The war on women is over. Or rather, the war on women never was.
The 2024 presidential campaign was the culmination of decades of unhinged paranoia from the Left. Democrats no longer warn that the opposition is wrong or misguided. They warn that fascistic forces led by a would-be Hitler would, among many other depravities, throw women into servitude.
Most politically aware people have probably heard something about The Handmaid’s Tale, either the Hulu television series or the 1985 science-fiction novel it was based on. In the story, fascistic Christian fundamentalists seize power after a terrorist attack and create a patriarchal state in which women are not only forbidden from owning property, reading, wearing their own clothing, sharing their own ideas, or making any real choices but also thrown into a biblically determined caste system. The handmaids, women who are identified as morally corrupt, are compelled to bear the children for chaste couples.
Sounds pretty awful, right? Much like George Orwell’s 1984, the book is a favorite point of analogy in contemporary politics. Unlike 1984, however, it fails to offer a single vaguely valuable lesson about the modern political environment or life in the United States, where women are freer and more prosperous than women have been in any place in all of history. Nevertheless, over the past few years, most major mass media outlets have run pieces contemplating the parallels between social conservatives and the patriarchal fascists of Gilead.
Though The Handmaid’s Tale exhibits a deep misunderstanding of both Christianity and Americans, the aesthetics, subservient women dressed as nuns under the watchful eye of dour white men, offer powerful imagery to feed the darkest fantasies of the paranoid Left.
The Handmaid’s Tale imagery had been a favorite of pro-abortion activists for years. When pollsters at Morning Consult asked voters, “Is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ rooted in reality?” a few years ago, 29% of Democratic men and 26% of Democratic women believed it was “grounded in truth and could become a reality someday.”
Why do a fourth of all Democrats claim to believe that it is plausible that women will be slaves to the whims of a theocratic ruling class? Carefully polished and calibrated conspiracy theories.
The Left doesn’t get nearly enough credit for its conspiratorial nature. From the 9/11 trutherism to the Russia collusion hoax, cynical Democrats have proven far more skilled at scaring their credulous constituents into compliance. While the Right’s conspiracy theories are often spread by deranged characters and marginal social media voices, the Left’s deceptions are laundered through activist media and imbued with credibility by a slew of (once) trusted institutions. Most conservative conspiracies are smothered in fact checks from major media organizations. Left-wing paranoia is reinforced with bogus social science and given plausibility by journalists.
Some of you may recall the 2012 presidential election, when inveterate centrist Mitt Romney was derided for a slew of imaginary crimes against women. Though Donald Trump was perhaps the least socially conservative GOP presidential candidate in a century, both as a personal matter and policy-wise, the war on women rhetoric was ratcheted up to new heights during his first presidency.
The entire paranoia of The Handmaid’s Tale revolves around the demand for unfettered access to abortion. Let’s, however, put the issue into some context: According to decadeslong Gallup polling on the issue, around 45% of women believe abortion should be legal only in certain circumstances, while another 15% believe it should be illegal in all circumstances. There is a wide range of views among women about the legality of the procedure and when life is worth protecting because women aren’t lockstepping automatons. The notion that limiting abortion is inherently anti-woman or authoritarian or dystopic isn’t reality.
It is certainly not antidemocratic to be pro-life. As we’ve seen, however, every political setback for Democrats is transformed into an attack on the pillars of democracy, even when it strengthens the ability of people to decide their fate, as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization did.
Let’s recall that the same institution that gave us the Dobbs decision, overturning the wholly concocted constitutional right to an abortion, also unilaterally legalized abortion nationwide in the first place with Roe v. Wade. That decision was taken by a court wholly made up of men, whereas the court that handed down Dobbs had multiple women on it, one of whom ruled with the majority. The big difference between the rulings is that Dobbs empowered the public to vote on an issue that was unmentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Yet, still, hundreds of pieces were written by the Left lamenting how Dobbs had undermined democracy.
Because abortion is the core political issue for many feminists, Democrats have spent decades convincing millions of women that a cabal of sexual predators runs the highest court. During Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court, CNN’s lascivious chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, maintained that 40% of the court had “been credibly accused of sexual misconduct.” Of course, it is, at the very least, highly debatable that either Clarence Thomas or Kavanaugh had been credibly accused of anything. Yet this theme was repeated across the media. Uncorroborated accusations of sexual assault, no matter how risible or rickety, are almost always given a hearing by the media if they are aimed at a conservative. It’s meant to convince women that nefarious forces are working in the shadows to strip them of agency and rights.
For decades, leftists have also contended that pro-life social conservatives don’t care if women die by the thousands. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, former Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen predicted “a real situation where Roe could be overturned. And we know what will happen, which is that women will die. Thousands of women died every year pre-Roe.”
Of course, we know no such thing. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, some states passed stricter limitations on abortion while others passed more permissive laws. Not one, much less “thousands,” would die from abortion restrictions.
And so, 2024 Democrats were compelled to create fake incidents to continue to scare women, the most infamous being that of Amber Thurman, whose death was likely caused by abortifacients but blamed on Georgia’s abortion law — which, like all others, does nothing to stop doctors from assisting the victim. Other similar stories were cooked up to make the case.
None of this is new. Pro-abortion advocates have long fabricated stories and statistics to manipulate women emotionally. It began with the Walter Cronkite 1965 documentary on the issue, “Abortion and the Law,” which significantly exaggerated the number of “back-alley” abortions and deaths from botched procedures. The documentary claimed, under the veneer of scientific expertise, that a million illegal abortions were performed every year, more than are legally procured today, and that 5,000-10,000 women died from botched procedures. These claims were incessantly repeated thereafter by the media to shape public opinion. Experts who later looked at those numbers could never recreate them. Even counting secondhand reports, only a small fraction of those deaths could be found. Back-alley abortions were incredibly rare. They were largely a myth.
Fearmongering is the driving force in the Left’s paranoiac case. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential run was predicated on the fact that it was her turn, regularly accuses the GOP not only of opposing abortion but wanting to ban contraception. In 2023, Slate warned that “birth control” was next in line for anti-abortion Republicans. People like Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC) claimed that “Congress must codify the right to contraception before it’s too late,” warning about the “right-wing extremists’ war on contraception and outright assault on Americans’ fundamental rights, personal freedoms, and well-being.”
Now, it would be understandably disconcerting if Republicans were on the cusp of “denying women” access to birth control, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) often warns, but it’s simply untrue. Some Christians have justifiable faith-based reasons to oppose taxpayer-funded contraception. Catholics like President Joe Biden are also allegedly opposed to contraception. The political debate has always been over whether the government should be allowed to coerce insurance companies and, thus, consumers into paying for contraception. This is why then-President Barack Obama sued the Little Sisters of the Poor and tried to force them to undermine the basic tenets of faith and chip in for condoms.
No Republican congressional bill, however, has ever proposed banning contraception. Numerous Republican bills, in fact, both in states and in Congress, have proposed making birth control over the counter. But modern progressives have been convinced that if something hasn’t been provided to them for free by the state, then it’s as good as banned. Opposing federally funded condoms is outlawing contraception in the same way refusing to pay for your Whopper is a ban on Burger King.
Moreover, Democrats like to conflate contraception and abortifacients, which some Republicans want to limit. One is prophylactic, a method or device used to prevent conception. The other is used to end the life of a conceived human being. Whatever your beliefs on the topic, they are substantively different.
So, it’s great news that women did not fall for the Left’s conspiracy theories in 2024. According to exit polls, around 45% of women voted for Trump. Around 50% of middle-aged women. Around 51% of married women. All those numbers are basically the same as they were 20 years ago.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Let’s face it: It’s also paranoiac to believe that men act as an amorphous group of human beings when it comes to politics or much else. There is no political consensus among men. Some issues affect women more than men, but many of us would rather see a government with hundreds of Amy Coney Barretts before a single conspiracy theorist like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).
And perhaps the most destructive effect of the modern Left’s paranoid style of politics is that it convinces millions of people to see their neighbors as the enemy — a hallmark of the authoritarian mindset. Attempting to pit women and men against each other simply tears at the fabric of American life.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner and author of The Rise of BlueAnon: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy, from which this is excerpted.