We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment

On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.

At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Antiabortion Militants Open Training Facility in Memphis, Aim to Restart Large-Scale Clinic Blockades

Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, is trying to make a comeback by teaming up with antiabortion extremist group PAAU (the so-called “Progressive” Anti-Abortion Uprising group associated with dozens of clinic and pharmacy invasions), to kick off “Rescue Resurrection.” Their stated goal is to revive large-scale clinic blockades with a formal kick-off training and series of events starting Dec. 3 in Memphis, Tenn.

Terry was one of the leaders of mass clinic blockades that took antiabortion extremism to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Operation Rescue’s (OR’s) orchestrated blockades in Atlanta, Memphis and Wichita drew massive media coverage. During the sieges, accessing a targeted abortion clinic meant getting through a gauntlet of bodies blocking clinic doors and driveways. Antiabortion activists traveled state to state in order to participate, blockading clinics, going limp when arrested (to represent the “unborn”) and requiring three to four police officers to remove each protester arrested and carry them to waiting police buses.

What to Know About the CDC’s Baseless New Guidance on Autism

The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.

The revised CDC webpage will be used to support efforts to ditch most childhood vaccines, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. “It will be cited as evidence, even though it’s completely invented,” she said.

What Boys Learn When Powerful Men Face No Consequences

For decades, Donald Trump has modeled a version of masculinity rooted in entitlement, impunity and the casual degradation of women—and he has done so from one of the most visible platforms on Earth. That visibility matters. When the most powerful man in the country repeatedly evades consequences for misogynous acts, it sends a potent cultural message to boys and young men about what manhood looks like and what women’s lives are worth.

This is why the stakes of the Epstein files extend far beyond Trump’s personal exposure. His ability—or inability—to finally face accountability is inseparable from the broader crisis of male socialization and the normalization of men’s violence against women.

At the same time, focusing solely on Trump risks missing the larger system that made Jeffrey Epstein’s predation possible. As feminists have long argued, these abuses were not aberrations but expressions of a patriarchal network that exploited girls and women with impunity. The Epstein saga is not simply a story of individual bad actors; it is an indictment of the cultural, financial and political institutions that protected them. Whether the public and political leaders confront that reality—or once again look away—will reveal as much about our collective values as it does about the men at the center of this scandal.

The Resistance Is Everywhere

These past 10 months have been tough. Every day a fresh outrage, more trampling of the Constitution and a new attack on common decency. Taking a page from Hollywood, Trump and his administration seem to have embraced a strategy of “everything, everywhere all at once.” 

But, unfortunately for them: The resistance has also been everywhere all at once, too.

There is no doubt that when historians look back on this sordid moment in history, they will conclude that it was women, and feminists, who led the way out of it.

Trump’s War on Women Journalists Reveals His Fear of Truth

There is a cold wind that blows every time Donald Trump opens his mouth to belittle a woman who dares to ask him a question. Last week, that wind swept through Air Force One when Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey pressed him on the Epstein files. A reasonable question in a democracy: If there’s nothing incriminating, why fight so hard to keep the documents sealed? Trump wheeled toward her, finger stabbing the air, and snarled, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Lucey returned two days later—undaunted. Her courage was met with more schoolyard taunts: “You are the worst … I don’t know why they even have you.”

That is the tell of a man losing control: a loud desperation masquerading as swagger. The sound of someone terrified that truth might be closing in.

And we will keep telling the truth about Trump, about Epstein, about the women and children harmed, exploited, dismissed, erased. We owe it to the victims who never got to ask their own questions.

A Century After the Eugenics Movement, the U.S. Is Again Barring Disabled Immigrants

This month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as justification to deny people visas to the United States.

Many were outraged and shocked, observing the Trump administration’s new expansion of the “public charge” rule—directing visa officers to deny entry to people with disabilities, chronic illnesses or age-related conditions—as a modern revival of eugenic immigration policy designed to exclude, control and institutionalize disabled and marginalized people.

When Trump first took office in 2016, the Trump administration broadened the definition of public charge to include people who receive SNAP benefits, medicaid, housing assistance, childcare subsidies and more. This new rule was published in 2019 and went into effect in 2020 and early 2021; President Biden ended the use of this public charge rule definition in March 2021, returning it to the older but still restrictive version. Following Trump’s new rule, visa denials based on the “public charge” rule exploded during Trump’s first residency, rising from just over 1,000 denials in 2016 to over 20,000 in 2019, and it had disastrous effects.

As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found, broadening this public charge rule led many people to reduce or stop using benefits or services for themselves.

Virginia Giuffre’s Posthumous Memoir Is an Indictment of the Men—and Institutions—That Enabled Her Abuse

I thought I was mentally prepared to read Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl. I was wrong. If reading the book was gut-wrenching, I can’t imagine what it was like for her and other girls and women who experience the horrors of being trafficked.

In the final paragraph of the book, and perhaps in some of the final sentences she ever wrote, Giuffre tells that she will have achieved her goal with Nobody’s Girl if “just one person” is moved to create “a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as everybody else.”

Although she never lived to see this day, her book, her courage and her rage compel us to fight for this goal in the name of all victims and survivors of sex trafficking. 

Feminists vs. Authoritarians: Honoring Leaders Holding the Line

Greetings from Los Angeles—on the heels of a very special evening to celebrate the heart and soul of the democracy movement. On Tuesday night, Ms. paid tribute at the Global Women’s Rights Awards to bold leaders operating at the intersection of media, the law and storytelling—recognizing these as the essential trifecta for toppling authoritarianism. And, importantly, for fueling a feminist future.