, [Marine Le Pen]’s persuaded many, with popularity ratings she never enjoyed previously. But large swathes of France simply don’t buy it.

Nagette, a young Muslim office worker, told me Le Pen could ‘”change her mask as often as she liked” but that she remained far-right in her roots and policies.

She’d be voting Emmanuel Macron, she said, to keep Le Pen out.

When I followed Le Pen on her campaign trail in the south of France a few days ago, her press officers had us journalists meet them in a car park at an arranged time. We then were left to hang around irritably, until they suddenly announced the name of the village Marine Le Pen would imminently appear in for a campaign event.

It was quite surreal.

But there is a logic to it. If the press didn’t know ahead of time where Marine would be glad-handing, then her shouting, chanting, at times aggressive detractors wouldn’t be there either, to ruin her PR event.

WFTV9:

End of Reedy Creek: Disney won’t pay more taxes, but you will

One of the biggest myths circulating on the internet is that the end of Reedy Creek will finally force Disney to pay its fair share of taxes, boosting the economies of Florida and the counties its resorts are located in.

Let’s dispel that rumor right now: not only is it wrong, it’s the opposite that will take effect.

This much is true: the Reedy Creek Improvement District is an extension of Disney that shields the company from oversight others have. The theme park operator taxes itself and gives itself permission to build whatever, wherever so long as it follows building codes and other state and federal laws.

David Rothkopf / Daily Beast:

The Results Are in on the World’s Handling of the War in Ukraine

Some leaders have stepped up during Russia’s war on Ukraine—but others have failed to make the grade.

At this point, we have learned enough to provide a first pass at evaluating how those leaders are doing. Here’s an assessment of how the most noteworthy among them have distinguished themselves for better or for worse in the course of what must certainly be seen as one of the darkest chapters in the recent history of Europe.

…

So, it turns out having foreign policy experience matters. Biden, who had more than anyone elected to the US presidency in history, has certainly shown that during the Ukraine crisis. 

Pew Research Center:

Republicans increasingly critical of several major U.S. institutions, including big corporations and banks

Republicans are critical of how several major institutions, from large corporations and technology companies to universities and K-12 public schools, are affecting the United States. And in many cases, Republicans’ assessments have taken a sharp negative turn in the past few years.

Edward Stringer / Twitter:

Some thoughts on the air war over Ukraine and its implications for air forces in general. I caveat all by stating that we don’t know very much about UKR tactics, and if we did we wouldn’t want to be too descriptive. But we can pick out some essential observations.

The first point is that in the eighth week of this war the Russian Air Force (VKS) still shows no sign of running a campaign to gain air superiority. Given the advantages it has in the ‘physical component’ of air combat power this is truly remarkable. So it probably cannot.

And that means that the Russian army cannot discount air attack at any time, and UKR can plan to make use of the air environment. This could prove to be the factor that tips the balance in effective overall combat power, and it arises because the UKR armed forces are clearly leading in the ‘conceptual component’ of air combat power. They have worked out how to take a massive inferiority in numbers and turn that around by fighting smarter. There are lessons here in Air C2 for all air forces.

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It’s Friday everybody! A lot of Jan. 6 insurrectionist news is coming down the pipe this week. We have Marjorie Taylor Greene and her fellow white supremacist-leaning Proud Boys. Did you know that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is not simply a nightmare person, but a racist nightmare person? You did? Well, that’s still true! We have a messaging problem in the Democratic Party. Part of that issue is traditional news outlets have always leaned conservative—even if today’s MAGA conservative leans almost entirely fascist. The other part is that there are still many Democratic officials who mistake “going high” for not relentlessly calling out how horrendous GOP leadership actually is.

House Minority Kevin McCarthy is still one of the country’s top five dirtbags! And while he isn’t in the news as much—by design—Sen. Minority Dirtbag Mitch McConnell remains atop that list forever.

Here is some of what you may have missed.

• Awkward recording of Kevin McCarthy emerges hours after his denial. What else do reporters have?
• Just 3 in 10 voters know the U.S. created more jobs than it lost last year
• DeSantis’ new gerrymandered congressional map erases Black district and vastly inflates GOP edge
• POC students call for racist University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax to be held accountable
• Biden to request more Ukraine aid when Congress gets back next week
• Mark Meadows is registered to vote in how many states? Three and counting, apparently
• This video of Marjorie Taylor Greene getting busted for lying in court  is a must-see MAGA moment
• Who’s the biggest loser: Mitch or Kev?
• Florida releases examples of banned math textbooks that include lessons in … empathy?
• Utah media shows D.C. press how it’s done in holding Mike Lee accountable for 2020 election plotting
• With forest protection executive order, conservation groups finally feel heard by President Biden
• When you talk about inflation, definitely talk about corporate profits

And from the community:

• Babylon, Samarra, and other ancient wonders in Iraq are being destroyed by climate change
• Wisconsinites voted on April 5. Turnout went up by 86%. Expect that this fall, races will be close.

Also, check out new podcast episodes of Daily Kos’ The Brief, and The Downballot.

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Ukrainian officials say satellite images show a 300-meter mass grave in a Russian-occupied village near Mariupol where up to 9,000 people may be buried. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko, in a report by the Mariupol City Council on Telegram, likened the site of the mass grave in the village of Manhush—about 20 kilometers from Mariupol—to Babi Yar, the ravine in Kyiv where 33,000 Jews were killed by Nazi occupiers in 1941, Ukrainskaya Pravda said.

The satellite image from April 9 was provided by U.S. defense contractor Maxar Technologies, which said it is 20 times the size of a mass grave seen in a satellite image of the liberated town of Bucha near Kyiv that contained the bodies of 70 civilians. Officials estimated that the Russian forces may have buried between 3,000 and 9,000 Mariupol citizens in Manhush.

Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said that Russian troops collect the bodies of dead residents of Mariupol from the city’s streets and take them by truck to large refrigerated chambers at industrial facilities. The bodies are then put in black bags and disposed of in mass graves outside of Mariupol. ”We don’t know how many bodies there are or how to count them. There must be thousands of them there. … But at last, we have established where they are taking at least some of the people who were killed in Mariupol.”

Mariupol City Council sources told Ukrainskaya Pravda that the Russians dug new trenches on the outskirts of Mariupol and filled them with bodies on each day in April. Mariupol officials say at least 22,000 civilians have been killed by the Russian army since the siege of the port city began on March 1, but fear the death toll could be even higher. Before Russian forces took over nearly the entire Black Sea port city, Mariupol municipal services had buried nearly 5,000 people by mid-March.

Meanwhile, shelling by Russian occupiers prevented the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, according to Ukrainskaya Pravada. “No good news from Mariupol. It’s very tough. Everything that the Russians are doing is difficult, chaotic, slow, and, of course, deceitful,” she said.

On Wednesday, evacuation buses with 79 Mariupol residents were able to leave the city and arrived in territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. Ukrainian officials estimate that about 120,000 civilians remain in Mariupol, where supplies of food, water, electricity, and heat have been cut off.

Earlier Thursday, Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin that Mariupol had been “liberated” by Russian forces, but also admitted that more than 2,000 Ukrainian defenders remain in the city, concentrated on the sprawling grounds of the Azovstal steel factory. There are also several hundred civilians sheltering there.  

Putin ordered Shoigu to call off the planned storming of the Azovstal plant, calling it “impractical.” “We should always think, in this case especially, about saving the lives and health of our soldiers and officers. There is no need to climb into these catacombs,” Putin said. “Block off this industrial area so that not even a fly can escape.”

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by Tina Vásquez

This article was originally published at Prism.

Many are still trying to untangle the case of Lizelle Herrera, the 26-year-old Texan who was arrested April 7 for an alleged self-induced abortion that occurred in January. One of the most alarming details that has emerged is the likelihood that a health care provider reported Herrera to law enforcement, highlighting a troubling reality: Whether intentional or not, health care workers can operate as agents of the state and aid in the criminalization of patients. This is especially true when self-managed abortion is involved.

On March 30, the Starr County Clerk’s Office indicted Herrera, alleging that she “intentionally and knowingly cause[d] the death of an individual” through induced abortion. Her bail was set at half a million dollars. In order for Herrera to be charged with murder, a grand jury, a judge, and a prosecutor had to sign off on the indictment, signaling that they were all willing to severely punish and incarcerate a woman for her pregnancy outcome, according to Zaena Zamora, the executive director of the Frontera Fund. The abortion fund, based in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, immediately rallied to Herrera’s defense when news of her arrest went public.

According to advocates, it was clear from the beginning that Herrera’s case was full of holes. “The indictment is very skimpy on the details, which is a red flag for whatever due process was executed leading up to her arrest and charges,” Zamora said.

While Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez ultimately dropped Herrera’s charges, the press release announcing the dismissal of the indictment mentioned that Herrera was investigated because of an incident reported by a hospital to the Starr County Sheriff’s Department. It’s unclear where the incident took place; however, there is only one hospital in Starr County located in Rio Grande City. Rockie Gonzalez, the founder of Frontera Fund, said during a press conference that advocates have a fine line to walk between stigmatizing and demonizing any health care worker who potentially made a report and protecting them from the pressures of the law that may have made them feel obligated to report.

“We don’t know who these people are. We don’t know under what duress or personal judgment value they operated, but it’s one of the reasons why we need to make sure that at the county and the municipal level it’s made very clear to health care workers what the lines of a potential [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] violation look like and make sure that they are not under duress to do that kind of reporting,” Gonzalez said.

Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, told Prism that based on news coverage, what the district attorney has said, and statements from the sheriff’s department, it seems clear there was some kind of report from the health care provider to law enforcement. If/When/How’s Repro Legal Defense Fund paid Herrera’s bond on April 9, and on April 11, Ramirez filed a petition to drop the charges. But much remains unclear about how and why Herrera was criminalized.

“Little information is publicly available about the incident itself, or how or why confidentiality was broken, but we know enough to say that whatever she told the health care provider led them to turn her over to law enforcement,” Diaz-Tello said.

Based on the law, however, there was actually no reason for a health care provider to report Herrera. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, self-managed abortion is not illegal in Texas, nor in the vast majority of other states.

‘What happened wasn’t a crime’

When news of Herrera’s arrest began to make the rounds on social media April 8, many members of the public were outraged that a health care provider may have reported a woman to law enforcement in what they presumed to be a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Diaz-Tello told Prism HIPAA provides exceptions for the reporting of crimes, not something a provider thinks is a crime—because Herrera didn’t commit a crime.

“Something important for folks to understand is that in many cases, health care providers are under an incorrect impression that they’re mandated to report when somebody has self-managed an abortion,” Diaz-Tello said. “That’s just not the case. They’re not required to report that to law enforcement. This whole thing could have been avoided had a report not been made. In fact, it would have been more in line with a provider’s ethical and legal obligations to protect patient privacy for the facility not to make a report.”

Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Nevada are the only states to have explicit criminal laws against self-managed abortion. However, even if self-managed abortion isn’t a crime in the vast majority of states, there are laws that can be weaponized against people who self-induce.

According to If/When/How, no state requires doctors or health care providers to report someone who self-managed an abortion to the police, and people have no legal obligation to tell a doctor or hospital staff if they’ve self-managed. According to doctors, there is also no drug test that detects the medications commonly used for abortion in the U.S., and a miscarriage prompted by use of abortion pills is indistinguishable from one that occurs spontaneously.

That means that the Starr County district attorney’s decision to drop Herrera’s charges actually wasn’t an example of prosecutorial discretion, as many have suggested; it was a matter of following the law.

“What happened wasn’t a crime, whether it was a pregnancy loss or a self-induced abortion,” Diaz-Tello said. “We applaud the DAs who have taken a public stand against prosecuting people for abortions or for the outcome of their pregnancies. That’s an important step, but we need them to do more than follow the law, which they are already obligated to do. We need them to actively work to end and remedy the many situations where their colleagues reach beyond the law to punish people.”

An ‘aura of illegality’ around self-managed abortion

Organizations have spent years providing education on self-managed abortion with pills and the ways that this option comes with increased risk of criminalization. If/When/How also provides crucial legal scaffolding to help people better understand their rights and the potential risks associated with self-managed abortion. The organization has a confidential legal helpline that provides free legal information, and their Repro Legal Defense Fund covers bail and funds defenses for people like Herrera who are investigated, arrested, or prosecuted for alleged self-managed abortion.

But in states like Texas that have been pummeled with anti-abortion laws over the years, there is confusion about what the laws require—even among health care providers.

SB 8, passed last year, prohibits abortion as early as six weeks and puts enforcement in the hands of civilians who can obtain rewards of at least $10,000 for successfully bringing lawsuits against anyone who “aids or abets” abortion care. SB 4, also recently passed, makes it a criminal violation to provide abortion pills after 49 days of pregnancy. Under both laws, pregnant people who get abortions are exempted from criminal repercussions.

While the specifics of Herrera’s case may not fit the confines of SB 4 and SB 8, Diaz-Tello told Prism that Herrera’s indictment wasn’t a legal consequence of these laws, but her criminalization was likely a direct result of their existence.

“People’s immediate assumption was that this was because of SB 8 and SB 4, but the truth is a little bit more complicated,” Diaz-Tello explained. “Those laws don’t impose penalties on the pregnant person for anything they do or don’t do during pregnancy, so even if somebody obtains an abortion that is in violation of SB 8 or SB 4, they are essentially insulated from being the subject of the legal proceeding.”

The issue with laws like SB 4 and SB 8 is that they also create what If/When/How’s senior legal and policy director, Sara Ainsworth, calls an “aura of illegality.”

“It’s this idea that there’s something wrong or bad or potentially suspicious and a matter for the legal system when somebody either has an abortion or presents with something that is potentially an abortion. That is going to lead to people being criminalized and the reason for that is that criminalization is only a little bit about what the law says and much more about how the law classifies and categorizes people,” Diaz-Tell said.

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an OB-GYN and abortion provider in Texas, said that while it’s true that some health care providers are guided by personal or religious beliefs when they report people who disclose they’ve self-managed, often it’s a misunderstanding of what the law is and what the provider’s role is.

“It doesn’t actually matter what the law says or doesn’t say; it’s the climate that politics and anti-abortion laws create,” Moayedi said. “What I’ve seen happen in other instances is that a health care provider thought it was a mandatory reporter scenario, and this misunderstanding coincided with law enforcement also not understanding the law.”

Even providers who are experts in pregnancy care in Texas can have a misunderstanding of abortion laws, Moayedi explained. There isn’t a book providers are given that outlines abortion laws and how to comply with them. Complicating matters further are “decades and decades” of different health and safety codes enacted by different government agencies that have been subject to lawsuits, proceedings, and other changes over the years.

“Unless the law is something you really pay attention to because you’re an abortion provider or an activist in the community, it can be really difficult to know what’s true and what’s hearsay or someone’s interpretation of the law. On top of that, it is very common for clinics, hospitals, and other medical establishments to add abortion restrictions on top of abortion laws. That’s the other thing that can become confusing for medical providers: Their institutions may have policies or practices that aren’t related to the law in the state,” Moayedi said.

What does this look like in practice? Moayedi said that hospitals across Texas are creating policies in response to SB 8 because they are afraid of becoming entangled in abortion laws and abortion-related lawsuits. For example, hospitals are applying SB 8 to spontaneous abortion or miscarriage, meaning some providers aren’t initiating treatment for people who show up to their facilities with their membranes ruptured at 17 weeks.

“That’s a miscarriage, a spontaneous abortion; that’s not an induced abortion. To manage that scenario, you induce labor to prevent the person from hemorrhage, sepsis, and death. So while SB 8 doesn’t have anything to do with miscarriage, we’re seeing it applied to miscarriage because for clinics and hospitals, it’s turned into an issue of risk mitigation. It’s about not getting sued; it’s not about applying laws correctly,” Moayedi explained.

‘We are not here to help law enforcement build cases’

Evidence suggests that when states enact highly restrictive abortion laws, more people choose to self-manage. This also means more people may be criminalized. One of the more troubling aspects of this phenomenon is that people are generally socialized to be open and forthcoming with their health care providers, which doesn’t serve their best interests in the criminal justice system.

“On the one hand, people seeking health care are told to be honest and disclose as much information as possible so their provider can give them the care that they need. That’s exactly in opposition to the rights that people have when they are accused of a crime or investigated for a crime. All of our Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment protections that are crucial for protecting ourselves from unjust criminalization are in opposition to how we’ve been taught to behave in a health care setting,” Diaz-Tello said.

Moayedi told Prism this is a dynamic she “really struggles with.” While everyone deserves to be able to be fully transparent with their health care providers so that they can get individualized health care, as a person of color and a physician, she also understands that members of many communities can’t confide in a health care professional and trust the response that they’re going to get.

“The reality for many communities—communities of color, immigrant communities, queer communities, disabled communities—is that having to protect yourself from the health care industry is, to some extent, a part of life,” Moayedi said. “I came into medicine to really dismantle these very structures, but I recognize that I’m a part of them too. I am very forthright with patients and let them know that I am their physician; that I’m there to take care of them; and that I don’t care what they tell me. If they seem concerned, I let them know directly the only things I’m mandated to report are child abuse and elder abuse. It shouldn’t have to be on patients to vet who is and isn’t safe, but those are some ways I can flag to patients that they can trust me.”

Some of the most trusted professional associations for physicians have taken a public stand on self-managed abortion, asserting that providers should protect patient autonomy, confidentiality, and the integrity of the patient-physician relationship. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) released a position statement in 2017 opposing the prosecution of pregnant people for conduct alleged to have harmed their fetus, including the criminalization of self-induced abortion. ACOG said the threat of prosecution may result in negative health outcomes by deterring people from seeking needed care, including care related to complications after abortion.

“ACOG also opposes administrative policies that interfere with the legal and ethical requirement to protect private medical information by mandating obstetrician-gynecologists and other clinicians to report to law enforcement [those] they suspect have attempted self-induced abortion,” the statement said.

There are ways that physicians can push back against practices that can lead to criminalization. Moayedi said that a truly clarifying moment happened when she was a fellow working at a hospital and caring for someone who had just given birth and disclosed they had a history of drug use. Another physician caring for the woman’s newborn told Moayedi that she needed to order a drug test.

“There was no reason to order a drug test for this person’s medical care; she already told us that she did certain drugs and that they were going to be in her system,” Moayedi said. “When I asked why we needed to order a drug test, I was told, ‘We have to build a case.’ That was a very important moment. The notion that I needed to order a drug test to build a case against someone really went against why I became a physician.”

Moayedi said that it’s in these seemingly small moments that providers can take a stand.

“I really think it’s our duty as physicians to speak about these moments when they happen and to be transparent about them with residents and medical students to help them understand what criminalization can look like, and that we are not here to help law enforcement build cases against people,” Moayedi said.  

Nancy Cárdenas Peña, the Texas director for policy and advocacy at National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, said it’s “an unfortunate reality” that providers can act as agents of the state—whether they realize it or not. The Latina Institute is one of a small group of reproductive justice organizations that quickly organized on Herrera’s behalf.

Cárdenas Peña told Prism she’s been thinking a lot about the health care facility that may have reported Herrera and why whoever did the reporting felt empowered to do that. What about this hospital environment made them feel safe criminalizing a person who came in for a complication or whatever the case may have been?

“It isn’t always an act of aggression when reporting people for abortion; I also think it’s a symptom of the legislature that creates confusion,” Cárdenas Peña said. “We have providers who shouldn’t operate in these gray areas about what to report and what not to report. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last we hear about what happened in [Herrera’s] case. There seems to be a lot of momentum to figure out why this happened, who was responsible, and what happens next.”

Herrera’s case also shined a light on the localized impact of restrictive abortion access in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where organizers and advocates told Prism about the critical importance of cross-movement collaboration between criminal justice and reproductive justice organizers. Read more about cross-movement collaboration here.

Tina Vásquez is a contributing writer at Prism. She covers gender justice, workers’ rights, and immigration. Follow her on Twitter @TheTinaVasquez.      

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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On Thursday, the Florida legislature passed a bill cancelling Walt Disney World’s special tax status in that state. The bill, which will now almost certainly become law, eliminates the company’s Reedy Creek Improvement District, formed in 1967 as a consequence of the Disney corporation’s purchase of land to build its Magic Kingdom. The district and its quasi-ownership by Disney were created in part to alleviate anticipated tax burdens on local state governments with boundaries that encompass the 25,000-acre district, and it “essentially allows the megaresort, which employs roughly 80,000 people, to function as its own municipal government.”

Disney’s privileged status was revoked because Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek publicly criticized  legislation passed last month by DeSantis and the Florida GOP that prohibits discussions about gender-related issues in the state’s public schools. Known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, that bias-affirming legislation is one of the more recent examples of Republican legislation designed to marginalize and demonize LGBTQ people, now an imperative for the Republicans in their effort to gain and cement political power.

The impact this retaliatory legislation will have on Disney’s bottom line is unclear (its legality is highly questionable), but frankly it’s irrelevant to the larger point. What DeSantis and the Florida GOP have signaled with this action is their willingness to impose and inflict their warped sense of supposed Christian morality (or lack thereof) on the public at large through legislation that financially punishes private corporations that oppose or publicly disagree with their views. As Greg Sargent, writing for The Washington Post explains, this represents a chilling “expanded use of state power to fight the culture wars in a much broader and more pernicious sense.”

Again, Disney itself—whatever your feelings may be about that corporate behemoth—is wholly beside the point here. As explained by Jonathan Chait writing for New York Magazine, what the Republican Party now apparently sanctions, with little or no debate, is the same type of intimidation autocracies commonly use to stifle dissent and control public opinion in countries such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s Russia:

Corporations that publicly question the party’s preferred policy, or withhold donations in protest, will be subject to discriminatory policy. If they enjoy favorable regulatory or tax treatment, they can continue to do so on the condition that they stay in the GOP’s political good graces.

This is one way rulers like Orban and Putin hold power. It is a method that, until quite recently, would have been considered unthinkable in the United States. That bright line has been obliterated. Trump and DeSantis have now made it almost unremarkable.

Chait notes the lack of almost any conservative opposition to DeSantis’ action, a silence that confirms its tacit approval among the right. As Sargent notes, some of the current crop of Trump-vetted candidates, (J.D. Vance, for example, currently running for Senate in Ohio) have already voiced their support and approval of such tactics, which they characterize as the philosophy of a rejuvenated, more menacing “New Right” repurposed to promote a theocratically based “post-liberal moral order,” as Sargent describes it.

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Sargent’s piece in the Post, however, goes significantly further, explaining exactly how such tactics could—and likely would—play out on a national level assuming Republican control of Congress, or even worse, the executive branch that controls the function of our federal agencies. 

Sargent quotes professor Donald P. Moynihan of Georgetown University on the implications of this type of intimidation. Moynihan suggests that in an executive branch controlled by DeSantis, for example, administrative agencies could be staffed (much the way they were under the Trump administration) with “right-thinking” officials, but specifically tasked with hunting down and persecuting corporations that refused to toe the administration’s ideological lines. In effect, the government would “harass or investigate companies perceived as ‘culturally disloyal.’” Changing the tax status of liberal-leaning foundations and targeting specific corporations with punitive measures (akin to what DeSantis is imposing on Disney) would also be possible through the administrative state. 

And if for some reason that type of state-controlled pressure didn’t have its desired “chilling effect” on the way such foundations approached certain issues, the added legislative threat from a GOP Congress working in tandem with such agencies certainly would. Sargent poses the question: 

What if such a president were backed in this project by congressional leadership? Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor who studies Congress, says you could see legislation targeted at offending companies, and even if it didn’t survive the courts, it could still function in a punitive way.

Those companies would sink large sums of money into litigating against such measures, even as Congress relied on taxpayer-funded lawyers on their side, Chafetz told me, meaning “the onus of the expense would fall on the companies, which would have a chilling effect.”

All of this, of course, is in the service of maximizing political power through control of the population, be it publicly through their media propaganda outlets or now privately through coercion aimed at businesses and corporations that might threaten the conservative dogma that cements their control. And although conservatives love to pay fealty to the supposedly libertarian principles of “free enterprise,” those sentiments, as we now see in Florida, will readily come to a screeching halt when private businesses act as an impediment to the right’s theocratic cultural dogma. 

With their thoroughly corrupt majority on the Supreme Court, their gerrymandered legislative majorities seemingly pending to take control of the Congress, and now their increasing willingness to punish private corporations that decline to submit to their ideological malignancy, Republicans have shown every indication not only that they prefer to live in a country like Hungary or Russia, but that they intend to do whatever is necessary to make that happen as soon as possible. The rest of us—and the incredible diversity of race, religion, and gender that this country actually represents—are simply obstacles to their vision, and thus undeserving of any thought or consideration.

Our task is to prove them wrong.

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Sometimes it feels like grotesquely wealthy industrialist Charles Koch is determined to burn down the planet by the time his semi-ambulant corpus is officially declared dead. He’s 86, but with some luck and resolve, he’ll likely be able to time his cremation perfectly, disgorging his oily soul and erupting into a sulfuric pillar of flame just as the last verdant patch of earth inevitably yields to the cruel exigencies of global climate change.

In other words, he’s a total d*ck who doesn’t really care about our planet or anyone on it.

And, sadly, he’s far from alone. Indeed, there seems to be no end of Republican officials willing to grease the skids for sure environmental destruction if it gets them invited to the right cocktail parties. And Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts appears to be one of these characters. 

In a detailed new exposé, HuffPost has unmasked an unholy and largely secret alliance between Ricketts and a Koch-funded group called American Stewards of Liberty, which has been working behind the scenes to scuttle President Joe Biden’s pro-conservation 30×30 initiative ever since it was announced in early 2021.

After the Biden administration unveiled 30×30, with the goal of conserving 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, American Stewards Executive Director Margaret Byfield reached out for willing accomplices to help murder the initiative and, according to HuffPost, the organization, which “has become a magnet for anti-federal land zealots,” would soon find a “star” in Ricketts.

Internal communications HuffPost obtained via a public record request to Ricketts’ office show Byfield acting as a shadow adviser of the governor, not only on 30×30 but other environmental policy issues. She even played a direct role in crafting an executive order the governor signed in late June aimed at preventing President Joe Biden from implementing his 30×30 plan in Nebraska.

One of the governor’s top aides, Taylor Gage, was in regular contact with Byfield between February and November of last year. The two kept one another abreast of their anti-30×30 efforts and shared materials ahead of a series of town halls the governor held around the state to “raise awareness about the threat 30×30 poses to our way of life here in Nebraska.” They also strategized about dealing with reporters and which media outlets could best help them get their message out.

Of course, this is just another example of the right’s savant-like mastery of simple, deceptive messaging. According to American Stewards, Biden’s initiative was a “land grab” that “hands the powers of the Federal regulatory agencies to a movement that has been working to abolish private property for decades.”

That’s nonsense, of course—and you know it’s nonsense because 1) it makes no sense and 2) it almost immediately became an article of faith among dopey Republicans like Ricketts. Indeed, shortly after meeting with Byfield at the state Capitol on March 10, 2021, Ricketts began parroting the group’s dubious claims about the Biden administration’s conservation efforts.

“When the agriculture secretary [Tom Vilsack] says it’s not a land grab, then you know it is a land grab,” Ricketts told attendees at an anti-30×30 town hall meeting in June 2021. Behind him was a screen projection that included the words “30×30 LAND GRAB.” Oddly enough, the image was lifted directly from American Stewards’ website. Of course, if anyone who merely acknowledges the existence of gay people can be a “groomer,” there’s seemingly no limit to the kinds of rhetorical dross these dingbats are prepared to burnish into sparkly berms of bullshit.

In its story, HuffPost shows how the information pipeline from the ironically named American Stewards to Ricketts’ office was wide open, with Gage, who’s now the executive director of the Nebraska Republican Party, acting as a liaison between the anti-environment group and the governor. Within weeks of Biden floating 30×30 as a national goal, writes HuffPost, American Stewards began coordinating with Gage. Those efforts culminated in a June 2021 executive order that Ricketts signed. The order could only be described as industry-friendly—and it’s a document that, according to HuffPost, “has Byfield’s fingerprints all over it.”

Meanwhile, Ricketts’ administration was playing dumb. When contacted by The Daily Beast just prior to the executive order signing, the governor’s office “pretended it had little if any knowledge of the right-wing group.”

Which brings us to Earth Day 2022. American Stewards is sponsoring a STOP 30×30 Summit in nowhere else but Lincoln, Nebraska, to mark the holiday. Byfield has described it as “the most important conference” her group has ever organized, while HuffPost calls it a “who’s who of land transfer proponents, climate change deniers, conservation foes and sympathizers of anti-government extremists.” In other words, the Republican Party in a nutshell.

Predictably, Ricketts is hosting the event and will welcome such luminaries as Byfield, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, and other “leading figures” of the anti-30×30 movement. It promises to be the best event that dark Koch money can buy. 

American Stewards is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The majority of its revenue comes from donations, major gifts, and income from trainings, speaking fees and consulting contracts with local governments. Between 2015 and 2019, Kane County, Utah, paid the organization $483,000 for land-use consulting and legal services, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Over that same five-year period, Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, two groups that received millions from the fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch and have funneled huge amounts of dark money to climate change denial and other conservative causes, gave American Stewards at least $170,000, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

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Hey, it looks like maybe there will be some consequences for one of the big-time Republican donors who helped push the party’s hoaxes about supposed “election fraud” when Republicans didn’t win a presidential election and started having an absolute fascist cow about it.

And by “maybe,” I mean probably not, and by “consequences,” I mean he’ll probably never see the inside of an actual Texas courtroom ever because the Texas courts would rather burn their own buildings down than abide a rich conservative guy having to answer for a crime. But at least we can enjoy Steven Hotze getting his name in the newspapers for helping to fund a crackpot Republican vigilante who ran an air conditioner repairman off the road and held him at gunpoint, believing the repairman to be involved in some weirdly premised “election fraud” scheme that existed only as a propaganda campaign in the heads of those shouting it.

The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Republican “megadonor” Steven Hotze was on Wednesday indicted on two felony counts for his role in that armed assault. Hotze wasn’t at the scene, but the man who held the repairman at gunpoint so that his truck could be searched was one of the supposed investigators Hotze was paying to find supposed fraud. And while Hotze’s lawyer is performatively outraged that Hotze would face charges over that, Hotze wasn’t just a little involved.

Hotze paid investigator/gunman Mark Aguirre over a quarter of a million dollars, and the vast majority of that was paid to Aguirre the day after the assault.

Anyway, the guy is a far-right activist, he’s been active in Texas Republican politics for approximately forever, he’s able to shell out a truly bizarre amount of money even for an alleged physician—who the hell throws down a quarter-million bucks for some random gun-toting ex-cop to go on a violent “fraud hunt” based on nothing but internet conspiracy claims?—and now he and his ally Ken Paxton are both qualified to wear “currently indicted for criminal acts but still quite welcome in all Republican circles” commemorative t-shirts. But now he’ll have to spend money on a few more lawyers as well, which is money that can’t go toward getting anyone else in Texas nearly gunned down over a hoax. It’s the small things that count.

The idea that you can pay someone a quarter of a million dollars to “find” election fraud and the guy you’re paying follows that order by running a random vehicle off the road in the dead of night and holding a man at gunpoint in order to search his work truck for “ballots” is extremely not good, and yeah, it’s pretty clear why a grand jury thought Hotze’s extremely lavish funding of the scheme counts as being involved with the crime. There’s a deeper story here somewhere, and if Hotze wants to argue that he was conned by a violent weirdo he’s going to have to have a better explanation for why he paid $211,000 of the $266,000 provided the day after the attack took place.

Because that doesn’t look like an “investigation,” that looks like a bounty being paid out for doing “something” publicly to keep the election fraud hoax alive—even if the “something” meant pinning that hoax on random and innocent people.

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In Alabama, Lowndes County’s wastewater system is investigating discrimination. According to NBC News, residents in the county pay for sewage to flow into lagoons because they lack advanced centralized treatment facilities that are common in larger cities. But pumping the flow into lagoons isn’t even an option for some taxpayers. In some neighborhoods, the lack of a functioning sewage system has caused sewage to flow into yards.

“It really smells. It smells so bad,” said Jerry Dean Smith a resident of the county. “You got waste running in people’s yards, neighbors’ yards, running into places. It backs up into the majority of these neighbors’ homes. It backs up into their bathroom and on their floors. And the waste, I mean pure waste, comes through.”

According to NBC News, while the plumbing systems in some of the houses in Smith’s neighborhood are tied to the county system, they aren’t working properly, or the connections have failed entirely.

“It’s not necessary for this to be going on in 2022,” Smith said. “It just shouldn’t be in the United States. It shouldn’t be. This is the wealthiest country. A sewage system should be a right.”

Many are blaming racism for the lack of a centralized sewage system since the county is predominantly Black and has a poverty rate of 22%, about double the national average. According to NBC News, at least 40% of the county’s homes have inadequate or no sewage systems, resulting in residents having to carry PVC pipes with waste from their homes into open holes in the ground, a method known as “straight piping.”

Following complaints, the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation in November to assess whether the Alabama Department of Public Health and the Lowndes County Health Department are operating in a manner that discriminates against Black residents.

“I think it is happening because the county is majority Black,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental activist who grew up in the county. “We’re rural, and we may not speak standard English all the time, so people may think that we’re not smart. But we’re smart enough to know when we’re being screwed.” Flowers noted that she is also concerned that government officials can give penalties and place liens on homes that don’t have proper septic systems, even if people can’t afford them.

The investigation stems from evidence of the state and local departments’ inability to deliver adequate services. The Department of Justice is examining whether the state and local departments are blocking Black peoples’ access to adequate sanitation systems on purpose.

“We will conduct a fair and thorough investigation of these environmental justice concerns and their impact on the health, life and safety of people across Lowndes county, Alabama,” said Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, after launching the investigation.

By blocking their sanitation systems, not only are the residents disadvantaged in terms of infrastructure, but their health is at risk since the chance of parasitic infections increases.

According to The Guardian, a 2017 study conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine found that hookworm was thriving in Lowndes county. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hookworm is an intestinal parasite that was once widespread in North America but had not been detected in the U.S. since the 1980s.  The study found that one of every three adults has tested positive for hookworms.

“Sanitation is a basic human need,” Clarke said. “Bold action is needed to ensure that no one in this country is unjustifiably subjected to illness or harm resulting from inadequate access to safe sewage services.”

But lack of septic tanks and sewage are not the only issues rural Alabama faces. According to CBS News, in much of rural Alabama, there is a water crisis due to a lack of running water, indoor plumbing, and sanitation. Most of the cases were in the same county, Lowndes.

“When there is a lot of rain, you cannot flush the toilet,” Perman Hardy, who also lives in Lowndes County, told CBS News. Hardy noted that if he were to flush the toilet, the sewage would be on his home’s floor.

To address similar cases, the Biden administration has requested $1.4 million from Congress to open an environmental justice office within the Justice Department.

According to data collected by state agencies, there were more than 1,200 sewage spills across Alabama in 2016 alone. The number has been expected to increase in recent years. Click here to see a map of sewage overflow in the state.