Author: Jill Filipovic

Jill Filipovic is a New York-based writer, lawyer and author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A weekly columnist for CNN and a 2019 New America Future of War fellow, she is also a former contributing opinion writer to The New York Times and a former columnist for The Guardian. She writes at jill.substack.com and holds writing workshops and retreats around the world.

White Plight: Trump’s Embrace of White South African ‘Refugees’ Is a Racist Bullhorn

This week, Afrikaner “refugees” began arriving in the U.S.—some of the only refugees welcomed by the Trump administration. These white South Africans claim they are being persecuted at home: That white farmers are being attacked; that South Africa is not a safe place for them to live.

Much of the criticism of Trump’s decision to end refugee resettlement from just about everywhere else on the planet while welcoming a group that really isn’t facing particularly severe persecution has been derided as “political.” And it certainly is a stunt intended to provoke liberal outrage. But we should just call it what it is. It’s not “political.” It’s not a dogwhistle.

It’s racist.

This obvious troll from Trump (by way, I suspect, of Elon Musk and Stephen Miller) shows that, if they have their way, all the power will be white power.

Yes, America Should Make It Easier to Have Kids—But Trump Wants to Punish Childless and Single Women

The Trump administration wants to juice the birthrate. This isn’t surprising: Vice President JD Vance is an ardent pronatalist. So is shadow president Elon Musk, who seems to be working on populating Mars with his own progeny.

Abortion opponents, who make up a solid chunk of Trump’s base, want to see women have more babies whether we like it or not. Republicans and the Christian conservatives who elect them have generally been on the “be fruitful and multiply” side of things.

What’s different this time around, though, is that the Trump team is looking at carrots, not just sticks, in their baby-boom strategy. While the old way was to restrict abortion and make contraception harder to get, some of the proposals now include things like cash for kids, mommy medals, reserving scholarship program spots for young people who are married with children and (somewhat bizarrely) menstrual cycle education so women can figure out when they’re fertile and a national medal for motherhood for women with six or more children.

The administration is also considering policies that would effectively punish people for being single.

Boys Will Be Boys, But Women Are Too Emotional for the Supreme Court

Elon Musk and Peter Navarro are having a public slap fight. And while any other administration or workplace would be embarrassed by public outbursts, the White House seems to think it’s fine—because “boys will be boys,” according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

The thing with people who brush off male bad behavior, though, is that they rarely extend that patience to girls. While Leavitt was noting the White House would “let” Musk and Navarro’s “public sparring” continue, she—and the rest of the MAGA right—had no such forbearance for Amy Coney Barrett, who committed the cardinal sin of siding with the Constitution over the president in a recent Supreme Court decision, from which she dissented. The MAGA reaction was swift and ugly. Coney Barrett was a traitor—evidence that women are too empathetic to serve on the Supreme Court.

They Were Critically Ill. Abortion Could Have Saved Their Lives. They Weren’t Given the Option.

We don’t have the full picture of what abortion bans have wrought. We might never know the full scope of the damage, because the same people leveling these brutalities are the ones in charge of tracking them.

Instead, what we have are snapshots: data pulled by intrepid reporters. Women and their families brave enough to speak to the press. Doctors willing to speak anonymously with careful researchers.

This Is the Power-Grab Moment

Trump is not a small-government conservative because he read Ayn Rand in college. He’s a government-of-one conservative: an authoritarian.

What Trump has done here is not just a funding pause. It is a test: Will members of Congress comply with increasingly extreme acts—acts that strip their power, publicly humiliate them and anger their constituents? Will Congress and the public agree that in order to receive federal funding that Congress has already allocated, every single agency and organization that receives such funding has to demonstrate their loyalty to far-right Trumpian ideology? Will the people who make up the federal government decide that the foundation of American democracy—the separation of powers, put into place in part to ensure that the nation would be governed by representatives of people and not a singular king—is worth preserving?

American Maternity Care Is in Crisis. Abortion Bans Are Making It Worse.

Since the Dobbs decision, antiabortion Republicans are putting their resources not into expanding care for the women they’re forcing into motherhood, but into enforcing abortion bans—including those that make women risk their lives and health in pregnancy, drive up maternal injury and mortality, and push healthcare providers out of the workforce or out of state.

State budgets are limited, and how lawmakers spend the money they have tells us a lot.

Trump’s Cabinet Is Absurd. Republicans Will Accept It Anyway. That’s the Point.

Matt Gaetz for attorney general. RFK, Jr., for head of Health and Human Services. Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. 

The whole thing is a big public farce, and Trump is demanding that Republicans publicly play along—that they attach their names to this. It’s a signal that he expects to be treated as powerful beyond measure; that he is not to be questioned, no matter how dangerous or ridiculous his decisions. That he owns the government and everyone in it. 

Tyrants are never one-man machines. They are made and enabled by many others. And when tyrants emerge in democratic systems, they are made by people who consent to their abuse and misuse of that system. 

What Does the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement Care About?

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and overturned Roe v. Wade, there was a lot of talk, mostly from “compassionate conservative” abortion opponents, about what was next. It would be necessary, these abortion opponents argued, for the pro-life movement and perhaps even the Republican Party to finally turn its focus to actually helping women and babies. The country would be remade into one reflecting a broader “culture of life.” We were going to get a bipartisan pro-family agenda. Abortion wouldn’t just become illegal; the nation would be so welcoming to pregnant women that abortion would simply be unthinkable.

None of that has happened.

If Conservatives Want Stronger Marriages, They Should Look to Liberal Solutions

Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.

On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter—the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state—is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.

This isn’t a coincidence.

The GOP Isn’t Getting Less Radical on Abortion—They’re Getting Better at Lying

It’s not that Donald Trump is secretly pro-choice; it’s that he truly does not care at all about abortion rights either way, and anti-abortion groups were useful in getting him elected.

Now, though, those same groups are putting his candidacy at risk. 2024 is not 2016. Trump is adjusting accordingly. And one big adjustment is on abortion, which he wants Republicans to just quit talking about—for now. Once he’s in office, though, the calculus is different.