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One of the silver linings of this dark time of horror and suffering is that the American right has revealed itself like a cheap Scooby Doo villain. They yanked that mask off and underneath was exactly the soulless monster the left has been accusing them of being for decades.

Racist. Misogynist. Violent. Ignorant. Theocrats. Liars. Bigots. Morons. America-hating fascists who want nothing more than to destroy everything about this country because they hate everyone in it.

For the longest time, no one would listen to us. Elected Democrats refused to acknowledge that Republican voters were the problem. Partly through institutional calcification, but mostly through an inherent need to reach across the aisle. A need to not make waves and anger Republicans, Republican voters, and absolutely not anger the legacy press.1

The legacy press refused to acknowledge what we could all see happening right in front of us because then they would have to admit both sides weren’t the problem. Two long-time and highly respected political analysts tried to tell the truth about the Republican Party back in 2012:

How did the legacy press react? Like someone had left a flaming bag of dogshit on their doorstep.

Mann and Ornstein were not “debunked” by the legacy press. They were erased. No more invites on the Sunday shows. No more interviews. The legacy press lost their phone numbers for a very VERY long time. They said the thing none dare speak.

But here we are, a decade and a half later and who is telling us Republicans are the problem?

Republicans.

New 50-State Survey Finds Majority of Republicans (56%) Qualify as Christian Nationalism Supporters

At the national level, a majority of Republicans (56%) qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%), compared with one in four independents (25%) and less than one in five Democrats (17%). Overall, roughly one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (27%). These percentages largely have remained stable since PRRI first asked these questions in late 2022.

To be a Christian Nationalist is to be someone who rejects America. All of it, from top to bottom. The Constitution. The rule of law. The separation of church and state. Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. All of our civil rights. The entire concept of America as a nation of immigrants.

There is nothing about America that Christian Nationalists love. They want to destroy it all and rebuild it in their own racist image. And this is the key: It’s ALL about the racism. None of it is about Christianity.

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This is why the more violent and explicitly white nationalist the Republican Party becomes, the more the base embraces “Christian Nationalism.” This is the ideology that allows them to justify their violence and fascism in the name of “Jesus”:

Christian nationalism supporters hold more extreme views about immigrants.

Majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (67%) and Sympathizers (53%) agree with the idea that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” compared with 32% of Skeptics and 8% of Rejecters. Additionally, majorities of Christian nationalism Adherents (61%) and Sympathizers (54%) support “the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process.” In contrast, around one-third of Skeptics (34%) and one in ten Rejecters (11%) agree.

Le gasp! Who could have predicted such a thing except anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the American right for the last 160 years? EVERYTHING is about race with these fucking people. Race and misogyny and bigotry and hate and fear and cowardice.

The American right is comprised of the smallest, pettiest, weakest people America has ever produced, all balled up and concentrated into a pile of self-loathing filth, intent on erasing everything that scares them until all that’s left is a comforting lie. And when the lie collapses, they’ll burn what’s left to ashes, immolating themselves in the process.

At least, that’s what they WANT to do. But that’s not going to happen because the regime is failing, so fuck’em and their dreams of white glory.

What we get out of their non-stop racist temper tantrum, though, is the end of the lie. Even in the middle of the horror they are inflicting on us, they are sowing the seeds of their own long-term destruction. Not literally2, but socially, culturally, politically? Done. The narrative long used to protect them, that the American right is full of god-loving patriots who just want what’s best for the nation, is being shredded in real time by the very people it is meant to shield from accountability.

When this is over, and it will be over, there will be no going back for Republican voters. There will be no memory-holing what they’ve done and what they’ve embraced. Not only will we on the left not allow them to burn their MAGA hats and pretend they were victims all along, it also won’t matter.

Why? Because every time the right fails, they do one thing and one thing only: Lurch to the right. And who is waiting for them with open arms to the right of violent white nationalism? Nick Fuentes and his fellow Nazis.

UnPresidented

Nick Fuentes escalates MAGA civil war: 'We need to burn down the GOP and elect a Nazi in 2028'

Nick Fuentes, the far-right livestreamer long associated with white nationalist rhetoric and the fringes of the MAGA movement, is once again calling for political sabotage from within the right…

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2 days ago · 56 likes · 13 comments · UnPresidented

The right will never go back to dog whistles and coded language. They will never go back to democracy and the rule of law. They will only escalate their extremism and delight in their cruelty and sickness and terrorism. They are so disconnected from reality, they don’t even know how they look to civilized people anymore, as they caper about, drooling and gibbering Great Replacement nonsense and celebrating the murder of protesters.

Democrats are slowly, soooo slowly, beginning to no longer play the game of make-believe. They are slowly, soooo slowly, beginning to acknowledge these people are an unsalvageable threat to the nation. You cannot get them to vote for you because they are lost in a world of mindless fantasy. Write them off and move on.

The legacy press, on the other hand, will kick and scream and bite and scratch until the bitter end, demanding we go back to the good ol’ days when the American right was just a bunch of flag-waving church-goers who worship at the altar of Saint Ronald Reagan and American Exceptionalism. But that won’t work because the right will be flying Nazi flags and loudly worshipping at the altar of genocide.

You cannot gaslight a nation into not seeing a bunch of fucking Nazis being fucking Nazis.

The right doesn’t really understand yet what this will mean for them. They are so used to being coddled and protected, they cannot grasp the concept of being seen for what they truly are. But we see you, you fucking filth, and soon, you will wish you had stayed hidden behind your fig leaf of decency and respectability.

Thank you for being so unbelievably goddamn stupid.

Fascism thrives on fear. It wilts under scrutiny. Never look away. Never stop fighting. Hold them accountable and make them pay for every cruel thing they do. It’s the only way we get through this. Support this newsletter for just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), and we’ll get through together.

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There are only 256 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Donald Trump’s Supreme Court surprised him today by taking away the emergency tariff power he’s been playing with since taking office last year. He has already thrown his first tantrum, storming out of a meeting with the Governor’s Association when someone came into the East Room and handed him a piece of paper with the news.

Oh, my goodness! Now he can’t call reporters into the Oval Office and announce that he is really, really mad at Brazil because they found the former president guilty of attempting a coup and sentenced him to the rest of his natural life in prison, and he’s going to impose 100 percent tariffs on Brazilian maracas or whatever it is they export when they’re not salsa-ing…so there!

Axios dubbed his abuse of emergency powers a “tariff button,” and that’s exactly correct. On one side of his desk is the Diet Coke button, and on the other side is the tariff button he presses every time he’s got a hair up his ass or he wants to distract everyone from the latest releases out of the Epstein files. The tariff button allowed him to invent crazed shit like the “tariff bonuses” he said he would issue to taxpayers because we took in a hundred trillion dollars at the ports or wherever he thought tariffs were paid. They’re paying so much in tariffs that we can reduce your taxes! Fuck affordability! We’ve got tariffs! A cheeseburger in every pot! A Gulfstream in every driveway!

Trump held a press conference early this afternoon that was notable for two reasons: He wore a suit that was a dull gray, rather than his usual navy blue, and he decided he would throw a couple of grenades at the Supreme Court justices who didn’t vote his way, calling them “a disgrace to our nation.”

He didn’t mention Leonard Leo, the right-wing terrorist whose Heritage Society has earned Trump’s ire in recent months and who was behind the lawsuit that he lost. Darkly, he hinted that “foreign interests” were behind the lawsuit, which should come as something of a surprise to the thousands of Brooks Brothers attired young conservative go-getters who have peppered the Heritage Society ranks in recent years.

All in all, the press conference was a kind of low-speed chase of a tantrum, with Trump reading from notes and occasionally looking up to toss some fresh meat to the MAGA masses. In a blatant poke at the Supreme Court, Trump announced that he was imposing a new 10 percent “global tariff” under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, telling the assembled press it would be “an additional levy over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.”

In other news, Trump acknowledged that he is preparing a “limited strike” on Iran. He apparently came up with the idea yesterday at the meeting of his “Board of Peace” that was held at the old U.S. Institute of Peace building, which he renamed “The Donald Trump Institute of Peace” after it was gutted and emptied of employees during the DOGE days.

Of course he did. It will probably soon be closed for “renovations and repairs” like the Kennedy Center after the member states of his Board of Peace refuse to pay their dues into the fund that Trump announced he will personally control, probably through the same bank account in Qatar where he stashed the $500 million pay off from Venezuela he called “oil revenues.”

What a day. Three card monte tariffs turn into global tariffs as the most criminally corrupt administration in our history continues to accrue wealth for its Master and Commander.

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The Trump administration took down the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument across Christopher Street from where it all began. What they really want to do is turn back the clock to the day before Stonewall.

Histories written about Stonewall record June 28, 1969, as the official date of the uprising. I was there earlier on Friday night and witnessed the first arrests at the Stonewall Inn that precipitated the uprising by a crowd gathered across the street, just about where the Pride flag was erected as part of the Stonewall National Monument.

The crowd wasn’t big, less than a hundred, and it was peaceful. Then one of the cops took his nightstick and pushed a lesbian who had worked behind the bar in the Stonewall into a paddy wagon. She was later identified as Stormé DeLarverie, who was well known around the Village from working in other bars. She called out to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”

First, they threw pennies and other small change, then someone threw a cobblestone taken from a pile that was being used to repair the street. The window of the Stonewall shattered. The cops slammed shut the back door of the paddy wagon, it sped off, and the cops on the street retreated into the Stonewall and barred the door. The crowd pushed forward. Someone lit a fire. They started throwing garbage cans. Cop cars came screaming down Christopher Street, and it was off.

Greenwich Village, New York City, the entire United States of America, and most of all, the gay community was never the same after that moment.

The uprising went on for the next two nights, crowds confronting police from the Tactical Patrol Force, the SWAT-style unit the NYPD used to control riots. They used tear gas. They beat people in the streets.

Famously, or infamously, take your pick, I wrote “fag” in my description of the crowds that started the uprising. The use of the word “fag” was so common at that time that my article ran without the editors having a second thought. I mean, it was the Village Voice, for crying out loud! The Voice had dozens of gay employees; gay writers contributed articles and columns; the Voice covered arts such as Off-Broadway theater that was largely gay.

But to be gay was not acknowledged, and so somehow “fag” was okay even on the front page.

A few days after my story ran in the Voice, Jim Fouratt and a small crowd of people from what became the Gay Liberation Front demonstrated against the use of the word “fag” in my story outside the Voice offices on the corner of Christopher and 7^th Avenue. They demanded a meeting with the editor of the Voice, Dan Wolf, and got it. My story was the last time the word “fag” or any other pejorative for gay people was printed in the Voice.

I’ve written elsewhere calling the Stonewall riots the Rosa Parks moment for the gay movement. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, and that act set off the Montgomery bus boycott that was a key element in the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

On the night that the cops busted the Stonewall, gay people refused to slink away quietly, the way things had happened before, during every other bust of a gay bar. That was the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement. The slogans, “Gay Power,” and “Gay Pride,” were yelled repeatedly during the struggles between the Tactical Patrol Force and the huge crowd of gay people who took to the streets. “Gay power” was scrawled as graffiti on the walls of the Stonewall. The title of my article was “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.”

After Stonewall, the rainbow Pride flag came to symbolize what became known as the gay liberation movement. The Pride flag was removed by Trump’s National Park Service in the dead of night two weekends ago in a clear attempt to deny that the movement ever happened, in effect, to erase history. The Stonewall Inn still stands across Christopher Street from the park that was turned into the Stonewall National Monument.

Last Thursday, officials from the City of New York and a crowd of people erected a new flagpole to hang the Pride flag alongside the American flag.

All this is taking place as Donald Trump has erected banners displaying his own face on three government buildings in Washington D.C., most recently above the entrance to the Department of Justice, which before his administration had been by tradition and law separate from the White House and the rest of the Executive Branch.

The attempt by the Trump administration to remove the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument is about more than the historical event that took place there. Making history usually entails taking some action – writing and signing a document like the Declaration of Independence, fighting a battle like Gettysburg in the Civil War, a march for Civil Rights at the Lincoln Memorial or against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon, even refusing to give up your seat on a bus or to be arrested without protest at a gay bar.

But pride is more than history. Pride comes from within. It’s about who you are, not necessarily what you did.

There were many, many gay people in this country before the Stonewall uprising. But most of them didn’t dare declare who they were, because discrimination on the basis of sexual identity was the norm.

The idea of Gay Pride didn’t exist the day before Stonewall. There was no law in New York City against public display of affection by same-sex couples, but you didn’t see gay couples holding hands on the street unless it was late at night and you went way west on Christopher Street or over on West Street near the docks. Come daylight, gay people holding hands was over.

Think of it. Straight couples held hands. Gay couples didn’t. It was that basic in the days and weeks and months and years before Stonewall.

And then, the day after Stonewall, and during July and August and after that, you saw gay couples holding hands on the street. It was young people at first, mainly those who had been part of the Stonewall uprising. It was remarkable because you hadn’t seen it before. But then older gay couples started holding hands on the street, and slowly, it happened. Suddenly, it was just two people who loved each other walking down the street holding hands.

You could attribute the public display of affection by gay people to the opening of the very real closet so many gay people felt compelled to live in. That certainly happened in places of employment and in families and in places of business such as restaurants, where a shared touch or kiss by patrons over dinner would never have happened before, but was now, yes, a norm.

But new norms are not established without the courage to break old ones. It took courage for same sex couples to hold hands and walk down the street. It took courage to be gay and serve in the military when being openly gay as a solider was illegal. It was as if society thought the words “courage” and “gay” were mutually exclusive. What they’re trying to do by taking down the Pride flag at the Stonewall National Monument to go back to those days and deny the courage of the people and what happened there. It’s the equivalent of removing statues from battlefields, denying the courage of the soldiers who fought there.

A riot, or an uprising, or whatever you choose to call it, happened at the Stonewall Inn. But something greater precipitated it: Pride in being who you are, even if every person in your life, your friends and teachers and coaches and even members of your own family told you that who you are is somehow wrong.

Humanity is a mess that we’re all part of, no matter our gender or the color of our skin or what language we speak or which God we worship or who we choose to love. The day before Stonewall, being gay was not something to be publicly acknowledged. Then the cops busted a gay bar and everything changed, everything. This country is not going back. That is something for all of us to be proud of.

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Stick with me. I haven’t lost my mind.

What precipitated that headline is news that Elon Musk has – finally – moved to block Russia’s use of Starlink technology in its war against Ukraine. His decision apparently came after Russian drones equipped with Starlink antennas struck a civilian passenger train in northern Ukraine near Kharkiv in late January. One train car was hit by a Russian drone, and three others hit close to the train, apparently in an attempt to derail it. Five people were killed with an unknown number of wounded. There were 155 civilians traveling on the train at the time of the strike.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defense minister, contacted Starlink after the train strike and asked the company to find a way to disable the technology so that Russia cannot use Starlink to guide its drones in attacks on Ukraine. In the past, Russia has used the excuse that many of its drones that have struck civilian structures such as apartment buildings and businesses in Ukraine missed their military targets by mistake. Ukraine’s defense minister pointed out to executives from Space-X that Russia’s Starlink-guided drones hit a moving train filled with civilians, so that had to be Russia’s target.

On February 1, Musk posted on X, “Looks like the steps we took to stop the unauthorized use of Starlink by Russia have worked. Let us know if more needs to be done.” Musk had apparently ordered that Starlink terminals operated by Russians be disabled by restricting use of the technology using geo-fencing and registration tools that block terminals not registered with Starlink. Russia has captured some Starlink terminals and antennas from Ukrainian forces and acquired contraband Starlink sets on the black market.

Starlink has been an essential battlefield tool for Ukraine since the beginning of the war. Space-X donated about 3,500 terminals to Ukraine early in the war. After that, Starlink terminals and antennas were paid for by USAID, and then the Pentagon picked up the funding for both the terminals and the monthly fees to operate them. Poland and other NATO countries have pitched in with funding for Ukraine’s Starlink access. Poland remains one of the largest funders for Ukraine’s Starlink services, paying the subscription fees for more than 20,000 terminals it provided.

Ukraine uses the technology for communications between rear areas and the front lines and has employed Starlink for its own surveillance and attack drones, as well as some remote-controlled resupply vehicles on the ground. Starlink-connected drones with video have been used by Ukraine to adjust artillery. When Russia began using pirated Starlink technology, Ukraine pleaded with Space-X to find a way to block Russia’s use of its terminals and antennas.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that armed Russian drones cost about $500 to $800 to build, and the Starlink connections and equipment cost another $300 to $500, according to Ukrainian estimates. Starlink-connected drones are much more difficult to jam by Ukraine because they are satellite linked. Russia has been using Starlink-connected drones across the entire 600-mile front line of the war. Russia has also been bombarding Kyiv and other Ukrainian population centers using Starlink-connected drones. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported in late January that Russian BM-35 strike drones equipped with Starlink had a 500-kilometer range, making them capable of hitting targets all the way from the Russian border to areas in eastern Ukraine near the Polish border.

The BM-35 Russian strike drone looks like this illustration from ISW:

It is easy to see how dangerous Russian access to Starlink became in the war.

That fact became evident not long after Musk ordered the denial of Russian access to Starlink. The effect on frontline Russian forces has been “catastrophic,” according to sources quoted by Forbes. Ukrainian sources told Forbes that “All command and control of the [Russian] troops has collapsed. Assault operations have been halted in many areas.” This has enabled Ukraine to move to bolster its defenses around Pokrovsk, because Russian drones using Starlink can no longer target Ukrainian vehicles resupplying troops along the front lines. Reports from Ukraine say that its forces have made gains in the south near Kherson because of the blockage of Russia’s access to Starlink.

The New York Times reports that Russian forces have been “scrambling” to replace Starlink. Russia does not have its own equivalent technology, leaving its military to fall back on “ground internet, fiber-optic cables, Wi-Fi bridges and extenders that forces used before relying on Starlink,” according to the Times.

Ukraine has had its own problems since the move by Starlink. Each terminal and antenna is registered separately with Starlink, sort of like our cable connections are registered and billed separately. You must have an account for the equipment to work. Ukraine quickly came up with a list of its authorized terminals and Starlink accounts, which Space-X added to what is now called the “white list” of accounts, but some Ukrainian devices have not been registered yet. Russian accounts and terminals have been dubbed “black” and are barred from use by Space-X.

The modern battlefield has become hugely reliant on technology. Advances in night-vision and satellite surveillance have changed everything for forces on the ground, which used to be “blind” at night and reliant on line-of-sight reconnaissance for movement of units. Satellite communications technology like Starlink kicked the entire military calculus of warfare up about ten notches. The U.S. military has had soldiers in Ukraine studying Ukraine’s drone manufacturing and tactics. It’s amazing to contemplate, but the U.S. is currently behind Ukraine in supply and use of battlefield drones, although the Pentagon is scrambling – there’s that word again – to catch up.

Meanwhile, both Russia and China are planning their own Space-X-style systems of low-orbit satellites, so they can catch up to what will surely be a mandatory system to fight the next war. They are behind for now, but within the next five to ten years, both countries are expected to field versions of their own satellite communications networks for military and civilian use.

I guess it will remain a mystery why Elon Musk did not bar Russian use of Starlink technology right from the start, since the entire system belongs to him, and he is the one who makes all the decisions about how Starlink is used and by whom.

But he’s done it now. Ukraine is breathing a huge sigh of relief. The Russian drones that attack front line troops and population centers will be less accurate from now on thanks to Elon Musk, who appears to have somehow come by – however imperfectly and probably temporarily – an actual conscience.

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Republicans continue to prove that they are unfit to govern, leading us down a path that will cost lives for decades to come, even as the legacy press continues to bend the knee in abject surrender.

When the regime falls, and it will, everyone has to be held accountable for selling out democracy to pad their fucking bank accounts.

Ogre Nation News Update!

2:40 - 12:48 The regime pays back half a billion in filthy fossil fuel donations by killing a crucial Obama-era EPA legal ruling. Enjoy all the extra pollution courtesy of the “both sides are just as bad!” crowd. gives a short history lesson about Love Canal.

12:49 - 22:38 Gallup obeys in advance and ends presidential approval polls because Trump’s numbers are in the shitter. CBS manages to go from bad to unbelievably worse all in the same week. The legacy press continues to fail us.

22:39 - 25:40 As we enter the third government shutdown of Trump’s second term in office, we see the results of electing people who despise the very concept of government.

25:41 - 31:41 You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE

31:42 - 35:52 We Live in the Stupidest Timeline - I give a little Ogre history lesson about Lysenkoism.

35:53 - 46:56 Headlines for Short Attention Spans

46:57 - 53:10 Self-care of the Week

Few forces have emerged from the MAGA new right as forcefully as pro-natalism. Pro-natalists aren’t a unified group — there are the tech bros who are happy to use IVF and surrogacy to create dozens of “perfect” children, and there are the traditionalists who want to ban IVF and push all women to marry at 22 — but they share a unified vision of a world in which radically raising (white) birth rates is a top priority. And they all understand that the only way to do that is to radically constrain women’s rights and opportunities.

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There are, of course, ways to gently increase birth rates through support for women and families; France, for example, has had some success through a combination of generous childcare policies, paid leave, and cash payments for each child. But so far, no country has seen the huge upticks that pro-natalists want. The countries with the highest birthrates tend to be those in which women have the fewest rights and opportunities. And as women gain more rights and opportunities, birth rates go down, while age of first marriage and first birth go up.

This is why there is such a concerted effort on the pro-natalist right to force or at least coerce women to marry in their 20s and get to reproducing. It’s why the strategy includes pushing women out of higher education, banning or highly limiting contraception and IVF, and legalizing workplace discrimination against women so that employers can favor bread-winning men.

But that, of course, is not enough. The pro-natalist right is also using public shaming to criticize and mock any woman whose life doesn’t run on their ideal course. The idea seems to be that the US is in need of an anti-feminist cultural shift in which women who marry and reproduce early and then stay home to raise their children are praised, while women to delay until they’re settled into their careers or until they find the right person are derided. It really does give away the whole game on the right’s views on women. It’s not motherhood or children they value; it’s compliance.

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Case in point: Prominent conservatives are angry about the fact that the number of children born to women over 40 is rising, as is the number of children born to single women over 40. These are still pretty small numbers: Only about 4% of all births are to women 40 and older, and it’s closer to 1% for births to single women 40 and over. And thanks to the incredible success of campaigns to decrease teen pregnancy via long-acting contraception (coupled with much lower rates of teenage sex), there are now more births to women 40 and over than there are to teenage girls.

One would think that this would make conservatives happy. Teen pregnancy has been a focus of the left and the right for decades, with the left promoting contraception and the right promoting abstinence. If the goal is more babies born to women who are ready to be mothers, then the pro-natalists should be glad to see that women who are nearing the end of their fertile years are deciding to have them. That is, sadly, not the case. The pro-natalists are incredibly disparaging of these women, and especially of the professionally successful women who choose to have children while single. They are what happens “when you perfected your career and one day wake up that biology is passing you by.” It is “just a cruel thing to do to a child on purpose.” It means a fatherless child and a love-less mother. It’s “immorality and selfishness.”

The solution? The absolutely ubiquitous and only right-wing solution, which the Heritage Foundation wants to take money away from poor single moms in order to pay for?

Get married in your late teens or early 20s. Start having babies right away. Have as many as you can. If you don’t, be socially shunned. See? Easy!

Except, of course, that women have free will.

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