It IS Happening Here

the Law and the Battle to Save America. And in this book, Dahlia lays out a history of women and the law, going back to a time and are not too distant history where women had no rights in this country. That's right, And I'm not just talking about abortion. I'm also talking about financial independence. I'm also talking about workplace independence.

I'm also talking about bodily autonomy. And what Dahlia talks about and our interview gets into is also the correlations that we need to be drawing between what is happening right now on the streets of Iran being led by women and pushing back against an oppressive regime that wants to dictate how they look, where they go, what they wear, and what is happening with the Christo fascist Republican movement

in the United States. We cannot sit here in the US and clutch our pearls and look at Iran and say, oh, those poor women solidarity and throw up at this and think that what is happening, what has happened over the last forty plus years in Iran, can't happen or isn't

happening in the United States right now. And I will also talk about the upcoming Supreme Court docket and all of the major cases that are on there, from affirmative action to voting rights, and to more cases with regard to bodily autonomy, and how one decision at a time, this Supreme Court is set to disrupt, ruin crumble, destroy our democracy and women's bodily autonomy and black people's ability

to you know, access the American dream. So, folks, when we look at these other countries and we see them pushing back in revolution against these regimes, understand that authoritarian control doesn't always come in rolling down the street with tanks and in military uniform. It doesn't always come with the assassination right of said shah or said leader or dictator. No, it also comes in the form of dictators that are

wearing black robes. It also comes in the form of a Republican Party that decides that they no longer believe in the constitution, they no longer believe in the rule of law, and they no longer believe in the ability of the people to decide how they want to live. We are supposed to be a government that is for

and by the people of these United States. And what the Republican Party is telling us, and has been telling us for the last several fucking decades and now has a megaphone, is that fuck you and your laws, fuck you and your civil liberties, fuck you and your bodily autonomy. Right, I'm going to put you back in your place. Women, black people, queer people, disabled people, right, one decision at a time. And I'm telling you right now, I ain't going out like that, and I know many of you

that listen to wokaf aren't either. So pay attention, pay attention to what we are seeing in Iran. Pay attention to how women are leading the fight and the pushback against authoritarianism. And I've been saying this, if folks, if you've been listening to this show since twenty sixteen when I launched it that things in America are going to

get bloodier before they get better. And I say that not from a place of hyperbole, not from a place of joy, but from a place of reality that I need all of us to grasp on too, so that we are not caught off guard and surprised, as apparently everyone was in June when the Republican Party did exactly what it was that they have been saying that they would do for forty plus years, which was rolled back Rovie Wade. When people show you who the fuck they are,

believe them. And it's time that the American people show the christto fascist Republican movement who the fuck we are. Coming up next, my conversation with my friend Dahlia Lithwick. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from

the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to tackle current topics from gentrification to gun laws, and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday, Folks. I am very excited to welcome to wok F Daily my fellow nerd Avenger Dahlia Lithwick, who is the author of the new book Lady Justice, Women, The Law and the

Battle to Save America. Dahlia, I think that what is really fascinating and the perfect timing of your book is that it comes at a time when, for the first time in American history, since women have actually actualized themselves as full and complete citizens, that we are seeing an roll back in rights and protections for women that we have not seen since prior to I would say, nineteen

seventy four. What is also interesting about your book is that it takes us through this history of women in law, bringing us back to a not too distant future that I think that I'm so grateful for you in bringing it to the forefront the way that women have been treated. Right, women who are who were going in front of the court and needing to wear skirts, who are representatives in our Senate and in the House of representatives needing and being told too that they had to wear skirts on

the floor. This is but just forty some odd years ago that we understand that women didn't have the right to have a credit card without without the authority of a husband or a father. That was in the nineteen seventies in these United States. And I bring this up because while we are watching our rights being rolled back in this country, we're also watching at the same time a historic women led revolution that is happening in Iran.

And we always love in America to point the finger at the Middle East and countries and say, oh, look at them, that could never be as morality police. That's crazy. While they're being forced to wear he jobs, we're being forced to give birth. So talk to us about how your book is dropping at a time when women are being pushed back into a class of citizenship that modern day women have only ever read about. Yeah. I mean, first of all, Danielle, thank you for having me on.

I've been actually really psyched to talk about you because I feel like in our conversations you're one of the only people who just relentlessly says like, if you choose to forget the past, you don't know what's coming in the future. And I think, like, if you don't have that on a T shirt, you should, because I think you have really been a clarion voice of and you make this point in your piece that this week about iron.

My husband and I are obsessed with photos of Iranian women from the seventies in their like bell bottoms and their wedge heels and their T shirts because you can't look at that and look at where we are today and not understand this isn't like past is prologue. Is past is exactly where we think we are irrevocably now that we're going to forever and ever live in a

world of equality and rights and dignity. And then fast forward a couple decades and you know, women are, as you note, being killed for not wearing a head scarf appropriately by the quote unquote morality police. And so I think the refusal to not just look at what has happened in the past, like you say, you know, ask your grandmother if she had a credit card in her name, Ask her if her mother had a credit card in

her name. Ask if you know somebody raped their wife that they knew, if that could be charged as rape. It could not. And you know, I always say to people, you know, Ruth pader Ginsburg, We like to think she's sort of sprung fully form out of the ether. Ruth pader Ginsburgh had to hide her pregnancy or she would have been fired. And that wasn't the nineteen twenties. And

so you're exactly right, it's recent past. And I think that the two points that you're making that are both really important is that to be a historic about any of this is to fail to understand how much we had to claw equality and equal protection and dignity out of the kind of rock face of a constitution that

was blind to it. But the second point, and it's just as important, is that to refuse to look around the world and see what is happening in the name of sort of religious zelotry and ethnonationalism and just rampant religious misogyny, and to say that can't touch us because we live on this island of you know, irrevocable forward progress is just insane. And so I think both of those points are descriptively really important. One, history is not

ancient in many many ways, it's coming back. But also to think that oh, just because it happened in Iran. That women don't wear bell bottoms anymore doesn't mean it can happen here. Is it's just shortsighted to the point

of myopic and dangerous. You know. It's what I find always so troubling, particularly in America, is our inability to look at other countries and to consider our own futures as being predicated by what we're seeing, right, And that is why I wrote the piece about why American women need to pay attention to what is happening in Iran,

because it's only forty some odd years. It's forty six years, you know, forty I think it's like forty two years since the Islamic Republic took over, right Iran, And in that four decades, right, that they have seen a complete and total reversal and how women are allowed to present and show up in that country. And we have always looked down, I believe, in America, at other nations and said, look how backwards they are. Oh, the women in Saudi

Arabia just got the resentability to be able to drive. Well, look like you're saying, talk to your own grandmothers, who in there, your own grandmothers, Talk to your own mothers about how old they were when they were able to get a credit card. Right, that was in nineteen seventy four. Law, I believe that was passed in the United States. And so I want you to talk about why DABS. The DABS decision in June is the canary in the coal mine. It isn't. It isn't the end all be all. It

is actually the beginning of how America. And I believe it won't take forty years, right. I believe that it can take to tend or less than that for us to get to a place pre nineteen seventy four. Yeah,

I mean, I think, you know, what's the cliche. I mean, these things happen slowly and then quickly, and I think that we are caught up in the slow build of decades after casey of one form of attack on reproductive rights, which was essentially, we're going to use this pretext of caring about women and we want them to make good decisions.

And as long as the clinics, you know, have them come back for two consults, and as long as they have read these completely fact free warnings about the correlation between suicidal ideation abortion, like, we just want them to be safe and happy. And that was decades, right, those trap laws. You know, we just have to have wider corridors,

and we have to have doctors with admitting privileges. And then in a less than a year, right, we see that when the opportunity comes to actually reverse row, we're seeing like, no, actually, what we want is women to be incubators. We don't actually care about them making good decisions because we don't want them to make decisions at all.

And because I think we haven't processed that turn and how quickly it happened, you still hear all this nonsense from states that are like, no, we care about maternal health, we care about fetal health. You know, thank you, Justice Barrett. We're just going to force women to carry it to term, which is much much more dangerous than terminating. But it's okay because they're going to drop the babies off at

fire stations. And all of this fake solicitude for maternal health has just I think crumbled away in the span of the summer. Right, And so you are exactly right, and I know you and I talk about this in other contexts. We're now not talking about abortion. We're talking about miscarriages. We're talking about fetal endangerment. We're talking about

putting medication abortion in the mail. We're talking about women in Alabama who are stuck in jail who cannot get out because the state has determined they will endanger their children with drug use. Right, all of that just happened. And by the way, a lot of that has been happening before, Dubs. It's just that it happened principally to women of color and to poor women. All of that is happening. And you know, as you said, there's no talk of oh, we were lying when we said leave

it to the states. What we mean is federal abortion ban. Also, we're now just openly hearing about going after contracept next. You know, the whole checklist that Justice Thomas laid out in his concurrence in jobs, you know, which is LGBTQ rights and all other you know, determinants of what is private conduct and family conduct. All of that is on

the table. And so to suggest that you know the same people who not four years ago we're telling us in whole Women's Health that really the only reason we needed wide corridors to push a gurney through in a clinic was so that women would be healthy and safe, but that you know, what we really wanted was the primacy of their health and their baby's health, and to see that just scuppered. And now it's like we don't care because we just want them to be incubators. And

if they die, they die. If they have to go septic before we treat them, so be it. If they have to, you know, have babies that are going to live for a few moments, suffer terribly and die, so be it. And so I think in some sense, this isn't another one of those things where if you didn't know this was coming, you weren't watching what was happening in Oklahoma. To Brittany Poola, you know, if you didn't

see this coming, you weren't watching what's been happening. You know, people like Dorothy Roberts have been writing about this for decades. And you know, as I said, I think because this was coming principally for black and brown women and poor women, a lot of other people were shocked when Dubbs sort of sprawled out for us that your very parenting decisions

are now going to be criminalized. And it happened, and I think we haven't processed it in some I would say in no small measure, because we don't want to reckon with the history of slavery and how women and black women's bodies have been treated ever since. Indisputaful with Doctor Rashi Ricci is one of the latest shows on the TYT network and also the fastest growing news show

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a new episode. You know, and you mentioned slavery, and I'm also thinking, you know, not too recently during the Trump administration, the sterilization of undocumented women, which we don't talk about right, which has happened, by the way, the sterilization of undocumented women under both Democrats and Republicans, might I mention, and so you know, there has been Dahlia, an unrelenting war against women in this country for decades.

And my question is we understand that. But white women that have been voting with Donald Trump and have been voting with the Republican Party for the entirety of their voting age. The numbers went up from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty in terms of who was showing out for Donald Trump. How do you think that white women reconcile the war that has been on their autonomy and them still vote alongside their husbands and their fathers. I mean, I think the short, depressing answer is a failure to

connect the dots. I think it is to look at this as abortion and isolation and all the ways that many privileged white women have told themselves for decades that

this is not their problem. This is you know, if you are, you know, using abortions, birth control, you know all the stereotypes about you know, the kinds of women who get abortions and refusing, I think to open the aperture and say, oh wait, you know, my own miscarriage could now be subject to investigation and criminal charges because the state has determined that I wasn't mischarging, I wasn't

in fact having a miscarriage, I was aborting. So I think that all of that kind of judgmental narrow mindedness around reproductive freedom has been kind of blasted open. And I think when you you start to hear the kinds of stories we're hearing this summer, which, by the way, as you say, has been going on for years. You know, ten year old rape victim who has to cross state lines. You know, women being forced to carry a non viable fetus and leave the state because she can't terminate in

the state. You know this is familiar. Right now, We're not talking about abortion. Now, we're talking about miscarriage, which one pregnancy in four. Now we're talking about rape, which, as you always point out, you know, statistically one woman in four. Now we're talking about things that I think, even if you are utterly mired in the sort of judgmental narrow minded you know, abortion is something that only you know, loose women who aren't careful need to access.

You're in a new world now, and so as absolutely awful as it is that these stories of women who are left to bleed out until they are in critical condition and the hospital's lawyers says, okay, now you can treat her. Every one of us either had something like that happen or no, somebody who's had something like that happen. And so the depressing I think answer to your depressing question is a total failure of empathy and imagination, right, the total failure of this could have happened to me.

Oh wait, it did happen to me. You know, I had one of those miscarriages that had to be handled with a DNC that I think at this point, you know, some state actor could certainly have looked at what I was doing. And so I think a lot of people who said this is a problem for black women in Alabama are now looking around and saying, oh wait, this is when I send my child to college. This is a problem for them too. And I hate that that's

the answer. Failure of empathy, failure of imagination, failure to understand that you don't know what you don't know. But I think that's the answer. But the upside I really do think, Danielle, is that people are starting to see that they don't know what they don't know. And by the way, this isn't just loose women who are using

abortion as birth control. You know, I want to even go a step further with this with regard to your they don't know what they don't know, because I often say on this show that public education is the greatest perpetuator of white supremacy and also of patriarchy. And I say this because simple health education, sex education, reproductive education comprehensive would help us understand childbirth, would help us understand

a woman's body, would help us understand the burden of labor. Right, you had members of Congress and state legislatures, men who have no idea how a woman's body works, right, has no idea, Oh, just have the baby and drop it off, as if pregnancy, nine months of growing a new human being inside of you is somehow easy on the body. And so I wonder, you know, And I bring this up because there are only three women in the South Carolina Legislature, and now all of a sudden they're seeing

in a different tune. They've been voting quote unquote pro life until recently where one of them gave this floor speech about how disappointed she was with her male colleagues for not considering rape and incest and the well being and the welfare of of a woman of the mother, and then says she's voting against this legislation and oh, we need more comprehensive sex education. I said, wait, what,

where have the hell have you been? So I want you to talk about how these things go hand in hand, how we see these attacks on education, how we see these attacks on women, attacks on voting. And when you say we don't know what we don't know, it's strategic. I mean, you know, I'm going to land the place you and I always land, which is it's the culture, right.

I mean, we have this pathetic, pathetic cultural conversation around women and childbirth in which every single movie ends with like, you know, a dewey faced, blonde woman going and then the baby pops out and it's six months old, and you know, her handsome, strapping partner is like, and now we'll take it to a restaurant. You know, Like it's so insane that any ring Carmone has written so gorgeously about, Like, actually, here's what childbirth is like, it's not, in fact how

Hallmark movies end. And I think part of it is just an massively impoverished cultural conversation. I you know, I start the book the first chapter. There's two things in the book that I think maybe answer some of this. You know, when the court heard oral argument in Griswold versus Connecticut, it was all men and they were so

freaked out. This is the case that was raised the issue of whether you could use contraception in the privacy of a marriage, and the justices themselves, all men, were so freaked out Danielle about talking about this that they wouldn't name the devices. And so you go back and you read it and it's like a slip inside slide, like Abbott and Costello comedy routine, where they're like, oh, these devices and they you don't have to name them, and they're all yucking it up, and it's like, if

you can't name it, don't regulate it. Don't because this makes you uncomfortable. Don't. Don't. You don't get to set the rules. And so I think that's like part of the problem is that we're so squeamish and we're so prudish and we're so puritanical that we don't want to talk about it, but we seemingly still want to regulate it. And I think we haven't moved that far from the

days of Griswold, where you know, there are legislators. I mean, people are saying things like, but how can you pee with a tampon in Like again, that's not you know, if you don't know how women's bodies work, like, don't sit down and let doctors do their jobs. And so that's part of it. The other thing that I think is just really essential and part of the answer to this, is that so much of this stuff is bound up

in slavery. So much of this is bound up in sort of the idea of women and their bodies as economic you know, producers of units of future slavery, children taken away from their parents, fathers and mothers, separated, the idea that your body belongs to a white man who can rape you. It's impunity, who can separate you from

your children with impunity? And you know, I know you've heard me bang on about this, but the fourteenth Amendment was drafted to fix that because there was nothing else in the Constitution that would fix the idea that women could be used that way, and so which is why you know, when you hear during Contunja Brown Jackson's hearings, you know, Republican senators, including Marsha Blackbird, just being like, there's nothing about bodily autonomy and privacy in the Constitution.

There is, It's right there, and it was meant to be a curative for the obscene ways in which black women's bodies were utterly, utterly used at the whim of white men. And we've erased that history. You know, if we want to go through all the history, we don't want don't want to talk about. I didn't learn that,

by the way, in law school, to be clear. And if you erase all the history, then it's not a surprise that, like we are still living in the vestiges of a time when Justice Alito happily writes the Dab's opinion citing to the law of that moment, Dalia just you know, quickly, one, folks, everybody needs to pick up Lady Justice, women, the law and the battle to save America, which is out now. We have a new term for the Supreme Court that is coming up. The last term

gave America devastating blows. It was just nauseating. I didn't even want to be on Twitter between you, between Gentab, between Ellie miss Stall, between Joyce, Like I was just please stop. What can we expect at a time when our belief in the system of the Supreme Court is at an all time low? That no one we we I mean, their their approval ratings are in the toilet, not like they have to care because they're sitting on there until they're dead, right or retire. So what can

we expect and what recourse, if any, do the people have? Yeah, it's interesting. We're already seeing I mean, the term starts the first Monday of October, and we're already seeing a lot of conservative commentators try to suggest that, oh, we're going to take the temperature down this year. There's nothing on the docket that's nearly as you know, high profile as Dabbs. And you know, first of all, Dobbs wasn't the only case last year. As you said, the Court

massively expanded gun rights. The Court tried to essentially kneecap the EPA and regulatory agencies. The Court allowed religion to enter the public sphere in a series of cases that is shocking. Almost none of that got surfaced because we're

also busy reeling from Dubbs. Last term was, as you say, catastrophic in so many ways, and now we're heading into a term that really will first of all, see I think the demise of affirmative action and higher education that's already docketed, a bunch of voting rights cases that will probably do away with whatever's left of the Voting Rights Act. After the Court took you know, one whack at it in Shelby County and then another whack of it at

it in Bernovich. Now there's going to be another opportunity to pretty much make the Voting Rights Act utterly toothless. We have an Indian Child Welfare Act case that folks should really really pay attention to because it is, as we've been saying throughout this entire conversation, an effort to use surp tribal prerogatives their ability to keep families together, which is supposed to be a value, a constitutional value. And then you know the voting rights cases that are

really really chilling. Chief among them this you know Morvie Harper case, which is a case that it uses a made up, prefab notion of independent state legislature theory to hand all plenary power over elections to state legislatures. And this is a whole different show, and I'm happy to come back when it's argued. But it's the most important

case nobody's talking about. And the best way to describe it, I think I've said this to you before, is that the coup that John Eastman tried to pull in twenty twenty that judges laughed out of court, the notion that a state legislature could just say, like, h, whatever the legislature decides about this election is unreviewed by state courts. It is uncheckable by the governor that is coming in

black robes. And if the court says it's fine, then the twenty twenty four election is in the hands of legislatures in a way that John Eastman and Donald Trump and Jeffrey Clark were begging, begging state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Georgia to do in the twenty twenty election. Jeff, send your own electures, elector nobody can do anything that's coming. And it seems technical, it's really not technical. It is the most shocking power grab born of nothing. No doctrine

and it's coming. And if the term kind of plays out the way last term does, I'm sorry. If the term plays out the way last term did. This is a court that's not I think, inclined to pump the brakes on any of those areas. I tell you what this spells to me. Dahlia is an impending revolution and not I and I do not say that lightly. I have, but I have been saying this since twenty sixteen, that things in this country will get bloodier before they get better.

We cannot look at Iran with eyes that say, oh, poor them, because we are them. And this is where this country is headed. And it isn't an Islamic republic. It isn't the fear of foreign terrorists. It is the white supremist Christo fascists Republican party that is establishing their coup and putting them in black robes. Dalia Lithwick, thank you so much for making the time to join Woke

f We appreciate you your writing, your work all the time. Folks. Again, the book is Lady Justice, Women, The Law and the Battle to Save America on stands on Amazon everywhere you buy your books. Now, that is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke f as always Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fun. Get a behind the scenes look at Comedy Central's The Daily Show on Beyond the Scenes, an original podcast from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Every week, host Roy Wood Junior goes deeper with the notable guests and experts from the Emmy Award winning series. Together, they use comedy to a current topics from gentrification to gun laws, and take a closer look at how and why these topics matter. Listen to Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noa on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Tuesday.