The Daily Beast Podcast - Author of Shocking Post-Roe Rape Study Details ‘Truly Horrifying’ Numbers

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, Samuel Dickman, the medical director at Planned Parenthood Montana, joins us to unpack a jarring new study showing the dramatic increase in pregnancies related to rape after the banning of Roe v Wade. Plus! Author Andrew C. McKevitt talks about his new book, “Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current Campbell News conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully

even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another episode of the New Abnormal. We have such a great show for you today. John D. Winter's endowed professor of history at Louisiana Tech University, Drew McIbbott is here to tell us all about his new book, Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. Then Samuel Dickman, the medical director at Planned Parenthood, Montana, joins us to unpack the jarring new study of the dramatic increase in pregnancies really into rape after the banning of Roe versus Wade.

But first, let's have some fun. On the last episode of this year, new abnormal, I was all excited because we got to talk a little bit about sports because of the right-wing insanity over Taylor Swift dating Kansas City Chief Tide-end, Travis Kelsey. And some good news, we're going to do it again. And as a sign of just how insane this story is, I'm going to turn it over to Daniel. Oh, Jesus. You know, it's a sign not only of how crazy the story is, but that I actually care. That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

So here's the thing. The right wing has gone full fucking meltdown mode over the possibility that Taylor Swift is in the middle of the Super Bowl going to endorse Joe Biden and that if the chiefs win, then they're going to end up, I guess, on a float traveling from state to state endorsing Biden and getting thousands and thousands of people registered to vote, which is what Taylor Swift actually did at one of her concerts. And they're terrified of that. So much so that Donald Trump, not ever to be outdone by anyone being thrust into the spotlight or taking up more airtime on Fox has said that he in private is much more popular than Taylor Swift.

Now, here's what I will say. I don't love Taylor Swift. I don't like her music. And I don't love the comparisons to Beyonce. That being said, she don't have to be for me. But what I do know is that she's a hell of a lot more fucking popular than Donald Trump. Okay. and that if there were a toe-to-to-matchup popularity contest in high school, which is where Donald Trump lives, she would be the prom queen. He would not. He should be embarrassed, but you can't embarrass the devil, apparently. But I had no stake, Andy, in this game, in this Super Bowl game. I was just going to eat the bad food and watch for entertainment purposes and wait for Usher to perform. But now I will absolutely do.

Whatever it takes, if it takes me going into meditation, sage, you know, calling upon the ancestors for the chiefs to win, I will do that if it will have the meltdown effect that I hope takes place in Maga world. I'm sort of rooting for the 49ers, which is nothing against the chiefs. Neither one of them are my team. But they're both kind of likable teams. But yeah, I don't know, man, because now it's like, I'm sort of with you here. Like, I want the Chiefs to win just because of what it will do to Maga World. I both hate that and love that. So, I don't know.

I can't really decide there. I'm sort of like with you. Taylor Swift is not for me. And that's fine. Not all music is for everybody. And that's okay. Yeah. And that's completely okay.

She's no Olivia Rodriguez is all I will say. Oh, yeah. Wow. About the matter. I have nothing against Taylor Swift, never have. our producer at Jesse Cannon for any of these Swifties listening out there. Jesus Christ. Just for the record, this has made me on the side of the Swifties of the Swiftie War.

That's how bad it's gotten. Look at Taylor Swift bringing the world together. Taylor for president. Still team Maddie Healy, though, sorry. Oh, God. Gross. But look, the amazing thing about this is that Taylor Swift was named Times Person of the Year for last year, 2023.

and this apparently enraged Trump with all this shit being spewed about her and the conspiracy theories and that she's a Pentagon Siyop, which again, I think I said this last time, I don't even understand. And I don't care to. It's such a bizarre turn for the right wing to be sort of focusing on. I'm now starting to see in some corners of right wing land some pushback on this and some people who are actually saying, this is making us look a little crazy. This, this is making the look like. Well, that's the thing.

This is coming from people like Matt Walsh, who routinely talk about how 16-year-old is an ideal age for a wife. So you know shit has gone bad when the crazies are starting to worry that this is making them look crazy. God. Okay. So we can move on to like, and maybe, maybe we, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. after the Super Bowl, we'll never talk about this again. God only hopes. So let's move on more important

things, which is the fact that the Republicans plan of not ever coming to the table with any policy measures that are going to better the lives of the American people that are going to solve any of our big problems and issues, one of their plans is actually working, which is to blame Biden for the border. And here's the thing is that when you listen to experts in immigration. You know, I consistently hear that this very quote-unquote complicated issue is actually really not that complicated. And to me, what Republicans are showing is that they could absolutely have a bipartisan deal on this and one was in the works. Donald Trump said, no, I need to use

this as a talking point for my campaign. So we need to make the country crumble into shit or at least the perception thereof so that I can come in and save the day. That's what needs to happen. And I'm wondering, I'm like, oh, do you have Steve Bannon selling bricks again? Like, is that going to save us? Like, what are you offering? But they don't offer anything but chaos at the whim of Donald Trump. And so here we are. Immigration has been broken for, I don't know how many decades. And just the can has been kicked down the road from administration to administration, regardless of party. So how this is, are laying this at the feet of Biden right now when it's their Republican governors who are human trafficking and have yet to be charged by the Department Justice in my humble opinion because

they should be, Abbott looking at you, little boots, I'm looking at you. But, you know, here we are. So I don't know. I don't know how Biden uses this or turns the beat around on this conversation. Yeah, we talk a lot about on this podcast about how there are no more quiet parts. And you've got Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson out there who openly saying that they are not going to vote for this border bill because Donald Trump told them not to because Donald Trump doesn't want there to be a border bill because he wants to run on this issue. And Mike Johnson is not the only one. You know, we've been hearing this for the last week or a couple of weeks from various Republicans, but usually their names aren't attached to it.

And there's a couple things here. One, this border bill sucks. So let's get that straight. This border bill gives Republicans pretty much everything they fucking want. It gives President Biden the authority to shut down the southern border. It provides no pathway to citizenship for dreamers. It is not at all what the kind of border bill you would want from Democrats. So there's that.

But setting aside that Democrats are being off on the. this too. The fact I want to get at is that this bill gives Republicans almost everything they want, and they still won't vote for it because they want to run on a quote unquote border crisis. So that's where you get into this, just how awful of a human being are you. And I just want to tangentially throw in, because this is not about the border, and we can, we should get back to that. But there's a bill that was just passed by the House to expand the child tax credit. And it now goes to the Senate. As the Washington Post reports, nonpartisan estimates say that this bill would take 400,000 children out of poverty. Chuck Grassley has said that he is not in favor of passing this bill because,

quote, I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good and may allow checks before the election, in other words, checks to be sent out to people, means that he can be reelected. This is a U.S. Senator who is blatantly saying that, oh, I would rather 400,000 children stay in poverty who we could help lift out of poverty because it makes President Biden look good. I mean, Andy, don't they have bootstraps? Let them pull themselves up. Well, again, the Republican boots are so little. So small. So I guess the straps, you can't really lift yourself up with them. I don't know. Maybe Republicans just want to avoid the words boot and lids.

lift in the same sense at this point. And maybe that's why they're doing this. But, but again, now to get back to the border, I guess, this is what we're seeing from the Republican Party now. And look, politics is always a part of politics, duh, but it's usually not this blatant. And it's usually they come up with some, you know, bullshit reason why they're not going to vote for something when the actual reason is, oh, this might help the other party.

The fact that they are willing to go out and openly say this now, you know, and openly say this now is, I think, just a testimony to how deeply we have fallen. Yeah. Look, there have been, and I think that we've talked about it on the show, too, is that, you know, particularly as it pertains to the border, up in Chicago, there are a group of black Democrats who are suing the city for the fact that they are, have miraculously come up with funds for the migrant crisis, folks that are being, again, trafficked from places like Texas to Chicago, but these people are suing because the city is coming up with money for this,

you know, for this influx, money that they have denied black and brown communities for decades. And so I think that there is where you will really see a rub in communities of color, particularly as it pertains to the border crisis and Biden, when you are seeing their all of a sudden is all of this money, as people are seeing, and they're like, where is the money that we've been lobbying for, that we've been asking for, for our public schools, for health care, for aftercare, all of these, you know, different community measures that would change people's lives. Not to negate, but what we have is that there is this crab in a barrel mentality where you are going to see communities go up that would normally be, you know, yes, bring me

those that are marginalized and are in need of care, recognizing that they're not getting what they need, so why should those people receive? And they just came here. That, that to me, is going to be an issue that this administration is going to need to reckon with. Whether or not the tactics that the Republicans are using by just, you know, throwing up their hands and giving up on doing their actual fucking jobs, there are talking points that they can use there. But the fact that people in communities are actually being frustrated by what they are seeing as this influx of money when they have been asking for care, I think is going to be a larger sticking point. Yeah, for sure. There are arguments that can be made for certain things regarding the border

and regarding immigration and regarding what to do. The fact of the matter is the Republicans don't want to make them because they want to be able to run on it. I remember, I guess, would have been like seven, eight years ago when I was doing Essie Cupp Show on HLN, on headline news. She used to always say that we're never going to solve the border crisis because both parties don't really have an interest in solving it because they want to keep running on it. I don't know.

At the time, I was like, ah, I think that's going a little too far. And, you know, I think she was right, though. I do think it's much more of a Republican issue in the sense of them not wanting to solve it or at the very least not wanting to solve it while there's a Democratic president. But then I look at Eric Adams, the mayor here in New York, talks about how, oh, we have to cut, you know, we have so many budget problems because of all these migrants that are being sent here from, you know, by Greg Abbott and Rhonda Santis. And so we have to cut the libraries and all of that.

But he somehow manages to find money to continually throw at the NYPD. And it's like there are Democrats who will take any excuse it feels like to use a crisis to do things that they want to do. And so obviously, yes, I feel sympathy with the people that you mentioned in Chicago who are looking around going, you know, hey, you didn't have that money when we wanted it, which by the way, we still do and still need. But somehow you're finding it here. So there's so much politics being played with this issue. And meanwhile, what we're talking about here is people's lives. And we're talking about people. We're not talking about people who, you know, no matter how much the right desperately wants to spin it this way, we're not talking about people who want to. We're not talking about people who want to. come over here and sell fentanyl to your kids. We're talking about people who want to come over here because the place they live is very dangerous or their lives are not good there, regardless of whether or not it's dangerous. And they want to make a better life for themselves. And that's supposed to be what this country is about. But we found out a lot in the last 10 years about the difference between what this country is supposed to be about and what it actually is.

A hundred percent. And you know, the funny thing is, too, that when you say like, oh, they're not coming here to like sell fentanyl, but you know, the Sackler family who actually was selling opioids to your families and addicted millions of Americans to their drugs, guess what? Well, Republicans made sure to vote so that those type of people wouldn't be caught up in criminal cases or what have you and be totally absolved of their wrongdoing. But when I think about immigration and I always say to us, we need to ask ourselves, what is the United States, role in disrupting the countries that these people are coming from? What has been the United States role in moving around different players in Central America and extracting and keeping countries

poor and in destitute conditions? Like, America has a role here. These things don't just happen inside of a vacuum. You know, in my mind, it's like you reap what you sow. Like, if you had invested in these places and did not look at them as just a means of extraction, then maybe people would be able to stay in their home, which I'm certain that if they had the opportunity to build a better life in their own countries, they actually would. Yeah, you think. Right. You think that people, like I just, when when I listen to Republicans talk about these human beings, I'm like, again, can you imagine, can you even fathom what would get you to leave your? your home with nothing more than a backpack and be on foot for hundreds of miles,

risking death in the desert, you know, in drowning, all of these different things to get to a country where you foresee being held at the border is better than where you came from? Like, we can't even fathom that. And so I plead with people to like look at this not by stats, not by the numbers, but by human beings that are being forced from their homes. Ask yourself what role the United States did in destroying where they were. Danielle, I cannot believe that you are insinuating that the United States has worked to destabilize Latin America for decades, if not a century or so. I just, I can't believe you would say something like that.

I know. I wish that I didn't read, you know. And, you know, along these same lines of Republicans, you know, bowing to Trump's will and not wanting to pass things that make Joe Biden maybe. look better with an election coming up. We've also got Donald Trump actually now taking credit for things that have happened during the Biden administration. He wrote on his dumbass truth social about how the fact that the stock market is doing incredibly well right now and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at, I believe, an all-time high. He wrote in all caps. I shouldn't even have to say that at this point, but, but, you know, I just, because you have to picture him yelling.

And typing with two fingers, I would imagine. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. Like two fat, big fingers. Yeah. Fat fingers, small hands, though. Let's not make fun of fat fingers here, Jesus. I did. Fair point, Jesse. Apologies to Jesse. Sorry, Jesse. He wrote, this is the Trump stock market because my polls against Biden are so good that investors are projecting that I will win and that will drive the market up. So to be clear, what he's saying here is that the stock market, which again is that has hit

an all-time high, that the stock market is rising, not because of anything that Joe Biden has done or, you know, that the American economy has been doing for the past couple years, but because investors are so sure that Trump is going to win in 2024 later this year, that they are putting that optimism into driving the market up. Look, we're used to this shit, whatever, but Joe Biden can't win if you're a Republican. The things that are good that are happening under him are not because of him. Good things that could happen under him won't happen because Republicans are going out of their way not to vote for them. Trump likes to yell that the system is rigged.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a mirror, buddy. Bravo. America is a nation with more guns than people. And as my next guest notes, this is a condition unprecedented in world history. Joining me now to explain how we got here is the John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. And the author of the fascinating new book, Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America. Andrew McKevitt. Drew, thanks for being here.

Andy, thank you so much. for having me. Absolutely. Okay. So here's why I thought this book was so interesting. When we talk about gun culture in America, we usually tell stories of our nation's founding, our westward expansion, etc. But you actually argue, and really persuasively, I might add, that it was during the Cold War that this culture really took root. This is not a story we usually hear, as I said, and I'm curious what led you to think of it this way. It's a question of numbers, right? And so I don't dispute, which many other historians have written about, that the United States was some kind of gun country in the 18th or the 19th century, right?

But what happens in 1945 is we start to see an incredible trajectory of guns stockpiling in the United States, right? So I begin the book by mentioning that in 1945, there were about 45 million guns in the United States, as best we can tell, as best we can count. And counting guns in the United States is kind of mystical art. The government by law can't even count guns in certain ways. we got about 45 million guns in 1945. Today, we're looking at about probably 450 million, right? So that's 10 times as many guns in 80 years, right? And we don't have 10 times as many people as we did in

1945. So how do we explain that? You know, the Second Amendment was there in 1945. It was already there. It was already there in 1791. So we can't say that it's the Second Amendment that is responsible for this tremendous growth in gun ownership or a tradition of gun owners. or hunting or anything like that. And so that's what drew my attention to the material world of guns, which is to say the gun capitalism and the stockpiling of guns, the demand for guns, the supply of guns, and thinking about the problem in that way. So when we talk about the Cold War, we're talking about post-war War II, which I bring up not to show off how smart I am and that I know my historical eras, because we're talking about a time when, as you point out, there was a ready

supply of weapons from war surplus, et cetera, and therefore these companies arose that wanted to sell these guns. And this is sort of the first linchpin of your thesis, at least in my mind, and one that starts in Helsinki, which I believe is in Finland, and a man named Sam Cummings. Yes, Sam Cummings, I think, is the unsung hero, for better or worse, of gun culture in the United States in the 20th century. I think he should be up there in the pantheon of gun figures. We know like Samuel Colt and and Oliver Winchester and so forth. Sam Cummings is the founder of a company called Interarms. By the end of the 1950s,

Interarms will be the world's largest private arms dealer. And the way Sam Cummings makes that money, the way Sam Cummings builds gun capitalism after the Second World War, is he draws on this supply in Europe of war surplus firearms. And he would go over there and he would throw down a suitcase full of cash and, you know, in a country like Finland and a defense ministry in Finland or, Italy or Spain. And he would say, you have $200,000.

Give me as many guns as you can. And these are countries that are happy to get rid of their guns. They don't need these guns anymore. These are guns left over from the Second World War. They're not going to go and distribute among their own populations. Many of them have laws preventing them from doing that. And so here's Sam Cummings bringing in cash and saying, I'll get rid of these guns for you. I'll take this problem off your hands.

And he builds a whole logistics network to get them to the United States, to clean them up, to put them on the consumer market. And the remarkable thing is how cheap they are. He's selling guns for as little as $10 each when, you know, an equivalent well-made hunting rifle by a company like Remington or Winchester or something like that would go for $150, $180. Right. So you walk into a gun store or a pawn shop or whatever and you see the $150 hunting rifle or

the $10 or the $10 surplus rifle. And if you're just getting into guns yourself, you're going to go for that $10 gun. And, you know, he builds a market in that way. builds a mass market. And that's, you know, part of the argument here is that I think in this supply of surplus weapons flooding into the country, these super cheap guns, we start to see the expansion of that market for $10 guns, right, including the gun that Lee Harvey Oswald would use to shoot John F. Kennedy, allegedly in 1930. Yes. So how did Cummings and how did gun companies in general, how did they pitch their products to Americans in the 1950s? I want to say that I use the

term, or I use the words, pitch and products, because one of the big points of your book that I really want to get into later is that in America, gun culture is really just consumer culture and gun politics is consumer politics. So how do you pitch guns to 1950s Cold War America? Yeah, so we're talking about a population that is prosperous and growing rapidly, economically, right? This is the post-war boom. We're talking about people with more leisure time, more expendable income. We're talking about people who are moving out to the suburbs and looking for recreation opportunities out in the woods out there.

And so Sam Cummings' pitch is, the world's gun bonanza, the world's gun bounty, is your prize for having won the war. And I am here to go overseas and collect that bounty and bring it home to you, the American consumer. I mean, this is almost quite literally verbatim what he says in his advertisements. They're short of extraordinary documents. I've got a couple of.

them in the book where he's just stuffing pages full of guns, dozens of guns. And you contrast that with older advertising from the traditional gun makers, where they're trying to emphasize tradition or family relationships, fathers and sons bonding over hunting, that sort of thing. Sam Cummings doesn't have time for any of that. He's putting a couple dozen guns on the page and he's saying, here are these really cheap guns. I went overseas. I got these. You as the victorious American, you are entitled to these guns. The world's bounty. is your reward for having won this war. And so his approach to selling guns is just abject consumerism. He's shameless about it. And he already has no shame when it comes to selling these guns and driving the prices down and encouraging people to stockpile.

And I think that's a real change in the nature of gun capitalism and gun marketing after the Second World War. So given that we're talking about consumer culture here, talk about how the gun industry adapts with the times and how it shifts its marketing strategy. as time moves forward from the 1950s, because it is really interesting the way you track how advertising and marketing how it does shift over time. Yeah, so the first thing the gun industry tries to do is they try to stop Sam Cummings. And so they actually enlist their congressmen, two of them, one from Connecticut, his name was Albert Morano, and then a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy. And they're going to put forward in Congress in 1958, a bill that would essentially stop Sam Cummings from importing hundreds of thousands of rifles every year.

And had it passed, it didn't pass, had it passed, it would have stopped the gun that came into the country in 1960 and eventually Oswald would use to kill Kennedy. So their first response is, we don't want to adapt. But Sam Cummings is saying over and over again, I'm expanding the market here and you all need to figure out how to adapt to this new world of surplus, of bounty, of just crass consumerism. And so by the 1960s, they kind of figure that out. And they really turn in the 1960s to handguns. That's where the market is going to shift.

It's also a lot of where a lot of the kind of regulatory attention turns in the 1960s as well. When we get the first federal initiatives to really do something about guns and gun violence in the 1960s, they're going to turn to handguns. And so more and more of these traditional gun manufacturers are going to be producing more and more handguns. They're going to be selling more and more handguns such that by 1968, I forget what the exact figure you're going. was, but we're talking about about half of all guns sold in the United States were handguns, and that's a dramatic increase over the decade before. And the thing that's driving that, and the thing that the gunmakers are really taking advantage of are a lot of the social and

political conflicts in the United States in the era, especially black uprisings in, you know, you can go as far back as 1964, in Harlem, 65, and Watts. But then it really accelerates in 1967 with Newark and Detroit in 1968 in the aftermath of King's murder. You have a hundred of more cities across the country that are burning. And gun companies see this as the opportunity to pitch self-defense. In 1967 and 68 is the first real major spike in gun sales we see in the post-war era, driven by that, especially that kind of white uncertainty about black uprisings, the idea that the government won't protect you. This is one of the great criticisms of Johnson for instance, that he's letting black populations burn down cities and you have no choice but to go out

and buy a gun to protect yourself. So the gunmakers are really going to take advantage of that market. And that's where we see the real turn toward the beginning of a turn towards self-defense for marketing firearms. And it works quite effectively. And then somehow we get from that to something you mentioned in the book, which is an ad by, I think it was Remington for an AR-15 that uses the phrase, was it, get your man card back? Yeah, consider your man-carb. hard reissued, right? So this becomes infamous because this is the phrase that the Sandy Hook families use to Sue Remington for irresponsible marketing for encouraging the kind of violence that led to the Sandy Hook killing in 2012. And so just a year or two ago, Remington or its new owners, they settled

for, they settled for $73 million as a consequence of that kind of marketing. Yeah, just unreal. Okay, so I want to drill down a little further on how gun culture is really consumer culture. And you say it's not just gun rights groups that look at it this way, but ultimately also how gun control groups deal with the issue. What do you mean by that? Well, so the gun control groups are born in the early 1970s. It's kind of a, there's a sort of weird pattern that emerges here. So in the 1960s, we get a whole bunch of federal and state level initiatives, but those are really driven by politicians. There isn't anything like a grassroots gun control movement until the aftermath of 1968.

We get the Gun Control Act of 1968, which is by and large seen as a, uh, uh, failure across the board, both by the gun rights organizations and the gun control organizations. And for the gun control organizations, the law didn't go far enough. It was too moderate. It was a compromise. In fact, the NRA helped write it. And so we get the emergence of these grassroots groups in the early 1970s for the first time. And they're focusing on the material reality of guns in the United States. I write about, for instance, the organization that eventually becomes the Brady campaign. It is founded by a woman named Laura Fermi. And Laura Fermi is the widow of Enrico Fermi of Manhattan Project fame.

And she turns her attention to guns in Chicago in the early 1970s. And her approach is it's abolitionist. It's we need to get rid of especially handguns for civilian ownership. And we need to focus on that material problem. We don't need to talk about rights. We don't need to talk about laws or build laws around that make it easier for people for so-called law-abiding citizens to own guns, because in the grand scheme of things, everyday civilians don't need to own guns. And this perspective of Hage comes out of her experience

in fascist Italy in the 1930s, seeing Europe march to war and fearing that a population armed for war, things could take a nasty turn in the United States in the 1970s. On the other hand, there's another group that emerges in Chicago in the 1970s that is thinking about guns as a consumer problem and thinking about the ways that the state has an obligation to regulate dangerous consumer goods. This is the committee for handgun control. They call themselves. It's a group of women on the north shore of Chicago. They describes themselves as housewives. They kind of use this identity as housewives rather strategically. It's their responsibility to keep the home safe from dangerous consumer products. Among those consumer products are guns and handguns specifically. So they actually,

they petition the newly created consumer product safety commission, which is created by a law in 1972, to ban handgun bullets as dangerous substances. And at first, the commission's like, we don't want to touch this. This is crazy. But, you know, this is a third rail of politics. You don't want to go near this. But a federal judge actually tells them they have to consider the petition. And they get a lot of attention over a few months in 1974.

But eventually, Congress is going to step in in the middle of 1974 and say, we have no intention. of anyone using the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a means of banning guns or banning handgun bullets. So it's off limits. So I thought it was really smart that this group thought, you know, let's take it. Let's look at this major social and political and cultural development in the United States in after World War II, the rise of this consumer society and think about how guns fit into it. But Congress steps in and says, you're not allowed to think about guns in that way. Guns are special.

Gun capitalism needs to be protected by the state. Yeah, it's really unreal how it was sort of decided that guns were like a protected class. And along those lines, you have a chapter in the book that's called the Cold War's Second Amendment. And in the, I guess it was the late 70s or so, groups like the NRA start sort of turning away from what might even be described as moderate positions or at least relatively so. And they become much more ideological. And again, you know, we're sold this story about how guns and America and in particular, the individual ownership of guns and America, how those two things have been intertwined since our founding. And as you said, there's some truth to that, but you really do a good job of pointing out that, like,

a lot of things in our history, the story that they are selling is in many ways of myth. And this is the story the NRA sells about itself that in the late 1970s, and often the story focuses on 1977. There's the NRA annual meeting. It's in Cincinnati. Sometimes it's called the revolt in Cincinnati. And there's a kind of, as you said, there's a sort of moderate leadership. in the organization, they're still committed to hunting and sports shooting. They're talking about

moving the headquarters of the organization out to Colorado Springs and moving away from political lobbying because many of them feel uncomfortable with the more aggressive political lobbying that the organization has started to do in the 1970s. The way the NRA tells the story is that a leadership of kind of hardliners committed to defending the Second Amendment took over the organization in 1977. and put it on a new trajectory where it would be the strongest defender of Second Amendment rights in the country. And that's not necessarily untrue, but I think it's missing a big part of the story, which is why that group of hardliners had adopted a hardline position to begin with and what influenced them. And so I went back and I looked at the 1960s.

A lot of these debates in these right-wing groups in the 1960s, there are all these grassroots groups popping up in 67 and 68, the ones I write of it. There's a big one that emerges in Oregon in 1967 that I write a lot about. They have more radical interpretations of the Second Amendment and of guns in American society. And I argue that they're very much influenced not necessarily by the founders and these kind of ideals of the militia men, but it's the Cold War. They're convinced that they need guns and that citizens ought to be armed because the Soviet Union is coming. And not only is the Soviet Union is coming, but the communists are already here. If you look at Detroit and Newark in 1967, those are communist-inspired uprisings, they would say.

The communists have infiltrated the black power movement, and they're the ones who are trying to overthrow America in this moment. And so we need to be armed. And the Second Amendment is the thing that guarantees our right to own firearms to protect, not just for self-defense, but to protect this country. And some of them go out of their way and say, this isn't about hunting. The NRA is lying to you when they say, this is about hunting and sport shooting. This is about the individual citizen soldier being part of that quote unquote well-regulated militia and being ready to fight the Soviets if they, you know, if they invade the United States or if they come out of Los Angeles or Detroit or whatever. And so I think a lot of the hardline turn of the 1970s is very much a reflection of really the sort of paranoid anti-communism on the far right in the 1960s. And so that Second Amendment, as we think about as this absolute inalienable right to own a firearm,

that really comes out of that kind of paranoid right fringe from the 1960s. And I don't think we've given that enough credence. No, absolutely not. It was absolutely fascinating to read about how, you know, what we think of as the Second Amendment today and the debates we have are not debates that have been here since the founding of the country, but they're much more recent. I feel kind of silly asking you this question. but toward the end of the book, you ask, is it possible to break the cycle of gun consumerism and violence?

So what's your answer to this very simple question? God, I don't know. I don't know what to do. Everyone asks me this question all the time. I don't know what to do. I think the recent turn in the gun control movement towards thinking about gun safety is really important. It's not just a kind of rhetorical, strategic turn, but it is in recognition that there are half a billion guns here. We're not going to control them.

but perhaps we can learn how to keep ourselves safe from them. I think that's the approach. How do we keep ourselves safe? How do we make ourselves safe from the bad decisions we made 50, 60, 70 years ago? The book is Gun Country, Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America by Andrew McKevitt. Drew, thank you so much for coming on. The book, like I said, it's just sort of endlessly fascinating and I learned so much

reading it. And I really appreciate you writing it and talking to me. Well, thank you so much, Andy. Thanks for having me. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal Dr. Samuel Dickman, who is a health service researcher and medical director at Planned Parenthood of Montana. And recently is one of the co-authors of an astounding study that has, I think, been ringing alarm bells about the amount of births due to rape that have occurred in the 14 states that have

since banned abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And what is remarkable, and we've talked about this on The New Abnormal before, is the number. Dr. Dickman, thank you so much for joining the New Abnormal. I don't think that I can do your study justice. So please tell us why you decided to study births that were a product of rape and what, I guess, took you back the most by your findings. Thank you, Danielle. And I just want to acknowledge that this is an incredibly troubling and depressing topic and,

you know, not right for everyone to listen to. But I also think it's really important. You know, I was an abortion doc in Texas. up until 2022. And I saw a number of patients during that time who would just spontaneously tell me, look, I'm here, I'm pregnant. I need an abortion. And I'm pregnant because I was raped.

And, you know, I wasn't asking patients that question. This is just something that some were volunteering to me. And I knew, you know, from talking with friends and colleagues who work in domestic violence work, that if I was seeing some of those patients who were just telling me, you know, outright, that was just the tip of the iceberg and that there were probably many more patients who didn't feel comfortable disclosing that to me, nor should they. And, you know, so I think when Texas banned all abortions after the Dobbs decision in 2022, I started wondering how common was that that people would have become pregnant as a result of rape.

And that was the start of this line of research was to try to figure out not just the patient in front of me, but, you know, what is the scope and scale of that enormous problem in states that have banned abortions. So what is extraordinary? And I, and again, you know, and I thank you for the caveat that you offered at the top that this is a really difficult topic to discuss. And I think that what drew my attention as it did so many, as I have watched you and listened to you, give a couple of interviews, is that the figure that came out of your study is 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies. And is that since the overturning of Roe v. Wade? What time frame are we looking at for this number, this extraordinary. figure that came out of your research? Yeah, I mean, the numbers is truly horrifying. And that's just during the time period since the Supreme Court's job decision. And that accounts for the fact that

some states basically banned all abortions right away and others in this group of 14 states passed those abortion bans more recently. So the estimate accounts for those different time periods. But We also estimate that more than half a million women and girls between the ages of 15 and 45 have been raped during that period in states with abortion bans. And, you know, these numbers are just, they're impossible to ignore. They reflect just how common sexual violence is in the United States and the fact that states are imposing policies that are not designed to protect survivors. In fact, they're doing the opposite.

And just so, you know, people understand is that your report is assessing the number of vaginal rapes of women between the ages of 15 and 45. And so I just want people to understand that when we're providing this number of 64,565, that those are people, those are children in cases, sisters and mothers that have already experienced horrific trauma. and are now living in states where they are being forced to birth the product of rape. And I want to give you an opportunity, Dr. Dickman, to tell us, like, where do, like, what happens to these women and girls? Danielle, I mean, I appreciate the question. I mean, it's a really hard one to answer. Honestly, part of the reason I do this research is because thinking about individual patients,

that I've seen who have been in this circumstance is almost too hard to think about. And doing research, putting statistics on it, allows us to get a better sense of scale. And I hope it doesn't distract from the real human tragedy of each and every one of these cases. To answer your question or try to answer it a little more specifically, right, for a survivor of rape who becomes pregnant in a state like Texas, they have no options for ending the pregnancy in-state from an in-state provider. Now, of course, some people who are seeking abortions are able to, you know, for example, order pills online or they're traveling out of state, you know, states like New Mexico, Colorado.

I mean, you know, I've moved to Montana and we see a lot of patients who are traveling from Idaho and North Dakota and Wyoming. That's an option for some people, but I'll just highlight, of course, that, you know, many survivors of rape and sexual assault are closely connected to the perpetrator. And it may not be possible for them to travel safely. They may need to try to obtain an abortion privately, secretly. And having to drive eight hours each way is simply impossible. I remember when I was working in Texas talking to a patient who was in the situation, Texas had passed to, you know, what they called a six-week ban on abortion. This patient was about 10 weeks into her

pregnancy. And when I told her, oh, well, you know, unfortunately, I mean, this was a conversation that I had to have with many patients at the time. I said, look, I can't do this abortion for you because Texas has passed this new law. And you would need to travel 600 miles to New Mexico to get an abortion. And how it was just, it was so clear that that wasn't going to happen. I mean, I might have might as well have been telling her to like, you know, I don't know. Fly to the moon. Yeah, exactly. It was just there was just no way.

And so, you know, fortunately, some people have been able, I mean, many people have been able to travel out of state. If you look at the numbers across the country, I mean, many people are getting abortions in states that have protected access, places like New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Montana. But I think the barriers for survivors of sexual violence and rape are even higher. I think about the word is not even hurdles or obstacles that are purposefully being put in place by white evangelical Christian men in power who want to control women's uteruses. And I think about the burdens that are being placed on women who no longer have control over their own body and their future in these states. And what I'm thinking about Dr. Dickman is the fact that they want to nationalize this.

So while you just said, if we look at the travel that is happening, women and people with uteruses are able to, you know, if again, you have the privilege of time, wealth, you know, to be able to take time off from work, have the money to be able to fly, the time to be able to drive in order to have an abortion, that if the 2024 election does not go. go the way of Biden and Democrats, then what you have laid out with your fellow researchers and doctors in this report, that number will look like what exactly, nationally, in your mind? I mean, I'm a physician and abortion, you know, the way my colleagues and I see it is just a critical part of medical care. And, you know, we're very troubled by the imposition by, you know, politicians into what ought to be a medical decision made by patients with their medical providers. The estimate that the CDC has is that 3.4 million women have experienced a rape-related pregnancy during their lifetime. 3.4 million. And some choose to continue those pregnancies. Many choose

abortion if they have that option. So the prospect of a national abortion ban would be just an enormous setback for women and pregnant people and just the country. I mean, this is a fundamentally important right. Again, it's almost too hard to contemplate. And I'm wondering, you know, again, I know that you're a doctor and not, you know, a politician, not a democratic, you know, messenger. However, I wonder if you think that the way that we have been talking about abortion

in this country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade is right. In your mind, do you think that we are getting to the crux of the importance of this medical necessity? Do we talk about it in the right way so that people understand all of the different ramifications and all of the different ways that abortions are used and are necessary? Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, a good question, Danielle. There's a real push to point out that most abortions are actually not for survivors of rape. They're not for people whose fetus has a life-limiting anomaly. Most abortions happen because someone is pregnant and they are not ready to have a child. And there are so many reasons for that. That's really important to highlight is that we can't just rely on the kind of

most tragic stories of rape or fetal anomalies. Well, at the same time, I wouldn't want to lose, you know, the incredibly powerful emotion that I think many people have when they hear about someone who became pregnant as a result of rape. And the way I talk about abortion is, it's my job, or at least it's part of my job. I'm also a primary care physician. It's an incredibly valuable service, and I know that because that's what my patients tell me. And I think the more we can acknowledge

that it's a critically important service that so many people have benefited from and hopefully will continue to benefit from the better. Part of destigmatizing abortion is just being able to talk about it in all its forms, whether that's for someone, who has a major complication during pregnancy and needs an abortion to save her life, whether it's for a survivor of rape, who, if forced to continue that pregnancy, would also be forced to remain in a relationship with their abuser, or whether it's for the mother of three

who can't afford and doesn't want to have another child. You know, all of those patients deserve to be able to access medical care and all of them are important to talk about. I want to ask you a personal question with just a few minutes that we have left, which is that you were living in Texas and have since moved to Montana. And since this study has been completed, you have been being interviewed and giving the findings, providing the findings of your study to the public. We're living in an incredibly volatile time, a violent time, and I'm just wondering about how you have or are caring for your own safety if you feel under threat and what you've been experiencing since the study has come out. Thanks, Danielle. I mean, Montana has a long and really tragic history of anti-abortion violence. I have a colleague whose clinic in Montana was firebombed not just once but twice.

I have another colleague whose clinic was destroyed, burnt to the ground 20-ish years ago. You know, threats to providers are real and I take those threats seriously. I also just want to point out that I'm a physician. I have, you know, enormous privilege. And the people who are under the greatest threat of violence, are the patients who come in for abortion care. We know that patients who are survivors of domestic violence are at extraordinarily high risk when they become pregnant of increased violence from partners or family members.

And, you know, when I was in Texas, I remember there was a shooting at an abortion clinic across town where one of their patients' partners didn't want her to get an abortion and drove up to the clinic and used a gun to, you know, shoot into the clinic. Just a few months ago, the clinic where I work in Montana had an anti-abortion extremist walked up to the front window with a shotgun and shot multiple holes into the waiting room. Unfortunately, there were no patients in the waiting room. But this stuff is real. It's horrible. And, you know, it really affects patients. So it's not something I take lightly. Well, Dr. Dickman, I thank you so much for your work for this report and really appreciate you doing the kind of work that you do.

I can't imagine that it is easy and really appreciate your time. And please do stay as safe as possible. Thank you. Well, thanks, Samuel. I really appreciate it. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. Danielle, who is your fuck that guy to close out this week? Because we are an equal opportunity pod.

She, fuck that woman, fuck that girl, fuck that lady, fuck that fool. That's what we should name this. Fuck that. Actually, I kind of like that. I'm going to rename it. Fuck That Fool. Is the one and only Nimrata, aka Nikki Haley,

aka the patron saint of I don't see color. Like, Nikki Haley. This week found herself on the show, The Breakfast Club, where she proclaimed, following her comments about, you know, the Civil War, having nothing to do with racism, following her comments that racism doesn't exist in America

to now saying that racism does exist, but get this folks, only happened because of Obama. So everything pre-2008, I don't know, I guess she has never visited the lynching museum in Alabama or the African American History Museum in Washington, D.C., or read, any book, or put in, or Googled the word, enslaved Africans, or understood anything about Jim Crow. Maybe she thought it was just, you know, a title of a kind of bird. Apparently, Nikki Haley truly believes that America became racist when we all got together and said, let's vote for the black guy. I run out of words for this fucking fool. I really do. And I'm like, because of karma, I don't want to root for people's demise.

But I am rooting. I am cheering. I will get pom-poms. I want to do a dance. I want Nikki Haley to go the fuck away. I want her to go away. Because the shit that is coming out of her mouth. And the fact, you know, my other fuck that fool is for the breakfast club because here's

the thing. Y'all are not in politics. Y'all do not ask really great follow-up questions or, you know, and the, and the, stats and the issues that you are spreading to a very wide audience are in fact quite dangerous. So if you have the inability to really get to the root of the root of the issues with these political candidates, then here's an idea, have none of them on. Maybe just do town halls with your audience and figure out what are the issues that matter to them most and talk about that. But bringing on Nikki Haley and letting her spout off her bullshit is just like giving

white supremacy, the green light, and a huge platform to do so. So for this reason, Nikki Haley, as well as the folks at the Breakfast Club, you get my fuck that guy, fuck those fools for the end of this week. Wow, going after Charlemagne. I did it. I don't care. Yeah, going after the God. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, I was, I was looking at what she, the word she actually used, and she said, with Obama, if you go back, that's when we really started to feel the division. I don't know if Charlemagne pushed back or not, but sometimes you're just so stunned, you're like, she didn't just say that. She did.

And like you don't know how to respond because it's just so fucking stupid. We've pointed this out before. This is a woman who in her autobiography talked about being cast as Pocahontas, even though she's the quote unquote other kind of Indian. And she wants to talk about how division in this country started with Obama. And look, that's not an original thought of hers. That's been a right-wing talking point for a while now. And, you know, I say, and I'm not alone in saying this, that electing a black man

president broke a lot of brains in this country. And that's what we're seeing. That's why we're here. Exactly. That's why we're seeing a lot of what we're seeing right now. Yeah, I got nothing more to say, fuck those fools. So, Andy, as we close out yet another week in this, country that exhausts us. Who are you putting in our fuck that guy? Fuck that fool.

Hall of Fame. I am going to go with just a perfect example of the phrase that Adam Serwer famously coined, the cruelty is the point. I'm going to go to Florida for this, which unfortunately is not going to say not a shock to anybody, where the Florida Department of Highway Safety and motor vehicles, has issued a memo saying that if you are a trans person, you cannot change your gender on your driver's license in the state of Florida. And that if you do, your license could be revoked or you could even face prosecution. And what they're saying, I think, basically, is that the gender on your driver's license has to match the gender on your birth certificate. And you cannot change it. In addition, to the cruelty being the point here, because that is the main focus of this is just to go after

trans people for existing. The problems that this is going to cause, just from a practical perspective, if you have a trans woman, so presents as a woman, and their driver's license has to say, male on it, do we not think that's going to cause problems? Do we not think that's going to cause problems with TSA or anywhere else that you have to show a driver's license? So, what this is doing is not only attempting to criminalize being transgender, it's trying to make their lives as difficult as humanly possible. There's no better way to say it than the cruelty is the point, so I'm just going to keep re-saying that because there is absolutely no reason for this law other than to make the lives of trans men and trans women miserable. And I'm a cishead white guy,

but this shit makes me so angry that you would just take an incredibly marginalized group of Americans and seek to marginalize them further and make their lives harder than they already are because of what they face in society. And it's just, it's so fucking anger making. And so it's just, fuck these fools. Fuck those fools. Fuck all fools. Fuck all fools.

And the reason why the right wing hates trans people and LGBT people so much is because it is a community of people that live their truth that are liberated that do not exist inside of the binary, which means that you're free. And that is exactly what they do not want. So the goal is to beat people back in line, back into submission, back into the closet. And people have to realize that because other people living their truth and their freedom has nothing to do with you unless you're afraid to do so yourself. So the more that they beat down on the trans community, the more they reveal who the fuck they are and just how fragile, how fragile their quote unquote masculinity is. So fuck those guys. Yeah, it sucks being old enough to remember when conservatives used to talk a lot about individual freedom. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

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