SEGMENT ONE

Interview with Professor Carrie N. Baker on her article: "Republican National Platform Invites Nationwide Abortion Ban by Supreme Court Decree." 

Republicans are laying low on the abortion issue as a result of polls showing the vast majority of Americans support abortion rights--they have lost seven out of seven abortion ballot measures since Dobbs, including in conservative states of Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, as well as electoral defeats. For the first time since 1984, the Republican Platform does NOT contain a demand for an amendment and legislations that would give zygotes, embryos and fetuses the same "personhood" rights as grown persons.

But WAIT...according to Carrie N. Baker, Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Smith College, there is a stealth pathway within the Republican Platform that would lead to the same result--'fetal personhood'.

In her article she states that: "Conservatives have devised a way to sidestep political accountability, while still achieving a nationwide abortion ban: by asking the Supreme Court to use the 14th Amendment to ban abortion across the U.S." This strategy assumes that the 14th Amendment can be the foundation of 'fetal personhood laws'. The 14th Amendment states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

Professor Baker will explain in detail how Republicans are trying to use this amendment to assert that it ALREADY grants zygotes, embryos and fetuses personhood rights and, therefore, they needn't go through the trouble of the long process of amending the Constitution to achieve their long stated aim of a total ban on all abortion throughout the U.S.

SEGMENT TWO

Interview with Denise Oliver-Velez, Professor, Civil Rights Movement leader and the first woman on the Central Committee of the Young Lords Party-- on sexist, racist attacks on Kamala Harris.

Background:

President Joe Biden had no sooner exited the race for president and endorsed Kamala Harris, than an online explosion of misogynistic and racist attacks on Harris, quickly ensued. 

Some social media posts repeated suggestions Harris "slept her way to the top", citing her brief relationship in the 90s with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

Meanwhile, posts using the new AI technology appeared on twitter/X of a doctored image of Harris appearing to pose alongside disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein..

Online posts also derided US-born Harris as a "Black African woman," a repeat of the "birther" campaign against Barack Obama, whom the right wing falsely claimed was ineligible for the Presidency because born in another country.

Harris was accused of  "exaggerating" her racial identities for political gain..

She was also widely attacked as a "DEI hire"--someone chosen as a token of Affirmative Action rather than for her abilities and accomplishments.

She was accused of the sexist slander of not being able to identify with parents and families (specifically started by JD Vance earlier, then picked up by others), because she has not birthed a child, discounting that she is stepmother to two children--and that no man in office has birthed a child either. 

Race- and gender-driven attacks on Harris are not new. In 2021, then-Senate candidate JD Vance branded her as being part of a group of "childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives."

And Jackson Lahmeyer, who founded the "Pastors for Trump" movement, wrote on X on July 4: "Both Joe + the Ho gotta go!" He also called Harris a "whore" and "harlot" while replying to comments on his post.

Experts say such attacks are to be expected in a presidential race this brutal.

"It's important to label these narratives and lies as what they are: an attempt to undermine a powerful woman's public service because of her gender, her background, her skin color," said Nina Jankowicz, co-founder of the disinformation watchdog American Sunlight Project. In 2020, Jankowicz led a study that found more than 336,000 instances of "gendered abuse and disinformation" used to attack 13 women politicians. Some 78 percent of that targeted Harris.

Roberta Braga, executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, warned internet users to be alert for "lies and conspiracies" about Harris in the coming days.

"The misinformation will be laced with gender-based attacks. And it won't be new," Braga said.

Women candidates of color in the 2020 elections were twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted with disinformation and four times as likely to be targeted with violent abuse, according to a report from the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology.

'Gendered disinformation' –- when sexism and misogyny intersect with online falsehoods -- has relentlessly targeted women politicians around the world, tarnishing their reputations, undermining their credibility and, in many cases, upending their careers.

As the White House race -- already vulnerable to an avalanche of disinformation -- heads into its final months, researchers are bracing for a flood of falsehoods targeting Harris.

Experts say such attacks are to be expected in a presidential race this brutal and to brace for more of them as the election campaign proceeds.

Bios of Guests:

Carrie Baker Bio

Carrie N. Baker, J.D., Ph.D., is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College and a contributing editor for Ms. magazine, writing regularly on women’s legal rights and feminist activism.

Denise Oliver-Velez Bio

Denise Oliver-Velez is currently an adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at SUNY New Paltz, and is a Contributing Editor for the progressive political blog Daily Kos. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947, she currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley on a small farm with her husband, dogs, cats and roosters; growing garlic and roses, and spending time with her hobby of African-American genealogical research, when she isn't teaching or blogging or registering voters.

She has been a political activist and community organizer, was in the Civil Rights movement, women's movement, and AIDS activism movement, and was a member of both the Young Lords Party and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was the firs woman on the Central Committee of the Young Lords She worked in community media and public broadcasting for many years, and was a co-founder and program director of Pacifica's first minority-controlled radio station, WPFW-FM, in Washington DC. She was the executive director of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. She has published ethnographic research as part of several HIV/AIDS intervention projects and is working on a book on the women of the Young Lords Party with co-author Iris Morales.