My guilty little secret revealed…..

Let’s Talk About the Right to F*ck: Conservatives’ War to Control Birth Control, Sex, and Ultimately—Women

I have to admit something to you—some of my favorite political instagram influencers are shills for far right extremism.  

Yes, it’s shameful. Yes, I feel terrible about it. And no I cannot stop watching them and once you start you probably won’t be able to either. 

They look so incredibly beautiful all the time (hair and makeup teams), the political recaps are snappy (lies) and they advertise a version of womanhood in which the choices are uncomplicated and obvious (patriarchy).  

If you look at Alex Clark’s YouTube (she is Turning Point USA’s headline female influencer and has a show called Poplitics), the banners for her show are things like: homemaking over girl bossing, motherhood can’t wait, pre-school is a gimmick, anti-daycare is pro-family, why surrogacy is selfish, an uncomfortable convo about IVF, surrogacy, gay adoption & divorce, how to track your period naturally, anti-woke wellness, and GIRL TALK: Why Women (And I!) Are Ditching Birth Control.  

Clark is patently terrible for sure, but she is also compelling to watch and the social media algorithms love her. 

You don’t need Project 2025 to see the agenda at play here. Turning Point USA, if you aren’t familiar, is the propaganda arm of the MAGA movement - and they’ve been building out a stable of influencers for many years.  Alex has always served as a critical arrow in their quiver, one whose framing is as a pop culture commentator who serves as a gateway to bring young women into the MAGA movement. While last year they were more explicit about their anti-birth control stance (her brand sweatshirts said “Birth Control? Ew.”), this year they’ve changed to a focus on wellness. 

Alex is just doing it for us, the women, to protect our health. 

Alex’s comments (and the ones made by all the women in the TPUSA stable) are culture war weapons. TPUSA has been investing in her for many, many years, building a powerful weapon to make the argument that things like banning birth control is in the best interest of women. 

It’s a classic wellness-to-rightwing pipeline schlock and few are better at it thanAlex Clark. .. 

This kind of influencer content is  incredibly persuasive branding to capture the 

swaths of crunchy mamas radicalized by the pandemic - by vaccines, masks and school closures - who are ripe for picking. 

This culture war doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s deeply connected to a legal and political movement to send women back to a time before we had access to legal abortions, birth control and more. They also want to end no fault divorce trapping women in marriages, even violent ones!

And these influencers are the coiffed and curled gateway drug. Come for the catchy slogans about wellness, stay for the deterioration of your rights. This is proselytization by gauzy filters and barrel curls, my friends. 

Because the front line of influencers are bringing women over to the Republican side so they can keep enacting all of the laws that will fuck women over.

So far this year we’ve seen Republican Governors in states like Virginia veto legislation that establishes a right to contraception, and Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would codify the right to contraception. 

Like any good evil plan, conservatives have a bunch of pathways open to banning birth control.  One possible way is through the courts. The mifepristone case that was recently heard at the Supreme Court is the perfect example of the plan, in my opinion. To review that case: the FDA approved the drug mifepristone for abortion care about 20 years ago as safe and effective. Conservative dark money forces got a group of doctors and dentists together to say that the FDA wrongly approved the drug-based on junk science, hopes and dreams. Legal rulings narrowed the question down to be about FDA decisions in 2016 and 2021 that expanded access to the drug. The Supreme Court dismissed the case based on a legal issue called standing, essentially saying that the group of doctors and dentists didn’t have reason to sue because they hadn’t been injured. In doing so, they wrote a roadmap for future conservative litigants on how to bring a viable case and overturn longstanding FDA rules.

Two recent Supreme Court decisions made that path easier. Last month, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine, which has been law since 1984 and says that courts must defer to the expertise of federal agencies (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo). Now judges will be able to second guess the FDA’s approval based on paid-for science and public outcry (performed by conservative influencers like Alex Clark). In another case, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Court made it substantially easier to bring lawsuits challenging federal regulations by extending how statute of limitations are calculated. During the case, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar specifically said that this decision would open the doors for doctors to sue over drug approvals decided decades ago. “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested the mifepristone case would be “fair game” for a new lawsuit, even though the statute of limitations for challenging the drug, approved in 2000, had long expired.”

Democrats often act like we’re too good to participate in the culture war. Culturally and politically, we are the majority. People who support pluralism, who accept diversity, who want to help other people and not just themselves, are the monoculture of institutions of learning, Hollywood and the financial elite. Contraception access is a wildly popular policy.  But the war is being waged and it’s a classic case of asymmetrical warfare. We are playing on their battlefield (social media) with early stage weapons. 

Democratic influencers (the few of us that there are) simply aren’t as mobilized, hungry and supported as the ones being trained in the Turning Point USA model. The messaging is scatterbrained, the targeting minimal. We are using slingshots against their tanks. 

I can’t turn away from the conservative influencers because they have created good branding and marketing for terrible things. They are the very definition of propaganda and, worst of all, the most powerful ones are women. This is a Barbie pink army coming to take away your rights.

Are you gonna let them?

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In Democracy in Retrograde we try to take your hopelessness and channel that into civic engagement that is authentic and sustainable for you. My political philosophy is that a rising tide lifts all boats, but that tide only rises with thousands of raindrops. It requires all of us to do a little. 

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