Hello and welcome to Slate Political Gab Fest. July 30th, 2026. The Unhinged Obsession Edition. I'm David Plotz of CityCast in my new home in Washington, D.C. If I sound different, the air here getting used to my voice. And also I think there's unpacking going on behind me. So if you're here clicking and clacking, that might be unpacking. Oh, I made a rhyme. From the York Times Magazine, Daniel University Law School.
Oh, the moments of wonder and joy on the guy. That was Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily. Hello. And of course, from his own empire, his empire of words, John Dickerson. Hello, John. Hello, David. May I ask you a question about what's over your left shoulder? Is that a railing of some sort? It's a staircase. I'm working in a niche right now. I'm probably going to have to leave this niche and go to an office because the sound is a little echoey because I'm just hearing too much else that's going on in the house.
Anyway, this week on the Gap Fest, this week on the Gap Fest is all thematic, actually, which is like, I feel like we're in a Buddhist state or something. I don't know much about Buddhism, but nothing ever ends anymore. The notable quality of American political life is that everything is in a constant state of re-litigation and nothing ever actually gets resolved. And so all of our topics this week have that quality. So we're going to talk about the Iran war that has taken weird new turns. We're going to talk about the never-ending demonization of Tony Fauci and then the latest fantastical efforts to stop medication abortions. Plus, of course, we'll have cocktail chatter.
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The Schrödinger's War continued this week. U.S. attacks on Iran subsided maybe, but then the U.S. and Saudi Arabia opened a new front by attacking Iranian allies in Iraq. There seems to have been an attack in Egypt overnight, maybe from Iran. We now have a fully regional war. There's fighting in Iran, Lebanon, off the coast of Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait. And President Trump appears utterly perplexed about what to do to resolve it. John.
Why? Well, I mean, let me start with a great reporting that I think that Emily's colleagues at the Times did, that the U.S. is running alarmingly short of Patriot missile interceptors. Why would that matter? Why is that an important question? It's important on so many levels. Let's take it at face value for a moment. Because the question is, why is this information out? I mean, this is really bad information to have in the public record. I mean, obviously, the Iranians can read the newspapers. And if they know that the US is running out of these Patriot interceptors that protect not only US bases, but allies in the region, and that are also important for, I mean, Ukraine needs the same Patriot interceptors. If you're fighting an invasion from the Chinese, you need them too. So this is a catastrophic problem outside of this particular war. This really comes home from the Haberman Swan book.
It's totally possible that this is actually the case. And the only way to get the president or the system, the chaotic decision-making system in the White House to work is to leak this kind of thing, to kind of put pressures on the president and to get him to think in a way that the normal process, because there is no normal process, doesn't do. We've known for months that there are dwindling stockpiles as one of the concerns from military planners. And also, it's a question of the moment because the president who has made these threats, it's hundreds of them, it feels like, threats of increased escalation to get the Iranians to cry uncle, was considering extending that 13-day pounding and making it even more. severe. And so the point was, basically, you do more of this, you'll get more retaliation, you'll burn through more of these Patriot missile interceptors, and that'll put you in an even worse strategic position. I think for me, what was most important about that reporting in the moment we're at here is it goes back to the question David Sanger asked like a month ago when he was called a traitor, which was why, if bombing so far hasn't achieved your result, will more bombing achieve more of your result?
It was just a simple question. Like, why? How do you see that working out? And the question was so befuddling to the president that he called him a traitor. And I think the reason that's important is, A, we're living through that now. And B, it goes back to what is arguably one of the original flaws of this engagement, which is they didn't think through what might happen. Pete Hegseth was talking, you know, there have been these flyovers over citizens where planes and helicopters are going alarmingly close, doing daring flyovers, and they're like flying over Pensacola Beach.
Pilots shouldn't be doing this in the Navy. They shouldn't be making these runs over human beings out celebrating on the beach. And Pete Hegseth cheered them on because it's like, this is so fun and daring. And he said, this will continue until morale improves. And there's the same quality of this war, which is like, this war will continue. The beatings will continue until morale improves. The bombing will continue until morale. This inability to break out of a cycle of relentless lack of change is so hard to comprehend. They don't have other tools besides bomb.
This war seems totally feckless and we don't know what the purpose is and pounding them into submission isn't working. So you just keep pounding them. And then to go back to your point, John, the leak of this information about how we're running out of Patriot interceptors is to try to be a countermeasure to say, wait, there's a cost here. Like we can't just continue wasting our weaponry and money forever because then we won't be prepared for other kinds of conflicts that we should be armed against and ready for. And so it's sort of, I mean.
It seems as if from the reporting, there is very little support for the strategy from even within the administration, right? That lots of people inside the rooms are concluding that there's no real strategy here and that it would be better to find an off ramp. And so the way they're trying to push Trump onto the off ramp, or at least into not continuing with the increase of the bombings, is to say, wait a second, this can't go on forever. We have this problem here. And the big problem with the off-ramp, which we've talked about for weeks, is the off-ramp does not take the United States to the destination the president said was the key one. In other words, we are at a position where now that there have been two changes basically in Iran's favor. One has been the ability to use the Strait of Hormuz to basically control the world economy. And the second is this widening war that David's talking about. So now the U.S. has to stop the attacks on its allies. And that's one thing it has to figure out through diplomacy. And the second thing it has to figure out through diplomacy is the Strait of Hormuz.
you're not going to get to no more nuclear program. Like that's gone. So now you've taken the off ramp. Let's say you can control those first two things. You've got an off ramp. It means the ultimate reason for which the war was started was a failure. So that's- And all we're talking about is status quo ante. That's right. Not even status quo, not even as good as status quo ante because Iran will have some control over the strait and will probably extract some tax or fee off of it. We've lived through different wars, right? We're old enough. Like we've lived through several conflicts. Is this the-
dumbest one like i'm trying to remember what it felt like when we were invading iraq which i remember opposing and being extremely concerned about i yeah i don't know is this this is dumber than iraq this is why is it dumber it feels dumber to me too um well with iraq they literally did get rid of the a truly awful regime they did manage to get rid of a truly awful regime and at an enormous cost. Right. Not that like we would go back and do it again, but there was a, I mean, I don't want, it's funny to use the words mission accomplice because they got George W. Bush into so much trouble, but they did topple Saddam Hussein. And in this case, the regime, it seems to be pretty clear that the regime that is now in power is even more, and this has been some of the analysis coming out of this quote unquote surprise attack on Jordan, is that the IRGC is now even more in control of things in Iran than ever. So that the early dreams and promotion of the president to have a citizen-led overthrow of the Iranian regime seems a total fantasy. It was a fantasy in the moment.
But now what it's created is a governing structure that's even more radical than what was there before. And yeah, we don't need to compare the two, but this is certainly competing for the dumbest war of our lifetime. Yeah, yeah. Did you guys read this amazing story in The Atlantic, and now I can't remember who wrote it, about one of the very surprising aspects of this war is that actually oil prices have not gone up as much as people expected. Yeah, talk about that. I'm confused by that. So oil prices have gone up, but they have ended up going up.
significantly less than most experts anticipated. And there's one clear reason, which is that China has massively cut the amount of oil it's importing. So it has cut the oil it's importing from that part of the world in half. What's interesting is that experts don't know how it happened because there is no decline in use of oil in China. Do they have strategic reserves that they released? Well, a couple of things. So number one, no decline in use. Number two, there's no indication of increased Russian imports into China or exports into China. China sneaks around sanctions and gets Russian oil, but there's no evidence of a significant increase of that. There's no evidence in the strategic reserves that people know about of any decline in the strategic reserves.
Magic? It's magic. And so there's some sense that maybe there's a mysterious other strategic reserves they keep. But the indication is that China has now proved a couple of things. One, that it's kind of independent of the global oil economy, which means that if there's a war against Taiwan, the loss of oil imports may not hurt them that much. Number two, it may have been a strategic decision. They didn't want to damage the rest of the global economy on which they depend for so much of their export income.
They don't want to damage Europe and prevent Europe from having the ability to import their Chinese goods. And so they didn't want to raise energy prices even more in Europe. And so they did something strategic that way. But it's so fascinating that there's this really cool article in the Atlantic, which is saying like a huge thing has happened in the global economy and no one understands why. But it's been really influential.
Can I throw out some random this is and that's because that's incredibly cool, but I have nothing to add to it. One is that when we were talking about the excessive reliance on bombs and blowing things up, there was reporting from CNN, the Washington Post this week about the 67 attacks on what the government calls drug boats and the 221 deaths and internal government reports that show that those attacks have done nothing to slow the cocaine trade. So you have another instance in which we're going to negotiate with bombs. We're going to blow up stuff and kill lots of people. And the end goal.
was not achieved. So just like as you're linking like things with like things. And then you look at the president's polling, just back to the idea of an exit ramp, 60% of the country thinks, you know, is against what's going on. And an even greater number of people think that the war was not worth it. So if the off-ramp is taken, it will affirm those people's views that this was a wasted adventure. It affirms basically a very bad piece of public opinion polling right at the time we have an election happening.
So do we just keep lurching forward? I don't really see how this ends. I see how it kind of goes like hot, cold, on, off, worse, not so terrible for a minute, but it just feels like there's, it's really hard to see how Trump is going to find the exit that he's, that isn't going to lose so much face that he's going to be able to live with it. Right. But then the downside also is he every other day, he's like, well, it's going to get worse. And no, it's not going to get, it's just like this constant reaffirmation of his flaccidity. Good word, flaccidity. Maybe we should end on that. Yes.
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More than a gift. Shop new styles in store or online at pandora.net. In some version of my own hell, I would be continually called to testify before Congress and have to listen to Randall Paul Hector May about something I did or did not say seven years earlier. Tony Fauci is 85 years old. He's retired. And yet here he was this week, hauled before a Senate committee to be entrapped into saying something that could land him in prison, a trap he chose not to fall into by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incarnation more than 100 times when quizzed, even I think unto a question about whether there was a folder in front of him on the table.
It's just this spectacle, this kind of bizarre show trial of Tony Fauci. Emily, what is the origin of it? The COVID virus may or may not have been manufactured, but this was definitely manufactured. What was going on here? Right. I mean, the origin of this is that Fauci was the face of the American response to COVID at a time when there was a lot of confusion and uncertainty. He pushed for some restrictive measures and libertarians like Rand Paul are totally furious, think that people are still angry about some of it, which I think is true. And that part is true and have turned Fauci into the total scapegoat for this in a way that erases all of his decades of public service, all the extremely important work he did many years ago to address the AIDS crisis and turns him into this like potential criminal.
And then, of course, you know, there are the release of these diaries. Fauci was keeping many, many pages that were hosted on government servers, which is totally bananas that he did it that way and make him look really fatuous. And like he was kind of celebrity hogging and extremely concerned with his own fame. So that's not helping at all. But, you know, mostly there's just something like.
really sad about this, that we're at a moment in American politics where this person who for all his flaws, and I got to say, like, I'm not a big fan of Tony Fauci or his COVID response, but that idea that he would be like basically strung up and threatened with, you know, being criminally prosecuted just seems like some total extreme that is really reflective of this moment in American politics. And totally useless in terms of trying to figure out how to walk the cat back on what happened with COVID and how to make things better for the next time. We've never had any kind of real review to try to figure out what happened, right? The government, I mean, there's been lots of organizations that have tried to do that kind of review, but the American government has not gone back in a like thorough, responsible way and had that kind of bipartisan effort. And it's going to make us less prepared the next time. Just two toxic parts of the Fauci moment, which is on the one hand, you have the incredibly...
passionate feeling people had from the COVID era about like, don't you tell me what to do with my life and with my kids and their schools. And that legitimate anger, it's all channeled to him because he was the public face of it. And because he, you know, particularly with respect to masks, it's been shown that the public guidance they were giving on masks had some spin on it that wasn't consistent. Like they were saying one thing publicly, but another thing privately about masks. So there's some grounds for that feeling, but there's nothing more powerful than the political feeling that you're being told what to do.
by people you don't think have your best interests at heart. So there's that. Then there's the conspiracy theory part about the Wuhan lab leak that Paul thinks Fauci knew came from the lab. Although I must say when I read the diaries and what he was saying in the diaries and what he was saying publicly, there was not a huge distance. But you get conspiracy theory plus personal sense of umbrage, and that's all coming down on him at once.
Just to clarify something, John, when you're saying conspiracy theory, that part is that Fauci knew. You're not saying that like the origin theory of the lab is also a conspiracy theory, because at this point that is, you know, a potential real explanation. Oh, yeah. So, yes, I'm saying two things. One, like there's still, and David has paid more attention to this than I am, but there is still the debate whether COVID-19 came out of the lab or whether it came out of the market. And then in reading his, the wet market in Wuhan, in reading Fauci's journal, diaries, there's also, which I completely forgotten, the idea that it came from somewhere in nature.
and then was accelerated at the market, which is a slightly different thing than it was born in the market. But I think there are two things with respect to Fauci. One is that he funded the gain of function research that led to this. And two is that because of that, or maybe not because of that, but that he covered up the origin of COVID-19 and said it was from the market when he knew otherwise. Then there's your legitimate question, Emily, which is where the hell did this thing actually start? And did the gain of function research create vulnerabilities, which is also a legitimate question that's gotten totally obfuscated by the conspiracy theories.
And Paul's claim is that Fauci lied about it. Fauci said we didn't fund through these subsidiaries gain of function research of the kind that you have accused us of doing. And Paul said that wasn't telling the truth. Just to clarify for any person listening to this episode who somehow hasn't followed this, because you probably all followed it. The reason they have called him before this Senate panel was that.
President Biden gave him a blanket pardon for everything that he did from 2011 to 2025 preemptively. And so they're trying to create some other incident of criminal activity. And that would be some form of perjury where he would say something in front of a Senate panel under oath that contradicted something that he had said earlier. And that could be a new crime that he could be prosecuted for. I mean, it's really like when you think about trying to entrap somebody into a crime, there's nothing more obvious because it wasn't there weren't sort of seeking legitimate information. The whole idea was to gotcha this guy. And this was a way that they tried to criminally charge James Comey.
Lo, that was many months ago before that turned into criminal charges for seashells. The diary release has actually gotten a ton of press and I'm super ambivalent about it because on the one hand, I love reveling in people's vanities and shortcomings and like discovering that, of course, that, wow, Tony Fauci liked his fame. He was a self-involved star fucker. He liked to get phone calls from Barbra Streisand. I mean, that's nice to know. But unlike, oh yeah, and that makes him so different than the other people on that Senate panel. Makes him so different from the people who are interrogating him. Oh, by the way, just to jump in there, sorry. Who then go through extravagant new kinds of buffoonery?
to get the attention of the kind that they are criticizing him for wanting. I'm sort of sympathetic to him having stuck this on a work computer. I know he's being... What? Look, he'd worked at NIH his whole life. There is a way in which people commingle their personal and work lives, especially, look, when they've worked at a single place. My mother is a person who has never had any email address other than an email address from the institution at which she worked. I think my father, that was true too. And I'm sure there are all sorts of things that my mother's put in her email because she doesn't think about it. She doesn't, it doesn't occur to her. And like, he's an idiot for doing it. But people, I guarantee you, Emily Bazelon, that somewhere in your New York Times account, you have...
said things about your children or you've said things about your finances. How about you? Actually, I do a lot of gossiping about you in my New York Times email. Yes, exactly. No, of course, you're right. Of course, you're right. We slip up in that way. But 1100 pages of embarrassing personal diaries, I don't think on my New York Times servers. This was a mistake. It's a shame, though, because whether you rightly or wrongly, you want officials like this to use diaries. And in the middle of a total pell-mell insane process, you want a record, both for their own cognitive benefit, but also for mankind. And can I just say one other thing?
Imagine applying the level of rigor, although we've established that this is not actual genuine rigor backed by critical thinking. But I mean, the asymmetry of concern about Fauci versus any of the other actors, particularly the president, either on anything, but particularly with respect to the president's behavior with respect to COVID, the asymmetry of concern is striking. Can I ask one last question about this, which is how much of the elder abuse of Fauci do you think stems from? Well, so there are different factors. Rand Paul's personal vendetta.
But also the kind of sense that he was dishonest about the origins of COVID. But also how much of it is about just this real distaste for resentment of elites and experts that has pervaded the Republican Party recently. And I feel like Fauci has come to stand in for expertise. He is the scapegoat for all expertise now. And expertise is something that...
the Republican Party really stands against. Well, and especially public health expertise, right? And then you can try to tap into this deeper skepticism, which I think is still lingering from COVID about school closures. Yes, legitimately. Legitimately, totally right. This is where I become sympathetic, right? And also the idea that in the beginning, the advice about masks was spun, like you were saying before. It was...
initially the idea of like, no, you don't need a mask because they were trying to make sure there would be enough masks for the first responder people. And actually they did. And then they were telling everyone to use masks and a lot of the masks were ineffective. And that also turned out to be, it seems very paternalistic. Like the public health people were not being straight with us the whole time. And I think that if you're trying to be really fair and I close my eyes and I go back to the beginning, there was so much that was unknown in the beginning and so much fear. And I understand the ultra caution in the very beginning, but at least where I live, it lasted for an inordinate amount of time. And I think there is a lot of like libertarian latent.
rage or resentment about that. And so in that sense, like Fauci is a good political target. It's just that this is such a profoundly unserious way of addressing all this, because like I said, we don't have a sort of really cogent government review. We have this spectacle of Rand Paul just lashing out. And maybe actually government review, given the state of government is probably not so, you know, probably wouldn't get as much anyway. But also we just one. I mean, I go back to the review, you know, that was done in which President Trump was really was labeled a comorbidity in with respect to the COVID response. But we should just throw in the historical populist.
distaste for experts and pointy-headed, egg-headed professors and scientists. There's a strong strain of that in American life, but also, I mean, George Wallace used to go on at length in his speeches and get a real populist support from people on both sides of the aisle with that critique. Right now, Marshall's buyers are still hustling to get amazing new gifts into stores, like this season's Italian leather handbags. They're in the bag. The latest designer perfumes.
Perfection. And the cuddliest of cuddly toys. So soft. Wait, these gourmet chocolates just landed from Europe? Bellissimo. Marshalls, we get the deals. You get the good stuff. Right up to it. For most of the history of professional sports, there was a wall between the game and gambling. Then suddenly it was everywhere. But that wasn't supposed to include the players themselves. Understood the big bet. Find us on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, in the endless night of perpetual unrest where nothing is ever completed.
comes our old friend Mifeprestone. The FDA approved medicine for medication abortion. Back in the news for several reasons this week. First, Republican senators are trying to pressure attorney general, acting attorney general, attorney general nominee Todd Blanche to take a more aggressive stance against it if he's confirmed as AG. Second, a federal judge in Virginia declared various Biden-era FDA restrictions on Mifeprestone to be unnecessary and burdensome.
they should be lifted. And finally, young anti-abortion conservatives rolled out a fantastical new line of attack against the medicine, which is the thing that I'm most interested in. But let's start, Emily, with the judge's ruling. What did he find about mifocrestone? What are the FDA regulations he says are unnecessary? Are they unnecessary? But nothing's going to happen anyway, right?
Yeah, so there are competing court challenges about FDA of approval of a mifepristone and all the rules around mifepristone. This is a case that an abortion clinic brought Whole Woman's Health saying that the rules remain too restrictive, that basically there's a lot of burdensome paperwork that's still in place from 2023 revisions that the Biden administration took in place, put in place. And so the idea is that the FDA is still creating kind of extra bureaucracy that is unnecessary and has nothing to do with making sure that patients safely and effectively take mifepristone. And they got a district court ruling in their favor. The competing court challenges, which are trying to either eliminate FDA approval of mifepristone altogether or roll it back to the time when you had to have in-person visits. That's from 2016 and 2020. Those are cases that conservative states are bringing in Texas and Missouri. So there's just a bunch of different mifepristone cases kind of percolating up, pointing in different directions. And like eventually we'll see what happens with that. That's like sort of on slow simmer.
in most senses. And then there are these, I think, hotter questions about the wastewater, the idea that people are drinking abortions, which we can certainly talk about. And then also this demand of Todd Blanche, the Justice Department actually do something about prosecuting people for prescribing abortion pills across state lines. And I guess just to back up a second and unify some of this. What's really the fundamental dynamic here is that before the 2024 elections, if you go back to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and this idea of what the next conservative president would do, there were a lot of ideas about restricting abortion because one of the deep frustrations of abortion opponents since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022 is that the number of abortions has slightly risen across the country. And that's largely because abortion pills are getting mailed into states with bans. And if you are an abortion opponent, that is very frustrating and upsetting to you.
And so they put all these, from their point of view, like potent ideas into Project 2025. And they have gotten none of them because Donald Trump is not interested in any of this. He thinks he's done. He gave the anti-abortion lobby the end of Roe versus Wade by appointing three Supreme Court justices. He wants to be thanked for that. And he is not interested in running any political risks for furthering their agenda. And they're mad. They're like, they want to think of themselves as an important constituency and they want some things. And so everything that's happening kind of ties into like their strategies of trying to lift this issue back up because right now nobody's really talking about it.
And nobody really cares. It seems in the Trump administration that they're not getting what they want. So let's turn to this wastewater question. The new argument that's being made by the Students for Life of America, an organization I had not heard of, but I'm sure Emily has. What is the claim that they are making?
Well, so it's not actually new. So Students for Life of America is very much focused on college campuses and recruiting young people and students into the movement. They're sort of like a turning point USA, but anti-abortion organization that's all about college organizing. And so back in 2017, they had this idea like, okay, lots of young people care about the environment. What if we start talking about this idea that there is mifepristone and abortion drugs in the water and that people are drinking other people's abortions? That was their line, right?
It is really, really scientifically implausible that this is like a health threat, but it's like a gross idea, right? I think the grossness, the idea of contamination from abortion pills was like the initial hook. And they really pushed this for a long time, more kind of from like a crunchy kind of like trying to recruit students on the left, I think. And then RFK Jr. gets appointed to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. And he cares a lot about contaminating chemicals, right?
not this chemical, but other ones. Like he is really into the idea that there are threats in the water. And one of the things that RFK Jr. talks about with a great deal of passion is the problem of endocrine disruptors, plastics that are, he thinks, causing sperm rates and fertility rates to decline. He cares about this. And it is possible that there is something in like BPA plastics that is causing these kinds of problems. It's not like nail down science, but the idea that endocrine disruptors are linked to declining fertility rates is not a crazy idea. And it's something that RFK Jr. cares about. So then you have students for Life of America kind of latching.
on to this and trying to also make it about drinking abortion in the water and mifepristone, even though mifepristone has a different chemical composition, it works in a different way. It's sort of like potentially related enough that they went down this path and have tried to make it attractive to the to the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement. It hasn't really gotten any lift off so far. So I think, again, they're frustrated. And so you saw them release a study this week that they claimed was peer reviewed. They released it through an anti-abortion journal. It's done by anti-abortion researchers. But they're trying to show that there's something to study here, that the EPA should put mifepristone.
on a list of what it calls contaminant chemicals and start actually measuring it in the water. The study has all kinds of problems, but that's the sort of pathway and the strategy. May I ask you, Emily, about Todd Blanche and his confirmation hearings was pressed by Senator Hawley and Senator Cruz about looking at, and I know you can't wait to talk about this. The Comstock Act. Yes, yes, the Comstock Act. Would you explain what DOJ finding from the Biden era they would like reversed and what's the chance that Blanche might do it? We should note as of Thursday that Blanche's confirmation hearing in the Judiciary Committee was delayed because two senators, Cornyn and Tillis, would like to get his assurances that the slush fund created out of the goofy and weird IRS agreement with the president to drop the lawsuit against the IRS, that that's now been delayed because Blanche won't give them the assurances that they want, which suggests that there is something to their concern that the slush fund ain't really dead.
Seriously. Yeah. So again, this is about the frustration of the anti-abortion groups. The Comstock Act is this 1872 law passed by like super Puritan. crusader, Anthony Comstock. It really was like his baby. It was passed by Congress, Emily. Okay, sorry, good point. I mean, the United States Congress passed the bill and it was signed by the president. Yes, totally fair. And actually they did it with like very little debate and just kind of waved it through because Anthony Comstock was very successful at convincing them that obscenity, that like racy playing cards and, you know, the 1872 version of pornography were like a serious threat. There was a big panic over that. And that's the origin of this law, which also talked about making it a crime to mail or send through any kind of delivery carrier, any item related to abortion.
So the Comstock Act, this part of it remains on the books. Technically speaking, like you mail anything related to an abortion with the intent of an abortion and it's a crime. So we haven't enforced this law in any way, shape or form for many decades, but it sits there. It's like a loaded gun if you are an abortion opponent. And the Biden administration issued an opinion within the Justice Department through the Office of Legal Counsel. That's like the internal part of the Justice Department that says like what the government's approach to laws is going to be.
That says the Biden DOJ said we're not prosecuting anyone under the Comstock Act because in order to have a prosecution, you'd have to show that the purpose of mailing or sending this abortion drug or item is unlawful. And that's too hard to prove. Most abortion related items are being mailed for lawful purposes. And so we're not doing this. And I mean, many people, including me, expected the Trump DOJ to revoke that opinion. It just seems like an obvious move that you would make. And revoking that opinion could pose a real threat. The companies that manufacture and distribute mifepristone and misoprostol, the second abortion drug, which is also.
in theory, covered by the Comstock Act, these companies could look at that and say, wait a second, like we're no longer assured that there won't be criminal liability for mailing these drugs. And so we're not going to ship them anymore. I don't know that that would happen if they revoked the DOJ guidance, but the DOJ guidance is helpful for them continuing to do business. And yet. No one's made any kind of move to revoke this guidance. And also the Trump DOJ has had zero, I would say, negative interest in trying to prosecute anybody for mailing nevipristone and misoprostol or anything else connected to abortion across state lines or just haven't done that at all because they I think it's a political nonstarter. Again, not something Donald Trump has interest in using any political capital for. So if you're Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and you're supposed to be a committed anti-abortion lawmaker, this is like exactly a thing that you would press Todd Blanche on. And what Blanche said was that he would look into it. Before we leave this, I just want to go back to the.
wastewater abortion question because one of the things that really gets my goat i mean hypocrisy is not a crime you're allowed to be as critical as you want and that is that's your right as a human being it's your right as the president it's your right whoever you want but the idea that this administration which has been extremely cavalier about enforcing things like clean water act clean air uh is not shown any interest i mean rfk jr perhaps slightly to the contrary but even there there's been very little actual thing that's happened but They're not worried about the pesticides that are in your water or the cyanide that's in your water or any number of other things that are befouling our water. But suddenly we've discovered something. There is this one thing that's befouling our water that we need to investigate. And it reminds me of that effort.
Trump's very successful effort to stop offshore wind farms. And one reason, one way they've been able to stop offshore wind farms is by invoking risks to birds and saying, oh, these poor birds are threatened. And they could give a shit about the birds when the birds are flying over land or when the birds are flying anywhere other than near these windmills. It's just like, oh, if we can use this excuse, these environmental laws that are on the books pretextually to take out this thing that we don't want for cultural and political reasons, we're going to do it. And it just annoys me.
Yeah, that's a totally good analogy to draw. And it's also about how possible it is to confuse people once you make it a public health threat, right? And there is this whole set of, again, like you can understand why people in the Maha movement are concerned about public health. Like there are risks from environmental factors to public health. Like that is broadly true. And then people get really...
uncertain about how to deal with these kind of unsettled scientific questions. And so, yeah, sure, let's try to throw Mifepristone into the mix here, even though, you know, when you look at the actual science of like how many parts per million could possibly be in the water from people excreting it, like it's all bananas. But the idea of it, you're just like throwing up a lot of chaff. And yes, pretending that you have real environmental concerns. I wonder if you could place adjacent to that the administration's new double digit tariffs, which have been placed on more than 80 countries, citing the failures of those countries to enforce abandon imports produced by forced and child labor. Like, do they really feel a deep concern?
about child-enforced labor? Not really. They're using it as a pretext for reanimating the president's tariff scheme. I think if I wrote a book about the Trump administration, it might be called Pretext. But I'm not going to do that. No worries. Let us go to cocktail chatter when, Emily, you are drinking, not abortions, but a delicious cocktail. What are you going to be chattering about to Dr. Bazelon?
I'm sort of staying on the theme of our last topic. I read such a good piece this week in Mother Jones by the writer Julia Lurie. It's called Me, Myself, and IUDs. And it's a really nuanced look at hormonal birth control. This is something I've been looking into my book, and Julia just did such a good job with this topic. It's hard to talk about because we need hormonal birth control. It's been really important for many things, especially women's equality, to have really effective birth control. It is also true that hormonal birth control, both from oral contraception and in a smaller number of cases, IUDs, can have side effects for women that are serious.
You know, people talk about less libido. struggling with depression and weight gain. Those are just like three of the things people are concerned about. And again, it doesn't affect that many people. And Julia did a really good job of being careful throughout her article to caveat what she was saying. But it is also true that it's not zero people. And I think some of the response of the medical establishment has been to kind of hand wave about a lot of the complaints women have because for good reason, the medical establishment doesn't want people to think that they have to get off of this birth control. Because for most women, it is successful and it's such an important tool. And the IUD in particular has a very, very tiny failure rate. So there are just all these interesting and important questions here.
thinking about how women or even men, there is research on that, could have better birth control with fewer side effects while we also don't destabilize people's use of birth control. Because for whatever the side effects of hormonal birth control is, it is also true that having an unplanned pregnancy is its own important consequence in people's lives. So I recommend this piece. Me, myself and the IOD, Julia Lurie, Mother Jones. What is your chatter? My chatter is based on a story that I was introduced to by Kotke.org, which we shall, you know. Oh, I haven't heard that name for a long time. I know, but it's a good reminder that it's out there doing great work, Jason Kotke. Anyway, it was based on an article in Space Daily. What it wrote about was something we were all probably familiar with, but still, it was just wonderful, which is that after six months aboard the International Space Station, the astronauts, some of them, reported when they come back to Earth, having this, Space Daily called it jet lag of the self, where essentially.
They felt like participants in their own lives. They'd sit down to dinner and feel like a guest. They'd drive a familiar street as though they were piloting it. And that basically this lingered a lot longer. We know about the feeling that astronauts have reported, which is when they're up there, they look down and have this very strong sense of awe and sense of human unity and the fragility of the planet. And that that overview effect, as it's called, is pretty well reported. But I was intrigued by this lingering thing, which is that when you come back, your view of the planet and your own participation in your own life has this kind of...
split feeling for a little while until you reintegrate my chatter uh two chatters one i just want to spend one second remembering one of my uh musical not pantheon but somebody i really admired glenn hansard uh died in apparently a motorcycle accident in ireland this week and if you've ever seen the movie once he is the protagonist in the movie once which is really truly one of one of my favorite movies ever made and it has i think there's a there's a particular scene in that movie and if you've seen the movie you know what it is that is I think truly like the most moving musical scene I can think of in a movie. It was a wonderful soundtrack, that movie. And just a wonderful soundtrack. And then he created a lot of great music with the band called The Frames and then The Swell Season, which was a sort of he and his co-star in once Marketa Erglova toured together with The Swell Season. I saw them once. It was wonderful. When Shane McGowan of The Pokes died, Glenn Hansard kind of...
almost emceed the funeral the celebratory funeral concert and he was so good in that and he's just like this gigantic red-headed goof uh wonderful singer incredible voice just a great storyteller and um bummer real bummer you know him john i take it oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it was uh my instagram feed which you know is tuned to uh no not only did i follow him but then like everybody i followed and all the fan pages of everybody i followed had tributes and so for the entire day yesterday it was just one wave after another of tributes and live performances. And yeah, it was really an outpouring of affection for him. Yeah. I mean, see if nothing else, just see the movie once. But my actual chatter, I want to talk about another podcast I did this week with another member of the GapFest family. I had the enormous pleasure of talking to Eli Sabin, Emily's son, on my other podcast, Your City Could Be Better. Eli Sabin is a politician in Connecticut. He was an alder in the city of New Haven. He is now running for state rep. In fact, his primary is coming up just in 10 days on August 11th. And Eli and I sat down to talk about zoning.
Such a boring subject that is so interesting. And Eli, pioneer-led, caused a complete reform of the zoning in downtown New Haven. And he talked about why that was, how he accomplished it, what he was doing, what the purpose was. Super-duper fun conversation. And as you would expect, given that he is the child of one Emily Bazelon, he's just engaging and smart and clears a bell about everything he's talking about. So check that out on Your City Could Be Better, me talking to Eli Saban.
Listeners, you've got chatters. Please email them to us at GapFest at Slate.com. Please email us your chatter. You've got something interesting, something delightful has happened to you. You read something, sent them to us at GapFest at Slate.com. And our listener chatter this week comes from Craig. Hi, GapFest listeners. This is Craig Kujala from Washington, D.C. My chatter is about a significant event that occurred this month in the world of acapella.
Over 50 of the best barbershop quartets in the world competed at the International Convention of the Barbershop Harmony Society, something that, except during the pandemic, has happened annually since 1938. The traditionally all-male organization, however, opened membership to all people in 2018, and for the first time in the society's 88-year history, this year's gold medal-winning quartet was comprised of four women. GQ, short for Girls Quartet, had placed in the top five before, but never won the gold. Three of its members are kindergarten or elementary school music teachers. Their final performance in the contest, a cover of Maddie Zom's song, Mothers and Daughters, is poignant, achingly beautiful, and an excellent example of modern, unaccompanied four-part close harmony singing.
the classic American art form that is barbershop. It just might be the best six minutes you spend all day. Check it out on YouTube. Thanks. Greg, thank you. That's not the only podcast that's late this week. We are not the only podcast that's late this week, I should say. Hit Parade has a new episode out about Jay-Z, and Chris Malanfi is just such a great podcaster. His Hit Parade is so fun, and he traces the decades-long history of Jay-Z as a hitmaker. And it's the Run This Town edition of Hit Parade. Check it out.
That is all for our episode this week, but we also have a bonus episode on your feed. We're interviewing, we've already interviewed, in fact, NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mauser. She's really interesting and smart, very, you know, one of the leaders of this incredibly successful political movement on the left. That is only for Slate Plus members, though, so you should subscribe to Slate Plus. Go to the Political Gap Fest show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or visit slate.com slash Gap Fest Plus, and you will get access to that, our bonus episodes every week, as well as lots of other stuff. You'll never hit the paywall on the Slate site and much more.
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