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Maybe they’re onto something.
In fact, various news outlets have been reporting all spring about how “disgusted” most of the Kennedys are by their brother/cousin/uncle’s decision to oppose Biden. Why does he have so little support among his family members? It’s pretty simple: As the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Jr.’s name and connection to his family’s political dynasty are his biggest assets. But he doesn’t actually share most of the Kennedy clan’s mainstream Democratic politics. Instead, his beliefs pretty plainly diverge into conspiracy theories and anti-vax rhetoric. You might call him a KINO. Politico went with “black sheep.”
A sampling of these beliefs? He thinks the pandemic originated at a U.S.-funded lab in China, he thinks 5G networks are killing us, he thinks the 2004 presidential election was stolen from John Kerry … and so on. He’s so far gone that he was suspended from Instagram in 2021 for spreading vaccine misinformation, though he was recently reinstated. But despite holding these fringe positions, Kennedy Jr.’s attempt to trade on his name appears to be working: He’s polling as high as 20 percent among Democratic voters, though as my colleague Jim Newell has explained, many of them may not know the extent to which he’s fallen off the deep end. Kennedy Jr. is also a popular figure on the right, though it’s unclear how sincere Republicans’ embrace of him has been.
Kennedy Jr. is well aware that he and his family aren’t on the same page: At a press conference in April, he said, “My whole family, including myself, have long personal relationships with President Biden … and many of them just plain disagree with me on issues like censorship and war and public health. They are entitled to their beliefs … and I love them back.” Still, he clearly knows how compelling his name alone is to voters. Why else would Kennedy, as CNN pointed out, choose to launch his presidential campaign in Boston, a city he’s never lived in, other than to emphasize his deep connection to Kennedy country?
On some level, Kennedy Jr. might be used to family strife by now. His family has been opposed to his views—going so far as to write op-eds against them at times—for a long time now. Even his own wife has had to distance herself. Last year, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, who is Kennedy’s third wife, “expressed disapproval of his anti-vaccine beliefs … after he compared the plight of an anti-vaxxer to the plight of Anne Frank in Nazi Germany,” People reported. Hines does, however, support Kennedy Jr.’s presidential run. At least he has her—Politico reported that “just a smattering of his children and grandchildren showed up” when he launched his presidential campaign earlier this year. In addition to political differences, Kennedy Jr. has inspired interfamily ire over advocating for the release of his father’s convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan, from prison.
It’s not just that Kennedy Jr.’s family members don’t support his run, though. Some are actively speaking out against it, and have given statements to that effect. For example, his sister Kerry Kennedy said, in a quote picked up by multiple outlets, “I love my brother Bobby, but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues, including the COVID pandemic, vaccinations, and the role of social media platforms in policing false information.” By and large, these disavowals have refrained from saying anything outright nasty, though according to CNN, there’s been at least one Kennedy family subtweet of Kennedy Jr.’s campaign—it came from Bobby Shriver, who, upon his cousin’s announcement, felt compelled to mention to his followers that he was excited to support Biden again.
Like Shriver, in addition to not showing up for Kennedy Jr., many Kennedys are openly backing Biden (who, on top of being a longtime member of the Democratic establishment, can bond with the Kennedys over being only the second Catholic president, after JFK). Worse, some of Kennedy Jr.’s family members literally currently work for the Biden administration in some capacity—Caroline Kennedy, Kennedy Jr.’s cousin, is the ambassador to Australia, for one.
Most political types agree that he doesn’t pose a serious threat to Biden, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a nuisance who’s pushing dangerous ideas with no basis in reality. For everyone but Kennedy Jr., the best outcome here would be for the campaign to end before it really gets going—and really embarrasses all of them. After all, they want to keep coasting on “Ask not what your country can do for you” and all that, and a guy who wrote a book calling Anthony Fauci a pandemic profiteer who is masterminding “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy” just isn’t good for the brand.
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Ex-attorney general William Barr: 'Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets that the country has. They have to be in the custody of the archivist.' (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
William Barr Says Trump May Be 'Toast' After 'Very Damning' Indictment
Maya Yang, Guardian UK
Yang writes: "Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr believes that the former president may be 'toast' as he faces a sweeping indictment of 37 federal criminal charges over his alleged mishandling of classified documents."
Former attorney general who has largely broken with Trump ‘shocked by the degree of sensitivity’ of documents
Speaking to Fox News on Sunday following the release of the indictment, Barr, who served as the US attorney general under Trump from 2019 to 2020, said that he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity at these documents and how many there were”.
“I do think we have to wait and see what the defense says and what proves to be true. But I do think…if even half of it is true, then he’s toast… It’s a very detailed indictment and it’s very damning,” said Barr.
Barr has largely broken with Trump since he left office. His comments stand in stark contrast to Trump’s tirade against federal prosecutors whom he said is pursuing him as part of a “witch-hunt”.
Barr added: “The government’s agenda was to … protect those documents and get them out and I think it was perfectly appropriate to do that. It was the right thing to do.”
Barr went on to push back against Trump’s narrative that he is the victim of a broader government “hoax”, saying: “Presenting Trump as a victim here, the victim of a witch hunt is ridiculous.”
“He’s been a victim in the past. His adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims and I’ve been at his side defending against him when he is a victim, but this is much different. He’s not a victim here,” said Barr.
According to the indictment unsealed on Friday, Trump stored classified documents in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
It also added that Trump directed Walt Nauta, his valet and aide, to deliberately move boxes of records to “conceal them from Trump’s attorney, the FBI, and the grand jury”.
Documents possessed by Trump “included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” said the indictment.
Barr said: “. Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets that the country has. They have to be in the custody of the archivist. He had no right to maintain them and retain them. And he kept them in a way at Mar-a-Lago that anyone who really cares about national security, their stomach would churn at it,” he added.
In addition to being charged with mishandling classified documents, Trump has been charged with several counts of obstruction of justice as well as making false statements to investigators.
Trump has repeatedly maintained his innocence. In two fiery addresses on Saturday – his first public speeches since the federal indictment against him, the GOP’s top presidential contender told crowds of supporters in Georgia and North Carolina that he “will never be detained”.
He also lashed out against federal officials, saying: “Now the Marxist left is once again using the same corrupt DoJ [justice department] and the same corrupt FBI, and the attorney general and the local district attorneys to interfere … They’re cheating. They’re crooked. They’re corrupt. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated. You have to defeat them.”
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Boxes of records stored at former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in an image included in his indictment. (photo: Justice Department/AP)
The former president does not face illegal-retention charges for the classified documents he returned to the National Archives
But the Trump indictment itself helps explain the difference between his case and other high-profile probes, like those of Hillary Clinton, President Biden and former vice president Mike Pence — not for what it charges, but for what it doesn’t.
Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, a crime delineated in the Espionage Act that carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. Each count represents a different highly sensitive document that Trump allegedly kept at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club.
Twenty-one of those documents, including some involving nuclear secrets, were found by FBI agents who searched the estate in August — yielding a total of 102 classified documents, according to the indictment. The other 10 willful-retention charges stem from a batch of 38 classified documents turned over to the FBI last June in response to a grand jury subpoena.
But the historic investigation into the former president was precipitated months earlier, in January 2022, when the former president gave 15 boxes of papers to the National Archives and Records Administration. The agency had been seeking all presidential records from Trump since he left office.
Inside the boxes, archivists found 197 classified documents, some extremely sensitive, the government alleged in court filings. That discovery set in motion the chain of events that led to the unsealing Friday of a 38-count indictment against Trump and Walt Nauta, a trusted servant.
Notably, however, the indictment does not charge Trump with the illegal retention of any of the 197 documents he returned to the archives.
That shows that if Trump had simply returned all the classified documents he had, he probably never would have been charged with any crimes, said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor.
“This is not a case about what documents were taken, it’s about what former president Trump did after the government sought to retrieve those documents,” said Mintz, who noted that willful-retention cases often hinge on how much evidence prosecutors can find that a person deliberately hid material or refused to give it back.
The indictment offers anecdote after alleged anecdote charging that the former president sought to hide and keep some of the classified papers, so much so that Trump and Nauta are accused of conspiring to obstruct the investigation and scheming to conceal the truth not just from the government, but even from Trump’s own lawyer.
Those allegations include: moving boxes out of a storage room; telling an attorney to search that room for classified material without saying that dozens of boxes were being kept elsewhere; suggesting an attorney hide or destroy documents that had been subpoenaed; and causing another person to make false statements about whether all the classified documents had been produced.
“That’s not the kind of evidence you typically find in a case like this, and it’s certainly not the type of evidence so far that has come out of the Biden investigation or the Clinton email server case,” Mintz said.
According to the indictment, Trump ruminated about the Clinton case in May 2022, as he discussed how to respond to the subpoena he had just received.
As a presidential candidate running against Clinton in 2016, he had railed against her use of a personal email server to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state — an arrangement that led to classified information being shared on a nonclassified, nongovernment computer server. Clinton’s case was also different from Trump’s in another key respect: While the email chains discussed classified topics, they were not classified documents in the traditional sense, with extensive markings and acronyms.
But when discussing his own possible mishandling case last year, Trump seized on another facet of the Clinton probe: that attorneys for Clinton had reviewed more than 60,000 emails and turned over about 30,000 to government officials because they were deemed related to her official duties. Clinton’s lawyers deleted the rest, about 30,000 emails, after deeming them personal and unrelated to her work. It has long been standard practice in the federal government for officials to review their own correspondence in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and decide which of their emails are personal and therefore not turned over. In Clinton’s case, her lawyers did that for her.
As a candidate and president, Trump denounced the decision to delete the emails. In July 2016, he notoriously declared at a news conference: “Russia: if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
When the grand jury subpoena for any classified documents arrived at his door, however, Trump expressed a very different view to his lawyer, according to the indictment, praising Clinton’s lawyer for deleting the 30,000 emails.
The Clinton lawyer, Trump allegedly said on May 23, 2002, “was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments. And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them.”
“Trump related the story more than once that day,” the indictment notes dryly.
“I really don’t think there’s any plausible comparison between the Trump case and the Hillary Clinton case,” said Robert Kelner, a veteran D.C. attorney. “The key difference is that in the Hillary Clinton case, as we learned from the Department of Justice inspector general report, there was no evidence that Hillary Clinton sought to obstruct justice. … The focus of the Trump indictment is on his rather stark effort to obstruct justice. That’s the fundamental difference.”
Kelner is critical of how the FBI handled aspects of the Clinton case, arguing that at times, the agency pulled punches when it came to investigating the conduct of some of those around her. But he said those criticisms do not change the fact that Trump appears to have repeatedly tried to keep documents he could not legally have, while Clinton did not.
“They have essentially game, set and match against Trump based on the evidence in the indictment,” he said.
Kelner cautioned, however, that he expects Trump’s lawyers will fight hard, potentially trying to convince at least one juror that a former president should not go to prison over the documents case. He said there was “a very real chance Trump’s team could obtain a mistrial, no matter how compelling the evidence.”
Comparing the Trump indictment to the ongoing investigation of Biden is more difficult, partly because fewer facts are known about the current president’s possession of classified documents when he was out of office.
The Justice Department began investigating the matter late last year, when roughly a dozen classified documents were found at a think tank office in Washington that Biden had used before he became president — suggesting the papers may have dated to his time as vice president.
Weeks after that discovery, a small number of classified documents were also found at Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate whether any crimes were committed. Biden’s lawyers say they have cooperated at every step of the investigation and readily returned all classified materials found in the office and the Wilmington house. An FBI search of Biden’s beach house turned up no classified papers.
The Pence case also points to the key distinction in the national security probes involving presidents, former top officials or presidential candidates — that it is not so much what is taken, but what is kept. Just a week before the Trump indictment, the Justice Department notified Pence it had closed an investigation into whether he mishandled classified information.
FBI agents had conducted a consensual search at Pence’s Indiana home in February, after a lawyer for Pence found “a small number” of potentially sensitive or classified documents there in late January. The FBI search turned up one additional classified document, according to an adviser.
All the materials were quickly turned over to government authorities, Pence’s lawyer said.
Days after the Justice Department closed the case, Pence formally announced his 2024 bid for president.
He joined a crowded Republican field, in which Trump is the front-runner.
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CUNY School of Law graduation. (image: Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images and CUNY School of Law)
CUNY Law student Fatima Mohammed was accused of “hate speech” after speaking at her school’s commencement ceremony. But it was her own free speech that was undermined.
She spoke, for instance, about her classmates’ shared struggles with COVID-19 and highlighted their efforts to stop CUNY from contracting with data companies that work with ICE. She drew attention to deadly conditions at Rikers Island, criticized Mayor Eric Adams and Senator Chuck Schumer’s lukewarm responses to the killing of Jordan Neely, and condemned CUNY Central for its ties to the NYPD, which she called a fascist institution.
But Mohammed’s remarks about “Israeli settler colonialism,” while resoundingly applauded in the auditorium at the time, would come to touch a nerve after the fact.
Namely, in praising CUNY Law as “one of the few, if not the only” law schools for publicly come out in support of its students’ Palestinian activism, Mohammad said that “silence is no longer acceptable,” as Israel “continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers” “encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes and businesses,” and perpetuates a “project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes.”
While her comments on Israel drew little outside attention at first, as the New York Post began covering these portions of the speech two weeks later an online pile-on ensued, with prominent politicians across the aisle taking to Twitter to blast Mohammed’s speech—or, rather, their perceptions of it.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz suggested Mohammed had “enthusiastically celebrate[d] antisemitism.” Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres called her “crazed,” pathologizing her words as “anti-Israel derangement syndrome.” Mayor Eric Adams (whose own speech at the CUNY Law graduation was met with derision from many students), too, cast aspersions on the graduate’s so-called “words of divisiveness.” On May 30, Mohammed was plastered on the cover of Murdoch’s New York tabloid, beside the headline “Stark Raving Grad.”
That same day, surely feeling the heat, CUNY’s board of trustees and chancellor issued a statement condemning Mohammed’s remarks as “hate speech”—which, they added, “should not be confused with free speech”—as they represented “a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation.”
While this statement from CUNY leadership indicated no intention of formally punishing Mohammed, it has rightfully raised free expression concerns at CUNY Law.
For one, the CUNY administrators’ assertion that Mohammed’s speech does not constitute free speech flies in the face of First Amendment protections. On top of that, the curious inclusion of “political affiliation” in their definition of hate speech deviates from the standard understanding of the term—a letter signed by 40 CUNY Law faculty described this addition as “wildly inconsistent with long-standing and legal definitions of the concept of hate speech.”
The faculty signatories also made note that “none of the student’s comments attacked any persons or protected classes,” and lamented the statement’s apparent “attempts to equate the scourge of antisemitism with criticisms of the State of Israel.” Indeed, Mohammed’s critiques of Israel and the IDF (like her criticisms of the United States, the NYPD, et cetera) made rhetorical targets of governments and institutions rather than, as the charge of hate speech suggests, disparaging religious or ethnic groups. CUNY’s statement failed to appreciate this crucial distinction.
The Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) at CUNY Law was quick to express solidarity with Mohammed and dismiss suggestions that her speech was antisemitic. In a statement signed alongside several other CUNY Law student organizations, the JLSA held that “the majority of CUNY Law’s Jewish students… wholeheartedly stand with Fatima and have been grateful to have her as our classmate throughout law school.”
CUNY did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Aside from conflating Mohammed’s criticisms with hate speech, the administrators’ May 30 statement also troublingly threatened to exacerbate, and lend legitimacy to, the onslaught of hate she faced amid what The New York Times described as “nearly nonstop, consistently furious international tabloid coverage.” Observers have regarded the chancellor and board of trustees’ apparent deference to external pressures as disappointing if not predictable.
In an email to The Daily Beast on behalf of CUNY Law’s JLSA, Eric Horowitz, a member of the association’s executive board, wrote: “Although we were dismayed by [the May 30] statement, its contents did not come as a surprise to us. CUNY central has a well-established history of prioritizing their standing in the eyes of politicians and media at the expense of student-organizers.”
“Even though CUNY primarily serves working-class New Yorkers and People of Color,” Horowitz continued, “CUNY central has demonstrated a particular animus against student organizers like Fatima—a Muslim Woman of Color from Queens.”
On the evening of June 5, protesters convened outside a CUNY board of trustees meeting to “demand that the Chancellor and BOT rescind and apologize for their defamatory statement against Fatima” and “call for the resignation of the BOT members,” as per a press release shared with The Daily Beast.
An organizer of the protest, Palestinian activist and CUNY Law alumna Nerdeen Kiswani, told The Daily Beast that the protesters seek to “fight back against false claims” of antisemitism levied against pro-Palestinian activists for expressing “legitimate grievances” with Israel, and to draw attention to a “pattern of CUNY throwing their students under the bus [and] exposing us to Islamophobic hate.”
In this case, such hate became such a threat to Mohammed’s security that, as The Mehdi Hasan Show recently reported, the CUNY Law grad “has had to go into hiding.” Naz Ahmad, a staff attorney at CUNY Law, told Hasan that Mohammed “had to leave and explain to her parents why this is happening,” and that CUNY Law faculty is looking to “connect her with resources that help people who have been doxxed.”
This context considered, it seems entirely untoward of academic administrators to have compounded the barrage against an imperiled community member with an imprecise, hair-trigger denunciation of her political expression, rather than an unequivocal affirmation of her free speech rights.
In this haphazard attempt to avoid the heat of controversy, those helming this progressive academic institution and supposed bastion of free inquiry seem to have chilled open debate instead, reinforcing the notion of a “Palestine exception” to free expression while doing so.
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Protestors outside a Glendale Unified School District meeting on teaching sexual identity to kids in Glendale, California on June 6, 2023. (photo: Allen J. Schaben/LA Times)
The American right is returning to its homophobic roots.
Almost immediately, Cruz faced a wave of criticism from prominent conservative accounts with large followings.
“Unlike the lawmakers in Texas, the Uganda government recognizes that if you give an inch, the LGBTQ Mafia will take a mile,” wrote Lauren Witzke, the 2020 GOP Senate candidate in Delaware. “While you guys struggle to stop drag queens from twerking on the laps of toddlers, they stop it before it starts.”
The attacks on Cruz were a sign of the times for American conservatism, which is currently in the grips of a renewed and increasingly vicious anti-LGBTQ fervor.
In January, Donald Trump released a campaign video decrying “the left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children.” He vowed that, in a second term, his administration would work to ban gender-affirming care for minors “in all 50 states,” officially recognize “male” and “female” as “assigned at birth” as the only genders, and reconfigure school curriculums to teach students “positive education about the nuclear family [and] the roles of mothers and fathers.”
Trump’s leading competitor for the 2024 nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has gone even further, making laws attacking LGBTQ inclusion, especially in schools, into a core plank of his “anti-woke” governing agenda. DeSantis’s campaign is part of a broader trend, with 2023 seeing a fresh wave of anti-trans legislation in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country — with over 530 bills proposed by late May, by one tally. Right-wing activists are leading boycotts against brands that celebrate LGBTQ identity and Pride month, like Target and Bud Light. Just this Tuesday, a school board meeting about teaching gender in Glendale, California, schools devolved into a fistfight.
Politically, the anti-LGBTQ turn may well turn out to be counterproductive for the right. Polling data suggests that the public, and especially younger generations, are becoming increasingly liberal on LGBTQ issues. The fact that conservatives are going after corporations like Disney, Anheuser-Busch, and Target — some of the biggest and most famous icons of mainstream America — indicates just how out of step they are with the country.
Yet it’s this reality, somewhat paradoxically, that might explain the resurgence in anti-LGBTQ politics: The cultural right is lashing out because it’s been losing for so long. Much as the rise of Donald Trump and the panic about “wokeness” began (primarily) in reaction to challenges to America’s racial hierarchy, so too has the return of anti-LGBTQ politics been a reaction to changing norms about sexuality and gender.
To a certain extent, anti-LGBTQ conservative intellectuals openly acknowledge that they are on the defensive. In their worldview, they are standing up for the “ordinary” American against an overwhelmingly progressive elite culture successfully imposing its own values on everyone else — a claim that implicitly rejects the idea that changing attitudes on sex and gender are moving from the bottom up rather than the top down.
But as we’ve seen in the renewed energy behind anti-LGBTQ politics and the raft of anti-trans bills in statehouses across the country, a rearguard backlash politics can still be powerful — mobilizing a committed minority in ways that have significant consequences for real people’s lives.
When liberals won the culture war over gay rights
In 2020, New York University sociologists Delia Baldassarri and Barum Park published an article with a provocative thesis: The “culture war” that once dominated American politics, centering on moral divides between religious conservatives and more secular liberals, was over. The liberals had won.
Using detailed data sets covering the years 1972 to 2016, Baldassarri and Park traced the evolution of public opinion on a large variety of policy questions. On most issues they examined — in areas like economics, race, immigration, and foreign policy — average public opinion stayed relatively static.
But on “moral” issues, like feminism or drug use, the picture was remarkably different. “Among all of the 37 moral issues under study, only for one issue, namely whether extramarital sex is wrong, was the proportion of liberal responses lower in 1972 compared to 2016,” they write. In virtually all of those 36 cases, the public shifted notably in the liberal direction (with the important exception of abortion, where opinion stayed static rather than trending left).
Nowhere was this trend clearer than on gay rights, where the authors found “by far the most pronounced opinion change we observe in the data.” (Note that their study did not include any surveys on trans issues, since there was no reliable data from most of the time period under examination.)
“In only two decades, more than a third of the population has changed its position on gay rights: the approval of gays’ right to adopt children rose by 48.8 percentage points between 1992 and 2016,” they write. “Gay marriage support grew from 12.4 percent in 1988 to 59.4 percent in 2016, a 47 percentage point difference.”
Looking beneath the hood, Baldassarri and Park uncovered an interesting partisan pattern in the moral issues data: On topic after topic, Democrats would become more progressive faster than Republicans, who would eventually start to catch up years later. What at first looked like a persistent partisan gap, akin to views on tax cuts and abortion, would eventually give way to bipartisan consensus.
Notably, the Republican shift on gay rights took off during arguably the most intense recent period of partisan conflict on the issue: the struggle over same-sex marriage in the George W. Bush presidency.
In the 2004 presidential election, legally codifying marriage as something between a man and a woman was a central plank of the Republican Party’s platform. Yet as that was happening, it appears rank-and-file Republicans were already shifting to the left on LGBTQ issues.
These changes were too fast to be explained by older Republicans dying off and younger, more liberal ones taking their place. Instead, Baldassarri and Park suggest the best explanation is that many Americans genuinely changed their minds.
As the overall cultural environment became more liberal thanks to decades of LGBTQ activism, gays and lesbians around the country felt more comfortable coming out of the closet. The result is that more Republicans had personal contact with gay people, which in turn made them more sympathetic to LGBTQ equality. There is a wide body of literature supporting this so-called “contact hypothesis,” and Baldassarri and Park see it as central to the new bipartisan consensus on issues like same-sex marriage.
“At least in recent years, both Republicans and Democrats have similar probabilities of knowing someone in their close social circles who is gay or lesbian,” they write. “This may explain why Republicans have turned towards more progressive views so easily on these issues.”
How an anti-trans backlash reopened the queer culture war
On the right, the smartest voices have understood the basic contours of the new reality for quite some time.
In 2014, a year before the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right in Obergefell v. Hodges, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column negotiating “the terms of our surrender” on same-sex marriage.
Seeing the debate on the matter as essentially lost, Douthat pleaded for magnanimity from the victorious left, hoping for a world where “religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage.”
This view — we’ve lost the culture war, now let us be conservatives in peace — morphed into something like the mainstream right’s official position on LGBTQ issues after Obergefell. Rallying under the banner of religious liberty, the right championed causes like a Christian baker refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. What liberals called discrimination was, conservatives argued, actually an exercise of religious freedom.
Around the same time, some on the right even flirted with trying to build a kind of pro-gay conservatism akin to certain European far-right movements. During his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, Donald Trump tried to win over LGBTQ voters by touting his proposed ban on Muslim immigration: “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
He also opposed a North Carolina law forcing people to use the bathroom that matches their sex assigned at birth and unfurled a Pride flag on stage at an October rally. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman declared that “it is his views on gay rights and gay people that most distinguish Mr. Trump from previous Republican standard-bearers.”
Obviously, things have changed — both with Trump and with the right more broadly. The language of religious freedom has been muted, and pro-gay conservatism feels like (at best) a distant dream. Today, the right is defined by calls to stamp out “gender ideology,” panic about drag queen readings at public libraries, and accusations that LGBTQ activists are “grooming” kids for sexual abuse.
The difference between then and now is not that the religious right, the traditional source of anti-LGBTQ sentiment, has gotten more influential. If anything, the conservative base has moved in a slightly more secular direction. Between 2010 and 2020, the percentage of Republicans who belonged to a church declined by 10 points (from 75 to 65 percent).
Nor was this spearheaded by Trump’s presidency. Trump’s policy record on LGBTQ issues was — contrary to his pronouncements as a candidate — fairly hostile. But it wasn’t a major focus of his rhetoric in the way that race and immigration were. In fact, he once again attempted to reach out to LGBTQ voters in the 2020 campaign (with little success).
Understanding the right’s return to anti-LGBTQ politics instead requires understanding two things: the rise of trans identity and the emergence of a broader right-wing war on “wokeness.”
In 2014, Time magazine published a cover story on “the transgender tipping point”: the notion that trans people were finally “emerging from the margins” and demanding rights and public recognition. Today, the article feels quaint — but usefully so, in that it documents just how new the ideas of the trans movement are to many straight cisgender Americans.
In many ways, the notion that 2014 was a “tipping point” for trans equality feels overly optimistic. But there’s no doubt that there’s been significant progress since then as well.
In 2022, the journal Public Opinion Quarterly published an analysis by five scholars examining data on trans people and trans issues in the same way that Baldassarri and Park studied gay issues. Examining “feelings thermometer” data between 2002 and 2020, in which respondents were asked to rate how warmly they feel toward trans people, the researchers document a clear positive trend — with nearly all of the increase happening between 2015 and 2020.
Drilling down on that period, they also find a generally pro-trans trend on specific issues. “Support for allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military has increased from 52–54 percent in 2015 to 76 percent in 2020, reflecting a change from a relatively divided public to near consensus by 2020,” they write.
That said, the public is still more divided on trans issues than on gay and lesbian ones. A 2022 Pew survey found that majorities of Americans say that whether one is a man or woman is determined by sex assigned at birth and oppose requiring that health insurance cover gender-affirmation care. A 2023 Washington Post/KFF poll found that a large majority supported anti-discrimination protections for trans individuals, but a (slightly smaller) majority also opposed trans women participating in women’s sports.
This is a climate rife for right-wing backlash.
The overall rapid trend toward trans inclusion and visibility generates the dual sense of vulnerability and threat that powers much of social conservative politics. And the fact that they are specific issues where the public is still seemingly on their side is seen as an opportunity by the anti-LGBTQ right to halt and even reverse the overall trend.
You can’t take the T out of LGBTQ
The backlash against the trans movement’s challenge to traditional ideas has radicalized the right more broadly on sex and gender — making the post-Obergefell “religious liberty” arguments feel almost as quaint as the Time essay. Today, the right has gone on offense against not only trans identity but LGBTQ inclusion more broadly, as seen in policies like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law or attacks on Kohl’s for selling a onesie with a Pride flag on it.
Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire podcast host and a leading advocate of boycotting LGBTQ-friendly companies, made that goal explicit in a recent tweet: “The goal is to make ‘pride’ toxic for brands. If they decide to shove this garbage in our face, they should know that they’ll pay a price. It won’t be worth whatever they think they’ll gain.”
This development grows out of the sense of loss that Douthat gestured at, and not only on LGBTQ issues.
In the past several years, the culture warrior right has developed a narrative of total isolation and cultural besiegement. From their point of view, the left controls the commanding heights of culture: the universities, Hollywood, the media, and even Fortune 500 companies. Increasingly, they claim, these institutions have been captured by a hostile “woke” ideology that won’t be happy with cultural detente — nothing less than stamping out conservative thinking on every cultural issue will do.
The Catholic conservative Sohrab Ahmari put this thinking clearly in a 2019 essay: “Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism.”
In this increasingly influential line of right-wing thought, any expression of left-wing cultural values in public life is an example of wokeness’s assault on conservative values. Those conservatives who never really reconciled themselves to defeat in the marriage war now point to the trans campaign for acceptance as proof that the slope was in fact slippery — and that if wokeness as a whole is not defeated, the result will be the destruction of everything conservatives hold dear.
This is why the backlash against the “T” in LGBTQ was bound to consume the other letters as well: Conservatives see the increased visibility of the queer movement in general as a threat to their survival. The LGBTQ movement started this culture war, in the conservative mind; the new backlash against Pride Month and “woke corporations” is simply a defensive action.
“Pride was never such a controversial thing when it was gay men and lesbians,” the prominent right-wing commentator Erick Erickson tweeted. “Sure, there were issues, but no major public backlash till Pride also meant celebrating people with mental health disorders who bully those who disagree with them.”
Erickson’s argument ignores both the right’s history of anti-Pride agitprop and the author’s own long record of homophobia. His tweet was widely mocked by Twitter liberals. But Erickson’s fellow conservatives thought he had a point.
Pride events “were more commonly ignored before the 1-2 punch of pervasive corporate propaganda with transgender politics,” writes National Review’s Dan McLaughlin. “15 years ago, the average American might associate gay pride events with a parade in the Village, not their employer, their church, and the State Department flying the rainbow flag.”
This fear of “woke” conquest of American institutions doesn’t just explain the motivation behind the right’s increasing anti-LGBTQ politics — it also explains their theory of victory.
In their view, left-wing beliefs about sex and gender are not deeply and authentically held by a majority of Americans. Instead, their rise is the result of manipulation by cultural gatekeepers — nefarious woke elites indoctrinating the country into thinking things that are immoral are not. If Middle America can be aroused from its slumber, the anti-woke right believes, America can return to a time where queer identity is rightly consigned to the shadows.
“Regular people care greatly about the society their children are inheriting. That’s a concern that cuts to [the] deepest part of their soul. They are terrified that their children will be destroyed by our degenerate culture,” as Walsh puts it.
Certainly, the boycott campaigns have had startling success in punishing corporations. And the anti-LGBTQ turn on the right has influenced the legislative agenda in Republican-controlled states like Florida, with significant consequences for real people’s lives.
But recent data suggests the broader goal of changing minds, of reversing grassroots support for LGBTQ inclusion, will be a much tougher lift.
An analysis of data on the 2022 midterms by Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, found that Republican candidates for statewide office who spent heavily on anti-trans campaign ads in 2022 underperformed those who focused on other issues. This is in part because trans issues were a low priority for the electorate compared to issues like inflation, crime, immigration, and abortion — classic areas of persistent partisan conflict.
And this is because progress on LGBTQ issues is not, at root, an artifact of a handful of progressive elites forcing their ideas on everyone else, but the result of incremental and bottom-up cultural change: individual LGBTQ people changing the minds of people in their own lives. Corporations like Bud Light are not pioneers working to impose “wokeness” on America: They are late movers responding to a new pro-LGBTQ consensus that’s reflected in their sales and marketing research.
A majority of Americans already believe that Republicans talk too much about “wokeness,” with some of the right’s hobbyhorses — like ESG, a kind of socially conscious investing practice — scarcely registering with the general public. When politicians like Ron DeSantis take up the banner, their language — peppered with anti-woke jargon about “gender ideology” and “ESG” — feels out of step with where the electorate is.
We find ourselves in a strange and worrying political moment, where one of our two political parties has become consumed by anti-LGBTQ fervor, even as signs point to that position’s weakness in our culture and politics. Extremism has become normalized, and not just in Ted Cruz’s comment section. At the March Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in DC, arguably the leading conservative movement event of the year, prominent anti-gay commentator Michael Knowles proclaimed that “transgenderism must be eradicated” — to sustained applause.
But as dangerous as this new anti-LGBTQ right is, there are real political costs to living in a fantasy world — one where LGBTQ inclusion is seen as the result of a plot against America rather than authentic social change. While the backlash has been ugly and troubling, and the harms real and consequential, the long history of public opinion on LGBTQ rights should give some reason to think the bill may come due for the GOP sooner rather than later.
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People walk among scattered objects in the market of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, as fighting continues in Sudan between the forces of two rival generals, on April 29, 2023. (photo: AFP)
Brutal ethnic violence broke out in Darfur in 2003 when the government deployed the notorious Janjaweed Arab militia to put down an uprising by non-Arab groups, killing hundreds of thousands of people in what was widely labeled a genocide. That war ended in 2020, although there have since been sporadic incidents of violence.
In the current conflict in Sudan, which began in April, the de-facto government and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — a paramilitary group that grew out of the Janjaweed — have been vying for power, with much of the fighting centered on Sudan's capital, Khartoum. But experts warn it is now Darfur that's facing catastrophe.
Eric Reeves, an American academic who has been researching Sudan for over 20 years with a focus on Darfur, says he believes that the RSF, having suffered heavy casualties in Khartoum, could soon withdraw to Darfur "with their loot" to regroup.
RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, once led a Janjaweed brigade in the region.
Cities across Darfur, such as El Geneina, Kutum and El Fashar, have all seen heavy fighting in recent weeks. Satellite images of various areas show burnt villages and widespread destruction.
"We have seen in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, and very close to the border with Chad ... just how awful the nightmare of violence can be, how destructive, how cruel. The question is whether there is anything to constrain the RSF [and] allied Arab militias, if they do in fact withdraw from Khartoum," Reeves says in an email to NPR.
"They are well armed, have hijacked a great many vehicles and have no political or ideological motive — just a lust for money and power."
Return to dark days
Reeves says the current fighting also has an ethnic component, and warns "genocide looks to be resumed on a very large scale."
Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch, concurs that the latest violence in Darfur is raising ghosts of the past.
"Many people from non-Arab communities did say how the brutality of these attacks, the killings, massive destruction of property and food reserves, looting, [have] been reminding them of the early dark days of the conflict in Darfur," Osman says.
"However, they also pointed to the recent and new dynamics in the violence, including the power vacuum created by the fighting in Khartoum. ... [The government's Sudanese Armed Forces] and police largely withdrew from different parts of West Darfur," he adds.
A widespread communications blackout in the region has made it almost impossible to contact sources on the ground. But early last month, Adeeb Yousif, a former governor of Central Darfur, spoke to NPR.
He said he was concerned for people in the region who were still internally displaced, two decades after the outbreak of the last conflict. There are more than 3.7 million internally displaced people (IDPs) from previous conflicts in Darfur, according to the United Nations' refugee agency.
"Some of the IDPs, they are revictimized," Yousif said, noting their camps had been burnt. "Therefore they've moved from one location to another location ... and scattered into areas such as [the] streets," he said.
Dr. Attiyah Abdullah, general secretary of the Sudan Doctors' Union, tells NPR that because telecoms are down, it's been impossible to keep up with the increasing numbers of dead in Darfur. But based on what statistics are available, fatalities are in the hundreds.
The violence is also creating a new wave of refugees, with more than 115,000 people recently fleeing Darfur to neighboring Chad.
Sudanese refugees shared harrowing accounts of brutality back home during NPR's recent visit to makeshift camps in eastern Chad near the border with Sudan.
Marriam Hadiya Mohammed, 23, has recently gone to Chad for refuge.
"The reason I came is because 'the Arabs' came to my house and said they you will empty the house for us or we will kill you all," she told NPR, referring to the RSF fighters.
Ali Tahir Mohammed, 55, has also fled to Chad.
They "were just killing people. Anyone, a woman searching for herbs, they'd kill them. Children fetching water, they'd kill them. So we just couldn't live there," he said.
Dire humanitarian situation
Doctors Without Borders, the medical aid group known by its French initials, MSF, has staff on the ground in Darfur but has not been able to access the hospital it supports in El Geneina since it was attacked and looted on April 26. Residents, including pregnant women and children, are now unable to access services, MSF says, describing the situation as "unbearable."
"Movement in the city is currently limited to proximity around one's house due to the risk of random shootings, snipers and carjackings. Access to basic necessities like water is burdened with danger, and the task of retrieving bodies from the streets has become impossible," says Moussa Ibrahim, MSF's logistics supervisor in El Geneina.
"The consequences of the escalating conflict are devastating, with attacks on humanitarian organizations, police headquarters where weapons were stolen, and civilian locations like the local market and the main university," he adds.
MSF has a surgical team waiting across the border in Chad, but Ibrahim says it is difficult for patients to get there.
"The path from El Geneina to Chad is riddled with dangers as armed groups often patrol and can stop you on your route. There is no guarantee of security," he says.
Meanwhile, former governor Yousif, Reeves and others warn the fighting is having a disastrous effect on the region's agriculture, which could lead to greater food insecurity or even famine.
Whatever happens next in the almost two-month-old conflict, Reeves says one thing's for sure: "Darfur will be in the RSF crosshairs for the foreseeable future."
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Horseshoe crabs are bled at a facility in Charleston, S.C., in June 2014. (photo: Ariane Müeller/NPR)
But humans began to want something from the crabs, too – their blood. In the 1960s, scientists discovered that the sky blue blood inside horseshoe crabs would clot when it detected bacterial toxins. Vaccines, drugs and medical devices have to be sterile before they're put inside people. A better toxin detection system meant less contamination risk for patients, so fishermen soon started collecting and selling the prehistoric animals to be bled.
A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn't shrinking. It's growing. Five companies along the East Coast, with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Maryland, drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That's more than any year since officials started keeping track in 2004. Since then, the number of crabs bled by the industry has more than doubled. At least 80 million tests are performed each year around the world using the blood-derived ingredient.
As the industry has expanded, coast-wide regulation has been limited and the companies have become increasingly secretive. Records obtained by NPR indicate that in some states, fishermen paid by the bleeding companies have handled crabs in ways that research has shown to cause harm or have violated harvest laws without punishment. Meanwhile, the process of approving the alternative in the U.S. has stalled even as the number of birds in the sky has plummeted.
The federal government designated one of the migratory shorebird species that depends on horseshoe crab eggs, the red knot, as threatened. About 94% of red knots have disappeared over the past 40 years. Horseshoe crabs have become moderately depleted along the Atlantic coast, the International Union for Conservation of Nature determined. The ones around New England are noted as particularly vulnerable to extinction.
"We're up against this system that really prioritizes money over the health of the stock," said Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist and leader of the nonprofit Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition. "And the consequences show it."
A profitable gray area
Depending on which state they're harvested in, the crabs are either taken by hand from the beaches or pulled up from the bottom of the ocean with nets. Hundreds are piled on top of each other in boats, loaded into trucks and delivered to bleeding facilities. There, lab technicians pierce the crabs through their hearts and drain them alive, sometimes for eight minutes, which can deplete them of more than half their volume of blue blood. In Massachusetts, some of the bled crabs are then sold to be killed and used as bait. In states like South Carolina and New Jersey, the animals are delivered back to the fishermen, who return them to the ocean.
That makes the bleeding business unique among the industries it straddles. It's an unusual fishery, because the animals are not sold to be eaten. It's an atypical utilization of animals in medicine, since the crabs are not bled in the research stage, and they're not warm-blooded. They're not even crustaceans – horseshoe crabs are more closely related to scorpions than they are to snow crabs.
The business is also different from extractive industries like mining and logging, because the harvested natural resource is supposed to be returned to the environment alive.
"They sort of fall through the cracks a little bit in terms of what you could call the regulatory imagination," said Rich Gorman, a research fellow at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England. "Everyone assumes that everyone else is regulating it."
Family businesses used to own many of the smaller facilities in the earlier days of bleeding. Now, the industry is dominated by giant multinational firms, like a facility in Virginia owned by the Japanese conglomerate Fujifilm, and Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company based in Massachusetts that took over a local operation in South Carolina.
Federal laws require some animals used by biomedical industries to be treated humanely. The Animal Welfare Act protects some warm-blooded animals, like monkeys, that are used in scientific research. The Health Research Extension Act covers other vertebrates, like mice, that aren't included in the Welfare Act.
But coast-wide regulations regarding humane treatment of the crabs are virtually nonexistent or unenforced. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission manages stocks of fish meant to be quickly killed, like sea bass and flounder. It also manages horseshoe crabs, though the animals can spend dozens of hours alive above water during the harvest and bleeding process.
"Thinking of horseshoe crabs as a fishery, it really complicates and muddies the debate," said Gorman. "The aftercare that's involved in any scientific procedure that's carried out on an animal is really important."
The fisheries commission does publish a description of "Best Management Practices" for the industry, but those are guidelines, not laws. And they're often disregarded.
NPR obtained audio recorded during a meeting in January when those best practices were being discussed. Participants on the call can be heard mentioning that research shows picking crabs up by their tails harms the animals. That can prevent the crabs from being able to right themselves up if they've flipped on their backs, which can eventually kill them.
"Picking up by the tail is not proper handling technique," said one participant on the call. "Damage to the tail can increase their chances of not being able to flip over and dying when coming up to spawn."
But Benjie Swan, the head of a smaller company that bleeds crabs in New Jersey, can be heard admitting to that and opposing changing the practices to make it more clear that fishermen shouldn't.
"My people do pick the crabs up by the tail," she said. "I just think that if we give too much detail, we're opening ourselves up for scrutiny."
A biologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Steve Doctor, added that fishermen in his state typically handle crabs by the tail "all the time." Videos from South Carolina show fishermen grabbing the crabs by the tail and tossing them on top of each other into boats. Since at least 2020, instructions from the state's Department of Natural Resources have said not to pick up horseshoe crabs by their tails.
A representative for the fisheries commission on the call reminded the group that even if the guidelines were changed to appear stricter, they would not be required to follow them. State governments, however, police the industry as they choose. Those restrictions can vary widely.
In Maryland, fishermen are not allowed to begin harvesting female crabs until after June 6, when Doctor, the biologist, says many of the crabs have finished mating and the birds have had a chance to devour some of their eggs.
"It's less stress on them if they're done spawning," said Doctor. "We're trying to give them the most opportunity possible."
Other states operate differently. Charles River Laboratories is one of the industry's biggest players: It reportedly provides half of the world's supply of the blood-derived test, called limulus amebocyte lysate. Regulations in South Carolina have allowed fishermen for the company to harvest in the early spring – when the crabs are beginning to mate and the migratory birds have started looking for eggs. The fishermen have also been permitted to keep an unlimited number of male crabs trapped in holding ponds located off the beaches before they're delivered to the bleeding facility. Fishermen are not required to feed the crabs while they're there.
Environmental groups are now suing the company and state.
'A black box of information'
Charles River Laboratories has been scrutinized for how its suppliers treat animals before. The company is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its shipment of monkeys from Cambodia, which it suspended in February after links to a smuggling ring were revealed. In South Carolina, fishermen supplying crabs to the company were repeatedly caught taking horseshoe crabs from off-limits islands along the coast and inside a national wildlife refuge.
But after two environmental groups sued the company and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources in 2022 for allowing horseshoe crabs to be kept away from the birds in secluded holding ponds, the agency asked the court to allow it to keep details about the industry confidential in the court documents. The judge agreed.
"It's just really a black box of information," said Catherine Wannamaker, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
Still, not everything was kept secret. NPR reviewed a redacted copy of the documents submitted in court. Though some of the words are excluded from the documents, the files indicate fishermen for Charles River broke permit requirements last year. Only male crabs were allowed to be kept in the ponds. But the documents indicate something else happened.
Additional documents obtained by NPR from the state's Department of Natural Resources through an open records request reveal that no fishermen were punished for breaking those rules. Wannamaker said that is not unusual.
"Historically, those conditions have not been enforced or complied with," she said.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Charles River Laboratories declined an interview with NPR. In an emailed statement, a company representative said they do their work with a "healthy respect for the need to protect the horseshoe crab population for generations to come."
The company also declined to allow reporters to visit its facilities. But NPR purchased photos from one of the last photographers allowed to witness the bleeding process, in 2014.
This year, fewer horseshoe crabs from South Carolina will likely be harvested. Though both the state and Charles River Laboratories denied liability in the lawsuit, the judge found the evidence against them convincing enough to pause the collection of crabs from 30 of the state's beaches in 2023. But Charles River is now paying harvesters in other places. This season, fishermen for Charles River are harvesting crabs from Cape Cod, Mass., and Chincoteague, Va.
Those states also withhold information about the bleeding industry. When NPR requested annual reports from the five states where the bleeding facilities are based, the state governments often redacted the number of crabs collected and the numbers left dead owing to the process. Most leaned on exemptions in public records laws that allow trade secrets or business information to be kept hidden.
In response to an open records request from NPR, New Jersey redacted the number of crab deaths and crabs collected despite a court order from a previous case that required the state to provide that information to the public. When asked why the state did not share those numbers though the courts required it before, a representative from New Jersey did not respond with a comment by the time of publication.
The states are not the only ones with access to the collection and mortality numbers. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission also knows them. But the group doesn't share the numbers publicly, either. Instead, it publishes an estimate derived from research studies that tried to mimic the bleeding process. Since some of the mortality numbers published in those studies varied, the commission settled on an approximation of 15%. That would amount to over 100,000 dead crabs in 2021. But some scientists say that underestimates the long term consequences of the process. Other research has shown the crabs mate less after they're bled. And few of those studies tracked how many crabs bled by the industry died more than two weeks after they were released back into the ocean.
"It could be that they're bleeding so many crabs, they're not only killing, but they could also be preventing crabs from spawning," said Niles, the biologist from New Jersey. "We just don't know."
Representatives from the bleeding industry have said horseshoe crabs are not harmed by the bleeding process. When NPR reached out, however, all the companies either declined interviews or did not respond.
When turning down NPR's request for an interview in an email, one representative took the opportunity to mention a new product his company had recently started selling: a synthetic, recombinant copy of the clotting ingredient inside horseshoe crabs that requires no blood to keep vaccines free of contamination.
"It has been an exciting couple of years indeed," wrote Brett Hoffmeister, the lysate production manager of a company that bleeds crabs in Massachusetts, Associates of Cape Cod.
But the standard-setting body in the U.S. tasked with approving the synthetic tests has stalled, and few pharmaceutical companies are using them.
'We have seen that it is better'
As the pandemic raged, the experts at the European Pharmacopoeia were poised to take action.
It was those scientists' job to determine whether there was enough data to conclude the synthetic tests worked just as well or better than the crab-derived ones. By 2017, they had already decided the research did support that. And in 2020, Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, was putting the science into practice. The company produced all its COVID-19 antibody medications using the newer method.
"It's actually been cost advantageous for us," said Jay Bolden, the scientist that pushed Eli Lilly to use the synthetic, a move that required additional approval from the FDA since the U.S. Pharmacopoeia does not recognize it as equivalent. "Then from a quality perspective, we have seen that it is better."
Using the synthetic also made sense for making the production of medicines more sustainable, Bolden added, since the old method relied on diminishing natural resources. When the European Pharmacopoeia announced its decision to approve the synthetic as an equivalent in July of 2020, it made the same point.
"The world currently relies on a single source of lysate, the horseshoe crab family," the European Pharmacopoeia told the press. The approval was "a significant step towards alleviating the need for animal resources."
As Europe took steps, the U.S. Pharmacopeia appeared stalled. In 2020, it published a statement defending its expert committee's decision to wait for more evidence. The horseshoe crab-derived product had kept American patients safe for 30 years, the group said, so it was reasonable to hold on until more data supported the alternatives. Two years later, after almost no public updates on its progress, the Pharmacopeia suddenly dismissed everyone on the committee.
Jaap Venema, the Pharmacopeia's Chief Science Officer, said that considering the synthetic is a priority for the 20 new members that started to meet in 2023. But as it was with the experts those people replaced, the pace they move at is up to them. As of June, there were no upcoming deadlines or votes scheduled, the Pharmacopeia confirmed to NPR.
It's also up to pharmaceutical companies to determine whether and when they want to switch to using synthetic tests before the U.S. Pharmacopeia takes more action, like Eli Lilly did. This year, Roche Pharmaceuticals began using the synthetic in its manufacturing processes and has started preparing to test some of its medicines with it, too.
"Ultimately, patient safety is our number one priority," said Lindsey Silva, a senior scientist involved with the project. "We've been able to confirm that it's fit for its intended use and safe for patients."
Still, most pharmaceutical companies continue using the tests that require horseshoe crabs to be bled alive. Conditions generally evolve faster for species that are complex and mammalian like humans, said Rich Gorman, the researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. But the crabs underpin the global pharmaceutical industry. He believes the best way to improve their situation – and that of the birds that depend on them – is to have more open debate about the consequences of how they're used.
"It remains this really shadowy area," Gorman said. "For the horseshoe crab, it is time to begin to think about the welfare implications of this a lot more openly and honestly."
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