In just two years, the Comstock Act went from being a defunct 1873 law to an existential threat to abortion rights in America. This is largely thanks to the creative lawyering of one man: Jonathan Mitchell.
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On the Right tracks how the dreams of conservative intellectuals are becoming reality.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
A once-fringe anti-abortion legal theorist based in Austin, Texas, Mitchell rocketed to prominence in 2021 after the Texas State Legislature passed a law he developed — called SB 8 — that banned abortion after six weeks and empowered Texans to sue other citizens who violated it. SB 8 became a model for anti-abortion legislatures everywhere, and put Mitchell’s star on the rise.
When the Supreme Court struck down Roe in the 2022 Dobbs case, Mitchell began pushing another bold strategy: using Comstock to ban the national distribution of the abortion pill mifepristone.
On the surface, this seems straightforward: the act bans mailing anything “intended for producing abortion,” presumably including abortion-inducing drugs. Reality is more complicated: In the years since 1873, successive court rulings have significantly weakened Comstock, raising questions about whether it can be used as Mitchell wants.
But while his legal theory may be dubious, Mitchell and his allies have successfully convinced swaths of the conservative movement that it should be law.
The Mitchell argument played a starring role in a district court ruling banning mifepristone. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito cited Comstock during oral arguments on that ruling, which the Court recently overturned on narrow grounds. Project 2025, a 920-page document widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term, argues that the Justice Department should prosecute “providers and distributors of such pills” — a possibility left open by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in the recent case.
To summarize: several years ago, a once-obscure legal theorist dreamed up a questionable argument for restricting abortion access based on an 1873 law widely considered dead-letter. Today, his vision is part of a planning document that has major purchase with a Republican candidate leading the polls for the presidency.
It’s a wild story, but not a unique one. Time after time in the past few years, ideas have moved from the fancies of conservative activists and intellectuals into the corridors of power.
Invading Mexico to fight drug trafficking was once an obscure notion bandied about by right-wing think tankers. During the GOP primary, nearly every Republican presidential candidate endorsed it — Donald Trump among them.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to be a non-entity in Republican politics. In the late 2010s a small group of conservative writers and scholars began championing him in Washington. Today, he is the GOP’s favorite foreign leader — endorsed by Trump for reelection and serving as the inspiration for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Bronze Age Pervert used to be an anonymous Nietzschean shitposter on Twitter, sandwiching musings about a politics worse than fascism in between pictures of oiled-up bodybuilders. But after building a fan club among very online conservatives, he became required reading among young Trump administration staffers. His 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset, reached the top 150 books on all of Amazon.
Ideas that once seemed fringy, even completely absurd, have entered the mainstream of American politics with astonishing and unpredictable speed. The purpose of my new newsletter, “On the Right,” is to guide you through them: to help you understand what’s happening “on the right” and how it’s shaping both the 2024 campaign and a potential second Trump administration.
Some editions will focus on a philosopher who shapes the right. Others will track online controversies in the conservative world. Still others might look at a policy paper from a right-wing think tank, or the published work of a Trump campaign staffer.
No matter what the specific topic, the point of each edition will be the same: to help illuminate the ideas that are shaping the ideological right and, by extension, the Republican Party. I want to help you find out about the next Comstock Act or Viktor Orbán before they break through, to guide you through the deeper roots of what’s going on with Trump’s campaign.
On the Right aims less to criticize conservatism than to understand it, designed to depict conservative beliefs accurately and without caricature. This will surely at times appear as critique; some ideas swirling around the broader right unquestionably veer into anti-democratic and bigoted territory. But not all of them do. One goal of this newsletter is to help my fellow liberals tell the difference.
This post is an adaptation of the first edition of On the Right, Vox’s new newsletter — where Zack Beauchamp describes the ideas and trends driving the conservative movement. Sign up here!
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