The White Supremacist Regime: How the Trump Administration Is Pushing Authoritarianism in the U.S.

It feels like things in the U.S. have finally tipped over an invisible edge. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot an unarmed woman in the face, muttering “fucking bitch” as he walked away. The Trump regime has not only defended him, it has leveraged the full weight of the U.S. government to support its false narrative. The Department of Justice is investigating the victim, Renee Good, and her wife—not the officer who killed her. Various officials, including Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, have told the public demonstrable, flat-out lies about the incident, things that flatly contradict widely-available videos.

Musk Isn’t Stopping Grok From Creating Explicit Photos of Minors Using AI. Here’s What Can Be Done.

Since the end of December, X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, has responded to many users’ requests to undress real people by turning photos of the people into sexually explicit material. After people began using the feature, the social platform company faced global scrutiny for enabling users to generate nonconsensual sexually explicit depictions of real people.

The Grok account has posted thousands of “nudified” and sexually suggestive images per hour. Even more disturbing, Grok has generated sexualized images and sexually explicit material of minors.

X’s response: Blame the platform’s users, not us.

At Turning Point USA, JD Vance Picks Up Where Charlie Kirk Left Off

Vice President JD Vance gave the closing keynote speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 conference in Phoenix on Dec. 21. It was the first TP gathering since the right-wing organization’s co-founder, Charlie Kirk, was killed in September, and thus bound to attract an extraordinary amount of media coverage and commentary.

His speech cycled through a laundry list of right-wing Christian nationalist gripes about Democrats and the “left.” It’s certainly his right, and prerogative, to share his views. But it’s up to us—his audience—either to accept or push back on those takes.

That’s what I’m doing here.

What 200 Gen Z Women Told Me About Birth Control Should Alarm Every Woman in America

Birth control is the single most powerful tool for women’s economic mobility and autonomy in modern history. It changed everything: When women could plan if, when and with whom they wanted to have children, college enrollment soared, dropout rates fell and poverty rates declined. The ability to access contraception has been directly tied to women’s ability to stay in school, build careers and make decisions about their own futures.

So why, in 2025, are we finding ourselves in a messaging war on birth control?

Ahead of the Country: How Florida’s Progressive Fight Against Authoritarianism Is Setting the Tone

Like many others across the nation, people gathered outside the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 18, 2025, to send a message: No Kings. People played music and danced. Kids found space to throw a football. People ran into old friends. 

“What really stood out to me was how much fun it was. I mean, people were enjoying themselves. You had people in frog costumes and other things. You had some pretty funny signs,” says Larry Hannan, communications and policy director for State Voices Florida, who attended the No Kings rally in Jacksonville. 

While Florida has trended red in the last decade, its voters have consistently favored progressive measures. In 2024, Florida’s Right to Abortion Initiative, as well as the state’s Marijuana Legalization Initiative, received 57 and 56 percent of the vote, respectively. Even though both measures were supported by the majority of voters, both initiatives were struck down because they failed to meet Florida’s 60 percent supermajority.

“In a lot of ways, the better we fight back here, the better the country is. Because a lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this is happening.’ And us in Florida are saying, ‘Yeah, this happened a few years ago,’” says Hannan, who noted that Florida has served as a rough draft for the conservative MAGA movement, since many of the president’s current advisers are former Florida officials. 

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

Pronatalism is not simply about encouraging births—it is a political project rooted in racism and control. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children while coercing or punishing others for reproducing or parenting.

Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is a devastating example: a Black nurse and mother declared brain-dead, yet kept on life support for months to sustain her pregnancy under Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws. This is what pronatalism looks like in practice—the state asserting ownership over a Black woman’s body.

As Black feminists, we understand that reproductive choices are personal, but they are also deeply shaped by structural power. Pronatalist leaders and influencers cloak their agenda in the language of family and morality, but in truth, they seek to restrict autonomy and consolidate control. Reproductive justice, by contrast, insists on every person’s right to decide whether and how to have children, and to parent in safety and dignity.

In Upcoming Virginia, N.J. and Pennsylvania Elections, Women’s Votes Will Decide the Future of Reproductive Rights and Equality

All eyes will be on the elections this fall in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and beyond. These contests are not just bellwethers for next year’s midterms—they’re critical tests of how far Americans will go to defend women’s rights and equality at the state and national levels.

Women’s votes will be decisive. Pollster Celinda Lake told Ms. that women “are our own voters, we make up our own minds.” That independence has shaped elections for decades, with women consistently leaning more Democratic than men. This fall—from Virginia’s history-making two-woman governor’s race, to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court retention battles—reproductive rights and equality are squarely on the ballot.

The message is clear: State-level elections matter profoundly, especially for women. The Dobbs decision pushed abortion and gender equality battles back to the states, and now voters must decide who will stand up for their rights.

Trump’s Pronatalist Agenda Weaponizes Motherhood to Push Women Out of Public Life

The Trump administration is using one of the oldest tools of patriarchy—promising rewards for compliance—through a wave of proposed pronatalist policies designed to push women into motherhood and encourage them to give birth to more children.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center warns that these proposals are not random: They stem from an “obscure, dangerous, and increasingly influential movement of ‘pronatalists’” that are now dictating the Trump administration’s family policy. 

According to NWLC, there are two major groups of pronatalists: Silicon Valley tech elites, such as Elon Musk, who claim that “high-IQ” people like themselves should be having more children; and traditional conservatives, who advocate for pushing women back into stay-at-home motherhood.

‘Progressive Pronatalism’ Is an Oxymoron: How Arguments Buying Into the Low-Fertility Panic Fail Women

It’s ironic that the U.S. federal budget was signed on the cusp of World Population Day, which is meant to raise awareness of population growth and reproductive rights. The budget reflects Trump administration priorities, including its aggressive pronatalism agenda, which attempts to cajole or coerce women into having more babies. It’s catnip for the GOP conservative base, and as a result, Trump’s symbolic $1,000 “baby bonus” got to remain in the budget bill, while other social spending like Medicaid and food assistance got cut.

But it’s not just conservatives anymore. Now, many progressives are also panicking over an alleged fertility “crisis.”

Hundreds of millions of girls and women worldwide are still unable to control basic aspects of their lives. Dangling pronatalist incentives like a “baby bonus” in front of them, encouraging them to pawn their reproductive choice for favors from pronatalist governments, is grossly misguided.

Why Is the Trump Administration Destroying Almost $10 Million of Contraceptives?

After the richest man in the world shuttered the U.S. agency that provides aid for the world’s poorest, the government is now going to spend money destroying the contraceptives, medications and food items it chose not to distribute.

This includes $9.7 million in contraceptives that were bound for crisis areas—places like refugee camps and war zones. It includes $800,000 worth of high-energy biscuits, a kind of emergency food aid for people in the direst of circumstances—and enough of it to feed 1.5 million children for a week.

To be clear, all of these items have already been paid for by U.S. tax dollars. The Trump administration is about to spend more money to destroy them.