Introduction

Attacks on FACE Amid Surge of White Nationalism

Since the fall of Roe in 2022, anti-abortion states and federal officials have continued their efforts to restrict access to abortion, even as their voters have enshrined abortion rights into state constitutions. In 2025, the situation worsened when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Moreover, in addition to the familiar battles around abortion access, the political landscape severely compounded the challenge to ensure care. Suddenly, abortion providers also had to help their patients contend with the fear of ICE raids and violence against immigrant communities, alongside a surge in hate speech and racist rhetoric, which often prevented them from seeking the health care they need.

2025 saw a consistent, intense continuation of the type of violence and harassment seen in recent years, with significant increases in numerous categories.

The year began with the incoming Trump Administration immediately setting the tone that abortion providers and people accessing care would not be protected from incidents of violence and disruption. President Donald Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion extremists who had been convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for invading and/or blockading clinics that provide abortion care. At the same time, the Department of Justice announced it would only enforce FACE to protect abortion clinics in “extraordinary circumstances.” FACE prohibits using force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to prevent someone from providing or seeking reproductive health care services.

Overall, incidents were more widely spread across the country, more providers experienced at least one incident, and a small number of facilities experienced extremely high levels of activity.

The overall increase in incidents from 2024 to 2025 is primarily driven by a rise in targeted threat and harassment behaviors, particularly death threats (+113%) and stalking (+111%). The data show a shift toward more personal, sustained, and higher-risk targeting of providers and clinic staff. NAF attributes this to a combination of polarizing political rhetoric and the availability of personal information on the internet. The anti-abortion movement now includes younger groups who are more tech-savvy (such as the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising and Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust) and able to leverage online resources to target and harass individuals.  

NAF’s 2025 Violence & Disruption Report is essential to highlighting the continued and escalating attacks against abortion providers nationwide. Going beyond the data, this year’s report also centers first-hand accounts from providers about the incidents their clinics faced throughout 2025 and their continued fight to ensure abortion access for all patients.

Report Findings

NAF has tracked incidents of violence and disruption at abortion providers since the 1970s, documenting decades of persistent and escalating threats. However, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the landscape has shifted dramatically. Widespread clinic closures, shifting state policies, and the redistribution of care have fundamentally changed where and how incidents occur, making direct year-over-year comparisons less reflective of on-the-ground realities. For this reason, in addition to outlining key data on incidents of violence and disruptions throughout 2025, this year’s report also focuses on key indicators and notable trends within the current environment, while continuing to underscore the broader historical context.

Notable rise in incidents in 2025 compared to 2024, including:
Death threats / threats of harm
Assault & Battery
Full Report Data

Violence

Attempted Bombing / Arson
Trespassing
Anthrax / Bioterrorism Threats
Assault & Battery
Death Threats / Threats of Harm

Disruption

Harassment

Suspicious, harassing, or threatening calls, mail, email, or social media posts

Hoax Devices / Suspicious Packages
Picketing
Obstruction
Particular surges in violence and other incidents, like obstructions and mail/online harassment, include:

Surge of harassment related to the Boulder Valley Health Center Sex Ed Summer Camp event, which included 65,235 hostile calls, emails, and social media comments and direct messages.

Attempts to flood the phone system at Trust Women Wichita with 1,458 automated messages in 35 minutes on September 25 and 1,566 automated messages in 24 hours on December 11. This incident builds off a previous tactic of protestors attempting to block access by scheduling fake appointments so real patients are unable to access care, while also disrupting the financial and operational stability of clinics.

Provider Stories

Boulder Valley Health Center in Boulder, Colorado

Christie Burkhart, Director of Facilities & Infrastructure Operations

In spring 2025, Boulder Valley Health Center planned a youth sexual health education program developed in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder focused on age-appropriate education around consent and body awareness. 

In a virtual meeting intended for parents and guardians, an anti-abortion individual joined without the knowledge of the BVHC staff and recorded the meeting. The recording was clipped, taken out of context, and circulated on popular right-wing social media accounts, and BVHC quickly became the target of a wave of coordinated online backlash. The clinic was inundated with tens of thousands of social media interactions, hundreds of daily phone calls, and threats of violence directed at staff. 

To add to this, BVHC was further subjected to an increase in in-person protest activity outside the clinic. While most activity remained online, the volume and intensity of harassment underscores the growing role of digital platforms in amplifying threats against reproductive health providers, regardless of geography.

Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation in Atlanta, Georgia

Tracii Wesley, Head of Security

At Feminist Center, anti-abortion protestors gather multiple times each week, positioning themselves along the public right-of-way that patients must pass when entering the clinic. Staff reported that protest rhetoric in 2025 was increasingly aggressive and, at times, explicitly racist, particularly toward the predominantly Black and Brown patients served by the clinic.

One long-standing protestor has been a consistent source of disruption, regularly using a bullhorn, displaying graphic imagery, and directing confrontational and racially charged language at people approaching the clinic. Increasingly in 2025, staff noted that patients of color were subjected to more hostile rhetoric and hate speech, while white patients were addressed with more care, often being told, “we’ll pray for you.”

In one instance, protestors convinced a Latino man that clinic staff were undercover ICE agents preparing to detain and deport his partner while she was inside. Staff identified this as a particularly troubling example of how misinformation and racially targeted rhetoric are being used to provoke fear and disrupt care, patterns they report seeing more frequently throughout 2025.

Affiliated Medical Services in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Dabbie Phonekeo, Clinic Director

In March 2025, just weeks after Affiliated Medical Services opened in downtown Milwaukee, staff were confronted with an anti-abortion blockade inside their own building. Two individuals entered the clinic, refused to leave, and physically blocked the entrance until police dragged them out. Around the same time, another individual smashed the clinic’s front window. For a team that had never experienced this level of intrusion in over 15 years, the message of intimidation was clear. When providers asked local police about enforcing the FACE Act, the officers said they were unaware of the law.

In the weeks and months following this incident, anti-abortion protestors continued to harass clinic staff, shouting at them through bullhorns, following them to their cars, and directing aggressive, often dehumanizing language at them. Black patients were targeted with racist rhetoric, told they are committing “genocide,” and confronted with signs like “Black Babies Matter.” 

Beyond the sidewalk, harassment continued over the course of 2025 through fake appointments, threatening phone calls, and hateful mail, all intended to disrupt care, spread fear, and intimidate staff, simply for seeking or providing health care.

Trust Women in Wichita, Kansas

Kat Boyd, President and CEO

At Trust Women, violence and disruption reached a sustained “fever pitch” in 2025. In a city still shaped by the legacy of Dr. George Tiller’s murder, the clinic faces near-daily protest activity, including individuals blocking entrances, attempting to redirect patients, and engaging in increasingly aggressive behavior. This level of activity reflects a broader sense of emboldenment, particularly in the wake of weakened enforcement of the FACE Act and recent political developments.

In fall 2025, one individual spread raw hamburger meat across a 20-foot stretch of sidewalk, blocking the clinic’s entrance. When staff quickly cleared it to avoid disrupting patients, the same individual returned days later and repeated the act. Shortly after, the clinic received a package containing a decomposing hamburger patty and a note calling staff “murderers.” 

At the same time, disruption expanded across digital channels. On multiple occasions, the clinic received floods of up to 2,500 emails through its website, forcing staff to sift through each message to identify legitimate patient needs. Together, these incidents illustrate a broader shift: harassment is no longer confined to clinic grounds, but is increasingly coordinated, high-volume, and designed to interfere with care at every level.

The Women’s Center in Delaware County, Pennsylvania

Amanda Kifferly, Vice President for Abortion Access

In July 2025, well-known anti-abortion protestors invaded The Women’s Center clinic under the guise of fake appointments and threw unknown liquids and a white powder around the facility. These protestors had been recently pardoned by President Trump for previous violations of the FACE Act. 

While it seems such an act should prompt immediate evacuation and a full emergency response, in this situation, with three to five extremists in the clinic over the course of four hours, staff chose to hold their ground so as to not hand over their space to the invaders. Following the event, there was never any chemical analysis done of the substances – law enforcement and emergency fire responders took the criminal’s word that the substances were non-lethal/combustible. They took it into evidence, with no follow up performed.

Staff were left to manage the situation and reassure patients in real time, unsure of what they had been exposed to. Having happened in the space they spend countless hours providing compassionate care, clinic staff felt uneasy and violated.

Despite this, the clinic did not stop. Care continued, and every patient scheduled that day was still able to receive services. Staff remained focused on supporting patients through an already difficult experience, even as they navigated fear and uncertainty themselves—underscoring both the risks providers face and their unwavering commitment to ensuring access to care.

Key Threats to Providers

Erosion of FACE Enforcement

During the 1980s and early 1990s, violence against abortion providers was escalating across the country, culminating in the murder of Dr. David Gunn outside a Pensacola, Florida clinic and the attempted murder of Dr. Tiller outside his Wichita, Kansas clinic, both in 1993. In response to these incidents, Congress saw a new urgency to pass federal legislation to address violence against reproductive health care facilities and the denial of access to women and pregnant people seeking their services. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the FACE Act into law.

Since the passage of FACE, its enforcement has played an important role in setting boundaries and creating accountability. When enforcement is strong and visible, it can act as a deterrent. When it’s less consistent, it may contribute to an environment where individuals feel more emboldened to engage in disruptive or threatening behavior.

In 2025, the Trump Administration's pardons and curtailment of FACE sent a clear message to anti-abortion extremists: they will not face consequences for violating the law.

The reaction was swift and predictable. Some of those pardoned said they would likely offend again, and indeed did so. In July, a group of anti-abortion extremists, including two who had been pardoned, conducted a blockade and invasion at a clinic in Upland, Pennsylvania. Two other extremists blockaded a clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

Later in the year, Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion organization that fought to shut down abortion clinics in the 1980s and ‘90s, and Terrisa Bukovinac of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) formed a new organization called Rescue Resurrection. They purchased property in Memphis, Tennessee for a “pro-life activist academy” and announced, “We are bringing back rescue. This is not a drill.” 

In December, members of Rescue Resurrection blockaded the Planned Parenthood clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. The formation of this new group and their immediate blockade in Memphis shows they are emboldened by the weakening of FACE. Arrests occurred but none of the perpetrators face federal charges. This trend is expected to continue.

Shift to Digital Harassment

While reporting shows a decrease in in-person actions, such as a picketing, it's important to understand two factors: First, picketing occurs regularly across the majority of abortion providers, but not other health care providers. Given how commonplace this form of disruption is, many providers often just accept the behavior as the standard and may not report it as disruption. Second, alongside in-person attacks on clinics, providers have reported a significant rise in digital harassment. This includes threats and disruption via social media, phone calls, and hate mail, highlighting a potential shift in tactics and growing threat of online/at-home violence, rather than an overall decrease in harassment. 

Online harassment takes much less time and can be far more disruptive than in-person activities. When a Boulder, Colorado clinic publicized a sex-ed summer camp, an anti-abortion campaign flooded them with over 65,000 hostile calls, emails, and comments and messages on social media. A Wichita, Kansas phone system was inundated with over 1,400 automated messages across two separate incidents. 

This ties into the increase in death threats, threats of harm and stalking—they have simply moved from targeting facilities to targeting facility employees.

Providers have also reported incidents of harassment and disruption “in real life” but away from the clinic. After targeting city officials and the landlord, PAAU and the Survivors prevented the opening of an abortion clinic in Beverly Hills. They used that experience and evolved their tactics to use against other clinics by going after facilities’ licensing status, harassing construction personnel, and targeting a clinic landlord at their other business.

White Nationalism & Rising Hate Speech

Since the start of the second Trump Administration in 2025, providers have reported a marked increase in hateful, racist, and dehumanizing rhetoric directed at both clinic staff and patients. First-hand accounts point to harassment that is more explicit in its targeting of immigrant communities and people of color. While NAF’s Security team has not documented ICE raids at clinics, the fear of immigration enforcement is shaping behavior of providers, with reports of staff staying home for fear of ICE, as well as patients, with some delaying or forgoing care altogether due to concerns about raids.

This rise in hate speech reflects broader trends—many of the same white nationalist, anti-immigrant, and extremist groups targeting marginalized communities are the same ones targeting abortion providers. Their tactics are increasingly coordinated across digital and physical spaces, driving online harassment campaigns in addition to in-person activity outside clinics, and more overtly racist, xenophobic, and personal in tone.

These dynamics are contributing to a more widespread and volatile threat environment nationwide. More providers are experiencing incidents, while a smaller number of facilities face sustained, high levels of disruption. Notably, death threats and threats of harm increased from 38 in 2024 to 81 in 2025, highlighting the growing severity of targeting.

NAF’s Security Efforts

NAF’s Security program provides our members with 24-7 assistance with security incidents, threats, or emergencies. NAF also provides on-site staff security training and comprehensive physical security assessments for clinic facilities and providers’ homes. We develop and share expert security protocols, resources, and training on a wide range of topics from IT security to how to prevent and respond to various types of anti-abortion harassment or obstruction. We also liaise directly with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to report threats, share intelligence, and support efforts to prevent violence at health care facilities. In 2025, for the first time and thanks to a generous donation, we were able to provide operational grants to 50 clinics to upgrade and enhance their security.

Acknowledgements

NAF's Security & Safe Access Program is generously supported by private foundations and individual donors. We appreciate this ongoing support, which enables us to provide our members with 24/7 security support, trainings and assessments, and the collection and production of these statistics.

We would also like to thank Rachel Jones, PhD, from the Guttmacher Institute for support around our methodology.

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Abortion clinic protesters eligible for payouts from new Trump ‘anti-weaponization’ fund

The new fund comes as a pro-abortion rights group says threats and violent attacks at clinics are on the rise.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein

1 min. read
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Anti-abortion activists have since ramped up their civil disobedience and protest actions, according to a report released Tuesday by the pro-abortion rights advocacy group National Abortion Federation.

The group found that blockades of abortion clinics increased from one in 2024 to six in 2025, while stalking of abortion providers and death threats against them more than doubled during that time — from 19 to 40 and from 38 to 81, respectively. Assault and battery incidents also ticked up from 19 in 2024 to 23 in 2025.

Trump’s pardon and reduced enforcement, the group’s CEO Brittany Fonteno said on a Tuesday press call, “sent a really clear and really dangerous message that people who harass, threaten and intimidate abortion providers and patients may not face consequences for violating the law, and we’re seeing the impact play out across the country.”

DOJ did not respond immediately to POLITICO’s request for comment.

Democrats on Capitol Hill argue that the fund can’t dole out money until Congress appropriates money for it, something they have vowed to prevent as they blast the effort as corrupt. The administration has countered that the fund can draw from an already appropriated pool that is set aside to settle claims against the federal government.

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Nonprofit raises awareness about abortion pill access with Alabama billboard truck campaign

The rural outreach sought to cut through legal confusion by telling Alabamians that abortion pills remain available online and by mail.

By Alex Jobin

3 min. read
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Last week, Alabamians may have spotted a truck parked in front of a shopping center, movie theater or grocery store sporting a large digital billboard that read “Mifepristone & Misoprostol. Still available.” The truck, which made stops across rural Alabama throughout the week, is part of a guerrilla marketing strategy by Mayday Health, a nonprofit focused on educating Americans about abortion pill medications.

The campaign’s purpose is simple, Mayday’s Founder and Executive Director Leo Raisner told APR in a recent phone interview: let people know that they can still obtain abortion pills online and through the mail.

That information is vital, Raisner explained, because recent legal developments have created public confusion around whether such drugs are still legally available—particularly for those living in red states like Alabama.

“We sent trucks to Alabama and Arkansas primarily because over the last few weeks the headlines about abortion pills have been genuinely confusing,” Raisner told APR. “We wanted to correct the record and let people know that abortion pills are still available by mail.”

“When the news is murky, people can make decisions on what they think is true, and we want people to make decisions working from accurate information,” Raisner added.

Indeed, patients can still be prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol online and receive the pills by mail for the time being, due to a temporary stay granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit filed by Louisiana against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA.

Louisiana is arguing in its suit that current federal rules violate its sovereignty by allowing residents to circumvent the state’s abortion ban through mail-order mifepristone. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals originally sided with Louisiana, placing abortion pill access in jeopardy earlier this month until the Supreme Court’s stay sent the case back to the lower courts for further consideration. Ultimately, experts anticipate that the case will return to the highest court on an official appeal, where a permanent decision on whether access will continue could be made.

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While the legal fight continues, Raisner said Mayday will continue to focus on educating the public, particularly those living in rural areas.

“Just over 50 percent of people in this country even know that abortion pills exist,” Raisner said. “There’s a major information gap that this safe, effective medication exists and is available through the mail. And that’s what Mayday’s mission is: to remind people on digital channels and guerrilla marketing campaigns that pills are available through the mail.”

“That information tends to reach online communities, tends to reach cities, but really skips rural communities,” Raisner continued. “And so that’s why we sent these trucks to rural communities in Alabama to Walmart parking lots, Dick’s Sporting Goods parking lots, just to reach as many people as we could.”

For Raisner and other pro-choice advocates, maintaining access to abortion pills like mifepristone and misoprostol is essential following the 2022 Dobbs decision and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“Nearly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. now are medication abortions used with abortion pills,” Raisner explained. “Pills by mail is a big part of why the national abortion rate has stayed steady since Roe overturned, so just because a state passes a ban that shuts down a brick and mortar clinic, it doesn’t mean that people are out of options. That’s why Mayday exists, to remind people that no matter what, you still have options.”

Although Mayday’s billboard truck campaign is over in Alabama, Raisner told APR that the organization is continuing its educational work elsewhere in the country, including through strategic advertisements at 50 laundromat locations in San Diego and Los Angeles.

“This medication is so safe, it’s so effective, it’s been approved by the FDA for over two decades,” Raisner said. “There’s so much misinformation out there about what these pills are and what they aren’t, and we just want people to know accurate information about them. Folks should visit mayday.health to learn more.”

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Republican Conference Tells Young Women to Give Up Their Dreams & Their Birth Control

“Every ill that we're fighting right now in society has been brought forth by women," Candace Owens said at Turning Point USA's Young Women's Leadership Summit.

8 min. read
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CBS’s big push to turn itself into diet Fox News under the “leadership” of a woman who’s only skill is flattering out-of-touch rich men’s biases may be coming to an end soon, according to Puck News. “As it closes in on its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount leadership has had informal discussions about changing Bari Weiss’s mandate at CBS News (and, eventually, CNN) in ways that would give her less control over TV,” they reported. This comes on the heels of 60 Minutes losing its big star who Bari Weiss hoped to anchor the CBS Evening News, Anderson Cooper, who signed off for the last time saying, “I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes.” What a ringing endorsement of how she “does the fucking news!”

Paramount denied this report to The Independent, saying that “Bari has the full support of Paramount and David Ellison as the editorial leader overseeing CBS News and 60 Minutes. Reports suggesting otherwise are inaccurate.” It’s possible that Puck’s Dylan Byers could be misinformed, but there’s a reason the most powerful people in American media leak to him, and it’s not because he’s in the business of alienating them. Not to mention, there is a veritable avalanche of evidence suggesting that Bari should lose her job for cause, and it would be strange if she wasn’t at risk. She is a failure by every objective metric.

I previously wrote before about how any serious media businessperson could see what a sham the acquisition of The Free Press was and how the notion that Weiss is some media savant is a farce. It was sold at 7.5 times its revenue, which makes Cox’s acquisition of an actual news outlet in Axios at about five times its revenue look like a screaming bargain. The idea that Bari Weiss created a unique financial success could only come from the out of touch boobs who read her and think she’s ever had a single insightful thing to say. She is very talented at one thing and one thing only: attracting rich conservative doofuses like David Ellison and convincing them to make bad investments with their time and money.

Under Weiss’s “leadership,” CBS Mornings had its worst ratings on record in the first quarter of 2026, seeing is lowest-rated April ever both in total audience and the coveted 25 to 54 demographic. NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America had nearly double the number of viewers for the week of April 20th, drawing roughly 3 million each versus 1.8 million for CBS. Just 310,000 viewers aged 25-54 tuned in to the new Ellison-owned network’s morning show that week, compared to 639,000 for Today and 508,000 for GMA. That same week, CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, the man who won the job because he impressed Bari Weiss when he showed his ass to the whole world castigating Ta-Nehisi Coates over his trip to Gaza to see Israel’s apartheid and genocide first-hand, averaged just 3.8 million viewers—TV light years behind ABC’s World News Tonight at 8.5 million and a little more than half of NBC’s Nightly News‘ 6.1 million viewers.

In the first week with a new anchor who was certainly not Bari Weiss’s first or “seventh or eighth choice” given how many people reportedly turned the gig down, CBS’s Evening News lost nearly a quarter of its viewership compared to the year before she got her hands on it. CBS is a historic ratings disaster under Bari Weiss’s leadership, so what has Donald Trump’s favorite mainstream network executive done in response? Call TV ratings fake news of course. In what was described as a blistering internal January town hall in response to the complete and utter shitshow leaking like the Titanic that has been CBS under her so-called leadership, she told CBS News staff that “As we move forward, we are not competing primarily for ratings but for audience share. Our competitors are not just the other broadcast networks. We are competing for the attention of anyone in front of a screen.”

That’s all fine and dandy for someone talking out their ass about the future of media to Joe Rogan, but if I were an investor who paid broadcast network prices to acquire a broadcast network, I would want that broadcast network to compete with other broadcast networks, not Twitter and podcasts. Crazy notion! Right? But not in diet Fox News land, where a cadre of Very Serious rich conservative mostly men have convinced themselves that their self-serving political beliefs are actually the broad consensus that America is being denied by the dreaded liberal media. Trump won after all, so why do we have to cover anything to the left of him?

Because that’s not how media works, proving that yet again, the only conservative media owners who understand anything about media are those who run conservative media outlets. Glenn Beck has proven to be a far savvier operator than Jeff Bezos, and Tucker Carlson may as well be Ted Turner by comparison. The Washington Post is another unmitigated disaster of a pivot towards Dear Leader, and it has abandoned its status as a major newspaper in America under Bezos as it devolves into a more braindead version of the Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed section while losing $100 million a year. All these rightward shifts of established brands fundamentally misjudge who consumes what in America, and it’s a proven fact that Alex Jones and his gay frogs understand far more about the media landscape than David Ellison or Jeff Bezos.

Fun fact: conservatives have their own centibillion-dollar media environment. They can watch Fox News or Newsmax, read The Daily Wire (although they are having their own financial issues, recently going through a huge round of layoffs), listen to the endless array of seventeen-hour podcasts from non-subject experts, let YouTube’s algorithm take them down conspiratorial rabbit holes, or visit the vast constellation of conservative websites that have existed since the days of Drudge. This is not a difficult dynamic to wrap your head around, yet for David Ellison and Jeff Bezos, the inherent media bifurcation in America may as well be an alien planet.

There is a genuine belief by this kind of conservative investor that they can just buy brands that are consumed by liberals and make them conservative while still retaining the brand’s value. That is not how any of this works! Do they think they can buy McDonald’s and maintain the business pivoting to salads? Imagine if a conservative bought Jezebel and Splinter and tried to push them right, what a fun way to light money on fire! I’m not sure it’s possible to get negative clicks, but if it is, that’s how you would do it.

CNN already went through this predictable failure in 2022 to 2023, when they hired Chris Licht with a mandate to win back independent and conservative viewers. They really thought they could steal Republican viewers from Fox News with a diet Fox News product, and they posted the network’s lowest ratings in nine years. There is a vast disconnect between the worldview of wealthy conservatives and the red meat MAGA base they are allied with, and the wealthy conservatives fail to see this time and time and time again. 

In 2004, Air America launched as a liberal alternative to talk radio. The idea was to build up a counterweight to Rush Limbaugh, and the effort was so successful that many of you are reading about this radio station for the first time in your lives (it did birth the political media careers of people like Rachel Maddow, Al Franken, and Marc Maron). Air America filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010, demonstrating the inverse of the law that conservative media owners like Ellison are failing to grasp. Liberals consume mainstream media. Conservatives consume conservative media. It’s stunning that this even has to be explained to many media owners in America, but such is the decrepit state of this dying industry.

The Onion now has more print subscribers than The Washington Post. Hasan Piker’s election night Twitch stream had double the viewers that CBS’s new nightly news is averaging. WaPo and CBS’s financial disasters are exactly what you should expect given the plans both conservative media owners are executing. The rightward pivot was noticed by the liberals and centrists who constitute most of their existing audience, many left, and the hope was that any liberals they lost would be replaced with more conservatives. It’s the famed Chuck Schumer quote that for every rural voter Democrats lose, they will pick up two more at Panera, but for clueless conservative media owners. 

Conservative media that tries to appeal to liberals will attract neither liberals nor conservatives to it. Conservatives have the red meat media they want and they will not consume a watered-down version of it, and just because Bari Weiss’ Free Press blogs worked to gin up rage clicks while flattering the preconceived notions of a dwindling wealthy minority doesn’t mean she can replicate that effort at scale in one of the most difficult and complex jobs in America. Being the head of CBS News takes actual skill, and being a one-note troll is not a skill. It’s a grift on a widely despised capitalist class that Bari has executed to perfection.

But she is realizing the limits of this power, and trying to say that CBS is now competing with the For You tab on the MechaHitler CSAM site is not likely going to satisfy Paramount shareholders. David Ellison took out seventy-fucking-nine-billion dollars in debt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and if its flagship network is aiming to be competing with Twitch streamers now, then this acquisition is in big, big trouble. Add in the fact that his father who is the source of this failson’s riches, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, is also heavily leveraged and making the stock market very nervous, and a big pullback could mean that we may enter the Cool Zone for the Ellison clan where things go boom. If the S&P 500 drops 30% or more and Bari continues losing viewers to her chosen competitors like Facebook AI slop, it’s quite possible that CBS could find itself with another new owner in the coming years.

Any schmuck like me who spent several months studying finance could have told you that the acquisition of The Free Press was wholly ideological, and the exorbitant price that Ellison paid for it cannot be justified by any other industry benchmark. Bari Weiss fleeced David Ellison, and now she is captaining a ship that could very well sink his hopes to become this next generation’s Rupert Murdoch. She really might wind up being the single most effective resistance to the conservative media takeover in the wake of Trump’s election.

Just because I don’t like apples doesn’t mean I do like oranges, and this is the key aspect of the 2024 election that the David Ellisons of the world still don’t understand. All these out of touch rich boobs were so excited to think that young people actually agreed with them for once in their isolated lives, and the rightward media gold rush after the election completely ignored the fact that an estimated 19 million 2020 Biden voters didn’t vote in 2024. The story of that loss is a historical collapse in Democratic Party support, not a permanent rightward shift in American culture where everyone under 25 is Joe Rogan now, but I guess it shouldn’t be shocking that wealthy folks who would pay 7.5x revenue for Bari Weiss’s blog don’t understand basic math.