The Public Eye, Winter/Spring 2025

Upon Donald Trump’s re-election to the U.S. presidency, the White nationalist far-right provocateur, Nick Fuentes, was among those who publicly rejoiced. The Groyper leader took to social media to proclaim “Your body, my choice”—an inversion of the popular abortion rights slogan, “My body, my choice”—in a tweet that went viral. Fuentes’ words were characteristic of a cornerstone of the contemporary Far Right: how it mobilizes misogyny (as researcher Alex DiBranco put it in this magazine, in 2017) and anti-trans campaigns to consolidate its power.

The theme of this double issue—Gender & Authoritarianism—is a growing program area at PRA, and our first article introduces a critical framework for analyzing the centrality of gender to authoritarian politics. As senior research analyst Annie Wilkinson writes, when “The idea that gender is not a fixed or natural order threatens to upend the logical underpinnings of authoritarian power,” authoritarians deploy the normative family ideal and patriarchal discipline to assert and justify their rule.

In our first feature, Mary Reynolds and Carol Mason examine how the Heritage Foundation wields “parents’ rights” and anti-gender campaigns to advance their decades-long project to dismantle public education. In Kentucky and West Virginia, the authors write, “Assaults on state public education systems offer early warnings of what the Heritage-led coalition backing the second Trump administration has in store for the whole country.” Elsewhere, PRA research analyst Chancie Calliham analyzes how a far-right strategy backed by dark money is reshaping Texas through court capture and the state attorney general’s overreach in attacks on reproductive health and gender-affirming care.

Our next two features focus on reproductive politics. Journalist Gaby Del Valle investigates the growing movement of right-wing pronatalism. While divided into “trad” and “tech” wings, as Del Valle writes, the movement is (for now) united by an ideological commitment to birthing more babies that reproduces hierarchy and inequality. The flipside of encouraging rich White people to have more children is reproductive injustice and the criminalization of people of color and the poor and working classes under increasingly authoritarian conditions, the subject of our roundtable with movement leaders and advocates.

As federal agencies carry out Trump’s executive orders seeking to erase transgender and nonbinary people from public life, several of this issue’s articles dissect the Right’s anti-trans politics. Hannah Silver examines the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition of right-wing women and anti-trans feminists mobilizing to exclude trans people from sports. Sophie Lewis, author of the new book Enemy Feminisms, makes the case for reckoning with the 200-year history of right-wing and fascist feminisms—from Western imperialism to today’s White cis feminism—to organize against them. And scholars Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl outline how transnational moral conservative networks have built opposition to LGBTQ rights as part of a broader counterrevolutionary agenda.

As the Right weaponizes notions of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” gone amok in its attacks on racial, gender, and reproductive justice, how can we build a broader human rights movement? In our Q&A, Chancie Calliham speaks with Loretta Ross about her new book, Calling In.

Our cover features a collage by genderqueer South African feminist artist Boniswa Khumalo, whose work is part of Beyond Molotovs: A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies. The Art of Activism highlights the handbook’s mix of thoughtful and creative strategies for defeating authoritarianism.

Between print issues of The Public Eye, visit us at politicalresearch.org and religiondispatches.org for more of PRA’s research and reporting on the authoritarian Right.

Kitana Ananda, Editor