Political prisoners in 56 different prisons across the country continued their hunger strike in the 113th week of the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign. Members of this campaign, while condemning the widespread and arbitrary executions, particularly the execution of several protesters on the eve of Nowruz, called these actions an attempt by the regime to instill fear and terror in society. The striking prisoners, warning about the dire conditions of the prisons and the risk of execution for recent detainees in the shadow of communication blackouts, called upon the international community and human rights organizations to increase pressure on the Iranian regime to halt these sentences and secure the release of political prisoners.
Please find the full text of the statement by the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign below:
Continuation of the “No to Execution Tuesdays” Campaign in its 113th Week in 56 Different Prisons
The “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign congratulates the general public of Iran, and especially the families of those who lost their lives in the Dey [January] 1404 uprising and all the executed individuals of the past year who were massacred by the despotic and repressive “Velayat-e Faqih” regime, on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr and Nowruz 1405. We express our utmost thanks and appreciation to all individuals, teachers’ trade syndicates, retirees, workers, and families of those sentenced to death, as well as independent media and all those who served as the voice for death row inmates, and we hope that the year 1405 will be the year of Iran’s freedom—an Iran without torture and executions.
The execution regime has hanged over 2,650 of our compatriots in various parts of the country over the past year. Cruelly, on the eve of Nowruz, it executed three brave youths named Mehdi Ghasemi, Saeed Davoudi, and Saleh Mohammadi, who had been arrested during the Dey [January] protests, in Qom, and hanged another prisoner named Kourosh Keyvani on charges of espionage in Karaj Central Prison.
We, the members of the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign, while condemning the arbitrary and brutal executions carried out with the aim of creating fear and terror in society, call upon the United Nations, various countries, and human rights organizations to exert pressure on the Iranian regime so that the minimum rights of prisoners are respected. This is particularly crucial for those prisoners who have been arrested in recent months and are enduring torture in the midst of media silence and internet blackouts, facing the risk of death sentences; we also demand the release of political prisoners. Especially under the conditions of bombardments, the lives of prisoners are exposed to a double threat, and many prisoners are suffering from a lack of food and medical care. In the past week, dozens of prisoners in Chabahar Prison were killed and wounded by prison guards due to their protests against the lack of food supplies.
It should be noted that over the past two weeks, the statement of this campaign (Weeks 111 and 112) was not published due to communication blackouts.
The “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign in its 113th week is on hunger strike in the following 56 prisons:
Evin Prison (Women’s and Men’s Wards), Ghezel Hesar Prison (Units 2, 3, and 4), Karaj Central Prison, Karaj Fardis Prison, Greater Tehran Prison, Qarchak Prison, Khorin Prison of Varamin, Choubindar Prison of Qazvin, Ahar Prison, Arak Prison, Langarud Prison of Qom, Khorramabad Prison, Borujerd Prison, Yasuj Prison, Asadabad Prison of Isfahan, Dastgerd Prison of Isfahan, Sheiban Prison of Ahvaz, Sepidar Prison of Ahvaz (Women’s and Men’s Wards), Nezam Prison of Shiraz, Adelabad Prison of Shiraz (Women’s and Men’s Wards), Firuzabad Prison of Fars, Dehdasht Prison, Zahedan Prison (Women’s and Men’s Wards), Borazjan Prison, Ramhormoz Prison, Behbahan Prison, Bam Prison, Yazd Prison (Women’s and Men’s Wards), Kahnuj Prison, Tabas Prison, Birjand Central Prison, Mashhad Prison, Gorgan Prison, Sabzevar Prison, Gonbad-e Kavus Prison, Qaemshahr Prison, Rasht Prison (Men’s and Women’s Wards), Rudsar Prison, Haviq Prison of Talesh, Azbaram Prison of Lahijan, Dizelabad Prison of Kermanshah, Ardabil Prison, Tabriz Prison, Urmia Prison, Salmas Prison, Khoy Prison, Naqadeh Prison, Miandoab Prison, Mahabad Prison, Bukan Prison, Saqqez Prison, Baneh Prison, Marivan Prison, Sanandaj Prison, Kamyaran Prison, and Ilam Prison.
Hi Everyone. Sorry for no posts except from my phone and later from my tablet which I have to carry a backup power supply and cord with me now to doctors appointments as my old pad has a battery life of less than 10 minutes. A new Ipad is not a priority for our money right now even the cheapest one. Ron needs heart surgery, Ron needs cataract surgery, I need both new glasses and cataract surgery, and the van still has an oil leak. Plus Kamyk has basicly given up and slipped into depression. He had an apartment open up that he needed first/ last / and security for which came to $900 a month. It was government-subsidized housing. But because he is in long term care now the nursing home took all his SSI, leaving him with no money. Plus he no longer gets physcial therapy so he is slowly losing the ability to walk again. His sister started a go fund me but he forbade her to tell me about it. He felt we had all done too much for him and did not want me or you people to think he was trying to milk us or be greedy.
In a way I am glad he did not tell me until it was too late because I worry that as he can’t walk well, doesn’t drive, and did not know how long it will take to get his SSI back, that he wouldn’t be able to care for himself and so would be homeless in two months. The nursing home he is in is really nice compared to the last one which was abusing him emotionally, physically, and even sexually because the nurses decided he needed Jesus in his life and he rejected that being forced on him. So they were going to abuse him until he relented and came to their Jesus. This one gives him his medications on time, changes his ostomy bag or helps him do it, and they have been nice / kind to him. I understand his frustrations having to share a room with another person and basicly having no privacy but… the US government / wealthy don’t care about people in a land where profit is king.
I got up at 4:20 to feed the cat who when he thinks he needs food howls to get one of us up. I decided to stay up and watch the recorded news that I did not get to watch yesterday. I was not well at all yesterday, highly stressed which has been the situation for a while. My doctors were clear and Ron reminded me that my body breaks down under stress, and I am to be under as little stress as possible. That is not possible and has not been for a while. When I woke yesterday it was already much later than normal for me. Ron said he could tell I was having a bad night, I was highly agitated. I had gotten up at 2 am with a huge contracture, a “cramp” in the large side muscle in the upper part of the leg. I managed to get out of bed but couldn’t straighten out my leg. I spent 30 minutes moving around the bed holding on to the dresser and the end of the bed, leaning over to put weight on the leg, then removing it. Eventally I got it to touch the floor and hold some weight so I limped to my office and got a cane, then went to the bathroom which was a critical need by then. Ron never woke up and was upset I did not wake him. Not much he could do that I did not know to do myself.
When I got up with Ron at 7 I still couldn’t move or use the leg which was being electrified from the knee down, I couldn’t bend the leg due to the muscle still hurting from the cramp. I was swinging the leg forward and walking “peg legged” with a cane. Ron realized something was wrong and had me take my blood pressure and pulse. My blood pressure was extremely high. My pulse was also far too high. So high he asked me to take another dose of my blood pressure and heart rate medications. Ron had me sitting and checking it every ten minutes. It was not coming down and the first news show I started watching made it worse. So as I as them recorded I went back to bed until noon.
The reason for so much stress is Ron. He had his new medication Saturday that opens the arteries so he was better Sunday, but all day friday and Saturday I had to watch him and deal with him. He was exstrememly forgetful, unable to work his computer, he would sit in his recliner and fall asleep even during a conversation. He has bad sleep apnea and so he has to have his CPAP machine anytime he goes to sleep. But even in the bed he was forgetting to put it on until reminded. I offered to move it out to his chair but he would promise not to fall asleep as he just wanted to watch a few things on TV, 2 minutes later he was asleep. I would make him go to bed and I stay there until he had his CPAP on. I don’t dare let him drive like this so I am doing all the driving and shopping now. I am doing the dishes so he doesn’t exsert himself and the last time he washed the dishes he put everything away in the worng drawers not even realizing he was doing it. So yesterday afternoon while he slept I did the dishes. He cooked a porkloin last night so I have a bunch of dishes to do when I get home. I did pick everything up and rinsed everything off / out so it should be easier than it could have been.
I have a doctor’s appointment this morning and I have to go with Ron as you can see to his new heart surgeon on Wednesday morning, which I have to look up and see where he is. I am tired people. I went to bed at 5 yesterday but kept getting up to check on Ron as he was in his recliner and I wanted to make sure he was not sleeping. Care of the cat has totally fallen to me now. I asked him if he could clean the cat litter box before he came to bed. He assured me he would so I went to bed. And he did not do it as he forgot. I did it when I woke up. Randy is sick after just having surgery, his parents are both sick / ill. Ron is teetering with the same thing that killed his brother-in-law. And I am worried and scared.
When I get the dishes done today I will try to get to the wonderful comments and reply to somethings Ali posted which I appreciate. Ali has really stepped up and is posting more to give everyone something on the blog to read and engage in. I can’t say how much I am grateful for that. Got to go. Hugs
The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra and Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Chabeli, Shefali and Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
Monica Ramirez, founder of Justice for Migrant Women, said the farmworker community has been “shaken to its foundation” by the allegations against Cesar Chavez. (Courtesy of Monica Ramirez)
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta sits during an interview in San Francisco, Saturday, June 8, 2024. Huerta revealed she was raped by Cesar Chavez and pressured into sex during their years organizing together, disclosures she kept private for decades while building the farmworker movement. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
Magaly Licolli, co-founder of Venceremos, pointed to a pattern in organizing spaces where women who report abuse are doubted, ignored or pushed out. (Courtesy of Magaly Licolli)
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez said movements are led by a collective and warned against placing any one individual on a pedestal. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP)
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”
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.
Rabbi Moti Rieber watches law enforcement as they confront protesters March 10, 2026, outside the Senate chamber in the Kansas Statehouse. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Rabbi Moti Rieber sat on the tiled floor, legs akimbo, in front of the arched passage leading to the Kansas Senate chamber with at least 20 people behind him and more lining the walls with handmade signs.
“We are here because when injustice becomes law, then resistance is necessary,” Rieber said. “We are here as moral witnesses.”
Clergy members led a sit-in protest Tuesday in opposition to a recently passed anti-trans law. The Republican-controlled Legislature used tactics to avoid public input and overrode the governor’s veto to pass Senate Bill 244, requiring people in public buildings to use the bathroom that coincides with their biological sex and also mandating driver’s licenses include a person’s sex assigned at birth instead of their gender.
Sergeants-at-arms looked on from behind the group, and Kansas Highway Patrol troopers soon joined. But it wasn’t until the group prevented Sen. Tim Shallenburger, R-Baxter Springs, from entering the chamber that troopers grabbed people by the arms to clear a path.
As troopers hoisted activists up from their seats, encouraging them to disperse, the group sang in harmony: “No one is getting left behind this time. No one is getting left behind. No one is getting left behind this time. We get there together or never get there at all.”
At one point, a trooper knocked a woman to the ground as she tried to pass through the crowd, appearing to mistake her as part of the demonstration. Protesters responded with chants of “Shame!”
The woman declined to be identified or comment but told Kansas Reflector she was OK.
Rieber, executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, said while sitting on the floor, addressing the crowd, that the process to pass SB 244 was “crooked.” (There is a TikTok embedded on the page, linked in the title above.)
The law has already been challenged in Douglas County District Court, where a judge decided Tuesday not to pause enforcement of the law. The state sent letters to 275 Kansans shortly before the law went into effect, telling them their driver’s licenses were invalid. Some experts say laws targeting trans people can harm their mental health and increase the likelihood of discrimination.
The Rev. Mandy Todd, pastor at Messiah Lutheran Church in Lindsborg, said SB 244 is hurtful, targeted and part of a culture war. She said the group is “disgusted by this Legislature’s treatment of trans people.”
The bill stokes fear and anxiety, she said.
Todd, the director of engagement for Kansas Interfaith Action, said trans people in her community have felt the immediate effects of SB 244. The closest driver’s license office is in the next town, which Todd said has hamstrung one Lindsborg woman, who now cannot legally drive to sort out her invalid license.
Pastor Charles McKinzie II of Grace United Methodist Church in Winfield is confident the law, which he said was flawed in process and in substance, will make its way to the Kansas Supreme Court to be overturned.
“In the meantime, people are hurting, and people need to know that they are seen,” McKinzie said.
Conversations about the effects of SB 244 aren’t limited to a courtroom. They are taking place in churches, synagogues and other small group settings across the state, McKinzie said, and the sit-in was meant as a show of nonviolence “to shed light on a violent system.”
About an hour after the protest, Master Trooper Scott Whitsell said that no one from the group had been cited or arrested to his knowledge. The only law the protestors broke was blocking an entryway, he said.
I know Jill posts songs and Randy recently posted some also. I don’t want to step on their toes and wont be able to do the grand job they do. But just now I went out to tell Ron something as he worked in our back yard raking leaves from the neighbors sea grapes. As I came back in side I noticed the dark black clouds in the sky and the increasing winds. It reminded me of the first song below. My adopting parents were huge C7W fans and Porter Wagner was one of their favorites. So as a kid I heard the first song a lot. It is often in my mind when the vortex comes for me, as it is the same kind of big winds in my mind. The second song I heard when I was in the military and it stuck with me as it also was played a lot. It fit my mood well back then. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 