For months now, if not years, front-line abortion providers and advocates for access have been writing about the fall of Roe v. Wade as a “ when ,” not an “if.” The end of Roe has already arrived in dozens of states where Republicans have forged a post-Roe reality by cutting off access to abortion and criminalizing its provision.

Yet the unprecedented leak Monday night of a Supreme Court draft opinion, signaling the final and unambiguous undoing of already weak constitutional abortion protections, curdles the blood even of those who saw it coming. More women and pregnant people will suffer and die; poor people of color will be affected in disproportionate numbers.

The blame lies squarely with the powerful Christian right, aided and abetted by cynical fascoid right-wingers, who have set their sights on pregnant peoples’ bodily autonomy for decades. They will not respond to our rage and protests. They will push on with their authoritarian agenda. Despite claims to states’ rights in the leaked opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, there is clear evidence that if Republicans retake Congress in November, they will seek to pass a federal abortion ban .

There is no reasoning with fascists. Our energies must go elsewhere: placing fierce and unwavering pressure on Democrats, spineless as they have been, to act on this issue when they still have some control of the legislature. It should never have come to this — the end of Roe with zero nationwide legislative protections for abortion access.

Democrats in Congress should have long ago codified the right to abortion access, as the party’s left flank has urged , but they didn’t. If they don’t act now to end the filibuster and pass abortion protection laws, they will deserve something approaching the same level of blame directed at anti-abortion Republicans.

Democrats will not take the lead. Instead, it is up to us — it always has been.

After Texas passed an effective abortion ban this year, which was already ruled unconstitutional by a state judge, President Joe Biden vowed to “launch a whole-of-government effort” to protect the right to abortion in the state. We are yet to see any such effort, even though, as I wrote at the time, there are a number of steps his administration could immediately take.

If — and this really is an if — the fear of a nationwide abortion ban and the shock of Roe’s undoing galvanizes Democratic voters in November, these will once again be votes against a greater evil, rather than votes the Democrats have earned. Just as today’s Democratic Party has refused to take the lead on this issue even as abortion access has fallen apart in so many places, they will not take the lead now. Instead, it is up to us — it always has been.

Since we cannot rely on Democratic leaders, we must — following the example of those organizers on the front lines of this struggle — work around the law, exploiting the coming interstate jurisdictional chaos around abortion law that the end of Roe will bring into even sharper relief. The fight for free and accessible abortions has always required solidarity, risk, and cunning. To keep reproductive justice alive, we must fight on terrain beyond the law, in contravention of certain laws, or in post-Roe legal grey areas.

The end of Roe, as a forthcoming and crucial paper in the Columbia Law Review notes, will bring forth an entirely new battleground of interstate juridical conflict. States that support access rights will move to pass laws that protect abortion providers who treat out-of-state patients, while anti-abortion states will seek to pass laws to prosecute out-of-state providers.

This clashing bifurcation is already beginning to unfold: Legislators in Connecticut passed a bill last week designed to protect abortion providers who assist patients seeking refuge from abortion-ban states. Other blue states should follow this lead.

Meanwhile, 26 states are ready with laws to enact abortion bans when Roe is undone and are passing ever more elaborate ways to criminalize abortions. Over a dozen of these states recently passed bans in their legislatures; others are laws that preexisted Roe but remain on the books and could snap back into effect. At present, only 16 states and Washington, D.C., have laws that actively protect the right to abortion.

Major interstate court battles along these lines are set to erupt after Roe — from the policing of women and other pregnant peoples’ interstate travel, to the functioning of telehealth services that can prescribe abortion pills across state lines, to the criminalization of those who share resources and material support to aid abortions.

The Columbia Law Review paper’s authors highlight that these fights will make a mockery of Republican claims that Roe has made abortion law more, rather than less, complicated. If legal confusions produce openings after Roe — spaces to set up new access sites and build greater networks, while finding new loopholes and ways to be ungovernable against repressive government action — we must take such advantage where we can.

It’s already clear that there will be more arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonments of abortion providers, supporters, and seekers. A recent attempt by a local law enforcement agency in Texas to charge a young woman, Lizelle Herrera, with murder in connection to a “self-induced abortion” failed because no such murder statute for charging pregnant people currently exists in the state. We have seen, though, how swiftly such laws are changing for the worse.

The policing of this post-Roe world gives us much reason to fear — but even more reason to resist and fight with and for the communities with the least power, who will no doubt be the most targeted.

Networks already exist to send abortion medication to jurisdictions where it has been made illegal. These will have to grow, using various online tools, techniques, physical mailing systems, and assistance with transportation — especially to ensure that those with the fewest resources are reached.

Crucially, though, this fight is something to join, not invent anew. Many will be shocked by the end of Roe, but they need to realize that there are existing efforts and groups on the ground who need support, more so than major organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Contrary to liberal mythologizing, the battle for bodily autonomy and justice did not begin at the Supreme Court, and it will not end there.

One thing that is abundantly clear in this still-emerging landscape is that we cannot focus solely on the law . Republican terror tactics against abortions have not hewed to existing statute; they have forged new realities to de facto ban abortion through brutal state action in clear violation of existing constitutional law and done so in the knowledge that these constitutional protections were on their last legs. The same extralegal Republican approach informs the right’s attacks on trans lives, and they are constantly pushing it further.

In his draft opinion , Alito also criticizes Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated sodomy law, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. “[N]one of these rights,” the justice wrote, “has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.” This is what fascists and their allies are fighting for: not just an end to abortions, horrifying enough as that is, but the palingenesis of a nation, in which the only rights permitted to stand are those that protect property, patriarchy, and whiteness — such, in Alito’s own framing, is the rooting of U.S. history.

Contrary to liberal mythologizing, the battle for bodily autonomy and justice was never won in the Supreme Court. The fight did not begin at the court, and it will not end there. On Monday night, a crowd of many hundreds gathered outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, chanting, “Fascist scum have got to go.” It is certainly in this antifascist spirit that the fight must go on.

The post The End of Roe: Saving Abortion Rights Means Taking Them Into Our Own Hands appeared first on The Intercept .

Since the mid-20th century, the U.S. has seen no fewer than three political movements broadly described as the “New Right.” There was the first New Right of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and conservative student groups, with their right-libertarianism, anti-communism, and emphasis on social values. The second generation to earn the moniker — the New Right of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and both George Bushes — leaned harder into conservative Christianity, populism, and free markets.

These New Right waves were different largely in tone and presentation; there was considerable overlap in ideology and even personnel. The high-minded conservatism of a Buckley and the pandering populism of a Bush have never been oppositional approaches, despite attempts to explain them this way. Every version of the New Right has been propelled by more or less explicit white supremacist backlash and robust funding.

Now, in our era of Trumpian reaction, we are seeing reports about a new New Right. Like the New Rights that came before it, it’s a loose constellation of self-identifying anti-establishment, allegedly heterodox reactionaries. The newest of the Rights is similarly fueled by disaffection with liberal progress myths and united by white supremacist backlash — this time, with funding largely from billionaire Peter Thiel .

The new New Right has made headlines in recent weeks. In particular, Vanity Fair published a thoroughly and thoughtfully reported feature detailing the emergence of a rising right-wing circle made up of highly educated Twitter posters, podcasters, artists, and even “online philosophers,” most notably the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin. And the New York Times dedicated a fluffy feature to the founding of niche online magazine Compact, which claims to feature heterodox thinking but instead offers predictable contrarianism and tired social conservatism.

Alongside GOP candidates for office like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, this motley scene follows the ideological weft and warp of Trumpist nationalism, while alluding to greater intellectual and revolutionary ambitions, sometimes wearing cooler clothes, and receiving money from Thiel.

The turn to the New Right is a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and — crucially — money.

The focus on these groups is all fine and well: Why shouldn’t the media do fair-minded reporting on a burgeoning political trend? Yet there is the risk of reifying a ragtag cohort into a cultural-political force with more power than it would otherwise have.

More crucially, there’s a glaring omission in the coverage. Today’s New Right frames itself as the only force currently willing to fight against the “regime,” as Vance calls it, of liberal capitalism’s establishment power and the narratives that undergird it. “The fundamental premise of liberalism,” Yarvin told Vanity Fair’s James Pogue, “is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.”

The problem is that characters like Yarvin had another choice; the march to the far right is no more inexorable than misplaced faith in liberal progress. There is a whole swath of the contemporary left that also wholly rejects liberal establishment powers, the logic of the capitalist state, and liberalism’s progress myths. Rejection of liberal progress propaganda has been a theme of left-wing writing, including mine, for years , and I’m hardly alone. Such positions are definitive of a radical, antifascist , anti-racist left.

These leftist, liberatory tendencies may not be empowered in the Democratic Party, even on its left flank, but they are still present and active throughout the United States. They exist, they are accessible, and they have raged against the “regime” of contemporary power long before the current New Right came into its embryonic form.

This matters when thinking about the forces of neo-reaction because it clarifies the type of choice members of the New Right are making. While neo-reaction is indeed often based on the rejection of the liberal mainstream and its hollow promises, that rejection alone does not itself push someone into the New Right; moves to the anti-racist far left can begin the exact same way.

So what distinguishes the New Right turn? It’s a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and — crucially — money. You cannot discount the cash: There’s serious money to be made, so long as your illiberalism upholds all the other oppressive hierarchies. And it’s of note that the key source of funding — Thiel’s fortunes — skyrocketed due to President Donald Trump’s racist immigration policies , which remain almost entirely in place under the Biden administration. Ethnocentrism is central to Vance’s and Masters’s platforms now.

The Vanity Fair piece highlights the irony that these so-called anti-authoritarians of the New Right, obsessed as they are with the dystopianism of the contemporary U.S., wholly overlook “the most dystopian aspects of American life: our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.”

Pogue is far from credulous and has said in interviews that the subjects of his story — however heterogeneous they claim to be — share an investment in authoritarianism. Yet the failure of New Right figures to talk about prisons and policing is no oversight: It is evidence of a white supremacism that need not be explicitly stated to run through this movement. This strain of reaction, after all, comes in the wake of the largest anti-racist uprisings in a generation, one that cannot be dismissed as liberal performance. The timing lays bare how this New Right fits into the country’s unbroken history of white backlash.

The decision of the disaffected to join the forces of reaction might appear understandable when it is presented as the only route for those willing to challenge the yoke of liberal capitalism and its pieties. This is harder to justify on those terms when it is clarified that an anti-capitalist left exists. The difference is that, unlike the New Right, the far left abhors white supremacist patriarchy and rejects the obvious fallacy that there is something pro-worker, or anti-capitalist, about border rule and labor segmentation.

The matter of money should not be understated. Radical left movements, unlike the New Right, are not popular among billionaire funders; that’s what happens when you challenge the actual “regime” of capital. To highlight the path not chosen by the New Right, then, is to show their active desire not for liberation but for domination — which is nothing new on the right at all.

The post The New New Right Was Forged in Greed and White Backlash appeared first on The Intercept .