Town Hall on Abortion Rights Emergency

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Episode78

Sun, 9/26 8:25PM • 1:10:39

Prologue 00:00

For listeners who maybe are not familiar, Texas, on September 1, made law the most extreme abortion ban in 50 years… The Supreme Court can no longer be viewed as anything more than a political tool or a repressive political agenda of the radical political and religious right in the United States… If you aid and abet an abortion, or if you “intend to aid and abet an abortion,” you can be liable… They just want it to be unconstitutional to have an abortion anywhere… This is a movement that has terrorized women at clinics for decades. This is a movement that has killed abortion providers and bombs clinics. It’s a movement that mobilized for decades, massive marches of people indoctrinated to see women as breeders of children and the property of men. The sperm of a rapist or an uncle or an older brother or a father has more legal standing than a woman, which includes 11-year-olds that people bring in for abortions… So these October 2 marches we’re gonna have a contingent within them. Everybody who cares about the attacks on the right to abortion should be at one of these marches wherever you are.

Sam Goldman 01:31

Welcome to Episode 78 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. Less than a week out from the Women’s March’s rallies for abortion justice, today, we’re sharing excerpts of a town hall on the abortion rights emergency that originally aired September 21 on WBAI and WPFW and live-streamed on Refuse Fascism YouTube and Facebook accounts. The townhall was hosted by Sunsara Taylor on her show, “We Only Want the World.” Sunsara is a pal of the show, a frequent guest and co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. You’ll hear from Dahlia Lithwick, host of Amicus podcast and writer for Slate; Dr. Warren Hern, abortion provider; activist Michelle Xai: Tony RedRree, writer for Revcom.us, and myself. Have a listen.

Sunsara Taylor 02:38

It is now illegal in the state of Texas to perform or to assist a woman in obtaining an abortion after about six weeks into pregnancy, long before most women even know they’re pregnant. At the same time, coming up December 1, the Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear a case — another abortion ban out of Mississippi — that is a direct challenge to the landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade decision, which first legalized abortion nationwide. This is threatening to overturn or radically curtail abortion protections nationwide. We sit at a tipping point on what has been a decades- long Christian fascist assault on women’s rights to control their own bodies and their own reproduction and their very lives. And yet precisely at this moment, very few people understand that this is going on. This Texas ban caught most people by surprise, and very few understand the stakes of this upcoming December 1 Supreme Court case out of Mississippi.

This is what this town hall is aimed at helping transform; to wake people up to this emergency, to dig into where this has come from, how we got to this place, and what is needed to get us out of it. I will note right up front, that there are important marches that have been called on October 2 across the country by the Women’s March and other organizations for reproductive rights. It’s extremely important in this moment that these marches be as powerful, as determined, as uncompromising, as massive as possible, and that they not be merely one-off events where people go and vent their frustration and go back to their lives and go back to sleep. They need to be part of launching massive society-wide sustained protests and refusal to let women be slammed backwards. This is very important.

We’re going to get into this in tonight’s discussion and round table and we’re also going to be digging into the deeper questions afoot in this of what kind of society would enslave women in this kind of way, and what kind of future do we need? This town hall is to contribute to opening up that kind of debate and ferment and organizing, along with the struggle that is needed in the streets right now. Tonight’s special broadcast is also co-sponsored by two organizations. One is RefuseFascism.org and the other is the RNL — Revolution Nothing Less — Show.

Let me explain the format for our evening and then we’ll dive right in. We’re going to begin with a special message from the courageous longtime abortion provider Dr. Warren Hern. That will be followed by excerpts of an interview that I did with Dahlia Lithwick, who is the writer about the courts and the law at Slate.com. She’s also the host of the Amicus podcast, and she’s going to be getting into the stakes of this Mississippi abortion ban and the ban in Texas. Then we will move into a roundtable with three guests that I’ll introduce more fully when we get to that portion. Michelle Xai is a leader of the Los Angeles Revolution Club. Sam Goldman is on the editorial board of Refuse Fascism. Tony RedTree is a writer for Revcom.us. In the later portion, we’ll have a roundtable discussion with them. With that, let’s get started. Dr. Warren Hern has been providing abortion services full-time since 1973. He currently provides abortions to women from all over the world, including at the later stages of pregnancy. He’s one of the few doctors who does this, and does so publicly. This requires special skill, and mainly is geared towards women with dangerous complications, or women who, because of onerous and unjust restrictions, are unable to access abortion where they live. He has withstood threats of violence and the assassination of his colleagues and friends, but he has never backed down in his commitment to women. These days he is increasingly seeing women at his clinic from Texas who cannot get abortions there anymore. So this is his message recorded special for tonight’s program.

Dr. Warren Hern 06:30

Hello, I’m Dr. Warren Hern. I’m director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, which is my private medical practice. I would like to thank Sunsara for inviting me to speak to your conference about the Texas abortion law and its effects on women who need the services. The current Texas law in dispute SB 8 is notorious because it bans abortion after six weeks when a fetal heartbeat exists; it does not. A clear violation of Roe vs. Wade, which provides constitutional protection for a woman’s right to interrupt a pregnancy at that stage. The most pernicious aspect of this law, of course, is that it deputizes all citizens to become enforcers of the law, and pays them a $10,000 bounty for reporting anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion. This is the mentality of the witch hunt and mob rule from medieval times. It turns citizens against each other.

The most outrageous turn of events, however, is the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court approved of this blatantly unconstitutional violation of a woman’s rights and due process, not to mention the rights of those who are accused of breaking the law. Both Texas and the U.S. Supreme Court effectively nullified the U.S. Constitution and bill of rights for women in Texas by these actions. We have regressed to the 18th century on our way back to the 4th century. This means that women in Texas without the means to travel out of state cannot have safe abortions. They will have unsafe abortions and die, even though we have made early abortion one of the safest medical and surgical procedures ever performed in the history of medicine. 60 years ago, Texas women had to travel to Mexico to have abortions. Many of them died. Governor Abbott and the Texas Legislature have at minimum sent Texas women back to that barbaric condition. The U.S. Supreme Court has nullified its own credibility by this action. The Supreme Court can no longer be viewed as anything more than a political tool for a repressive political agenda of the radical political and religious right in the United States. This is no accident.

Now we have the spectacle of Amy Coney Barrett, the newest justice on the court, claiming that she is no political hack. She is. Barrett, who is officially a handmaid in her own medieval Catholic religious cult that is right out of the Dark Ages and celebrates an authoritarian, patriarchal ideology in which women are submissive, made this incredible statement while standing next to Mitch McConnell at a private partisan event in Kentucky. She is on the court because McConnell, in a ruthless and anti-democratic maneuver, refused to grant even a hearing for the confirmation of Merrick Garland in 2016, a year before the beginning of the next presidential term, and then rammed the Barrett nomination through the Senate a few weeks before the 2020 election in a strategy to put her in a position to override the U.S. presidential election in case, as they anticipated, Donald Trump lost the election. McConnell, Trump and their Republican sycophants planned a superficially legal but transparently anti-democratic and unconstitutional coup d’etat to maintain Donald Trump in office as President, even if he were rejected at the polls, as he was. During Trump’s four years as president, he appointed, and McConnell confirmed, a large number of federal judges, many of them completely incompetent and unqualified, to assure an authoritarian dominance of the federal court system.

Lest anyone think that any of this is normal, contemplate the fact that despite his ostentatious moral depravity, Donald Trump was supported by 82% of the white Christian evangelical voters in 2016, largely because he promised to put anti-abortion justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. This in spite of his own numerous statements prior to running for president that he was pro-choice. Due to the fact among other things that millions of Democrats who voted for Barack Obama did not bother to vote for Hillary Clinton, Trump won enough electoral votes to be elected and certified as President. His payback for the Christians was to nominate people for the U.S. Supreme Court who were certifiably anti-abortion, as vetted by the right wing Federalist Society instead of the American Bar Association, which has previously made professional assessment of nominees. The result of this Trump transaction with the white evangelical Christians. and McConnell’s Republican control of the U.S. Senate was the installation of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination hearings exposed his history as a violent sexual predator and unhinged, aggressive personality. The Trump administration concealed the full extent of his disqualification for any public office. Now we have a US Supreme Court completely dominated by a 6 to 3 majority of Catholic Republican originalists, which means that they apply 18th century standards, the jurisprudence without regard to over 200 years of constitutional and societal evolution.

Thanks to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, we have a strong fascist movement in the United States, which threatens not only constitutional democracy in this country, it is in conflict with basic premises of Western civilization. This is not just about women’s rights to have a safe abortion. These rights are collateral damage to a fascist, totalitarian political agenda led by a fascist political party that is opposed to democracy itself. The answer to this problem is clear. Democrats must win elections at every level, beginning with the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the presidency, especially all state legislators and state political offices, and all other political offices that are open and competitive. Thank you for your time and attention.

Sunsara Taylor 13:49

With that, we want to look at the legal implications of this Texas abortion ban and the Supreme Court decision to consider another ban out of the state of Mississippi on December 1; a 15 week abortion ban. To get into this I did an interview with Dahlia Lithwick. She is a writer for Slate.com, who covers the courts and the law. She has really been tracking this over years, and so it’s a pretty rich discussion. Let’s go to that right now. She is the host of Amicus podcast. We’re so happy that you can join us here today for this town hall. Dahlia, welcome.

Dahlia Lithwick 14:24

I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sunsara Taylor 14:26

For listeners who maybe are not familiar, Texas on September 1, made law the most extreme abortion ban in 50 years. 6 million women in Texas of reproductive age have been deprived of the ability to decide for themselves when and whether to have a child, and I wonder if you could just react to that law. What it means.

Dahlia Lithwick 14:46

Let’s do a little bit of the spade work. You know, in 1973, the Supreme Court decides Roe v Wade located in privacy doctrine and the right to bodily autonomy. This follows on cases about contraception, Griswold versus Connecticut. The court decides that abortion is lawful throughout the country. I’m sure your listeners know, massive decade’s long backlash to that. Roe is reaffirmed in 1992, in Casey. The court slightly changes the test, but what they essentially do is they draw a line at viability, and that’s been the law ever since. So for many, many years, states trying to do away with Roe enacted the so-called trap laws — targeted regulation of abortion providers — and those were the kind of laws we got used to. You got to broaden the hallways in clinics so the two gurneys could go past each other, put in an HVAC system, sometimes would stipulate what it looked like outside the windows of clinics. And this was all ostensibly not to ban abortion, but to make it a pleasant and healthy experience for women. Of course, the object of all those laws was to close clinics, right? Because it’s unbelievably onerous.

In the most recent case that went to the Supreme Court on this, in Whole Women’s Health, the Supreme Court said: No, you can just enact barriers to abortion. Texas was the testing grounds where after the trap line, Texas, was imposed and about three quarters of the clinics shut down. Okay, so that’s where we were. Suddenly, Brett Kavanaugh takes Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the court. Amy Coney Barrett takes Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the court, and it’s just open season now. It’s just we’re not going to pretend that we want women to make better choices, that we care about their health. We’re gonna just end abortion and that’s the kind of law that has led to this raft of, as you say, heartbeat bans. Those at six weeks are way pre-viability. They’re flagrantly unconstitutional. Texas knows it’s unconstitutional. But the point is to stop abortion. The reason the Texas law is different from the 15 week bans and the eight week bans and the other bans we’ve seen is because for the first time, and this is the sort of deviously fiendishly clever part, there’s no one in Texas to sue, because the law doesn’t get enforced by state actors. The law is enforced by your neighbor and your garbage man and somebody in Idaho who thinks that you are having an abortion. So the woman is not punished; the provider is punished. That’s the first thing in a civil lawsuit that can be brought by anyone. The entire country is conscripted to bring a civil suit against the provider, with this other really pernicious wrinkle that we’re going to talk about, which is this bounty system. If you aid and abet an abortion, or if you “intend to aid and abet an abortion,” you can be liable. That’s really the kind of fiendish part of this law. It makes it impossible to do what every other jurisdiction that had a 6 week ban or an 8 week ban or a 12 week or whatever, you just immediately enjoin it, you go to the courts, and you name the state actor that would enforce it. And the courts say, of course this is unconstitutional.

That’s what’s different about this. It was deliberately crafted to evade judicial review, and the roundabout sort of thing that the Supreme Court did, when faced with request by the providers to enjoin this, the law, said: nothing we can do, our hands are tied. As you note, and this is the important thing, the law goes into effect on September 1, and at midnight all of the providers except for somebody who just wrote a piece in The Washington Post, stopped giving abortions at 6 weeks, “the fetal heartbeat.” You’re exactly right, in the second most populous state in the nation, even though it is unconstitutional, and Texas stipulates that it violates the Constitution, you cannot get an abortion after 6 weeks, and we’ve already seen horrifying outcomes for women as a consequence.

Sunsara Taylor 18:49

I think that’s really important. I want to ask more about this vigilante bounty dimension of it, and the assault, really an open assault on the rule of law, that I think has bigger implications. And I wonder if you could just take a minute on that.

Dahlia Lithwick 19:04

This is the reason that ultimately, when the Supreme Court hands down the decision — the Supreme Court is implored to get involved, waits 24 hours, and hands down a page and a half unsigned opinion. We don’t know who wrote it, but it’s interestingly, not 6 to 3, it’s 5 to 4. Why? Because John Roberts, the Chief Justice, who is not a fan of abortion, who has in virtually every case been at pains to say he doesn’t think abortion should be protected by the Constitution, he hives off inside with the three liberal justices in dissent, and he goes so far as to write his own very pointed dissent. It goes exactly to the question you just asked; the rule of law question. When we do things at midnight without analysis, and we don’t explain ourselves, and we allow, in his view, this unprecedented law that sets the courts aside from review and says there’s nothing you can do, you cannot touch us, that encourages lawlessness.

What he’s reacting to is exactly the thing I think you’re surfacing in your question: Is the court really going to let any jurisdiction that wants to evade any lie judicial review, just go ahead and do that? The Chief Justice is affronted that this law was constructed deliberately to get around constitutional scrutiny. It does raise the question, and he flicks at this in his dissent, not just the optics of doing something like this in the dark of night, without reasoning, but this could now happen anywhere, right? New York could say we’re going to give you a bounty. If you turn in your neighbor for gun possession, California could say, hey, anybody who speaks ill of Governor Newsom, you’ll get a $10,000 bounty if you report them. Those are constitutionally protected rights, but if the system is designed the way Texas designed their system, no court can stop it. That is, as you’re pointing out, really the end of the rule of law. This is also the basis of the Biden administration’s lawsuit challenging Texas. It really does terrible violence to the supremacy clause and to the sort of role of the federal courts in protecting individual rights.

Sunsara Taylor 21:23

Can you explain the supremacy clause?

Dahlia Lithwick 21:27

It’s just the notion that the Supreme Court and the federal courts in the federal constitutional rules can’t be thwarted by state enterprises that would run against federal constitutional rules, and this is a long-standing notion. It’s not complicated. The Texas law was built to do precisely that. The only other thing that is really of a piece with this, and I’ve written about this a few times, but it’s not getting enough attention, just in this bucket of rule of law concerns, is the problem of deputizing individuals to take the law into their own hands. It shows both a kind of lack of faith in state actors: we’re not going to let the state entities enforce the law, we’re going to just let everyone make a decision about whether they think, subjectively, because it’s Tuesday, someone is violating the ban. The same day that SB 8 went into effect, Texas’s vote suppression bill went into effect. One of the things it is really permitting and in fact encouraging is for poll watchers and people who think that they’re seeing illegal action at polling places to take the law into their own hands. In addition to the sort of very meta problem you and I’ve been talking about, what does it mean to have the courts utterly sidelined? There’s another move that is just as pernicious, which is conscripting every individual who thinks in the moment that a law is being violated to take action. That’s as lawless and really fundamentally as dangerous as writing the federal courts out of the picture.

Sunsara Taylor 23:07

I think that’s very important and it’s something that is little understood. I want to read something and get your reaction to it, because I think it’s touching on the same basic issue. This is from an article that was at Revcom.us, called Bob Avakian on the Law, Justice and Ending Oppression and Exploitation, and it’s analyzing important principles about the rule of law. This is just one passage, it says: “The criminal legal process is not, or should not be a contest between individuals, but a confrontation between the state and people whom the state seeks to deprive of freedom on the basis that they have violated societal norms that are embodied in criminal statutes. The whole point of a legal system is or should be to remove disputes or perceived wrongs from the sphere of individual grievance and the corresponding attempts to settle such grievance through individual acts of revenge or reciprocal wrongdoing by providing a framework in which society, through established institutions and statutes, which are to be applied and work equally in regard to all who can adjudicate such disputes or claims of wrongdoing.” I think this is supposed to be a leap in the rule of law and a legal system that it’s not individual retribution, individual vigilantism. I wonder if you’re going right there. I just think it’s very important, very little understood. Maybe you want to say a little bit more about it.

Dahlia Lithwick 24:33

No, that’s a much more elegant articulation of the point I was making. I put things like Stand Your Ground laws into this category of laws that essentially say: instead of relying on the superstructure of the rule of law — and I say that with all of the doubts we have about policing and incarceration, I have no illusion that the systems we have constructed to “enforce the law” are in any way adequate to our needs, but the thing that is worse than that is deputizing everybody to be a vigilante. The problem with Stand Your Ground laws (we’re seeing this with the Kyle Rittenhouse trial right now) is that everybody gets to say, it doesn’t matter what the cops do, if there was an exigent need. What matters is what I subjectively thought in the moment, and I thought I should start shooting. I just think you are completely right. It’s easier cognitively to understand the move to get the courts out of the picture. That’s very clear what was intended. But I think this move that’s playing out, as you’ve just said, in so many contexts — in the voting context and the gun context — that every person is a law unto themselves. It really feels like a biblical arrangement, right? It’s an eye for an eye. If I feel that I need to be avenged, there is no check on me. It is absolutely foundational to a rule of law regime.

Sunsara Taylor 26:03

Let’s return to the Supreme Court case that is coming, you said probably in December. There was a 15 week abortion ban out of Mississippi, a state where there’s only one abortion clinic in the entire state. It has been blocked because it is blatantly unconstitutional. It’s in violation of Roe vs. Wade, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear it which obviously means they’re willing to reconsider Roe vs. Wade, either altogether or in significant dimensions. So is there anything you think people need to understand about that?

Dahlia Lithwick 26:35

The case is called Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health Organization. One of the things that Mississippi has asked for in the briefing in Dobbs is for Roe to be overturned. Doesn’t happen. Usually states are very modest in their asks of the court. As I said at the beginning, they do so under the guise of: we just want to help women make the choice. That is gone, all of the rhetoric around trap laws is gone. They just want it to be unconstitutional to have an abortion anywhere. The thing that I see is that difference in the briefing. What I’m seeing is the state absolutely emboldened to shoot for the moon; to ask for the whole thing. That’s why it is so shocking that the court decided to get involved in SB 8 and then let it stand. If you read the dissents from both Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor in that SB 8 order from September 1, they’re saying on the ground, women are being turned away. This is what has happened in the 24 hours this law has gone into effect.

Women are not getting constitutionally protected abortions. They’re waving their hand saying this violates Roe. Now that leads me to think that the states that are feeling emboldened to ask for the moon are feeling emboldened because they think they have five votes for it, and that is ground shifting. That means that a court that is well aware that it is a 6-3, very conservative super majority, not aligned with polling or the public mood on guns and on abortion and on voting, might just do it anyway; might just go big. And that’s the thing that I see is a harbinger that the SB 8 decision is really signaling forward. The court has managed in a matter of weeks to shift the Overton window, right, because we’re gonna get to Mississippi when Dobbs is argued, and we’re gonna look at ourselves and say: 15 weeks seems really generous next to Texas. That’s shocking, right? That’s viability at 22 weeks, not 15, not 8, but the court has really managed to insert itself into a discourse that would normalize 15 weeks as utterly reasonable. Those moves tell me that we really may see the thing that I never believed I would see, which is Roe overturned this coming spring.

Sunsara Taylor 29:02

Well, Dahlia, I really want to thank you for making the time to talk with us to get into the implications of the abortion ban, but also the bigger implications to the rule of law, the state of the courts. Thank you so much for joining us here today.

Dahlia Lithwick 29:16

It was a total pleasure. And really, thank you. It’s incredibly meaningful and important to have long, long conversations because this is not stuff that you can do justice to in two minutes. So thank you for a really, really deep dive. I think it’s absolutely urgently needed.

Sunsara Taylor 29:30

Okay, so that was my interview with Dahlia Lithwick, A writer for Slate.com, who covers the courts and the law and she is the host of Amicus, the podcast. We really are at an emergency moment, as I think you just heard from Dahlia, this massive assault on the rights of women to access abortion in Texas has already been shut down for the majority of women, 6 million women of reproductive age there. On December 1, the Supreme Court will be hearing a direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade, a case that could officially overturn abortion protections nationwide. It is urgent that people understand what’s afoot and respond. This must not be allowed to go down. That’s what we are getting into tonight. in this town hall. I want to introduce the first guest, who is part of our roundtable tonight, Michelle Chai is a leader in the Los Angeles Revolution Club. She is currently one of the organizers of Break the Chains contingents that are going to be marching on October 2 across this country in the marches that have been called by the Women’s March, Planned Parenthood, a number of other women’s organizations for Reproductive Rights, responding to this Texas abortion ban and the Supreme Court case, taking up the ban out of Mississippi. I wanted to welcome you, Michelle, to We Only Want the World.

Michelle Xai 30:46

Thank you.

Sunsara Taylor 30:48

Michelle, I have kind of two themes I want to talk with you about to get us started. One is a bit more about your own personal development, which I think will bring a lot of insights to our listeners, which is when you first met the revolution and got involved in the fight for massive change, liberatory change, I know that it was around the struggle of Trayvon Martin and police murder and the white supremacy in this country, the vigilantism in that sense. You were actually very, very opposed to abortion, morally and deeply. You’ve changed tremendously on this. I wonder if you could just share some of your own transformation because I know a lot of people grow up hearing and believing that abortion is wrong, that it’s shameful, that it’s some kind of murder. I think it’d be helpful for you to share some of your own transformation on that.

Michelle Xai 31:35

Yeah, I grew up in a very Catholic home, where we just wouldn’t talk about sexuality, we wouldn’t talk about anything like that. And I had a best friend who was very anti-abortion, and it was the first time I had even heard about what an abortion even was. The way it was put in my head was, it’s the murder of babies. And that just stayed with me. In the same way that you’re told not to question the Bible, you’re told not to question whether there’s a god or not, you’re told, then you don’t question what an abortion is or why it’s wrong. I remember coming out of school some days, and I would see these rabid anti-abortion people with the big signs that had what they claimed to be aborted fetuses that looked like very small toy-looking babies. I was told this is what an aborted fetus looks like, and this is the murder of babies. This is what I just went along with, believing that was just a bad thing to do. That basically coming down to the role of women is to be mothers and to have children. That’s just not something that you question. That’s just something you do.

Then I came around the Revolution Club when I was about 18. I was very enraged around seeing the murder of Trayvon Martin, but then somebody very righteously struggled with me and challenged me on why do you say that an abortion is murder? I could not answer that question. That was actually the first time that I was told, show your work. Why do you say that abortion is murder? What evidence do you have for that? I felt like that was the hardest question that had been asked, because I didn’t have any evidence to back it up, other than to say, that’s just what you know. Around the same time, I was asked to backup the existence of a god, and I didn’t know how to back that up either, other than holding up the Bible and saying it’s in the Bible, you don’t question that.

It was such a big deal to me to even go home and think about, okay, everything I’ve known about the role of women, basically, and what my role is in this world is to bring a child into this world, and that’s the most that I can be, has just been put into question. That rocked my world. This person that challenged me on this, when they brought this book by Ardea Skybreak, The Science of Evolution, and he just opened the book up with me and walked through this is what a fetus looks like, at this time and this is what it looks like at this time. This is how we’ve evolved. The thing that struck me was the little tail on the fetus. I was so struck by that, because I never knew the science of it. All I had in my head was a floating baby somewhere that was not connected to the woman and it was supposed to look cute and adorable and just ready to come out. When that was shown to me it changed my whole view on on everything.

Sunsara Taylor 34:22

You are organizing these contingents at this march on October 2, called Break the Chains. I wonder if you could talk some about that and why you’re organizing them what the revolution club is aiming to do and how people would connect with that and why they should.

Michelle Xai 34:37

So these October 2 marches, we’re gonna have a contingent within them. Everybody who cares about the attacks on the right to abortion should be at one of these marches wherever you are, and we’re going to have these contingents within them; Break the Chains contingent: Unleash the Fury of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution. We’re calling on people to be there. To not just let this be one day of symbolic protest and then going home, but the beginning of determined resistance to actually force them to back down from this line and actually stop them from making this a national thing where they get rid of abortions.

In the Revolution Club we’re fighting for a whole different world where we can actually put an end to the oppression of women as a part of putting an end to the oppression of all people everywhere. We need a revolution. We need to overthrow this whole system. One of the slogans is actually patriarchy and capitalism — you cannot end one without ending the other. We need revolution, nothing less. The other very powerful slogans as part of our contingent are No Going Back, No Surrender; Abortion on Demand and Without Apology; Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement; Christian Fascist Theocrats, Get Your Laws and Vigilantes Off Our Bodies. We need powerful contingents that are loud, that are lively, and that are representing a whole different future and are fighting to not allow this to go down. We’re calling on all those people that are out there that were like me 10 years ago that were questioning, how do I understand this? The question being, Are women going to be human beings or not? And people actually picking a side on that. That’s why we’re calling on people from all walks of lives to come together and march in these contingents and on the day itself.

Sunsara Taylor 36:07

All right, well, Michelle, stick around. We’re gonna keep going with the round table, and then we’ll bring everybody into conversation together. I want to invite now Sam Goldman, who is on the editorial board of RefuseFascism.org, and she is also the host of the Refuse Fascism podcast. We’ve heard a lot already. So I wanted to ask you to situate this attack on abortion, on abortion rights, in what Refuse Fascism has come together and exists to expose and oppose, which is the consolidation of fascism in this country. So we’ve talked about — and you’re welcome to add to each of these things — but we’ve talked a little bit about abortion being an assault on women’s lives and women’s rights. This attack on abortion, Dahlia Lithwick talked about this a lot in terms of the way these attacks have come down being an assault on the rule of law. Maybe you could react to that, build on that, but also put that in the larger picture of a rising fascism in this country.

Sam Goldman 37:06

Yeah, I think it’s both. It is a power grab. Right now we’re seeing that the end game in terms of what it means for women, and those who seek abortions, is not just the end of abortion, it is the end game of fetal personhood, and the subordination of women. That is part of the whole fascist assault that we’re seeing. I’m going meters, right?to probably echo some things that Dahlia said and Dr. Hern, I’m going to start with actually. In the words of Dr. Hern, the anti-abortion movement is the face of fascism in the United States. This is a movement that centers on a political program of white supremacy, the subjugation of women, theocracy, and a form of rule enforced by fear and coercion. And it’s a movement with a mass base, organized and funded by elite sections of society. There’s the alt-right, the proud boys and the three percenters, there’s Q-Anon, and there’s Trump, but before all of that, there was the anti-abortion movement.

I know Sunsara knows full well, spending decades face to face up against them, this is a movement that has terrorized women at clinics for decades. This is a movement that has killed abortion providers and bombs clinics. It’s a movement that mobilized for decades, massive marches of people indoctrinated to see women as breeders of children and the property of men. This is the movement that was a key organizing force behind the rise of Trump and Pence into the White House and bestowed power to a regime that then staffed the courts with Christian fascist judges. Yeah, I’m talking about the Supreme Court, that Amy Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch that Dr. Hern spoke to, but also an unprecedented amount of federal judge appointments; really Christian fascist across the board. These are people that go against Brown versus Board of Education fascist. Now these are courts that are poised to strip away the basic right to abortion. To speak to the role of women in the assault of women, whether we’re to be more than breeders of children, has been one of the touch points of what we see as a so-called modern society or not. And when we think about Trump, “Make America Great Again”, that was, by definition, harking back to some other time, some earlier time when society was ordered the so-called right way.

It’s very important that we’re clear that this right way for them is pre-Civil War greatness. That’s what they want to reclaim, where whole sections of people are deemed as subhuman. So, Trump, people are thinking he’s not in power, hey, then what are you talking about this for? 74 million people voted for him in 2020, and we’re faced with a Republi-fascist party that’s been purged of all dissenting voices. We’re talking about a mass fascist movement that’s hardened post the January 6 coup. We’ve seen in Texas, as one acute example, efforts to restrict voting, to attack immigrants and the right to abortion being rapidly advanced. And this is just one of the state houses. There are several states that are pushing through copycat laws to do what Texas has done. Florida is one example of that. It’s clear, in my opinion and the opinion of others with Refuse Fascism, that the election of Biden in this regard has not eliminated the danger; it’s really only bought time.

I’ve used the word fascism a lot, and Dr. Hern did as well, so I just want to situate in what we mean by that. We’re talking about a qualitative change in how society is governed, not the worst insult that can be slung. Once in power, and what we think is the most essential, is that the defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. So what this looks like and what you can see today is the moves to restrict people’s right to vote, the right to dissent — which we see being criminalized across the country — and any avenue of redress, and yes, the right to abortion, which is essential to the ability of people to fully participate in society; to have control over their lives and destiny, as Sunsara spoke about earlier. When you’re looking at fascism, you’re looking at a movement that obliterates the truth.

As Michelle was talking about, the truth that a fetus isn’t a baby. Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. That’s what both Sunsara and Dahlia were talking about deputizing people, really fostering a culture of mass vigilantism. The law is shredded, as we’re seeing the total disregard of the Constitution in Texas, or rewritten as they’re trying to do with Dobbs, as a means to terrorize and rule by brute force. I think Anthea Butler said this on a previous episode of the Refuse Fascism podcast, I’m paraphrasing here, in what she calls white Christian evangelicals. She said: these people aren’t some moral force. They are a political force who use morality as a bludgeon. That’s what we’re seeing. Taking this right away from women is crucial to bringing about the kind of society that these fascists want to cement in place. That looks like white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy, and American supremacy where they’re unquestioned and unchallenged. They’re trying to do this through legal means right now, but they are prepared to use extra legal means and whatever levels of violence they need to take down whatever well exists between church and state. This is what we mean when we say theocracy. They want to take down whatever level of protections have been there through the great struggle, including women taking to the streets for the right to abortion in the first place. They want to take all that back and shatter the rule of law and force all-out fascism.

This Texas law in this sense further intensifies how acute and immediately posed it is that this is going to be resolved one way or another. Just to repeat, this is a fascist movement. It’s aided by a fascist majority Supreme Court, fascist Trump appointed federal judges across the country, and a rabid base of millions, and it’s a party that has purged its ranks of anyone who didn’t go along with the big lie; anyone who didn’t want to use fascist violence and voter suppression to outright lock in permanent fascist minority role. That’s how I see this all connected.

Sunsara Taylor 43:55

Sam, there’s a lot there in terms of the picture that you’re painting. This is not the so-called pendulum swing. What you’re talking about is the buildup of a fascist movement; the implantation of fascist judges. I just heard the statistic given that Donald Trump was able to appoint more federal judges than any president ever since George Washington; who everybody should know appointed the most judges because he was the first one appointing them. This is unprecedented and it is the dead hand of Donald Trump’s legal structure, and then this mass fascist base and a purged Republican party. People have to reckon with that and I think we should hold that in in our minds as we continue this round table. We’ll come back to it and what’s required in the face of that.

I want to bring Tony Redtree into the conversation. Tony is a writer for revcom.us. She just yesterday published two major and very important pieces on this abortion rights emergency which we’ll bring in in a minute, taking on a lot of the very poor, not wise, but very poor, dangerous deadly council from institutions like the New York Times, on how we should respond to this emergency. We’ll get to that. Tony is also a follower of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian. Tony, welcome to We Only Want the World.

Toni RedTree 45:11

Thank you so much. I feel like we’re really building, speaker by speaker, an understanding of what’s going on here. So it’s very important.

Sunsara Taylor 45:18

Yeah, I do too. One of the things that Sam touched on at the end, actually, queues right up against something I wanted to start with you on, which I know you’ve written about. We recently discussed it in an episode of the Revolution, Nothing Less show. I think it bears returning to it repeatedly and mining its very rich understanding. So I wanted to read this quote that touches on what Sam said about a resolution one way or the other. This is a quote from Bob Avakian, from the revolutionary leader, from over 35 years ago, analyzing what then was a very acute fight over the position and role of women in society. I’m gonna read it and let you react to it as it’s become even more intense and acute. Now we’re right in the crux of it.

So he wrote: “Over the past several decades, in the US, there have been profound changes in the situation of women and the relations within the family. And only one of ten families is there the model situation where the husband is the sole breadwinner, and the wife, a totally dependent homemaker. With these economic changes have come significant changes in attitudes and expectations, and very significant strains, not only on the fabric of the family, but of social relations more broadly. The whole question of the position and role of women in society is more and more acutely posing itself in today’s extreme circumstances. This is a powder keg in the US today, it is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms, and through extremely violent means. The question yet to be determined is will it be a radical reactionary, or a radical revolutionary resolution? Will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement, or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains, and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all such forms of enslavement?

Toni RedTree 47:18

There’s a lot there to dig into, but I wanted to just pick up on the point of what is yet to be determined: Is this going to be a radical reactionary, and very horrible resolution, or an actual radically emancipating one? The Texas laws really do concentrate a lot about where we’re at on this, but I want to say to the people who are sitting in California and New York, that it’s really terrible, and maybe I’ll send some money to Planned Parenthood so that people can come to California or New York for an abortion. You don’t get it. We’re looking at a situation where everything that Sam just raised about how they’ve packed the courts on this, and what’s the actual agenda of the Christian theocrats, who have actually been pushing this from the beginning and they have gotten quite far toward eliminating abortion completely.

One of the things that they were actually moving on to next, which is something that Justice Clarence Thomas is pushing is a Fetal Personhood Act under the 14th Amendment, which would actually make it illegal in the whole United States. I think this is the direction things are going. One of the things I was reflecting on in the last week is that you read people saying: Oh my god, they’re actually outlawing abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. People who are rational human beings are looking at this, and it just seems so crazy. Just think about what this actually means. Think of the violence of this. Think of the intended cruelty in it. Before Roe was passed, in most states they had provisions that were exemptions — for what? — for the life of the mother, for her health. It wasn’t really in big danger for cases of rape, incest, and fetal abnormality, which is all the things that they’ve actually moved on in this recent period.

You’re actually saying that the sperm of a rapist or an uncle or an older brother or a father has more legal standing than a woman, and what happens to her for the rest of her life. If you read the accounts in the last week from abortion doctors that are talking about what’s going to happen to their clientele, which includes 11 year olds that people bring in for abortions. And we know just how rampant these things are in our society. Just think of the violence of that. What this is really all about is not about babies, it’s really about the forceful control of women. In particular, the violent and aggressive assertion of male supremacy. I think that we have to take stock of where we’re at in terms of the radical resolution we want to avoid in this. People have to wake up to the fact that this is where things are heading.

These are such radically different visions of freedom and what it means to be a human being and what’s a life worth living? We’re now sitting in a country that’s two countries in one. There’s no reconciling these things. One of the things that is in this declaration that’s been put out is that it’s a call to get organized for an actual revolution, and the work that Bob Avakian has been doing analyzing this whole period. You have not had a situation for 150 years that’s actually been like this. It feels like you’re living in the pre-Civil War days, with one section actively organizing for this, and the broad masses of people not doing nearly enough to actually understand and deal with this.

This is kind of the point you raised at the beginning, the level of struggle and resistance around this is way too low. It’s way too quiescent for what’s actually really coming down here. The other side is that this is revealing the fact that the society that’s been run this way for 150 years, it can’t be held together anymore this way. There’s a society that’s really ripping apart. There’s — as Samantha laid out — a fascist mass movement around this. But this has also been led from forces on top of society in the ruling class, who really decided that the social composition of the country is changing. It’s their last chance. They actually think the only way you can run this imperialist empire is through straight up, outright fascism, where you actually just get rid of fundamental rights and civil rights, democratic rights. They’re intending to run things through minority rule.

Sunsara Taylor 51:27

In the context of this larger crisis you’re describing, there is a major flashpoint in this battle over abortion, which is coming to a head with the December 1 Supreme Court case, and there are protests being called on October 2, which is very important. Everybody has given voice to this in different ways that people should be out in the streets on October 2 for these marches. But it can’t just be a one-off. The whole period where fascism has been on the rise where the people who care about women, the people who care about the rights of the oppressed, the people who hate white supremacy and police terror, the people who care about the rights of LGBTQ people, the people who understand and fight for science in relation to the virus, the pandemic and in relation to the climate are way too passive, and the people who want to steamroll and bury all that are armed to the teeth, rabid, and out there fighting and changing laws and shattering lives and aggressively moving forward. They staged an insurrection attempt on January 6. So this situation has to be reversed.

I want to open up to have some discussion with all of you together now where we look at why is the side of the half of the country that cares about these rights that does not want to go back to this dark ages, slam women back, and everything else bound up with it, why is there such quiescence? Why is there such calm, and what needs to be changed in people’s understanding, and flowing from that their behavior such that we can wrench a beautiful future out of this? I know we’ve been talking already, but I want to throw that first to you, Tony, if you want to speak some about that.

Toni RedTree 53:01

There’s a lot of reasons for that, and actually, it would be really important to hear from listeners, if they want to put things in the chat on why they think that’s the case. I don’t think it’s the only reason, but I think one reason is that there’s been a lot of counsel from representatives of those who rule this country on the Democratic side of the ledger, for people to actually chill. There’s an article I wrote for Revcom.us today, and maybe you could read the New York Times…

Sunsara Taylor 53:29

Yeah. So I brought this because you did respond to this, the editorial board of the New York Times, which does think that women should not be deprived of their right to abortion. That is the side of this divide they’re on, and yet here’s what they wrote. This is a quote from your article, but it’s a quote from the editorial board: “For the majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to comprehensive reproductive health, the Supreme Court is now an adversary. Any long term success will mean fighting in the same way anti-abortion campaigners have for decades, in the political realm, by winning elections at the state and federal levels and changing laws as a result. Unlike justices, elected leaders can be voted out if they don’t listen to their constituents. It is a long and difficult road, but it’s the one that all lasting reforms in the democracy must take.” I’ll underline “long”. In your article, you coupled this with another interview from a major legal leader in the fight for abortion rights, who said look, it’s going to be a 40 year battle to slowly fight to restore the rights of women.

Toni RedTree 54:33

The first answer to that was how many women are you willing to sacrifice, whose lives are going to be foreclosed. The other thing is this strategy, it’s a loser. We’re living at a time where we’re working with institutions while the Democrats are arguing, look we just have to follow the rules, we have to uphold the very institutions that the Christian right and the fascist movement — all those people who now control the Republican Party — they’re blowing up those institutions in the rule of law. They’re passing Jim Crow legislation all over the country at this point. That’s what it is, it’s dragging people back to that period, where they’re taking away people’s rights and planning to rule through minority rule. Relying on those kinds of elections is a very dicey prospect, exactly because of the way the Electoral College, the Senate, all these things are actually products of a compromise around slavery. Right down to the day, they actually favor the people who are flying Confederate flags in the Capitol right now. So I think that’s one point.

As much as I appreciate a lot of what Warren [Hern] laid out with a really astute analysis of what’s actually going on here and the move towards fascism, the history of the country, and especially his point about dragging us back to the fourth century, which I think both he and Dahlia made, when it gets to solutions most people kind of just go there, because they don’t really envision what it is to work outside them. Which is true if anybody wants to make fundamental change, but it’s also true in general, in terms of the history of this country, or even what’s going on in the world right now.

Abortion rights were a product of an entire period in the 1960s, of a generation of people who were actually defying laws. Who were creating a multi front political crisis that the ruling class (for both economic reasons, but also how they looked in the world and others), they were fighting communism in the rest of the world and trying to show that they were a democratic country. It didn’t look so good when you had whole sections of people living without any kind of rights at all: Black people, women. Plessy vs. Ferguson got reversed in 1954. Then it was another 10 years of them refusing to actually implement any of those laws, until students went in and broke them and defied them, sat at lunch counters and in the backs of buses. It provoked whole decades of struggle around this. People were just out of the box, you know. There were people who were working on that, but the people who were at the cutting edge, making the change, weren’t actually relying on working inside those institutions and the slow process of being able to elect somebody. I think it’s worth looking around the world right now too. Women are out of the box all over the world, and they’re refusing to go back, you know what I mean? The women in Afghanistan are out in the streets. They’re shutting down schools at great risk. You see, these students who are male who are standing with them.

One of the questions I asked in the article is what makes people think as we’re losing our rights here and the quiescence that you see. how do you compare that with what’s gone on in Latin America and the fact that in one of the largest Catholic countries in the world, they’ve actually had to grant abortion rights from the Supreme Court in Mexico. Having read about this a little bit, even in the last few days, there were people who were actually doing a lot of that slow legislative work after it was granted in Mexico City, but everything changed in 2019, when women who had just had it with a kind of vengeance that’s come at women, because they’re drawn into society and work in ways they never were before. People went into the streets and basically said, we’re not putting up with femicide. That’s just been rampant in those countries and around the world. Standing up for abortion rights in the streets relentlessly, taking over buildings, challenging all the institutions. Somebody was talking to the other day about this, they said it changed the entire political climate in the country. It changed minds. It shifted the balance in terms of the tipping point of how people had looked at this before, and it’s still very hard fought. They’re anticipating a lot of retrenching in the states and people coming back at this.

It’s very controversial in the medical profession, where some people are opting out as conscientious objectors, who are refusing to do this, and the Supreme Court is trying to consider how do you address that? How do you make sure that abortion is actually provided in the public hospital? So it’s everywhere. It’s not just here. There’s a question of what is the future going to be? One of the things pointed to in our declaration around what’s the potential for revolution, you see that and what’s happened with people all over the world doing this. You saw this in the beautiful uprising last summer, that changes the minds of people. That’s one of the most important things. Instead what you’ve had is this strategy that’s been going on for years that I think you can talk more about, because you’ve had a lot of experience with this, where really in the name of winning elections — this has been the centrist strategy ever since Clinton — where he said abortion, oh, that’s really something should be legal but should also be rare. They just conceded away the actual moral questions that were involved, and public opinion on this. They’ve not really wanted to throw down on the fact that these are actual fundamental rights for women. Because if you follow a strategy like this, this is what got us to where we are now.

Sunsara Taylor 1:00:14

I think this does relate to the radical resolution one way or the other. You literally do have half the country is rabidly, or a powerful minority, but with power and with a fascist mobilizing base is going for all-out theocracy, all-out white supremacist rule. Tony and Sam are talking about ending and discarding democratic rights, which is true. It’s a part of fascism. Also ending whole sections of people. We saw the beginnings of this with the massacres that went on an uptick against immigrants, against Jewish people, all have this kind of thing under Trump. These people are going for a radical remaking. We see that, and I want to bring this to you, Sam.

On the other side, you have the ruling class, you have the Democrats who don’t share all that fascism, but they really don’t want to fight. They don’t want the upheaval that comes from that, and they don’t want the upheaval that is required to beat that back. That I think is really the other counsel of Common Ground, and I would just put this to you, Sam. You and Tony both reference… I came alive to political life in the 90s with the killing of abortion doctors, and I’ve watched and been involved in this over decades. I can remember 25 years ago going to a major conference for abortion rights, and people were talking about how they’re going to do underground abortions when it’s illegal, and talking about, over and over again, people finding schemes. The whole network of abortion funds, which has grown up, and which does life-saving work for many women who can’t access abortions where the laws have restricted it. But what they’re trying to do is help get women to other states.

What has been missing this whole time is a political fight — the kinds of things that Tony is talking about that we’ve seen in Mexico — where women are just raising hell in the streets and they want this right. It’s not secured yet; there’s further to go, but why is it going in one direction there and a different direction here? I think this is a big part of the picture. I know that you have been working on Refuse Fascism, which I’ve worked with you, trying to wake up the side of society to not keep playing by the rules when the rules are stacked against you, are being discarded and huge stakes for the future of humanity, for women and for different sections of people. I wonder if you just want to share how you see what is holding people back and what you think is needed right now.

Sam Goldman 1:02:50

Toni got into a lot of the dynamics of a culture of conciliation, a culture of training people to to wait and see at the peril of humanity. I do want to make sure that I put out there that those who are listening to this and are in need of abortion services, do check out NeedAnAbortion.org. To speak to your question, 80% of people do not want to see Roe reversed, but as you said, they are silent. They’re silent in the sense that right now we have bounty hunters going after doctors and the streets of Texas are not filled with people demanding abortion on demand without apology. We’re weeks away from the highest court in the land taking the right to abortion away. Not to be predictive here, but they showed their hands. They told you what they were going to do when they sat out of Texas. They said go right ahead, basically, and the streets aren’t filled. There was actually a question of whether or not there was going to be a women’s march. People are saying, well, December 1, they’re gonna hear the case, so we’ll protest on December 1. No way! No way!

I was in the streets with Sunsara, wearing a HANDMAID’S cloak, when Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, and I remember being like: Where the heck is everybody? That’s right. We were a small handful. I am so proud of the people I was with, and that is not to discount them, but it should have been 10s of 1000s. What happened then, to echo something that Tony said, that people were told, wait, wait for the election. It didn’t matter that they were running roughshod over the rule of law and ramming through the appointment. It didn’t matter. Wait, we’re gonna get in the White House and things will be different. Well, now you have a fully compliant, fascist Supreme Court. It would have made a difference. There are the lessons that we learn from the other places across the world. What happens when people take the street, but there’s also the lessons of what happens when we don’t. There was a huge price that we’re paying that we subordinated the lives of women and others, needing abortion, to the interests of the Democratic Party. Listen to those who are telling us, coaching us in civility and coaching us in patience instead of going out and waging a full-throated fight.

Right now is the time to be in the streets, to use whatever platform we have to wage that fight. So be very specific about what the Democrats are doing, because I think what’s important, is right now, they’re telling you and the movements that are arms of the Democratic Party are telling you to tell Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act. While the Women’s Health Protection Act may pass in the House, there’s no way it will pass in the Senate. People are calling for an end to the filibuster. You have Biden telling you it will rip the country apart. By that not saying we’ll do it because we know part of this country is fascist and they need to go. No, he’s saying we can’t do it. We need to come together, we need unity. There can be no unity with fascists except on the terms of the fascists. That 80%, it’s time that we’re out in the street, we’re visible, we’re vocal and we’re saying in the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America, abortion on demand without apology, get your fascist laws and vigilantes off our bodies.

Sunsara Taylor 1:06:39

I think Tony brought alive, and Sam has as well built on in many ways, the plain historical, undeniable fact that all the advances that have been made for the oppressed in the history of this country, have not been won like the New York Times says through the slow patient process of winning elections, but when people step outside of the channels of this system and the terms set by those who rule over us and what is deemed realistic.

Sam Goldman 1:07:06

Since this town hall originally aired, Florida has officially introduced an abortion ban, modeled after Texas. The House passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, but as I detailed in the town hall, it is basically dead on arrival to the Senate. Cheers to the more than 500 athletes and orgs that signed a friend of the court brief, to Supreme Court justices. This included 26 Olympians, 73 professional athletes and various athletic associations. They make the case to the court that abortion rights have helped the growth of women’s sports and expressed their concern that future athletes would suffer without these protections. I hope all these athletes and organizations will be calling people into the streets this Saturday, and many more fields take note and follow their lead. You can watch the full two hour program of the Abortion Rights Emergency Townhall at RefuseFascism.org.

It is time to fight for abortion rights in the same way they were won in the first place through massive outpourings of fury and determination to protect the rights of women and girls along with trans men and non binary people to control their own reproduction. October 2, Women’s Marches must be a day when all who care about the lives of half of humanity say: No More. No more ceding ground to fascists. No more surrendering the fundamental right to abortion. No more waiting for the courts that are overrun with fascists to intervene. No more relying on the Democratic Party, which has conceded and conciliated with Christian fascists as access to abortion got chipped away. This is the time to stay in the streets using our power of sustained nonviolent protest to stop the fascist assault on abortion and declare: in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America. Get your laws and vigilantes off our bodies. Abortion on demand and without apology. To get flyers, signs, stickers and more to print and bring to the protest visit RefuseFascism.org/resources. Find a protest near you at WomensMarch.com. Be sure to tag us in your social media pictures and videos at Saturday’s protests.

Of course I want to hear from you. Share your thoughts questions, ideas for topics or guests, or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected] or you can leave a voicemail by calling 917-426-7582. You can also record a voice message by going to anchor.fm/refuse-fascism and clicking the button there. You might even hear yourself on a future episode. Want to support the show? It’s simple. Show us some love by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice and follow subscribe so you never miss an episode. Want to help the show reach more listeners? Donate to help us, place, podcast adds. Give at RefuseFascism.org or Venmo Refuse-Fascism.

Thanks to Sunsara Taylor and the RNL team, Lina Thorne, Richie Marini, and Mark Tinkleman for producing the show. Thanks to incredible volunteers. We have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday with an interview with Rafia Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism. See you in the streets on Saturday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.