I realized recently that it’s been a while since we’ve seen an incel mass murderer. Because, really, for a time there, it seemed like something of an endless parade of angry young men going on murder sprees over not being able to get laid. It occurred to me the reason for this may be that, while they’re probably still not getting laid, they’re certainly less alone now. “Incel culture” has become mainstream on the Right. They hate women like incels. They talk like incels. Terms like “foid” (short for “femoid” or “female android”), “looksmaxxing,” “______ mogged,” “the wall” have entered their lexicon. Many of them are straight up turning themselves into incels just by hating women and various other groups of people so much that they are repulsive to women.
These days, they don’t have to go to dark corners of the internet in order to share their insane theories about women, to be told by other men that they are inherently superior to women, that women are crazy and evil and that giving them rights has ruined everything. They just have to go over to X The Everything App or to YouTube or, you know, listen to a sizeable majority of the mainstream male Republican pundits.
There are even more than a few women they can listen to. Women who will gladly tweet and stream and podcast all about how they think feminism and the sexual revolution ruined everything for women as well, who will even claim they want to #RepealThe19th because of how stupid and crazy we all are.
But that sort of pretense isn’t easy to maintain, especially once it’s no longer serving you. Thus, we’ve increasingly seen stories about alt-right women defecting from the movement after they have “seen the light” and suddenly come to realize that these men don’t actually like them, either. This week, we’ve got one in New York mag.
They all have pretty much the same story at this point. They fell into all of it because they were mad about “woke scolds” and thought it was cool and rebellious to embrace far-right ideology, because they enjoyed the attention they got for repeating anti-feminist talking points and maybe even believed that they’d rather be stay-at-home moms — literally nothing wrong with that! No one cares! Go and be well! — or that working instead of raising children was making women “crazy.” Then they realized, at some point — whether because they ended up in a pretty bad domestic violence situation like Lauren Southern, or because their baby daddy let his acolytes post AI child sexual abuse images of them on his social media site as happened to Ashley St. Clair, or because they realized that the Right did not actually allow for differing opinions or criticism, or because they realized that the men they were sucking up to hated their guts as much as they hate ours.
“Anna,” a former “celebrated pundit of the New Right,” anonymously told New York her own version of this well-worn origin story. She was liberal when she was younger and living in a conservative town, but then she left and …
[D]uring college in the mid-2010s, she was exposed to the overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke.
“I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.
She wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”
Ah yes, the “frisson of transgression.” “Gnosticism.” What a fabulously intellectual way to say “I got tingly from being a bigot and didn’t actually care about who I harmed as long as I felt special.” Another woman who spoke to New York said about the same thing.
[Alex] Kaschuta [who hosted the alt-right podcast Subversive], like Anna, says she was initially attracted to the New Right out of curiosity, contempt for woke pieties, and a taste for transgression. “I’ve always liked edgy stuff, unfortunately — that’s one of my problems,” she says, laughing.
We’ve seen a lot of this. People attempting to write off racist, misogynistic or otherwise shitty views as some attempt to “freak out the squares” — as though it’s somehow similar to middle schoolers trying to convince their teachers that they are Satanists just to mess with them. The thing is, you don’t do the latter unless you think it’s dumb that people are freaked out by Satanists (which it is), and you don’t do the former unless you think it’s dumb for people to not want to be harmed by bigotry. This kind of thing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Anyway, “Anne” seems to have realized the error of her ways when they started to harm her.
“Over time, the language of New Right misogyny got way more tuned in to red-pill-type stuff,” she says. Among young MAGA men, there ceased to be a huge difference between self-understood trads — Christians who tend to (patronizingly) venerate women’s special contributions to family and religious life — and rageful incels, who see women as conspirators in a plot to deprive them of sex and status. Both groups, Anna says, came to see women as “these objects you can use at will. So if you want a marriage, if you want a lifelong ‘bang maid,’ then you can pursue that. And if you want to just have endless hookups, you can pursue that by using these dating tactics within the red-pill sphere.”
While the language has certainly become more coarse over time, while it’s much more “acceptable” on the Right to now say, as Nick Fuentes does, that you’d like to see women put in concentration camps, this really isn’t anything new. In fact, what many of these women imagined themselves “rebelling” against was the silly feminist notion that these men thought these things and behaved this way in the first place. That the “woke scolds” were imagining all of this sexism and racism that didn’t actually exist anymore. Indeed, the swiftness with which they waver between blatant misogyny and racism and claiming that these things are not a problem in today’s society will give you whiplash.
Now, I am always glad for people to defect from any bad way of thinking, whatever it is that wakes them up. The fewer of these fuckers, the better. That being said, I do think this is all bullshit. I do think that the reason they’re leaving is because they’re being pushed out, not because they are suddenly realizing that right-wing ideology is bad.
The Right has fallen in love with the narrative of “the woke scolds were too much and we were all rebels who would never be any good, so we had to become Nazis!” but that is, and always has been, absolute bullshit. If someone’s instinct is to “rebel” or even simply to be contrarian, they’re not going to be out here demanding that everyone go along with them — because once that happens, you’re not a rebel anymore, you’re not “transgressive,” you’re just like everyone else. Their anger wasn’t ever that they couldn’t use slurs. The power to do so was within them all along. What they were mad about was that it wasn’t socially acceptable for them to do so. That other people weren’t doing it.
Similarly, no one (other than companies that don’t want to pay people enough money to subsist on a single income) has done anything to prevent any of these women from becoming housewives or stay-at-home moms. I’ve been a feminist my entire life. I’ve been a feminist in a professional capacity for over a decade at this point. At no point have I ever heard any feminist disparage “stay-at-home moms.” Literally not once. Ever. This is a narrative that lives exclusively in the minds of paranoid conservatives who live in terror of someone policing their life choices the way they police the life choices of others.
But you know what? Even if they did! Even if absolute legions of feminist writers devoted themselves fully to proclaiming that stay-at-home moms should not exist … other people’s opinions are not the law.
The fact is, both the men and the women who participate in this bullshit are looking for the same thing — validation and self-esteem. They want to be told “you’re better than other people just by being you.” For all the talk of “merit” on the Right, this is what they’re most thirsty for. The men want to be told they’re inherently superior to women — as well as people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, etc. depending on their personal identity — and the women wanted to be told they’re “not like the other girls!” or “so based!”
I suppose it is entirely possible that these women spent years in the dark and are just now realizing that the men in their movement really do hate women and really do want to deprive them of rights and that this would be unpleasant for them were it to actually occur — this seems to be what “Anna” feels happened to her.
“You almost don’t realize what’s happening until five years later,” Anna says, “when you look back and you’re like, Oh gosh, I was being used.” She also blames herself: “I was too frivolous with ideas.”
But I don’t think these defections are happening by coincidence at a time when shitty men now feel so “empowered” that they no longer require the permission of pick-me girls willing to say “I agree! Women are terrible and crazy and too emotional and shouldn’t have rights!”
Arguably, these women are no longer necessary to their movement and are being cast aside as such. Conservative men no longer feel like they need to be able to point to a woman and say “Look! She’s okay with it!” because they have gotten to the point where they do not care about that anymore.
This, indeed, is more or less what Kaschuta’s former compatriots had to say about her.
Many attacked her looks (Kaschuta is blond and conventionally attractive) and then attributed her defection to those same insults. Charles Cornish-Dale, a New Right figurehead who goes by the name Raw Egg Nationalist and appeared several times on Subversive, posted on X, “The truth about the whole saga … is that people (i.e., men) started calling Alex fat and telling her they didn’t want to be browbeaten and tone-policed by a woman.” This, he said, was the real reason she had turned against the right, “not principles or ideas.”
At this point in their evolution, they now feel free to denigrate those women just as furiously as they denigrate feminists, if not moreso.
They now take pledges to, as the article notes, “rape, kill and die” for Nick Fuentes (frequently abbreviated “RKD4NJF”). As “Anna” put it, they are “insisting that women subject themselves entirely to male authority, while advertising that male authority will be cruel and vicious and fickle.” They no longer feel the need to pretend that this is meant to be a good time for women as well. They’re just viscerally furious at women for existing and “ruining” everything for them by insisting upon being treated like human beings. They want to see us all punished for this and they no longer want to have to pretend to not hate a few women here and there.
In return, they are gaining power in the Republican Party. A follower of Fuentes’s was just elected as president of the College Republicans of America.
Granted, these defections and even these men outright saying that they want a world in which they get to be horrible to women will probably not deter other women from attempting to join in on all the #RepealThe19th good times. Because sure, they’ll still get a few “so based” and “If only all women were like you!” comments here and there and that will make it all worth it for them — for a while, at least, until they, too, experience the spontaneous revelation that they will have to also accept a much larger dose of disrespect in exchange.
(Well, another one!) I watched part of Sherri Shepherd’s interview of Jayne Kennedy yesterday morning. I didn’t catch the beginning, but recognized the name earlier when I read it. I looked her up, and found the following from BET, and that’s the post. In addition to what’s included, Jayne Kennedy seems to be living with depressive anxiety, from what I gleaned in the Sherri interview. I couldn’t find anything about that, but she’s written a book, Plain Jayne that I intend to read as soon as I can. From this article, I figured out how I recognized her name and her face; I recall when she was in the Miss USA pageant in the late 1970s. Then I recalled she got a job on some sports show, as covered below. Anyway, this woman, aside from being talented and beautiful, is also courageous. Follow the links within for more information.
Explore the multifaceted journey of the Emmy-winning trailblazer who transitioned from Hollywood to the NFL, changing the game forever.
By Tamara Brown March 9, 2026
NEW YORK – JANUARY 1: Jayne Kennedy and Brent Musburger on “N.F.L. Today,” on the CBS Sports television network. Circa 1978.
In the late 1970s, the network TV sports was a club where the doors were mostly locked to anyone who wasn’t white and male. But Jayne Kennedy didn’t just knock; she blasted those doors off the hinges.
As we continue our Women’s History Month spotlight, we’re looking back at the woman who, in 1978, became the first Black woman to co-host a major national sports program. When Kennedy stepped into the anchor chair on CBS’s The NFL Today, she did more than just read highlights.
Jayne Kennedy, now 74, held that ground-breaking role from 1978 to 1980, quickly becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the country. Before her history-making run at CBS, the former Miss Ohio USA was already a star. She got her start as a dancer on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and spent years touring with legends like Bob Hope and Dean Martin.
While her Hollywood resume is long, her impact on the sports world is what truly changed the culture. Beyond the NFL, Kennedy remains the only woman to host the long-running series Greatest Sports Legends. She even stepped into the ring as the first female color commentator for men’s professional boxing.
Even now, Kennedy isn’t slowing down. She was a key player in the LA28 Foundation, helping secure the bid for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. She’s also sharing her full story in her new memoir, Plain Jayne, which dives into the grit, faith, and ambition it took to navigate a career filled with hurdles.
By breaking that ceiling nearly 50 years ago, Kennedy didn’t just make a name for herself. She made sure that for the rest of us, the path was already paved with the excellence she brought to the screen every Sunday.
I emailed this to me on Sunday, but have only just gotten back to it to post here. My apologies on that, but it’s been both busy and stormy here! Anyway, I haven’t heard anything about the status of this; I hadn’t heard anything about it at all until I read it in Kansas Reflector. With no further ado:
LAWRENCE — Kansans won’t know until at least Tuesday if a judge will delay implementation of the state’s new “bathroom law,” but a concession by Attorney General Kris Kobach means key components of the law can be delayed until March 26.
Douglas County District Judge James McCabria heard arguments Friday about Senate Bill 244, the controversial new law that forces people to use bathrooms in government buildings and gender markers on driver’s licenses based on sex assigned at birth.
The three-hour hearing focused on technicalities, including whether the law meets any one of five specific criteria that would lead the judge to approve a temporary restraining order and pause enforcement of the law for up to 14 days.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Kansas Department of Administration said the law’s speedy implementation provided no grace period to Kansans needing a new driver’s license and for government leaders statewide to put a system in place for tracking bathroom usage.
The law took effect Feb. 26, a little over a week after the GOP-led Legislature overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. Kansans who held driver’s licenses with a gender marker that didn’t match their sex at birth were told their licenses were immediately invalidated and government leaders statewide were told they had to immediately enforce the bathroom portion of the bill.
Kobach told McCabria he agreed to give Kansans who needed to update driver’s licenses until March 26 to complete that. He also said he wouldn’t enforce the law’s penalties — which could be as high as $125,000 per day for violations — for cities, counties, municipalities and schools that might violate the bathroom rules, as well.
Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, talks to reporters after a Douglas County District Court hearing on March 6, 2026. Seldin asked the judge to place a temporary restraining order on the state to stop implementation of a new law that forces Kansans to use bathrooms and have documentation in their biological sex at birth. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
Harper Seldin, an ACLU attorney representing the two Lawrence transgender men who brought a case against the law under pseudonyms Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe, told the judge the law violates the Kansas Constitution.
SB 244 infringes on the rights of personal autonomy, expectations of privacy, and equal protection under the law, and has other issues, he said.
“The attorney general is incorrect when he says that we’re asking the court to break new ground,” Seldin said. “This is not a novel set of theories that require the government to do anything. The thread through these individual rights claims is that this is about Daniel and Matthew’s right to be left alone by the government.”
Seldin also said the law targets transgender individuals, which can be shown by the results of its implementation even if it’s not stated outright. He said the way SB 244 was implemented violated the Kansas Constitution when the bathroom portion of the bill was “logrolled” into the bill that originally addressed driver’s license and birth certificate gender markers.
Logrolling refers to dropping a bill into an unrelated bill, sidestepping the opportunity for public input. Seldin said cramming two separate subjects into one law violates the Kansas Constitution, which has a “single subject” clause.
Kobach said the two issues are congruent in that they both deal with defining sex within Kansas government.
“It’s this idea that bills should mean what they say and say what they mean,” Seldin said. “There’s a particular perniciousness to a law that hides the law.”
Kobach told the judge that a driver’s license is a government document, used for government purposes, and the state has the right to define the information contained in the document.
McCabria questioned Kobach about briefs included in the plaintiff testimony outlining the negative psychological effects on transgender people being made to use documents that don’t match their gender identity.
“Whatever a person may feel about their need to be perceived by the world in a certain way, what right do I have to compel the government to identify me in that way?” McCabria asked.
Kobach said the driver’s license is a document that records pertinent information, and sex is one of the elements, along with eye color and birthdate, that doesn’t change over time.
Kobach said the bathroom portion of the bill maintains the status quo in Kansas, where he contended residents have always gone to the bathroom that matches their biological sex at birth.
Seldin said trans people in the state have been going to the bathroom without any harms for decades.
Kobach said women who hear a man’s voice or see a man in private spaces could become anxious about their safety.
He acknowledged plaintiff’s assertions about the psychological or emotional harm they may suffer but told McCabria that in a balance of equities, that didn’t outweigh the harms of “99-plus percent of the population.”
When McCabria asked him to substantiate that number, Kobach said he didn’t mean to imply that everyone outside of transgender individuals were harmed by the law.
“Many courts have recognized the fear that ‘biological females’ have when a ‘biological male’ is in the bathroom with them, and that is something that I think any Kansan can identify with, especially a female,” Kobach said after the hearing.
Asked how women would be affected by seeing or hearing a transgender man who now has to use a woman’s bathroom, Kobach said, “All kinds of hypothetical cases are possible.”
McCabria said he had hoped to make a ruling Friday but that he needs more time to study the filings in the case and examine constitutional issues. He said he expects to rule by Tuesday.
“I think most people want to be respectful,” Seldin said after the hearing. “I think most people don’t want to pry into other people’s private lives. I think a law like this suggests the opposite, that Kansans have some prurient interest in other people’s habits and private spaces. And I don’t think that’s right.”
Z Kemp attended the hearing because her partner and many friends are affected. She said the law has caused “a lot of stress and anxiety.”
“That’s just unnecessary because as they’ve stated before, there was — especially with the bathroom situation —- no prior problem,” she said. “It’s only a problem whenever you make it a problem. I don’t think it’s that radical to just let trans people be. Just let them go to the bathroom.”
Avie Fallis said she has been through a lot of physical and legal changes to find herself. She said she is tired of well-meaning people recommending that she leave Kansas, which is her home state where her family and loved ones live.
“I feel like it’s a fire that’s just growing,” she said. “I’m not going to run away from fire. I feel like it should be extinguished.”
Z Kemp, left, and Avie Fallis attended a Douglas County District Court hearing March 6, 2026, about Kansas’ new law because it affects them and their loved ones. The law forces people to use the bathroom related to their biological sex at birth and to put that sex marker on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
This is total white supremacy Christian nationalism and an attempt to both roll back all civil rights of minorities and project a fake white Christians were the only good people in the country mentality. Propaganda in other words to support fragile white men’s egos and prop up declining church attendance. This is driven by people who don’t want to share the country equally with others but want everything for their group only. They want to remove an entire group of people from society, the LGBTQ+ community and go back to the pre1960s civil rights for nonwhites. Hugs
An internal government database first reported, by the Washington Post and posted on two public on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.
“The narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the department,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. The National Park Service is part of the Interior Department.
United States Department of the Interior logo and U.S. flag are seen in this illustration taken April 23, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
The U.S. Interior Department said a database revealing how President Donald Trump’s administration planned to revise information on key phases of American history at national park sites was deliberative and the employees who released it “will be held accountable.”
An internal government database first reported, by the Washington Post and posted on two public on Monday revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s effort to revise or remove information on African-American history, LGBT rights, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.
“The narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the department,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. The National Park Service is part of the Interior Department.
Trump has targeted cultural and historical institutions – from museums to monuments to national parks – to remove what he calls “anti-American” ideology.
His declarations and executive orders have led to the dismantling of exhibits on slavery, the restoration of Confederate statues and other moves that civil rights advocates say could reverse decades of progress.
The Interior Department spokesperson alleged the internal working documents were edited in a misrepresenting way before being released. The spokesperson also labeled the release as inappropriate and illegal, without specifying the law it allegedly violated.
“Employees who altered internal records and leaked in an effort to hurt the Trump administration will be held accountable,” the spokesperson added.
The Trump administration has sought to stifle internal dissent within government agencies and taken action against employees who have criticized its policies.
Last year, some employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were put on leave after they signed an open letter against the agency’s leadership, while some Environmental Protection Agency employees were fired after they signed a letter critical of the government’s actions.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus
There is a video at the site linked. How ever as you read through this remember that this is the group that wrote project 2025 and the main author of that Christian nationalist screed is Russell Vought who has a powerful position in the tRump administration. This is entirely about pushing a fundamentalist Christian lifestyle and worldview on the US public with heavy emphasis on quiverful which ishave as many children as possible for Christian families most of whom in that movement lived impoverished on one income. The idea is more kids butts in church pews now leads to more adult butts in those pews increasing tithes and money in the collection plates. Church attendance has decreased steadily and this is designed to increase it again. Plus it removes rights for women and LGBTQ+ families. The parents get the money only if women / the mothers marry young, forgo an advanced education, stay out of the work place, and have child after child after child like a breeding stock farm animal. It is only for the “right or correct types of families” and harms those who are not the “right” kinds of families. Plus it is totally racist with the poor people being cut out of the funds. The fact is minorities make on average far less than white families due to inherent racism and CRT, which is a real thing. Hugs
Last week, I wrote about the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the American Family: A Plan for the Next 250 Years. The plan is, essentially, to make women drop out of school, marry young, have tons of babies, rely financially on their husbands, be unable to divorce, and wind up in the poor house if they don’t follow these rules. But I wanted to zero in specifically on the policy section of the piece, which comes at the very end and which I haven’t seen get the coverage it deserves. Because what the Heritage Foundation is proposing is a massive cash transfer from poor single mothers to better-off married couples. This really is the plan: Take from the poor to give to the “right” kind of families. Make poor mothers work, and pay better-off ones to stay home. Further impoverish single mothers to force them to marry.
The Heritage Foundation wants to eventually end cash welfare as we know it (“Credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities,” Heritage laments). They don’t propose totally doing away with welfare benefits here, I suspect because they realize that would be a nonstarter. But they do propose taking resources that currently mostly benefit poorer families and redirecting them to wealthier ones, so long as those wealthier families have married parents. The Heritage proposal would only give its proposed benefits to married couples (policies should “privilege marriage as directly and explicitly as possible,” Heritage writes, emphasis theirs). It would only give benefits to married couples in which one partner works and makes above a certain income. And it would incentivize women dropping out of the workforce… unless they’re poor or single.
Here are the specifics.
Child tax credits only for married couples who are the child’s biological parents, who are working, and who make at least $30,500. The Heritage proposal would get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because that credit gives more money to struggling single parents than better-off married ones, as well as the Child Tax Credit, and replace them with what they call a Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit of $4,418 per child per year for four years. But this credit would phase in for families once they’re earning $30,500 per year — in other words, poor families wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to married parents — single parents wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to biological parents — step parents wouldn’t qualify. A person could be working full-time, but even if they’re earning above minimum wage, they may not qualify for this tax credit.
Bonuses for larger families — but only for married couples, only for biological parents, and not for the poor. Additionally, Heritage proposes a 25% per-child bonus to their FAM tax credit for third children and beyond. But, again, poor families are out of luck, as only couples with at least one working spouse qualify, and that spouse has to make at least $30,500.
More money for higher earners, none for the lowest. The FAM credit phases in at $30,500, and goes up from there relative to income. That’s right: This is government family support that gives more money to families that already have more money. And it gives the most money to families that are the most stable: Those with two married parents who make more than six figures. The credit doesn’t begin to scale down until a family makes $110,000, and even then, the wind-down is small (beginning at just 5%). Why set up a program that gives people more money as they make more money? Because “the FAM credit’s phase-in would incentivize work.” All of this means that a married couple with three children making $400,000 a year would get $14,000 additional dollars from the US taxpayer — while a single mom making $20,000 a year would get nada.
No help after a child’s fourth birthday. As it stands, parents can claim the Child Tax Credit until a child’s 17th birthday. The Heritage plan cuts parents off when their kid turns four. They claim that these early years are when parents need the most help. But children don’t stop needing food and a roof over their heads once they’re kindergarten age. The Heritage Foundation is clear that the purpose of this plan isn’t to support children, but to incentivize parents to have more of them: “The FAM credit is designed specifically for families with newborns or young children. Lawmakers interested in family policy may be inclined simply to expand the CTC. However, this approach would be inefficient as a family formation incentive. Only a small fraction of the benefit would go toward new parents, while most of it would go to families that are already formed.” They continue: “many other family benefits, such as the CTC, are backloaded to later in life when many parents are on more solid financial footing and may be past their prime child-bearing years.” Emphasis mine, because this is truly stunning: The Heritage Foundation only wants to give parents tax credits for their (expensive) children if those parents (mothers) are in their “prime child-bearing years” and might make more babies. Eggs too old? No child tax credits for you.
Pay women to stay home. The Heritage Foundation could have proposed a generous paid leave program, which would allow parents of newborns to stay home and care for them in that crucial first year. But their aim is not to make sure that young children receive the best possible care. Their aim seems to be to get women out of the workforce. And so they’ve instead offered a $2,000 per-child credit for one parent (almost always the mother) to stay home and care full-time for her child — but again, this only applies to married couples where one spouse (almost always the husband) is working and makes more than $30,500 per year. You’re a single mom who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. You’re a low-income married parent who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. If the concern really were for children — if the view really was that young children are best off being cared for at home by a parent — then this policy would apply to all parents of young children. But that’s not the concern. The concern is that women aren’t living their lives in the way Heritage deems acceptable.
Fund this whole scheme by getting rid of Head Start. Head Start is an incredible program that has had vast positive impacts, increasing high school and college graduation rates, adult incomes, health outcomes, and overall wellbeing. Studies have found it even decreases child abuse and neglect. This proposal would effectively end it, and use the money saved to give tax breaks to wealthy married couples with children.
Pay people to marry young. The final Heritage policy is a $2,500 deposit into a savings account for every new baby born in the US — but the only way to get the full benefit of that money as an adult is to marry well before the age of 30. That is, when an American is born, the government will deposit $2,500 into a savings account for them, which they cannot touch until they either marry or turn 30. At either marriage or age 30, they can start to withdraw from the account, but only over three years — so about a third of the original value per year. They get the full withdrawal amount each year (roughly one-third of the total account value) if, in each year, they are married but not yet 30. If they’re over 30, whether they’re married or not, they pay a tax penalty. In other words, to get the full benefit, you have to marry by 27 — below the average age of first marriage for women (28.6) and men (30.2) alike. Again, the point is not to incentivize marriage; it’s to incentivize women especially marrying as young as possible, despite early marriage being tied to higher divorce rates.
xx Jill
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In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.
The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.
“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”
In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote.
Brockman concludes the email by citing #MeToo and mentioning the news of another scientist, whose book he had tried to publish, coming under fire for sexual harassment allegations. He wonders whether it might be best for optics if the disgraced financier — the biggest financial backer to Brockman’s nonprofit Edge Foundation — didn’t attend after all.
“Me-Too is not going away; it’s growing, it’s all-pervasive and we’re now in a McCarthy-ism moment on steroids.”
Brockman did not respond to a request for comment.
The 2018 exchange, which was revealed as part of a trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. He was well connected to scientists at top universities who continued to associate with him after a 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed.
“I think we all had a sense that the system wasn’t super fair, right?” said Nicole Baran, a member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization that started in 2016 to combat racism and misogyny in STEM — or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Seeing some of these emails — and peering behind the curtains of the rooms that we were never invited into, I think has really laid bare, I don’t know, just truly how broken and corrupt the system is.”
The emails are a reminder to women like Baran that the profession, at its highest levels, still operates under the gaze of men. And in a field where funding is scarce — and climbing the career ladder is often only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files reveal the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back.
For the boys in the club, the arrangement worked to their benefit. Epstein donated millions of dollars to their research, hosted them at networking dinners at his home, invited them to visit his island or his ranch in Santa Fe, and connected them to potential funders to further their work.
As a result, these men were able to establish their own well-funded labs to pursue their work, land lucrative book deals and make connections to other prominent men, particularly those in Silicon Valley who were working on technological advancements like AI.
But as the emails reveal, these same men did not see women as intellectual equals.
Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”
“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”
(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)
Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent.
In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”
For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”
“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”
Importantly, she says, the ways in which women are talked about, and also excluded from the connections these men had, have professional repercussions
“Women scientists aren’t necessarily the people that come to mind for certain men when they’re thinking about who they’re inviting to dinner or who they’re inviting to a conference,” she said.
Not having that visibility can matter when it comes to achievements like being offered a tenured position — the height of stability in academia. “Often the tenure board will reach out for letters of recommendation from other people at other institutions in the field. Certainly, the more you’re known broadly, the better it is for your career in terms of tenure.”
Other scientists, like Alison Twelvetrees, a neurobiologist based in the United Kingdom, said she was not as surprised by the contents of the emails. “You just feel that it’s happening, even if you’re not privy to the exact contents of the conversations.”
In her career, she said she’s often been the only woman in the room. “You become very aware of the — I mean a very British way of putting this — blokey banter that you’re not a part of and you kind of feel that exclusion.”
For Twelvetrees, the emails also showed how these scientists would let things slide in their interactions with Epstein. “A lot of men who get to the top, they’re cowards,” she said. “So even if they’re aware that they’re not supposed to condone the way people are speaking, or they shouldn’t be that way in those environments, they will condone it,” she said. “It’s that sort of cowardice to [not] be an active bystander and not call it out. It’s still the majority.”
She sees a connection between the ways women are talked about in the files and the response to a recent push to strip Elon Musk of his fellow title at the Royal Society, the U.K.’s premier scientific institution, after his AI tool, Grok, was given the capability to undress women and girls.
So far, the head of the institute has said the only reasons to strip fellows of their titles is if they’ve conducted scientific misconduct, things like falsifying data, Twelvetrees said. “[Elon’s] used the products of science to make his personal AI assistant Grok a mass engine of misogyny and white supremacy. I don’t understand how that isn’t scientific misconduct.”
In January, X, formerly known as Twitter, announced it had limited image generation to paid users and added additional safety guardrails. However, reporting has shown Grok can still generate explicit images despite these changes.
For her, it’s just another example of men not being allies to women. “It’s these people at the top just sort of being pretty casual about stuff they should be standing up to,” she said.
Outside of quipping about women’s intelligence, some of the emails show men talking about young women in their profession in ways that are degrading. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University who corresponded with Epstein many times, recommending an undergrad student for a possible job, describing her to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” Yale has since placed Gelernter on leave, while they review his conduct.
In another series of exchanges, Epstein and Summers discuss a woman whom Summers said he was mentoring, but who he implied he wanted to sleep with. He has since clarified to the Harvard Crimson the woman was not a student. In November, he told the student newspaper that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and takes full responsibility “for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” He has stepped down from public positions including at the Center for American Progress and on the board of OpenAI.
The interactions revealed in the files are “very dehumanizing” for women, according to Baran, an assistant professor of biology at Davidson College. “I think especially when you think about like, these are men who had colleagues [and] mentees that were women,” she said. “And I think what was so clear is the way in which women in particular were just not spoken about as people with equal intellectual capacity and power.”
The revelations also made her question some of the work produced by some of the men scientists connected to Epstein, including researchers she teaches in her own classes. “It’s really hard to separate the science that these people created from the theories that are considered sort of foundational,” she said. “Especially in this area of psychology and evolution in particular, where I’m finding it just really hard to disentangle [from their] behavior in their personal life that seems so egregious and horrific.”
As an assistant professor of biology, it’s made her think of the young women she sees going into the sciences today. “Will their ideas be taken seriously?” she wonders. “Will their creativity, brilliance or ingenuity be taken seriously? Or will it be dismissed or ignored?”
As I said if they pass this I an a ton of other married people cannot vote. There is no time to get a passport, and there is no provision in either law for a maded marriage license acceptance so you can vote. Well unlike the federal bill this one allows a driver’s license as proof, and as I have one of those I might still get to vote. But if they strip it out to mirror the federal bill I lose the right to vote again. It is republicans showing how desperate they are to win when they are so unpopular that they need to rig and steal the elections. However there was voter fraud in Florida in the 2024 election, all citizens republicans who voted more than once for tRump, stole mail in ballots to vote for tRump, or ass one mail man did he threw away mail in voting from known democratic areas. Hugs
The Florida vote comes two weeks after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the SAVE America Act, a landmark bill that would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast their vote. If adopted, the bill would likely prevent millions of Americans from voting.
“What this legislation actually does is to prevent eligible U.S. citizens from voting,” Kanter Cohen said, “and that’s really the key issue.”
a current Florida driver’s license
In lockstep with the Trump administration, Florida Republicans say they are pushing the legislation to crack down on voting by noncitizens – despite the fact that election audits have repeatedly shown that illegal noncitizen voting is extremely rare. But the party continues to ignore those findings, using the myth of noncitizen voting as a tool to pass restrictive legislation aimed at creating more barriers to voting.
In other states, similar proof of citizenship laws have prevented tens of thousands of citizens from voting. But in Florida, with 13 million voters on the rolls, the scale could turn out to be even greater.
The Florida House of Representatives voted 83-31 Wednesday to move forward with a sweeping voter suppression bill that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of Floridians, at least, by creating new requirements for citizenship checks.
The alarming legislation represents the state-level component of a national Republican effort to make voting more difficult for American citizens.
Under the Florida House bill, residents wouldn’t be able to register to vote unless the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles database can verify their citizenship, or until the applicant provides proof of citizenship. The bill would also require the state to verify the citizenship status of all existing registered voters whose legal status has not already been verified.
State Rep. RaShon Young (D) said the legislation would have serious consequences for Floridians.
“This is fearmongering and disenfranchisement and voter suppression dressed up as security,” he said. “This is modern day gatekeeping and bureaucratic obstruction, administrative overreach and poll tax by paperwork.”
The Florida vote comes two weeks after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the SAVE America Act, a landmark bill that would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast their vote. If adopted, the bill would likely prevent millions of Americans from voting.
But the SAVE America Act is expected to face an uphill battle in the Senate, leading some state legislatures to attempt to pass their own versions.
Florida could be the latest to join other GOP-controlled states that have enacted similar state-level proof of citizenship laws like Arizona, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Wyoming, Indiana and Ohio. More states are currently considering similar legislation, including Utah, South Dakota and Missouri.
But the bills haven’t been successful everywhere. Texas failed to pass a proof of citizenship bill last year.
The Florida legislation closely mirrors the federal measure, according to Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel for the national voting rights group Fair Elections Center.
“This would do a lot of the same things, in terms of preventing American citizens from voting who don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship documents,” Kanter Cohen said.
The Florida House version of the bill would only go into effect in January 2027. But under a similar bill set for consideration in the Florida Senate, the new rules would take effect this July, before the November midterm elections. A House committee already gave preliminary approval to the bill earlier this month.
“What this legislation actually does is to prevent eligible U.S. citizens from voting,” Kanter Cohen said, “and that’s really the key issue.”
The timing of the proposal – as Congress considers a similar federal measure – is no coincidence. The Florida bill could be an effort to align state policies with the proposed federal restrictions to provide consistent rules for running elections, she said.
Under the bill approved by the House, Floridians whose citizenship status cannot be verified by the state would need to provide evidence of U.S. citizenship, including: a current U.S. passport, a U.S. birth certificate, a consular report of birth abroad, a current Florida driver’s license or Florida identification card that indicates U.S. citizenship, a naturalization certificate, a current photo identification issued by the federal or state government that indicates U.S. citizenship, or a federal court order granting U.S. citizenship.
In lockstep with the Trump administration, Florida Republicans say they are pushing the legislation to crack down on voting by noncitizens – despite the fact that election audits have repeatedly shown that illegal noncitizen voting is extremely rare. But the party continues to ignore those findings, using the myth of noncitizen voting as a tool to pass restrictive legislation aimed at creating more barriers to voting.
“The last thing someone who is on a path to citizenship would want to do is to jeopardize their naturalization by voting illegally,” Kanter Cohen said. “And so people don’t do that. That’s not something that’s happening because it has such dire consequences.”
Florida already has systems in place for investigating and prosecuting the small number of noncitizens who register to vote in the state. Last year, Florida found 198 “likely noncitizens who illegally registered and/or voted in Florida” out of the more than 13 million people on its voter rolls, according to a report from the state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security. The office referred 170 of them to law enforcement.
The Florida measure could disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters — including Republicans — to combat these miniscule amounts of possible illegal voting.
Married women of all political affiliations who have changed their last names could be among the most impacted by the legislation. If the voter’s legal name is different from the name on their citizenship document – such as their birth certificate – then the voter would need to provide official documentation providing proof of a legal name change.
The bill also would eliminate some identification documents voters can use to verify their identity at the polls. Floridians would no longer be able to use a debit or credit card, student identification, or retirement center, neighborhood association or public assistance identification.
In other states, similar proof of citizenship laws have prevented tens of thousands of citizens from voting. But in Florida, with 13 million voters on the rolls, the scale could turn out to be even greater.
Florida State Capitol building
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