August 1, 1914 As World War I began, Harry Hodgkin, a British Quaker, and Friedrich Siegmund-Schulte, a German Lutheran pastor, attending a conference in Germany, pledged to continue sowing the “seeds of peace and love, no matter what the future might bring,” germinating the idea for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).
FOR’s Mission: FOR seeks to replace violence, war, racism, and economic injustice with nonviolence, peace, and justice. We are an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a transforming way of life and as a means of radical change. We educate, train, build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and compassionate actions locally, nationally, and globally. History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation
August 1, 1920 Mohandas Gandhi began the movement of “non-violent non-cooperation” with the British Raj (ruling colonial authority) in India. The strategy was to bring the British administrative machine to a halt by the total withdrawal of Indian popular support, both Hindu and Muslim. British-made goods were boycotted, as were schools, courts of law, and elective offices. More on the Non-Cooperation Movement
August 1, 1944 The Polish underground army began its battle to liberate Warsaw, the first European city to have fallen to the Germans in World War II. The heroic effort to rout the Germans
August 1, 1975 The U.S. and the U.S.S.R, represented by President Gerald Ford and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, along with 33 other nations, signed the Helsinki Accords at the close of the Finland meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The agreement recognized the inherent relationship between respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the attainment of genuine peace and security. All signatories agreed to respect freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, as well as freedom of religion and belief, and to facilitate the free movement of people, ideas, and information between nations.
August 1, 1976 200 people, organized by the Clamshell Alliance, occupied the site of a new nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. They were attempting to halt construction the same day the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued a construction license. Eighteen were arrested. Eventually, only one of two planned reactors was built. Clamshell Alliance history
(original hanging in the Hay-Adam’s Off the Record bar)
My colleague KAL has also a post about the coasters he, Matt Wuerker, and I created for the bar.
(Note from A: Click through on KAL’s-you’ll love it!)
Irritating Screechy Blowhole by Clay Jones
Look, Europe! Our president (sic) is a raving lunatic Read on Substack
It’s one thing for Donald Trump to display his deteriorating mental state here at home, like ranting about lightbulbs or batteries so heavy that they sink boats to waiting sharks, but it’s another thing for TACO to go overseas and reassure our friends and allies that the United States of America has an insane racist at the helm (he howled about immigration into Europe).
While sitting next to European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, Trump went on a rant about windmills…again.
Trump said in a long-winded rant, “And the other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States, they’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. And I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains, beautiful areas of the United States, and you look up and you see windmills all over the place, it’s a horrible thing. It’s the most expensive form of energy; it’s no good. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won’t let you. But the propellers, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land; in other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”
Keep in mind, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is fighting its own power to fight Climate Change. Talk about a con job. (snip-yadayada [Trump] I mean MORE)
Actually, this has nothing to do with Sydney Sweeney.
I’ve seen some of her movies and shows. She’s a good actor. She seems nice. I have no real opinion of her beyond that.
The rightwing media ecosystem is currently obsessed with Ms. Sweeney, and per their usual outrage machine schtick, they’ve made her their latest vehicle for claiming Democrats are out-of-touch with America.
This week, Fox News and various other conservative outlets have spent considerable time claiming that Democrats are furious over a jeans advertisement featuring Ms. Sweeney—the details of their supposed outrage are too absurd to get into here, and I’d rather not insult your intelligence by pretending you should care.
But I figure tens of millions of Trump supporters are feverishly googling “Democrats” and “Sydney Sweeney” for that sweet, sweet hit of outrage to feed their addiction, and it occurred to me that a provocative headline could be a great opportunity to get them here and offer a read-out on what Democrats and progressives are currently, actually, passionately discussing.
I’m in approximately ~5,000 group chats with fellow Democrats (heavy sigh), give or take a few, and Sydney Sweeney has not come up once in any of them. Not a single one.
Here’s what we’ve really been talking about this week:
We’re pretty horrified by the ongoing horror in Gaza. Children there are starving-to-death, and the Israeli military has brutally slaughtered more than 1,000 innocent civilians attempting to get food assistance, almost all of which is being blocked by Netanyahu’s government.
All of our allies—including the United Kingdom—have been urgently pleading with Netanyahu to end the blockade and feed starving people in Gaza and please, oh please, stop shooting at them.
We’re wondering why Republican Christians in Congress would disregard Christ’s clear teachings on this matter. Pope Leo XIV condemned “the very grave humanitarian situation in Gaza, where the civilian population is crushed by hunger and remains exposed to violence and death.”
But hey, what the hell does he know?
We’re disgusted by the cover-up over the Epstein files, and it’s fairly obvious to everyone that Donald Trump is desperately attempting to conceal and distract from his involvement in a massive sex trafficking operation that targeted children.
Remember when the Republican Party pretended to care about pedophiles and sex trafficking and the so-called “Deep State” and Trump pandered to them for votes by claiming he would released the Epstein files and then he didn’t?
We’ve been talking all month about the fall-out of Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill and the fact that upwards of 17 million Americans will lose their health care coverage and millions will lose food assistance and a ton of rural hospitals are about to close down.
We have no idea how we’re going to help all these people when that legislation is fully implemented, and in discussing how to get medical treatment for the sick and food for the hungry, we don’t really care who these vulnerable folks voted for last year.
We’re considerably worried about the country’s total unpreparedness for natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and flooding and earthquakes because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have gutted the NOAA and the National Weather Service and FEMA.
We imagine a lot of people are going to needlessly die in flood waters and devastating cyclones because of Republican incompetence and cruelty, and again: we have no idea how we’re going to help these folks when that happens.
We’ve been talking a lot about the accelerating erosion of constitutional protections and the Trump administration openly forcing colleges and corporations to pay him a bribe in order to avoid being targeted by his dictatorial madness.
We’ve been talking about Trump’s efforts to silence Stephen Colbert and his other most prominent critics in pop culture, except, of course, when he’s too chickenshit to take on the creators of South Park.
We wonder how the Constitution will survive this era. We wonder how the courts can resist threats of violence. We wonder how democracy can endure when even the most concerned Republicans, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, have largely given up on their oaths.
Sydney Sweeney and which endorsements she’s landed and what ads she’s appearing in and what products she’s hawking to the public — none of that matters to us.
If anything, in regards to Ms. Sweeney, we’re embarrassed for the shamelessness of Republicans who are attempting to exploit her as a distraction from the death and destruction they’re causing and enabling.
Maybe if we got a hungry or sick child in a rural part of the country to record a video talking shit about Ms. Sweeney, that would be enough for Trump and Republicans to pay attention to their suffering. (snip)
Are Good Pierogis the only pierogis you’ll ever need? Yes! Drive to Martha’s Vineyard and eat them. Tell them, “Alan Dershowitz ain’t got no panties on.” We don’t know if they’ll give you a discount, but they might laugh.
If there’s one thing anybody knows about famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s life and career, it’s that he has panties on, except for all the times he’s being a nudist, which by definition implies the absence of panties. One time he definitely always had panties on? When he was getting a massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s Haus of Naked. That’s a five-alarm-panty-party for Alan Dershowitz, he has always assured us.
Another time Alan Dershowitz is always wearing panties — at least as far as we’ve heard — is when he’s having his civil rights and his bill of rights and his human rights violated by the evil shopkeepers and librarians of Martha’s Vineyard, where nobody will invite him over for dinner because they hate his guts, avec ou sans panties. Apparently the Jewish Democrats on Martha’s Vineyard really loathe El Chico Desnudo. Also everybody else on Martha’s Vineyard hates him, all the other liberals, and this makes Alan Dershowitz feel lonely and, well, naked. They won’t let him come to brunch, and it’s definitely not because he’s naked and won’t stop dipping his balls in the hollandaise, why would he dip his balls there, that’s not where Alan Dershowitz’s balls go. They won’t let him do his world-renowned standing-room-only readings and lectures at the meeting room at the library, it is an outrage, it is a seven deadly sins, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Larry David doesn’t invite him over, Barack Obama skips his birthday parties, and now he has to sue a Martha’s Vineyard farmer’s market vendor because they wouldn’t give him a dumpling.
A pierogi, to be specific. The vendor wouldn’t give him a pierogi, so now he has to show them his pierogi.
WITH PANTIES ON.
Dershowitz explained what’s going on in exhaustive detail on his Rumble show, but first here’s a tweet:
OK, so here’s the situation, here is Alan Dershowitz’s Yelp review for “that guy at the farmer’s market with the pierogis.”
“There was the pierogi place,” he said. “They’re Ukrainian, Russian delicacies. And I had gone there a few times before, and I bought the pierogi. They were ok. They were not my grandmother’s pierogi, but they were ok.”
Alan Dershowitz just wanted some pierogis, even though they weren’t that good, just OK.
BUT THEN HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED, ALAN SAYS:
DERSHOWITZ: Can I have six pierogi?
“BIGOTED VENDOR”: No.
DERSHOWITZ: Oh, you’ve run out of pierogi? Too bad.
“BIGOTED VENDOR”: No, no, no. We have plenty of pierogi. I just won’t sell them to you.
DERSHOWITZ: What do you mean you won’t sell them to me?
“BIGOTED VENDOR”: I won’t sell them to you because I don’t approve of your politics. I don’t approve of who you’ve represented. I don’t approve of who you support.
DERSHOWITZ: What is it about my politics that you don’t–
“BIGOTED VENDOR”: I’m not gonna tell you. I just don’t like your politics.
Love it when vendors at the farmer’s market are like “Forsooth, I don’t approve of you! I forsake you! You shan’t have six pierogis today, not to put in your belly, not to eat with panties on, not to slather in your Alan Dershowitz ball-ondaise sauce and save for later!” It’s just how farmer’s market vendors talk.
“The clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump on the floor of the Senate,” Dershowitz added. “I think that’s illegal.”
Alan Dershowitz is a very famous lawyer.
It gets better, because there’s video of at least part of the situation, or at least the aftermath, don’t worry it’s safe for work. Dershowitz was also filming, because he is a serious lawyer and we imagine he knows that sometimes cops and ICE agents and pierogi vendors are full of lies.
Therein, you can see the cop gently explaining to Alan Dershowitz The Very Famous Lawyer that according to his own understanding, restaurants can refuse service, but if he wants to pursue it further, he can pursue it civilly. Oh yes, Alan Dershowitz says! He is going to put this on the internet too, Alan Dershowitz says! That’ll be the end of this reign of terror for this pierogi seller whose pierogis are OK but not like Alan Dershowitz’s grandmother’s pierogis!
If you’d like to listen to Dershowitz debate the cop for one hundred hours on whether it’s OK for people to discriminate against Alan Dershowitz based on his protected class of sucking so much, that’s in that video. You can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or race, so how is it fair to discriminate against Alan Dershowitz on the basis of fuck that guy, we hate him? He asks to speak to the manager. The cop explains that actually he’s in charge right now. Dershowitz explains he’s lived here for 53 years and nobody has ever sent him home without pierogi in his belly. He accuses the extremely patient cop of “silencing” him. The cop gently explains that he is causing a disruption, that multiple people have complained, and that no, he may not stand next to the pierogi stand and tell people not to go to the pierogi stand. Alan Dershowitz explains that he would like to get some lemonade.
The user who posted the video says:
“I met Allen Dechowitz [sic] today. I stopped him from harassing a vendor who wouldn’t serve him pierogi at the farmer’s market on Martha’s Vineyard.”
The pierogi person, or the person who is presumably the pierogi person, replied, “Hey, thank you so much!”
Again, Dershowitz rushed to get on Rumble and talk about all of this, and he did so wearing a Martha’s Vineyard Farmer’s Market T-shirt. If you choose to subject yourself to this, skip to 3:54 or so in the video. He talks for a LONG VERY LONG TIME, about how the farmer’s market is on QUASI public land, and he pronounces QUASI like SWAYZE.
He explains that he really wanted to go to the farmer’s market that day because it was corn day, and he got there early, because corn day. He says corn day wasn’t supposed to be until August 1, but he had “insider information” that told him corn day would be this weekend instead.
So that’s insider corn day trading, by his own legal admission, somebody should sue Alan Dershowitz for tortious corn day.
In the Rumble video, Alan Dershowitz is much more agreeable than he is on the video with the cop, so we can only imagine what the actual encounter with the pierogi vendor was like. He does mention that when he was told that the pierogi vendor identifies as non-binary and uses the pronoun “they,” Alan Dershowitz responded, “I’ll use whatever language I choose to use, that’s a matter between me and my grammarian,” and when he said “grammarian,” it was like he was gesturing to the Great Grammarian in the Sky, so that might have also contributed to why Alan Dershowitz did not receive any pierogi, for himself or for his grammarian.
In the video, Dershowitz creates his own new metric for whether it’s OK to discriminate, based on the categories of “race, religion or politics,” which is, legal factcheck, not what it is. (The nice cop also tries to explain that to him.)
Dershowitz says he wrote an op-ed about this, he has sent an email to Sean Hannity — yes because the pierogi person was mean to him — and then, having babbled for over 10 minutes about this, starts explaining other times he’s faced discrimination on Martha’s Vineyard, just for being Alan Dershowitz too much. He’s discriminated against by the book fair, he’s discriminated against by the library, he’s discriminated against by the synagogue — he says they hate Israel — and blah blah blah blah blah Alan Dershowitz.
And then we turned off the video.
If you, like us, don’t want to watch the whole video, here is a screengrab of Alan Dershowitz making an Alan Dershowitz face while he complains.
So that is what has happened. Everybody on Martha’s Vineyard still hates Alan Dershowitz and Alan Dershowitz did not get a pierogi, therefore SUING.
Cannot hardly wait for Pam Bondi’s press conference on how she’s filed charges against the pierogi stand for discrimination and anti-semitism and also probably announcing that she found the real Epstein files in the pierogi stand’s fryers, they were there the whole time. (snip)
Trump puts another loyalist goon on a federal bench for life Read on Substack
Oops! I forgot to put satire in this cartoon.
I do that sometimes. I’ll draw a cartoon that illustrates exactly what happened. What happened here is that Republicans confirmed Emil Bove as a federal appeals court judge, which is a lifetime appointment.
They confirmed Bove despite him serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the hush money case that found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. The appeals court is one level below the Supreme Court. A Trump loyalist will be on the court for life. He has more loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution.
He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Bove will be as crooked as the judge in Florida who dismissed his stolen document case.
After Trump reentered the White House in January, he quickly made Bove a top official in the Justice Department where he worked on the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and the investigation of everyone who investigated department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Bove has accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.
It was bad enough to put a supporter of Trump’s white nationalist terrorists in the DOJ, but now he’s going to be a federal judge.
The whistleblowers provided evidence to the Senate that Bove lied during his testimony, and that he suggested the department should ignore court orders when it came to Trump’s illegal deportations. There’s an audio recording of Bove making statements about the Adams case that contradict his testimony, saying that whoever signed onto the dismissal would be rewarded.
Chuck Schumer said, “It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice.”
Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only two Republicans to vote against Bove’s confirmation, with Collins saying, “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”
Collins isn’t always right, like the time she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, believing him when he said he wouldn’t overturn Roe. (snip-MORE, and it’s good)
(Note from A: I’m adding this photo, because Emil Bove reminds me of the photo)
Black Indigenous Chefs Are Reclaiming Identity Through Food — One Dish at a Time by Michael Harriot
Black Native food workers are passing down culinary traditions, restoring lost connections and feeding body and soul. Read on Substack
Crystal Wahpepah (Photo courtesy of Crystal Wahpepah)
The Indigenous food movement has seen a renaissance in North America, with restaurant openings, cookbook releases and community initiatives that announce the presence, expertise and heritage of Indigenous food workers. Amidst this moment, Black Native food workers have seen both the beauty and the harshness of living at the intersection of Blackness and Indigeneity, as the dominant settler colonial culture of the United States often tries to erase or flatten all parts of their identities.
But those attempts at erasure have also provided moments of reflection and insight, and a realization that the mission of Black Indigenous food workers is profoundly spiritual and political healing work. For Stephan Oak, a Black and Lakota forager and woodworker who lives in Detroit, the threads of connection that Black Indigenous people hold in their family stories that are “steeped in violence, but also steeped in love and resistance” are also guides that allow them to connect in the past, present, and future — a shared cosmology.
Crystal Wahpepah, who is Black and Kickapoo and the executive chef and owner of Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, Calif., says that often, through representation and education, Black Native people in the food industry come to a deeper peace about their identity and heritage. At Wahpepah’s Kitchen, over cornbread dishes from the Ute and Kickapoo people, wild rice from the Great Lakes tribes and bison from the Great Plains, people often find themselves.
“I meet so many people who are Black and Native but never felt connected to their Indigenous side, and when they meet me, they start talking about it, about culture, about those things that have been lost,” she says. Wahpepah is also opening a new restaurant, A Feather and a Fork, which is also the title of her upcoming cookbook.
That loss is something felt in both Black and Indigenous communities and can often feel pronounced because of family separation through residential schools, land expulsions, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trade that broke up Black families across the country. “Because of colonial violence, there’s a fractured relationship to home or your connection to your ancestors,” says Oak. “The intent of the colonizer is to stop you from looking … to accept the identity of the conditions they’ve placed on you.”
Food is one of the ways Oak and others are reclaiming autonomy over their identities, especially as governments use food as a weapon by depriving communities of affordable, culturally relevant food. Oak points out that even amidst food deserts on reservations and urban Black communities, people find ways to be more self-sufficient and connect back to the land, which helps them reconnect with the essence of who they are. (snip-MORE; lots more but not too long)
Crystal Wahpepah’s wild rice salad with strawberries and pecans (Courtesy of Crystal Wahpepah)
Lez Out July might be drawing to a close, but one WNBA fan made damn sure that it’s not going out without a bang, pun semi-intended. And by that, we mean that someone launched a lime- green dildo onto the court at an Atlanta Dream game last night.
The incident occurred during the fourth quarter of the Dream’s July 29 game against the Golden State Valkyries at the Gateway Center Arena in College Park, Georgia. With a minute left on the clock and both teams tied at 75 points, the drama was already high. Perhaps that’s why one attendee felt inspired to launch a dildo into the air and onto the court with truly impressive velocity.
(embedded tweet; I can’t get it, see it on the page, linked in headline)
At about 17 seconds into the above clip, you can see slowed-down footage of the dildo’s journey, seemingly tossed from somewhere high up in the stands and bouncing across the court into the sidelines. And yes, we did get a close-up shot of the “object” in question, as the commentators called it. Absolute Cinema, if you ask us.
(embedded tweet; I can’t get it, see it on the page)
Though the commentators said that there was “no room for that type of activity,” and we certainly don’t support launched objects at concerts and games, it seems that WNBA players themselves have at least enough room to make jokes about that type of activity online. Las Vegas Aces guard Kierstan Bell quote-posted a video of the incident with, “Damn how my shit get there,” and an eyebrow-raised emoji. Indiana Fever point guard Sydney Colson, meanwhile, posted, “Sorry I did NOT mean to throw that so far y’all.” Though she didn’t include a video, that lime-green heart emoji (which is weirdly close to the color of the actual dildo) makes this an unmistakable reference. (snip-good sports, all! MORE)
July 31, 1896 The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was established in Washington, D.C. Its two leading members were Josephine Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. Founders also included some of the most renowned African-American women educators, community leaders, and civil-rights activists in America, including Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper, Margaret Murray Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Mary Church Terrell The original intention of the organization was “to furnish evidence of the moral, mental and material progress made by people of colour through the efforts of our women.” However, over the next ten years the NACW became involved in campaigns favoring women’s suffrage and opposing lynching and Jim Crow laws. By the time the United States entered the First World War, membership had reached 300,000. The NACW and its founders
July 31, 1986 25,000 people rallied in Namibia for freedom from South African colonial rule. In June, 1971 the International Court of Justice had ruled the South African presence in Namibia to be illegal. Eventually, open elections for a 72-member Constituent Assembly were held under U.N. supervision in November, 1989. Three months later Namibia gained its independence, and maintains it today. More on Namibia’s independence Namibian flag
July 31, 1991 The United States and the Soviet Union, represented by President George H.W. Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START I. It was the first agreement to actually reduce (by 25-35%) and verify both countries’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons at equal aggregate levels in strategic offensive arms. The Soviet Union dissolved several months later, but Russia and the U.S. met their goals by December, 2001. Three other former republics of the U.S.S.R., Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine, have eliminated these weapons from their territory altogether. Comprehensive info from the Federation of American Scientists:
July 30, 1492 The same month Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain for his “expedition of discovery to the Indies” [actually the Western Hemisphere], was the deadline for all “Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return . . .” lest they be executed. Under the influence of Fr. Tomas de Torquemada, the leader of the Spanish Inquisition, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had ordered the expulsion of the entire Jewish community of 200,000 from Spain within four months. Spain’s Muslims, or Moors, were forced out as well within ten years. The edict of expulsion from Spain signed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella All were forced to sell off their houses, businesses and possessions, were pressured to convert to Christianity, and to find a new country to live in. Those who left were known as Sephardim (Hebrew for Spain), settling in North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe and the Arab world. Most went to Portugal, were allowed to stay just six months, and then were enslaved under orders of King John. Those who made it to Turkey were welcomed by Sultan Bajazet who asked,“How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?”
July 30, 1996 Four Ploughshares activists in Liverpool, England, were acquitted of all charges (illegal entry and criminal damage) on the basis of their having prevented a greater crime, after having extensively damaged an F-16 Hawk fighter jet to be sold to the Indonesian government for use in its genocidal occupation of East Timor. Seeds of Hope-East Timor Ploughshares: the action and the aftermath
One-third of young women who don’t take birth control say they fear its side effects. Misinformation plays a role, a health expert says.
This story is part of our monthly series, Campus Dispatch. Read the rest of the stories in the series here.
As long as contraception has been widely available, misconceptions about its safety—from weight gain fears to claims you need a birth control “cleanse” every few years—have scared some young women away from using it. Today, this kind of misinformation is no longer solely circulated in locker rooms or sleepovers. In the modern digital world, active misinformation and disinformation campaigns that deter people from using contraception circulate on social media—reaching millions.
The origin of this issue varies. Sometimes, rumors about birth control are intentionally created and promoted for political purposes; this is disinformation. Sometimes, false claims are unintentionally spread by people who believe their statements are true. Other times, one person misrepresents their real, lived experience as a universal truth.
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, contraception and comprehensive sex education have become more than just public health priorities: They are now the front lines of defense in protecting reproductive rights and empowering people—young women especially—to make choices about their bodies.
I am a public health master’s candidate focused on reproductive health and communications. This summer, I am interning at the sexual health and equity non-profit Advocates for Youth, which champions bodily autonomy for young people. In my work here to develop sex education materials and resources for young people and educators, as well as in my academic research, I’ve come to believe that combatting digital misinformation about birth control will require a collective response.
Taking health advice from TikTok
It’s easy to see how young people can fall victim to digital misinformation: Imagine you’re a 15-year-old girl dealing with severe period pain, or perhaps your acne has gotten out of control. Or maybe, you’re just excited to start having sex for the first time and want to do so safely. After talking with your mom and doctor, you decide to try hormonal birth control. You feel relieved. After months of keeping this big life choice to yourself, you finally shared your needs—and you were heard. You have a plan.
That night, some two hours into your usual TikTok scroll, you’re shown a video featuring a beautiful young woman you recognize from your “For You” page. She says birth control not only wrecked her hormonal balance, but will also cause cancer. You’ve seen this creator’s lifestyle content before and always trusted her. In the most-liked comments, hundreds of people echo her experience, sharing stories of hair loss or feeling “crazy” on the pill. Some comment they’re grateful to have never started birth control at all. Nowhere in the comments do you see a doctor or other medical expert pushing back, insisting that birth control is safe and effective.
What do you do?
Perhaps you search TikTok for other perspectives. You find a couple videos from OB-GYNs disputing the claims. But the other creator’s post had more than 200,000 views and hundreds of comments, while that one OB-GYN’s explainer only has 5,000 views and 20 comments. On social media, attention often passes for credibility.
You text your best friend, who asks her older sister. The sister agrees with the original creator’s claims.
Now you’re really nervous (your sister’s friend has had two boyfriends, after all!). You go back to your mom to say you’re not sure about the plan anymore. You’re scared of what birth control will do to your body. She tries to reassure you that it’s safe, but you can’t stop thinking about the women on TikTok who said it wasn’t.
“Data clearly show the deluge of misinformation about reproductive health care, including birth control, on social media,” reads a June 2024 statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s top association of OB-GYNs. “This misinformation can cause real harm for patients by encouraging unsafe methods of contraception; by sharing ineffective methods that expose people to unintended pregnancy; or by scaring people away from safe, effective, evidence-based methods of contraception.”
The American Medical Association is likewise sounding the alarm that the rapid spread of misinformation puts lives at risk.
Instead, politicians capitalize on this weakening trust in medicine by amplifying misleading claims. Right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens routinely use their platforms to denounce birth control and spread lies about its effectiveness and adverse effects, while claiming they are concerned for women’s health. Some academic researchers and political analysts suggest these are deliberate efforts to dampen opposition should Republicans begin repealing access to birth control using the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the late 1800s that could stop doctors from mailing contraception or abortion pills. The fewer people believing in the efficacy of birth control, the more compelling their case.
Combatting disinformation together
Too often, efforts to combat misinformation are limited to one-on-one doctor’s office conversations, high school health class (if a school district even offers evidence-based sex education; many don’t), or sporadic debunking posts from reproductive health organizations.
Those of us who believe, as I do, that birth control should be a right for every person who needs it must challenge misinformation and disinformation with the same vigor and coordination as the people and groups spreading it. To meaningfully push back, organizations committed to advancing reproductive health-care access must invest in sweeping digital campaigns—paid, organic, and partnerships—to combat misconceptions and reclaim the narrative around contraception. I’m not the only one who believes these trends call for swift action to match the scale of the problem.
Power to Decide, an organization working to expand access to reproductive health services, is evolving its long-running hashtag campaign #thxbirthcontrol to meet the moment. What began in 2012 as a campaign on X to influence public perception of birth control has now expanded to other platforms including TikTok, where the group posts short videos that highlight the positive, everyday impacts of contraception. Combatting stigma with content that’s compelling, relatable, and accurate is essential to combatting misinformation. So is getting that content directly to the people most swayed by misinformation.
At the launch of their new Health Misinformation and Trust initiative, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman explained, “Most Americans have encountered health misinformation, but a large group simply isn’t sure if it’s true or false. Most people fall into this muddled middle place—underscoring the real opportunities we have to counter misinformation but also the risks of inaction.”
While both of these efforts are promising, they cannot be effective in isolation; a coordinated, aligned response is necessary to effectively combat misinformation.
One encouraging approach is Advocates for Youth’s “The Busybodies Club.” This national campaign, which launched before I joined the organization, combines digital education with relational organizing to teach young people how to “spot fake facts, identify misinformation, and challenge misconceptions.” The Busybodies Club is structured to recognize that challenging misinformation requires more than facts—it requires trust, community, and creativity at the interpersonal and systemic levels. The organization’s guide to spot red flags on birth control posts is a great starting point for folks interested in being part of the solution.
And as more organizations join the fight to combat misinformation about birth control, it’s important to acknowledge that hormonal birth control may not be right for everyone. Depending on the method and hormone type, contraceptives may cause headaches, nausea, and mood changes. For people who experience adverse side effects, there are alternatives like the copper IUD, or different hormonal formulations. This kind of honesty is essential to rebuild trust in contraception and for people to truly exercise reproductive autonomy.
Autonomy means choice. Trouble arises, though, when young women use falsehoods to inform their decisions. Misinformation can convince young people, incorrectly, that everyone will have terrible side effects from hormonal birth control or that or that all non-hormonal methods are equally effective. The copper IUD is more than 99 percent effective. Tracking your cycle is not—it fails to prevent pregnancy up to 25 percent of the time.
The current landscape can make it scary for young people to start birth control, and it shouldn’t be. When a girl wants to take charge of her sexual and reproductive health, I believe she should feel empowered, informed, and supported—not frightened. In an era where reproductive autonomy faces relentless attacks online and in legislatures, arming young people with facts isn’t a luxury. It’s a matter of survival.
Disclosure: Shoshana Kaplan is a 2025 graduate fellow at Rewire News Group, focused on sexual health. She is a summer intern at Advocates for Youth, where she receives some funding for her work.
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