 So, like most of you, I'm still trying to process the information that we got yesterday. I want to emphasize that I don't find this shocking. It's not surprising this is essentially what I had expected the Supreme Court to do, but still knowing that this is happening in my lifetime, that we're seeing the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, something that was seemingly unthinkable before, it is truly difficult to grapple with. I mean, it was on my mind all night. I couldn't sleep. I woke up in the morning with a sick feeling and it's just it's it's hard to accept how far we've fallen as a country, how far we're going back and a particular story that one of my Facebook friends had shared is really weighing heavily on my mind today. Basically her mom told her the story about an abortion that she had before it was legal, where she was blindfolded and taken to what was seemingly some random person's basement. They performed the abortion on her, put a bag over her head and then she was at a bus stop and she talked about how horrifying that experience was and she doesn't know how many women made it out of that basement. She couldn't grapple with the reality that many people had died where she had gotten that abortion because the procedure was so dangerous and unsafe and she was so happy. My friend says that her mom was crying as she was telling the story because she was really relieved knowing that her daughter would never grow up in that world. And here we are in the United States of America in 2022. We are going back to coat hanger abortions in back alleys. This is not a pro-life policy. Women are going to die because of this and Republicans who are supporting this, they think that they're pro-life. But what's interesting to me and one aspect that I wanted to talk about with regard to this story is that for some reason, after fighting for this for decades, literally the religious right in this country, they're not celebrating in the way that we thought they would be celebrating. It's not like they're, you know, not being sore winners because they care about the left feelings. Remember this is the fuck you're feelings crowd. But there's no dunking. There's no drinking of leftist tears. There's no means about SJW's melting down about women not being able to kill babies anymore. They're not doing that. Instead, they're fixated on something else rather than taking a victory lap. And to be clear, there's some that are taking a victory lap. But if you tune into right wing media, their most prominent propagandists are talking about the leak itself rather than this giant victory that they just secured. Take a look. This is so much more egregious an attack on our democracy than January 6th ever was. It's not even comparable. It's not even comparable, the leaking of this document. This is the worst type of attack you can launch against the integrity of the United States Supreme Court. So the Chief Justice, it's incumbent upon him to bring every law clerk before him. What is this person is treated as a heroic whistleblower? And you need, it seems to me, excuse the lecture, to concentrate on what the news is today. Not a leaked draft, but the fact that the draft was leaked. Wait a second, you just won. You got a massive dub that this religious fringe of evangelicals in this country has fought for for decades. You won. And you're malding. You're angry. You're more mad at the leaker as opposed to the substance. This doesn't make any sense. I mean, even if this were something that leaked that was good news for me, like, let's say marriage equality leaked in 2015, I wouldn't care at all about the leak. I would care about the substance and the impact that that decision that I just found out about has on society. But for whatever reason, conservatives are very angry with the leaker and they're not celebrating this victory. There's more, though. Ben Shapiro tweeted, there is little question that this leak is designed to create threat to the life and limb of any justice who signs onto the majority opinion prosecution to the full extent of the law. He adds the perverse attempt to create public pressure against the court by leaking this opinion should be prosecutable. It's absolutely unprecedented. Justin Amos tweeted, leaking a draft opinion of the Supreme Court destroys trust among the justices and undermines justice. Oh, give me a fucking break. The justices must be able to share their thoughts candidly and vulnerably with one another. They are judges deciding cases, not legislators writing laws that need public input. Josh Hawley writes, the left continues its assault on the Supreme Court with an unprecedented breach of confidentiality, clearly meant to intimidate. The justices mustn't give into this attempt to corrupt the process, stay strong. Mike Cernovich tweeted, Supreme Court draft opinions don't leak. This has never happened before. I don't even have the words to describe this. So let's just pause for a moment and discuss this. Discuss why they're choosing to focus on this. The religious right just got one of the biggest victories, something that they've been fighting for for decades. They are imposing their minority, theocratic opinion on the rest of society when other developed countries who are also religious are moving forward. They just sent us all backwards decades. And they're mad. They got what they wanted. They won and they're mad. Something doesn't add up here. Something really fishy is going on. Either the entire conservative base of propagandists or network of propagandists, I should say, is a hive mind and some mother brain somewhere sent out the signal that they all have to be outraged about the leak. Or this is a little bit conspiratorial, admittedly so. They all are coordinating what to say. And that's a very likely thing. They're just a little bit too conspicuous here. And the reason why they're focusing on the leak itself rather than the dub that they just got is because they know exactly what the American people are going to say. They know that this is not popular. So if you can shift outrage away from the fact that women are now second-class citizens and shifted onto the leaker, then that's how you can make this really unpopular thing that's happening imposed by the right on all of us a little bit more palatable for normies. And Jason Stanley, who is the author of How Fascism Works and Philosophy Professor, explains why the GOP is doing this. Changing the anger about the decision to anger about the leak is incredibly strategically clever. It's directed at the media to get the media to shift their attention. Whatever worries the court has about its legitimacy, it will redirect in retribution against the leaker, unless the leaker turns out to be on their ideological side, in which case the legal threat to the leaker will likely, but not invariably, dissipate. So this is one of the many tactics that fascists use. And I would highly encourage you to read Jason Stanley's book, I read it a couple of years ago, and it was very, very illuminating. You understand why there's so many contradictions with the far right, why they simultaneously say that their opposition is weak and they're cucks and they're snowflakes, but at the same time, they're very scary and they're a threat to society. Like you understand why they implement these tactics. It's all strategic, it's all purposeful. And so they have to do this because they know that people are going to be fucking pissed off. As Data for Progress points out, there is not a single state where support for a federal ban on abortion has more than 30% support among the public. And that right there is why right wing propagandists are focusing on the leak. This is how we're seeing in real time, the way that they take unpopular things that they're doing, their will being imposed on us, rather than us getting mad at them and what they've accomplished, we're getting mad at something else, the leaker. It's a distraction tactic. This is always what they do. They distract you from the real issues and that's how they impose their agenda covertly. It's a masterclass in deflection, it's a masterclass in propaganda and it's exactly how fascists operate because that's what they are, fascists. And they'll say, well, you know what? The Supreme Court isn't supposed to take public opinion into account and that's theoretically true, but abortion is a constitutional right that has been affirmed multiple times by the Supreme Court. So for all this crying of activist judges, now all of a sudden they're showing us what activist judges really are. They're not judges, they are political actors. So, you know, if they were worried about the Supreme Court's legitimacy and think that the leaker would have anything to do with that, I hate to break it to you all, but the substance of their ruling is going to have a lot more to do with the Supreme Court's legitimacy. No one should take the Supreme Court seriously. The Supreme Court at this point, in my opinion, abolish them, strip them of judicial review. That's not in the Constitution. They say that abortion isn't in the Constitution. Judicial review isn't in the Constitution. The Supreme Court's power to tell us which laws are and aren't constitutional also isn't in the Constitution. Should we strip that away from them? I mean, at this point, do what we need to to get our agenda implemented, break the rules. I don't even care. Women are second-class citizens in this country. They're going back to coat hanger abortions and back alleys. Fuck everything that you've been told. Fuck decorum, fuck norms, fuck civility. Now is the time to stand up and take a stand because this is what fascists are doing. So before they end up manipulating all of your normie friends into thinking that really this is about the leaker, don't let them set the narrative. Don't let them monopolize discourse here. We saw the way that they did it with the George Floyd protest. Rather than focusing on the murder of an unarmed black man by a racist cop, what we got instead was outrage over defund the police, the slogan that emerged organically. Oh, that's a terrible slogan. Even the left went along with talking about how bad of a slogan that is, rather than fixating on the substance. Don't let them distract you. Focus on the real outrage here. And that is the fact that women do not have control over their own bodily autonomy in red states in 2022. It's absolutely egregious.