Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Monday, March 23, 2026
Pete Hegseth Swastika Tattoo: 'Democrats think this is Swastika': Row over chest tattoo of Trump's secretary of defense Pete Hegseth - Times of India
Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death | Jan-Werner Müller | The Guardian
"It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.
Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.
Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.
During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.
Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.
Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.
Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.
It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.
Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).
The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.
The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.
Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).
Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.
Jan-Werner Mueller is a Guardian US columnist"
Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Opinion | Chuck Schumer: What the SAVE Act Would Really Do - The New York Times (Jim Crow Redux!)
Chuck Schumer: This Is Trump’s Plan to ‘Guarantee the Midterms’ (Jim Crow Redux!)
By Chuck Schumer
Mr. Schumer, a Democrat of New York, is the Senate minority leader.
The Republican effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections is neither theoretical nor exaggerated. A coordinated, multifaceted campaign is underway — including the attempt to pass the SAVE America Act, which narrowly passed the House last month and which the Senate started debating last week. President Trump has not been coy about his motivations: If Republicans pass the SAVE Act, he said, “it’ll guarantee the midterms.”
Republicans like to pretend that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill. Though on the surface it appears to be one, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans. In the bill, voter ID comes into play only at the very end of a process designed to systematically disenfranchise Americans.
This purge would begin with the Department of Homeland Security. Under the SAVE Act, every state would be required to turn over its voter rolls to the department — an extraordinary federal intrusion into the state administration of elections. It would hand Washington control over voter eligibility, which Democratic- and Republican-led states have long resisted.
The next step would involve running the voter rolls through an algorithm that would ostensibly root out noncitizens — a program overhauled by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has already proved dangerously unreliable. In a trial run of the program in Boone County, Mo., more than half of the voters flagged as ineligible were, in fact, eligible American citizens. County clerks in Texas also found many examples of wrongly identified voters. Citizens were removed from the voter rolls anyway.
This is not about stopping widespread voter fraud, which is a myth pushed by Republicans in the first place. Rather, it’s about giving the Department of Homeland Security power to choose who can vote. Don’t forget that Kristi Noem, the disgraced former secretary of the department, said that it was working proactively to make sure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.”
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The third step would be to leave purged voters in the dark about what has happened. Under the SAVE Act, if you are purged from voter rolls by the federal government, you may not know that this has occurred until you show up to vote. The bill imposes no requirement that voters be notified if they are purged. Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the country on Election Day. It would be pandemonium.
Lastly, the bill would impose voter ID requirements — not as a safeguard against fraud, but as another barrier to voting. For those who had been wrongfully purged from voter rolls, the SAVE Act would make registering again a bureaucratic nightmare. No longer would a driver’s license or another state-sanctioned identification suffice. They would instead have to produce a passport (which only about half of Americans have) or a birth certificate (which many cannot easily access). For a married woman who changed her surname, and whose married name doesn’t match her birth certificate, even a birth certificate may not be enough. Some 20 million American citizens lack the required documents to prove citizenship under the SAVE Act.
The bill would also dismantle the most common and accessible ways to register to vote. Mail-in registration? Gone. Registering at churches and college campuses? Illegal. Registering when you get your driver’s license or sign up for Social Security? No more. Under the SAVE Act, the only path to register to vote would be in person at a state or local election office.
The burdens of the SAVE Act would fall most heavily on the socioeconomically disadvantaged, the working class and voters of color. They would fall on Americans who cannot spend hours navigating bureaucratic obstacles, on older people who depend on voting by mail, on those without passports, on rural communities far from election offices. In other words: millions of everyday Americans.
Mr. Trump knows his administration is not delivering for the American people. Costs are rising and instability is increasing at home and abroad. Instead of changing course, he is attempting to change the electorate.
Democrats are united in opposing the SAVE Act. We know the right to vote is not a partisan advantage to be engineered or withheld. It is the foundation of American democracy."
Live Updates: Supreme Court Hearing Mail-In Ballots Case - The New York Times
The case focuses on Mississippi’s law but the outcome could affect more than a dozen states.
The Supreme Court on Monday appeared poised to reject Mississippi’s mail-in ballot law, a decision that could upend mail-in voting throughout the country.
The justices appeared divided along partisan lines, with the court’s six conservatives expressing deep skepticism with Mississippi’s law during arguments held on Monday. The state’s law allows ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day but received within five business days afterward.
At least 18 other states and territories also allow ballots to be counted so long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The justices repeatedly pressed the lawyer for Mississippi on what is required to make a ballot selection final, suggesting that federal law sets out Election Day as the day ballots should be considered final.
“So when do I know whether or not a choice is final?” Justice Clarence Thomas asked the lawyer for Mississippi.
Several other conservative justices including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is often a key vote, also had sharp questions for Mississippi. They focused on how the state could determine when a ballot had officially been cast, particularly because Mississippi allows late-arriving ballots to be counted when delivered by FedEx.
The three liberal justices pushed back strongly on arguments by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration that such mail-in ballot laws are invalid, noting states are allowed to set their own election regulations.
The R.N.C. argument, the liberal justices contended, could invalidate rules allowing any early voting, which the national party committee denied. The liberal justices worried too that a ruling invalidating the law could make it harder for members of the military to vote.
“Congress couldn’t have conceived of the kind of early voting we have now, it couldn’t have conceived of 1,000 other ways in which we administer elections now,” said Justice Elena Kagan, suggesting federal law does not invalidate the state statute.
The outcome of the case could have sweeping consequences for voters in the midterm elections, potentially creating chaos among states that allow mail-in balloting. A broader group of states allow military and overseas ballots to be counted after Election Day, and it remains unclear what effect a ruling against Mississippi’s law would have on those ballots for states throughout the country.
A decision in the case is expected by the end of June or early July, ahead of the November vote.
The case is part of a broader political battle over the use of mail-in ballots, which surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, setting off a string of legal challenges throughout the country.
President Trump has long opposed mail-in voting and has falsely claimed that the practice was a source of fraud and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. He has encouraged Republicans to support legislation outlawing mail-in voting.
A Republican-backed measure that would severely restrict mail-in voting across the country has passed the House of Representatives and is being considered by the Senate. A bloc of hard-right Republicans is also pushing a separate proposal that would entirely ban mail-in ballots, with narrow exceptions for military service, travel, disability, medical issues and other hardships.
The Mississippi dispute marks the latest in a string of election and voting rights cases before the court this term, which began in October. In January, the justices cleared the way for a Republican congressman from Illinois to challenge his state’s rules governing vote counting, clarifying who is allowed to sue over voting rules.
The justices are currently considering two other major election-related matters — a Republican challenge to federal rules that limit how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates and a challenge by a group of white Louisiana voters who claim that the state’s creation of a second majority-minority voting district violated the Constitution. That case will test a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark of the civil rights era.
The case before the justices on Monday focused on a statute passed by Mississippi lawmakers in 2020, during the pandemic. The state law allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they are received within five business days of the election.
In 2024, the R.N.C., the Mississippi Republican Party and individual voters sued to block those rules, arguing that Mississippi’s law conflicted with federal statutes establishing an Election Day for federal offices.
The challengers argued that the state law had led to valid ballots being diluted by late-arriving ballots and that it had disproportionately hurt Republican candidates and voters.
In July 2024, a federal judge, Senior U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola, a Republican appointee, upheld the state mail-in ballot rule. The challengers then asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to intervene. Later that fall, the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court, finding that the Mississippi law violated federal law.
At that point, Mississippi officials asked the Supreme Court to reverse the appeals court and uphold the state law. In a brief to the court, state officials argued that the appeals court ruling, “if left to stand — will have destabilizing nationwide ramifications” and that it “would require scrapping election laws in most states.”
The Mississippi leaders asserted that under the “plain meaning” of the word “election,” Mississippi voters make their choice by casting and submitting their ballots by the date of the election, even if some of the ballots are not received by election officials until after that day.
Lawyers for the R.N.C. argued that state officials should not be able to accept ballots received after the federal Election Day. They pointed to the increasing number of states that accept ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after that, warning that the practice delayed the resolution of disputed election results and deprived the electorate of a “clear nationwide deadline.”
The Trump administration has weighed in, asking the justices to strike down Mississippi’s law.
“Elections have consequences,” lawyers for the Trump administration wrote in a brief to the court. “They also have a definition. And from the dawn of America, Election Day has meant the day the ballot box closes — and when election officials must be in receipt of all ballots.”
In California, a Republican Sheriff Seizes Ballots, Prompting Concerns - The New York Times
In California, a Republican Sheriff Seizes Ballots, Prompting Criticism
"Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a candidate for governor, recently took possession of more than 650,000 ballots as part of a fraud probe. Election officials say his investigation is baseless.
A Republican sheriff who is running for governor of California recently seized more than 650,000 ballots cast in a 2025 statewide election, prompting criticism from the state’s top election official, who said the sheriff’s concerns about fraud “lack credible evidence.”
The sheriff, Chad Bianco, on Friday said he was investigating allegations by an election activist group that vote tallies did not match the number of ballots received. “This investigation is simple,” he said at a news conference. “Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.” His office confirmed the ballot seizure and investigation on Sunday.
Mr. Bianco’s investigation involves ballots cast in the 2025 special election over Proposition 50, which asked voters whether they wanted to allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts in response to the nationwide redistricting war Republicans sparked in Texas last year. The outcome was not close: Voters overwhelmingly supported the redistricting effort, with about 7.4 million voting in favor and 4.1 million voting against it.
State and local and election officials have described the investigation and Mr. Bianco’s justification for seizing the ballots as baseless. Democrats and Republicans in the state have also said they believe that politics was a motivating factor in the probe. When asked for comment, Mr. Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff, criticized the state’s Democratic attorney general.
The moves by Mr. Bianco, a supporter of Mr. Trump, are similar to efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to discredit previous elections. Such efforts could be used as a justification for attempts to change the way future elections are conducted, election experts have said.
The outcome of the probe is unlikely to have any impact on the result of the Proposition 50 vote, given the margin. But it has raised alarm among election officials about future election interference and accusations in both parties that Mr. Bianco is trying to enhance his standing with the party base — and Mr. Trump — by raising an issue that animates the president and many of his backers.
“It looks to me like it’s a politically motivated effort,” said Jon Fleischman, the former executive director of the California Republican Party. He added: “It’s awfully coincidental that he would be taking this high profile and extreme of an action literally two months before he’s facing a statewide election.”
Shirley Weber, the Democratic secretary of state, denounced the investigation and said the claims made by Mr. Bianco were not backed by evidence. Moreover, a sheriff’s department was not properly equipped to conduct such an election review, she said.
“The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections” Ms. Weber said in a statement on Friday. She added: “Investigations into election processes must be conducted by those with the appropriate legal authority and subject matter expertise. Similar claims raised in other states by individuals without election administration experience have been thoroughly reviewed and debunked.”
Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general in California, issued a stern rebuke of Mr. Bianco’s investigation in a letter earlier this month, saying the office had “serious concerns” about the underlying evidence and that Mr. Bianco was “flagrantly violating my directives.”
Mr. Bonta took particular issue with Mr. Bianco’s plan to use his own staff to audit the ballots.
“Let me be clear: this is unacceptable,” Mr. Bonta wrote. “Your decision to seize ballots and begin counting them based on vague, unsubstantiated allegations about irregularities in the November special election results sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.”
In a statement, Mr. Bianco criticized Mr. Bonta and said he viewed the attorney general’s actions as interfering with his election.
“A judge approved the warrant, so Bonta’s opinion means absolutely nothing,” Mr. Bianco said.
The investigation stems from allegations from a group called Riverside Election Integrity Team. The group said its examination of records found about 45,000 more ballots had been counted than were documented as having been received, according to Mr. Bianco. But local election officials quickly dispelled the allegations, noting that they were rooted in a misunderstanding of how ballots are officially counted, according to The Palm Springs Desert Sun.
“County election staff follow detailed procedures established by state and federal law to protect the integrity of the vote and to ensure that every eligible ballot is processed and counted in accordance with those legal requirements,” Riverside County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said in a statement. He said he would not comment on the sheriff’s investigation or remarks.
Mr. Bianco is locked in a sprawling all-party primary election for governor in California, a heavily Democratic state. The top two candidates, regardless of party, will advance to the general election — and with many Democrats in the field, a vote split that opens the door for Republicans remains possible.
Mr. Bianco has polled near the top of the field. But he has faced criticism from some on the far right, including Laura Loomer, the activist with close ties to Mr. Trump. The investigation into voter fraud, a central issue for Mr. Trump, has been derided by critics of Mr. Bianco as an attempt to build support with Trump and the right-wing base, as he competes with another Republican candidate, Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host.
While Mr. Bianco’s effort is focused on a previous election, Democrats and election experts in the state voiced concern that it could be a preview of potential intrusions into the midterms.
Conservative activists have previously courted sheriffs to join their efforts to investigate past and present elections. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, two right-wing sheriffs’ groups endorsed a plan for local law enforcement officials to play a more active role in elections.
At least three sheriffs involved in the 2022 effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — carried out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warned that they were overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they had little expertise.
The upheaval in California is happening as the federal government has taken drastic actions to investigate the 2020 election as part of the president’s crusade to find voter fraud, which is exceptionally rare in the United States. In late January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided a warehouse in Fulton County, Ga., seizing roughly 700 boxes of election materials from the 2020 election, including original ballots, envelopes, applications and other materials.
The affidavit supporting the raid in Georgia revealed that the justification for seizing the ballots was based on a host of false and disproved claims about the election. Nearly every issue had already been investigated and dismissed by state officials.
“These ballot seizures are setting a dangerous precedent,” Gowri Ramachandran, director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote on social media. She noted that there are clear avenues for contesting an election, such as recounts and lawsuits.
Laurel Rosenhall and Tim Balk contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections."
Sunday, March 22, 2026
ICE to Help TSA at Airports Amid Partial Shutdown, Trump’s Border Czar Says - The New York Times
ICE to Aid Airport Security Amid Partial Shutdown, Border Czar Says
"Tom Homan, President Trump’s chief border official, cast the operation largely as one to help ease long security lines that have been frustrating passengers at U.S. airports.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, confirmed on Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would be deployed to U.S. airports on Monday, casting the operation largely as an effort to ease long lines that have caused frustration among travelers during one of the busiest travel seasons.
President Trump announced the measure on Saturday, first as a threat aimed at pressuring congressional Democrats to agree to a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Transportation Security Administration, and then as an aggressive operation. He said on social media that agents would “do security like no one has ever seen before,” which would include “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that his agency was drawing up plans for deployment and stressed that ICE agents would help support security officials whose ranks have thinned as thousands have gone without pay amid a partial government shutdown.
“It’s a work in progress, but we will be at airports tomorrow, helping T.S.A. move those lines along,” Mr. Homan said.
With the deployment less than 24 hours away, administration officials apparently have not nailed down many details. Mr. Homan said that “his opinion” was that agents would concentrate on airports with long wait times at security, prioritizing ones with lines of about three hours. He said that agency heads were still discussing how many agents to deploy, how quickly to deploy them and to where.
He said more concrete plans would be made on Sunday afternoon.
“When we deploy them more, we’ll have a well-thought-out plan to execute,” Mr. Homan said.
Airports around the country have been smothered with passengers over the past weeks, hit with the combination of the shutdown and heavy spring break travel. At LaGuardia Airport in New York on Sunday, the wait in the line at T.S.A. checkpoints was as long as three hours.
Sarah Estes, 41, a nurse from Dallas visiting for what she called a “girls’ trip,” said the airport website had estimated a 20-minute wait for T.S.A. PreCheck. But after they arrived, she said, they were told it would take at least two and a half hours.
Ms. Estes said she had conflicting thoughts about using ICE at the airports.
“I don’t trust those people,” she said. “So how can I trust them to help out at the airport? But the airports do need help.”
Mr. Homan noted that ICE agents were already working in airports, doing immigration enforcement and conducting investigations into reports of criminal activity like smuggling. He also said that the ICE agents — who are still being paid while T.S.A. agents are not — are also “well trained” in security and identification.
But he indicated that the bulk of their work would be to cover exits and other areas that T.S.A. workers are now staffing in order to free up agents to do screenings and other functions to help reduce lines.
“This is about helping T.S.A. do their mission, and get the American public through that airport as quick as they can, while adhering to all the security guidelines and the protocols,” he said. “We’re simply there to help T.S.A. do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise.”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, blasted Mr. Trump’s idea on Sunday.
“The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country, potentially to brutalize or to kill them,” he said during an interview on “State of the Union,” referring to the killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January.
Mike Gayzagian, a T.S.A. officer at Boston Logan International Airport and the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2617, which represents T.S.A. employees across New England, said he was unsure whether ICE agents would show up to airports in his region on Monday. If they did, he said, they were not likely to be of much help, especially if they were stationed at exits as Mr. Homan suggested.
Mr. Gayzagian said the administration’s move shifted attention from the larger issue at hand. “None of this would be happening if Congress had just simply decided to pay us,” he said.
Johnny Jones, a T.S.A. officer at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and a secretary-treasurer with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing nearly 50,000 T.S.A. officers, said that stationing ICE agents at airports would “be a distracting scenario, to say the least.”
He said ICE agents’ presence could make airports less safe because of the widespread public anger at immigration officers’ recent conduct. He added that placing paid immigration agents next to unpaid T.S.A. agents would inflame frustrations.
“All we want is a paycheck,” Mr. Jones said. “We don’t need all these optics.”
Tara Terranova contributed reporting from New York, and Michael Gold from Washington.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: ICE to Aid Airport Security During Partial Shutdown, Border Czar Says""
The Trump administration kills children abroad while being ‘pro-life’ at home | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian
The Trump administration kills children abroad while being ‘pro-life’ at home | Arwa Mahdawi
How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.
In Lebanon, a US-backed Israel is killing or wounding a classroom’s worth of children every day, Unicef’s deputy executive director told Reuters. That’s just after killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza in two years, all with the help of US taxpayer dollars.
Classrooms full of massacred children sounds pretty shocking to any normal person. But remember, when it comes to the Middle East, the situation is always complicated. Certainly, our lawmakers aren’t losing any sleep over dead brown kids.
“I’m willing to live with that report,” Donald Trump shrugged after being informed the US was responsible for bombing an elementary school in Iran. And, to be fair, dead American schoolchildren don’t seem to bother many of our politicians much either; not enough to do anything about school shootings anyway.
No, the lives that really matter for the party of family values, as we all know, are the ones that haven’t actually started yet. Ever since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, emboldened anti-abortion extremists have been doing everything they can to punish any woman who so much thinks about ending a pregnancy.
In the two years after Roe fell, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with pregnancy-related crimes, the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.
The latest alarming example of this ongoing crusade to criminalize abortion comes from Georgia, where 31-year-old Alexia Moore was recently charged with murder after allegedly taking pills to induce an illegal termination.
If prosecutors move forward with the charge brought by local police, it will be one of the first cases of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions after around six weeks. (A woman was charged in 2015 with murder after inducing an abortion by taking pills but that was later dropped.) Women in states including Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky have also faced criminal charges for inducing abortions.
The details of Moore’s case are not completely clear. But, according to court records, Moore went to hospital in December with severe pain. Moore told medical staff that she’d taken the opioid painkiller oxycodone and misoprostol, a medication that, along with mifepristone, is commonly known as the abortion pill. She then gave birth to a premature fetus who was suffering from health issues and died within a couple of hours. Moore was not charged with a crime until last week, and is currently in jail without bond.
Again: a lot of the details of this case are not clear including how many weeks pregnant Moore was. According to one arrest warrant, Moore allegedly told a friend she believed she was within a 14-week time frame. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that the fetus was 22-to-24 weeks along. Still, while some details are murky, one thing is clear: nobody should be charged with murder for having an abortion.
Another thing that we can say for certain: making it practically impossible to have a safe and legal abortion doesn’t result in fewer abortions. Privileged women will go abroad to seek care, and desperate women will risk their lives and health trying to get terminations.
One can certainly argue that it was unwise for Moore to take misoprostol outside of the 10-week window approved by the FDA, but she may have found herself without many other options. Georgia makes abortion illegal after cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
Talking about “six weeks of pregnancy” is also misleading. Medical professionals date pregnancy from the first day of your last period rather than the date of conception. So being six weeks pregnant means the embryo is actually only around four weeks old. Many women have no idea they’re pregnant then because it’s only a couple of weeks after a missed period, and not everyone has regular periods.
As for that cardiac activity these so-called heartbeat bills are based on? While talking about a fetal heartbeat is emotive, they are sporadic electric impulses rather than anything you’d recognize as a heart. The Guardian has published some very illuminating photos of pregnancies before 10 weeks: there are no tiny fetuses, just microscopic tissue.
In short: if you need to terminate a pregnancy in Georgia, or another state with a similarly dystopian abortion ban, you have almost no time to do it safely and legally. You are still allowed to leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere if you can afford to travel – but several Republican-led states are trying to crack down on that as well.
Increasingly, you’re either forced to carry a pregnancy that might kill you, have a child that you are unable to care for, or be thrown in prison for trying to find a way out. The land of the free, eh? Perhaps instead of bombing Iran to “liberate” people from an autocratic religious regime, the US could try liberation closer to home.
Republican senator helpfully explains he’s ‘married to a married woman’
Senate Republicans are working overtime this weekend to try and pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (Save America Act), which Trump has called “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself”. He’s not entirely wrong there: if the Save America Act passes it would make it much harder for certain groups, including married women, to vote. On Thursday, Republican senator Rick Scott dismissed concerns that the legislation’s new paperwork requirements would make voting difficult for women who changed their names after marriage. “They say: ‘Married women, it’s gonna disenfranchise married women,’” Scott said. “I’m married to a married woman. I have two daughters that are married … They can figure this out. So, any Democrat that says that women can’t figure this out, they’re stupid.” Thanks for that, senator.
Be careful who you go hiking with
There have been a string of recent stories about men ditching their female partners while hiking together, leading TikTok to coin the phrase “alpine divorce”.
One of Trump’s buddies asked Ice to detain the mother of his child
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who is now a special envoy of the President, has been in a longstanding custody battle with his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, Amanda Ungaro. The New York Times reported on Friday that, after Ungaro was arrested on fraud charges, Zampoli reached out to Ice agents and ensured she was put in detention and then deported.
Israeli police kill two young Palestinian boys and their parents in West Bank
The Israeli police shot a mother, father, a five-year-old boy, and a seven-year-old boy in the head and face while they were driving back from shopping for Eid. The Guardian writes: “Asked what threat was posed by four young children and their unarmed parents, or whether the shooting violated Israeli rules of engagement, the police and military declined to comment.”
A ‘Pints and Ponytails’ class teaches dads how to braid their daughters’ hair
They should expand this very wholesome class to include mums who can’t braid hair. Whenever I try to style my four-year-old’s hair, she gives me a failing grade and demands that her other mother do it instead.
The week in pawtriarchy
You’ve heard about the bull in a china shop, but what about the possum in a gift shop? Travellers browsing a souvenir store at Hobart airport in Australia this week were surprised to see a real life possum hiding out among a row of stuffed animals. The marsupial was escorted out of the airport before any tourists could take it home. This is not the first time something like this has happened at Hobart airport: a snake and an echidna have been rescued from the runway in recent years. Australia really is wild.
The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
"How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.
In Lebanon, a US-backed Israel is killing or wounding a classroom’s worth of children every day, Unicef’s deputy executive director told Reuters. That’s just after killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza in two years, all with the help of US taxpayer dollars.
Classrooms full of massacred children sounds pretty shocking to any normal person. But remember, when it comes to the Middle East, the situation is always complicated. Certainly, our lawmakers aren’t losing any sleep over dead brown kids.
“I’m willing to live with that report,” Donald Trump shrugged after being informed the US was responsible for bombing an elementary school in Iran. And, to be fair, dead American schoolchildren don’t seem to bother many of our politicians much either; not enough to do anything about school shootings anyway.
No, the lives that really matter for the party of family values, as we all know, are the ones that haven’t actually started yet. Ever since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, emboldened anti-abortion extremists have been doing everything they can to punish any woman who so much thinks about ending a pregnancy.
In the two years after Roe fell, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with pregnancy-related crimes, the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.
The latest alarming example of this ongoing crusade to criminalize abortion comes from Georgia, where 31-year-old Alexia Moore was recently charged with murder after allegedly taking pills to induce an illegal termination.
If prosecutors move forward with the charge brought by local police, it will be one of the first cases of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions after around six weeks. (A woman was charged in 2015 with murder after inducing an abortion by taking pills but that was later dropped.) Women in states including Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky have also faced criminal charges for inducing abortions.
The details of Moore’s case are not completely clear. But, according to court records, Moore went to hospital in December with severe pain. Moore told medical staff that she’d taken the opioid painkiller oxycodone and misoprostol, a medication that, along with mifepristone, is commonly known as the abortion pill. She then gave birth to a premature fetus who was suffering from health issues and died within a couple of hours. Moore was not charged with a crime until last week, and is currently in jail without bond.
Again: a lot of the details of this case are not clear including how many weeks pregnant Moore was. According to one arrest warrant, Moore allegedly told a friend she believed she was within a 14-week time frame. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that the fetus was 22-to-24 weeks along. Still, while some details are murky, one thing is clear: nobody should be charged with murder for having an abortion.
Another thing that we can say for certain: making it practically impossible to have a safe and legal abortion doesn’t result in fewer abortions. Privileged women will go abroad to seek care, and desperate women will risk their lives and health trying to get terminations.
One can certainly argue that it was unwise for Moore to take misoprostol outside of the 10-week window approved by the FDA, but she may have found herself without many other options. Georgia makes abortion illegal after cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
Talking about “six weeks of pregnancy” is also misleading. Medical professionals date pregnancy from the first day of your last period rather than the date of conception. So being six weeks pregnant means the embryo is actually only around four weeks old. Many women have no idea they’re pregnant then because it’s only a couple of weeks after a missed period, and not everyone has regular periods.
As for that cardiac activity these so-called heartbeat bills are based on? While talking about a fetal heartbeat is emotive, they are sporadic electric impulses rather than anything you’d recognize as a heart. The Guardian has published some very illuminating photos of pregnancies before 10 weeks: there are no tiny fetuses, just microscopic tissue.
In short: if you need to terminate a pregnancy in Georgia, or another state with a similarly dystopian abortion ban, you have almost no time to do it safely and legally. You are still allowed to leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere if you can afford to travel – but several Republican-led states are trying to crack down on that as well.
Increasingly, you’re either forced to carry a pregnancy that might kill you, have a child that you are unable to care for, or be thrown in prison for trying to find a way out. The land of the free, eh? Perhaps instead of bombing Iran to “liberate” people from an autocratic religious regime, the US could try liberation closer to home.
Republican senator helpfully explains he’s ‘married to a married woman’
Senate Republicans are working overtime this weekend to try and pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (Save America Act), which Trump has called “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself”. He’s not entirely wrong there: if the Save America Act passes it would make it much harder for certain groups, including married women, to vote. On Thursday, Republican senator Rick Scott dismissed concerns that the legislation’s new paperwork requirements would make voting difficult for women who changed their names after marriage. “They say: ‘Married women, it’s gonna disenfranchise married women,’” Scott said. “I’m married to a married woman. I have two daughters that are married … They can figure this out. So, any Democrat that says that women can’t figure this out, they’re stupid.” Thanks for that, senator.
Be careful who you go hiking with
There have been a string of recent stories about men ditching their female partners while hiking together, leading TikTok to coin the phrase “alpine divorce”.
One of Trump’s buddies asked Ice to detain the mother of his child
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who is now a special envoy of the President, has been in a longstanding custody battle with his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, Amanda Ungaro. The New York Times reported on Friday that, after Ungaro was arrested on fraud charges, Zampoli reached out to Ice agents and ensured she was put in detention and then deported.
Israeli police kill two young Palestinian boys and their parents in West Bank
The Israeli police shot a mother, father, a five-year-old boy, and a seven-year-old boy in the head and face while they were driving back from shopping for Eid. The Guardian writes: “Asked what threat was posed by four young children and their unarmed parents, or whether the shooting violated Israeli rules of engagement, the police and military declined to comment.”
A ‘Pints and Ponytails’ class teaches dads how to braid their daughters’ hair
They should expand this very wholesome class to include mums who can’t braid hair. Whenever I try to style my four-year-old’s hair, she gives me a failing grade and demands that her other mother do it instead.
The week in pawtriarchy
You’ve heard about the bull in a china shop, but what about the possum in a gift shop? Travellers browsing a souvenir store at Hobart airport in Australia this week were surprised to see a real life possum hiding out among a row of stuffed animals. The marsupial was escorted out of the airport before any tourists could take it home. This is not the first time something like this has happened at Hobart airport: a snake and an echidna have been rescued from the runway in recent years. Australia really is wild.
The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live"
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