When Teresa Lancaster was a teenager in the 1970s, she was raped by a chaplain at her Catholic high school in Baltimore. But when she and another survivor, Jean Wehner, sued the chaplain and the diocese decades later, the court rejected their case, saying too much time had passed under Maryland law. Lancaster, by then in her mid-40s, enrolled in law school with one goal: to lift the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse lawsuits.

“It was crushing,” she said about losing the lawsuit. “I had to pick myself up and decide what I was going to do. I knew if I became a lawyer, people would have to listen to me, and I could gain some respect back.”

Lancaster went on to become an attorney for victims of sexual abuse, and she eventually testified in front of the Maryland state legislature in favor of statute of limitations reform. Last April, Lancaster finally saw her goal achieved when Governor Wes Moore signed the Child Victims Act into law. It was one of 26 similar laws passed in the wake of the MeToo movement and high-profile sexual assault scandals involving the Boy Scouts and USA Gymnastics. 

But even in victory, Lancaster was not fully at ease. “I told everybody, this is a win,” she said. “But I was ready for them to attack back.” 

And they did. In September, just two days before the law went into effect, the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy—meaning all lawsuits against the Archdiocese would be paused, and any sexual abuse claims against a church would have to go through the bankruptcy court. Now, Lancaster is working hard to finish filing claims for herself and 20 clients by a court-imposed May 31 deadline, or else risk losing their one shot to find justice.      

In recent years, bankruptcy has become increasingly popular among Catholic dioceses as a tool to avoid bad press and prevent future litigation. After an organization files for bankruptcy, all civil litigation against it stops. Instead, the bankruptcy court sets a deadline for victims or other creditors to submit a claim against the organization. That deadline essentially overrides any statute of limitations reform passed by the state legislature—if victims don’t meet it, they likely can’t sue in the future. Then, claims are resolved with a batch settlement—which makes bankruptcy an appealing option to dioceses, because it allows them to settle hundreds of lawsuits via a single process rather than litigating them individually. In a statement, Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori claimed that bankruptcy would “best allow the Archdiocese both to equitably compensate victim-survivors of child sexual abuse and ensure the local Church can continue its mission and ministries.”

But victims like Lancaster are skeptical. Many survivors and advocates argue that the bankruptcy process protects churches’ interests at the expense of victims. Unlike a civil trial, bankruptcy has no discovery process that would allow further information about abusers’ crimes to come to light—which means victims may be left with lingering questions about how much their churches knew about their abuse, or whether other people were victimized. In addition, because bankruptcy sets a deadline for claims, it can force victims to come forward before they’re ready, or risk losing their pathway to justice forever. Since many victims of childhood sexual abuse often don’t disclose their abuse for decades, the public may never know the full extent of clerical abuse. 

“Survivors have a right to say, ‘This happened to me,’” said Wehner, who is also a claimant in the Baltimore bankruptcy case. “Because after this is done, we don’t get to do that anymore. What this bankruptcy does is shortens our time. It puts a pressure on us.” 

Bankruptcy has long been common as a tool for corporations like Johnson & Johnson and Purdue Pharma to respond to mass lawsuits. According to Marie Reilly, a Penn State law professor and bankruptcy expert, the Archdiocese of Portland was the first diocese to use this legal maneuver back in 2004, when it declared bankruptcy amid child sexual abuse claims. Since then, Reilly said, 35 other dioceses have filed for bankruptcy, with 16 of those cases coming in the past four years. 

Reilly attributes the recent acceleration in the trend to the wave of legislation like Maryland’s Child Victims Act. Thirteen of the recent bankruptcies have been concentrated in states like New York and California, which recently passed look-back windows—periods of time in which victims can bring forth child sexual abuse claims previously blocked by the statute of limitations. 

There are some potential solutions to the problem. In April, Representative Deborah Ross (D-NC) introduced legislation to amend bankruptcy proceedings in cases of child sex abuse. The bill would give victims the opportunity to submit impact statements and mandate a discovery hearing where information about individual cases and institutional negligence could come to light. It would also require an independent forensic accountant to examine the bankrupt organization’s estate, along with the holdings of any third parties involved in the proceedings, to ensure victims receive a settlement commensurate with the organization’s worth.

Lancaster supports the bill, though she acknowledges that no amount of money will heal the emotional scars of abuse. Ideally, she’d like to see prosecutions of attackers and a memorial for survivors. But she knows that, at the moment, money is the most important tool survivors have at their disposal to hold the diocese to account. “That is the only thing that the church as a corporation is going to understand,” she said. “If we hit them hard enough, maybe they’ll really do something about the abuse situation.”

When I spoke to Lancaster this spring, she was simultaneously counseling her clients on how to file their claims—which often means recounting abuse in excruciating detail—while working on her own claim. It’s a frustrating, emotionally draining process. But Lancaster’s life has been a lesson in moving forward, even at high emotional cost. “It’s upsetting, but I pushed that into the back so that I can be a fighter in the front, you know?” she said. 

After the Child Victims Act passed and victims were looking for representation, another lawyer cautioned Lancaster against disclosing her abuse to her clients because, as Lancaster recalled, “They can’t see a weak person standing before them to fight for them.” She disagreed.

“One of the reasons people will come and talk to me is because they know I’ve been there,” she told me. “I say, ‘I’m a survivor, and I understand.’”

The new documentary Bad Faith, directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, begins with footage familiar to many Americans: an army of insurrectionists adorned in stars, stripes, and military gear storming the Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. It was a watershed moment that left many Americans wondering how we got here. Bad Faith seeks to help answer that question by looking at a crucial reason why American democracy ended up at a precipice: the rise of Christian nationalism. 

Christian nationalism, broadly speaking, is a movement that believes America is a Christian nation, and that our political institutions should be governed by Christian values. But as the film points out, the movement often privileges a very narrow definition of “Christian values”: “The big idea of Christian nationalism is that God made America for Christians, and not all Christians, but a particular kind of white Christian with a particular theology and a particular worldview,” Eboo Patel, founder of the nonprofit group Interfaith America, says in the documentary. 

Bad Faith contends that the story of January 6 began in the 1980s with conservative operative Paul Weyrich, who partnered with Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority. The organization registered and briefed conservative voters on political issues, crystallizing the religious right into a powerful voting bloc. Weyrich would also go on to co-found organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Council for National Policy, forming the foundation for a sophisticated conservative network that has brought extremist, anti-democratic ideas into the mainstream. Weyrich is also credited with popularizing the pro-life stance among evangelicals, working to bring teachings about abortion into churches and thereby galvanizing evangelicals around the issue. 

The documentary shows how Weyrich used anxieties about desegregation, especially in Christian colleges, to launch a network of think tanks and conferences dedicated to shaping America along ultra-conservative, Christian ideals. Though Weyrich died in 2008, his legacy is still visible in the modern right. The film cites a 2001 manifesto written by Weyrich’s mentee Eric Heubeck at the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank Weyrich founded. Heubeck writes that to revive the “defeatist” conservative movement, “we will not try to reform institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them.”

As we approach  the 2024 election, Christian nationalism has become more mainstream in American politics than ever. The Heritage Foundation is now leading the charge on Project 2025, a plan to pack a second Trump administration with loyalists and rearrange American bureaucracy to give the president unprecedented power—a blueprint that, the filmmakers argue, shares the anti-democratic overtones of Heubeck’s manifesto. To better understand the threat of Christian nationalism and its origins, I spoke with Ujlaki and Anne Nelson, whose book on the collapse of local journalism and the rise of the right wing’s information war, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Alt-Right, helped inspire the film. Our interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What inspired you to make this film?

Ujlaki: I was inspired by the election of Trump in 2016. In 2018, I started researching. And I wanted to find out more about evangelicals because that was a key part of what brought [Trump] to power. And I went back into history to discover the roots of it. Eventually, I ran across Anne’s book, which provided a whole new dimension to the story of Christian nationalism. She delved into how they were funded, how they were organized. And she highlighted the exploits of Paul Weyrich, somebody who had pretty much avoided the spotlight for a while.

It took years to get this thing right, because the country kept shifting at the same time. So it was hard; the goalposts were changing. But Anne was great as a creative collaborator, not just her book, which was essential, but her own continuing knowledge of the situation was very helpful. 

Nelson: I am from Oklahoma, and I go back several times a year to visit my family. That served as an early warning system for this movement. Oklahoma is serving as this laboratory state where they’re experimenting with legislation. They’re attacking public schools, attacking public health programs, and seeing what they can achieve with the combination of the legislature and the governor, and the judiciary then leveraging that across state lines. 

Initially I thought it was just a local phenomenon. And then when I looked especially at the radio network, and the media system, [the influence] went across the middle of the United States, but not so much on the coasts. So then, when Trump’s victory occurred in 2016, I could see that there was this underlying architecture, and I jumped in to try to really map that architecture.

What did you learn about Christian nationalism by making the film? 

Ujlaki: It was only after I read Anne’s book that I came across what I call the smoking gun, which is the Weyrich manifesto, a manifesto he commissioned because he was finally realizing that he would never succeed in creating a Christian nation through democracy. He would always be in a minority, and the solution was to bypass democracy, to dismantle it. The decision was, if we’re going to accomplish the will of God as we see it, then democracy stands in the way.

We could show that from that manifesto to what they’ve been doing in the last 20 years, they’ve been following that plan. And that’s where Anne’s book and Anne have been so instrumental in actually charting all that. In other words, everything that’s happening today is the result of a plan. It’s not happenstance. 

The film identifies Bob Jones v. The United States, the Supreme Court case desegregating Christian colleges, as an important case for galvanizing the right politically. Yet abortion ended up taking precedence as the right’s main issue in the 1980s. What made abortion such an attractive cause?

Ujlaki: It was all about protecting their investment, protecting their segregated Christian academies. That’s why [evangelical Christians] were so angered, and that’s why they decided they wanted to get involved with politics. However, Weyrich, evil genius that he was, realized that that wasn’t actually going to work very well. And so they came up with this idea of abortion and the rights of the unborn. It took off like crazy. And the Democrats are kind of left behind, because it seems like they’re not defending the rights of the unborn. The whole thing is a bogus issue. It was essentially about white supremacy, but they made it about abortion. And they succeeded in conquering an entire country with this.

What do you think Paul Weyrich understood about democracy that most Americans don’t?

Nelson: The national press and the Democratic Party tend to be focused on marquee elections, and they also look at generic polls. But that is misleading in terms of the way our political system actually works. We’ve got the Electoral College, this strange system where even the way the states assign electors can differ. That is not conveyed in the national press and the way the Democratic party talks. They talk about winning an election with a number of votes. And that’s just not how it works. As we know, you can win the largest number of votes and still lose the election. Paul Weyrich and his partners understood this. They understood that if you drilled down and found unengaged, evangelical voters, especially in swing states, you could tilt the elections ever farther in an anti-majoritarian sense. They also understood the power of evangelicals and fundamentalists and right-wing talk radio, which the Democrats had written off. So they really did a lot of deep analysis of how the country works, and pulled ahead in terms of activating critical splinter votes in the places where they needed them. 

The film ends with a warning about Project 2025. How seriously should we take that threat? 

Ujlaki: I feel that we’re witnessing a slow-moving revolution. People are not realizing that the tide is coming in to overpower them. And they can’t quite believe it’s happening…Trump doesn’t have to win for them to say he’s going to win. That was the plan. And I never understood how that was possible, until I realized that they don’t believe in democracy.

I’m extremely worried. We’re hoping that people will wake up and realize that they are the majority. They need to push back on this. [The right] are announcing their plans ahead of time. They’re so confident of what’s going to happen. That’s scary.

Nelson: We have to change the perception of American politics. We have worked with the supposition of norms. And what they’ve done is knock over all the guardrails of democracy by violating the norms. So now we have to anticipate that.

Bad Faith is now available to rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. 

In 2021, Zack finally got a second chance at justice, when the Louisiana state legislature passed a three-year “look-back window” that allowed victims of child sex abuse to file civil suits over crimes that occurred many years in the past. He began preparing to file his claim before the deadline the legislature had imposed in June 2024. But then, this March, before Zack was able to file his suit, the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down the look-back window, ruling that it was unconstitutional. It was crushing news for Zack and hundreds of other Louisiana survivors, who must now wait on the results of a protracted legal battle to see whether they will be able to move forward with their claims. In a rare move, the court agreed to rehear the case earlier this month, with supplemental briefs due this week. If the ruling holds, it will mean that adult survivors like Zack will have lost one of their few options to achieve justice through the legal system.  

Look-back windows can be a lifeline for victims whose claims were previously barred by statutes of limitations, and they have been essential in some of the most high-profile cases in the post-MeToo era, including E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Donald Trump. According to child rights think tank Child USA, since 2018, 20 states have passed laws granting look-back windows for victims of child sexual abuse to file civil suits. The March ruling by Louisiana’s Supreme Court makes Louisiana one of only two states, along with Utah, to declare these laws unconstitutional. 

In its 4-3 decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court sided with the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette, which had brought a constitutional challenge to the look-back law after being sued by 11 survivors of child sexual abuse. The court ruled that the look-back window infringed on the diocese’s right to defend itself from civil litigation using the statute of limitations. 

The decision has potential implications not only for the victims in the Lafayette case, but also for hundreds of other survivors with pending abuse claims against other churches. In New Orleans, more than 500 survivors have filed claims against the Archdiocese for sexual abuse and are currently awaiting the results of a years-long bankruptcy proceeding that will determine what kind of restitution, if any, they get from the church. Now, victims face even more uncertainty around what they might receive at the end of this process. If the court’s decision to repeal the look-back window stands, each survivor will have to prove that their case meets one of the narrow exceptions to the state’s statue of limitations—for instance, if they had repressed memories of the abuse. However, these exception are rarely granted, lawyers told me.

“For the courts to hold that the legislature doesn’t even have power to revive claims was a big surprise to me,” said Zack’s lawyer, Kristi Schubert. “A lot of my clients were just completely gutted. It sent them the message that a child molester’s right to escape responsibility for child rape is more important than the right of the sex abuse survivor to get justice.” 

Steve McEvoy, another of Schubert’s clients and one of the victims in the New Orleans case, said he struggled with alcohol addiction and mental health issues for decades due to being raped as a child. His mental health issues were re-triggered after the court’s decision, but this time he had a network of fellow victims to help him through. “Your body just wants to go lay down, but mentally, you have to go in a different direction,” he said. “You have so many people around you that are willing to fight.” 

After the ruling, both the plaintiffs and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed requests for the court to reconsider the case. Murrill wrote that the court’s decision “strikes at the very heart of the separation of power.” The judiciary overstepped its role, she added, risking a future where courts “will begin making policy decisions rather than leaving policymaking to the Legislature and the Executive.” 

As survivors await the results of the Supreme Court’s rehearing, the Louisiana state legislature is working on a bill to extend the look-back window for another three years, to 2027. The bill has passed the Senate and waiting on the House’s approval. But the bill’s future is uncertain if the Supreme Court upholds its ruling. 

As Schubert pointed out, the court’s decision could have repercussions that extend far beyond the current abuse cases making their way through the legal system. “One thing I truly wish more people understood is that the look-back window is not only about benefiting the abuse survivors themselves,” she said. “It benefits everyone, because civil lawsuits related to childhood sexual abuse claims play a critical role in forcing organizations to improve their policies and finally start taking abuse protection seriously.” 

The passage of these measures heralded a new era for the church. At the convention in 2019, delegates, made up of both clergy and laypeople, voted 438 to 384 to affirm the bans struck down in this year’s conference and heightened penalties for breaking them. But 2024 marks the first convention after an ideological schism between conservative and progressive Methodists led some parishes to buck restrictions on LGBTQ worshippers while others doubled down. 

Between 2019 and 2023, one-quarter of US Methodist denominations disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. As the progressive arm of the church gained strength, many conservative parishes disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church, clearing the path for progressives to reverse anti-LGBTQ bans with overwhelming support. 

Still, the fight for parity is not over. Wednesday’s repeal does not mandate that all parishes accept queer clergy. It would also apply only to Methodist churches in the US, since parishes from other countries control their own governance. Yet even this measured win sparked an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd. Advocates embraced and applauded teary-eyed, according to the Associated Press, and celebrations rang out outside the convention center. 

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, author of Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity, wrote in a NBC News op-ed that these changes should mark a shift in the cultural understanding of queerness in religion. “We can put to rest the idea that religion and LGBTQ rights are inherently in conflict,” he wrote. “Just as positive views on LGBTQ rights have trended upward, so, too, have Christian groups evolved their theological understandings of human sexuality and gender identity.”

The four-part docuseries aired on Max and Investigation Discovery earlier this month, and a surprise fifth episode is in the works for next week. The show explores the dark side of Dan Schneider’s tenure at Nickelodeon, painting him as a temperamental, manipulative boss with a disturbing habit of inserting sexual innuendos into scenes with child actors. Details of Schneider’s conduct began to leak out in 2018, when Schneider left Nickelodeon amid allegations of abusive behavior. The New York Times reported in 2021 that an internal investigation had found Schneider was verbally abusive to staff, while a 2022 Business Insider investigation highlighted his controlling demeanor and sexism in the writers room. 

On set, Schneider’s crew included two now-convicted sex offenders. In 2004, Jason Handy, a production assistant, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading no contest to performing lewd acts on a child, distributing sexually explicit material, and child exploitation. The same year, dialogue coach Brian Peck pleaded no contest to two charges related child sexual abuse against an anonymous child actor and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. Quiet on Set’s biggest bombshell is that Peck’s victim was Drake Bell, a star of Drake & Josh and a regular on The Amanda Show. 

The documentary chronicles the Schneider years at Nickelodeon through interviews with former cast and crew members, journalists who reported on the scandal, and the parents of child actors. It also resurfaces moments of inappropriate humor from Schneider’s shows that seem alarming in retrospect: In one scene, a 16-year-old Ariana Grande, a cast member on Schneider’s Victorious, attempts to “juice” a potato while moaning suggestively. 

The fourth episode, originally slated to be the last in the series, ends with Bell sharing how the abuse impacted him emotionally. In the last shots, we see Bell and his dad walking off the documentary set, then the camera cuts to a sunset. As the credits rolled, I felt a mix of anger and hopelessness. While the filmmakers had done a skillful job of laying out the allegations against Schneider, the show also left many questions unanswered. Schneider declined to be interviewed for the documentary, though it included a written statement from him, saying his content went through many levels of approval before it aired. (Nickelodeon provided a statement to the documentary saying it “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to foster a safe and professional workplace.”) After the documentary, Schneider offered a lackluster mea culpa in a softball interview with a former iCarly cast member, where he muddled his apology with asides that his behavior was caused by “inexperience” and letting pressures get to him.

Nickelodeon’s decision to sever ties with Schneider was necessary and long overdue, but it’s unsettling to think that he can continue to live his life quietly without taking full accountability. And what cuts deeper is that so many people in the industry allowed such a toxic environment to fester—from the parents of child stars who failed to speak up to the industry insiders who wrote letters in support of Peck before his sentencing, including actor James Marsden.

Meanwhile, though Bell has rightfully received an outpouring of support for speaking out, the renewed good will toward the star treads a fine line. In 2021, Bell pleaded guilty to attempted child endangerment charges related to sexual conversations he had with a 15-year-old fan. In a victim impact statement, she claimed Bell groomed and sexually assaulted her multiple times. (Bell was charged only with attempted child endangerment and a misdemeanor for disseminating harmful material to a juvenile. He denies the allegations of sexual assault.) The documentary only mentions these allegations briefly in the context of Bell’s downward spiral after his own abuse, emphasizing that “he was not charged with doing anything physical.” 

The abuse on Nickelodeon happened before the eyes of an entire generation, tainting media intertwined with our childhood nostalgia. After Quiet on Set aired, emotions ran high online. “Jail is not enough!!!” wrote one X user, whose post received almost 5,000 likes. Social media users demanded that Drake Bell’s former costar, Josh Peck (no relation to Brian Peck), speak out. Bell released a statement saying that Josh Peck had personally reached out to him and asked fans to “take it a little easy on him.” On The View, host Sunny Hostin questioned Ariana Grande’s silence about the documentary, saying, “She is an adult now, so is silence complicity or not?” In the wake of this explosive reaction, Investigation Discovery announced that a bonus fifth episode of Quiet on Set would premiere on April 7.  The new episode, a discussion with former child actors moderated by Soledad O’Brien, is billed as “digging deeper into the crucial conversations the docuseries ignited and exploring the lingering questions left in their wake to provide further insight from the brave voices who’ve spoken out.” 

The decision to add a fifth episode felt like a tacit acknowledgement of the fact the final episode of the show had left many questions unanswered. But while the new episode is an opportunity to channel outrage into productive conversations about how to protect child actors from abuse, it may not answer every burning question. As viewers, there’s some uncertainty we have to accept: Public outrage should not come at the cost of victims’ decision to tell their stories if and when they’re ready. It’s possible we may never know everything that happened at Nickelodeon, or how every former child star was affected—and that’s okay. Justice might not come swiftly, and it may not look like what viewers expect. It might look like victims remaining nameless, going about their lives in private, and just trying to pick up the pieces. 

The players voted to join SEIU Local 560, which already represents some employees at the college. Their efforts to unionize began in earnest last September, when the team filed a petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board. In an opinion piece for the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, players Romeo Myrthil and Cade Haskins argue that they should be paid either with hourly wages comparable to other campus jobs or with scholarships, which would alleviate the need for students to juggle part-time jobs alongside athletic and academic commitments. They also want Dartmouth to be responsible for insurance deductibles and long-term disability costs for students who suffer serious injuries at games and practices.

Early last month, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the athletes should be considered school employees, clearing the way for the vote. 

The vote comes after mounting public and legal pressure for the NCAA to rethink its longstanding business model, which for more than a century allowed it to rake in huge profits off the backs of student-athletes who received little to no compensation. But even after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that student athletes could be paid, only the very top players benefited from their newfound ability to get brand deals and corporate sponsorships. Unionizing could allow a greater number of college athletes to negotiate compensation with their universities. 

For months, Dartmouth has fought the players’ organizing attempt, allegedly telling them that unionizing could get them kicked out of the Ivy League or the NCAA and insisting that the players were students, not employees. A day before the vote, the NLRB threw out a request from the school to reconsider its ruling that the athletes are Dartmouth employees. 

While the vote is major step, the players still have a ways to go before officially unionizing. The school could file an objection with the NLRB, delaying negotiations until current students have graduated. Myrthil and Haskins told the Associated Press they hope that freshmen will carry on the fight.

Correction, March 5: An earlier version of this story misspelled Cade Haskins’ and Romeo Myrthil’s names. 

It’s a question comedian Ziwe reckoned with in her “bombshell” interview with the disgraced former congressman, released yesterday on her YouTube channel. It was an apt, highly anticipated pairing. Both Ziwe and Santos are emblems of the modern political era. In different ways, they epitomize a cultural moment that is at best irreverent and at worst nihilistic. They typify a zeitgeist where scammers lurk everywhere, from the pits of reality TV to the highest levels of government. 

As showcased in her now-canceled eponymous comedy show, Ziwe’s comedy subverts conventions of journalistic practice with long, awkward pauses and deliberate misquotes of her subject in spliced audio clips. Such cheap tricks were on display in her interview with Santos when she asked him to say the word “icon,” only to repeat an elongated version of Santos appearing to mouth “I con” for viewers to mock. Ziwe’s comedy is something of a racket itself, but thankfully no cost to the American taxpayer.

While Ziwe’s schemes get her laughs, Santos’ might get him prison time. During his brief tenure in Congress, Santos paired wild antics—like carrying a mystery baby through Congress—with extraordinary alleged crimes and harmful political stances. Santos eventually became loathed enough to become only the sixth congressman ever to be expelled from the House of Representatives. 

People had high hopes for the interview. “This is my Frost/Nixon,” wrote comedian Rohita Kadambi when the interview was announced. But looking back, what did we expect from this pairing? We got Ziwe’s usual zingers. Softball questions, like asking Santos about his outfit, morphed into gotcha questions, “How many stolen credit cards did you use to pay for this look?” But the final product was uncharacteristically dark and unsettling. 

On Ziwe’s former comedy series, subjects frequently struggled to keep up with her world of brash statements and politically incorrect questions. Some played along with the joke. Others, like Andrew Yang, stumbled blindly through questions like, “What are your favorite racial stereotypes?” The result could be mildly uncomfortable but was mostly lighthearted. But Ziwe’s formula didn’t work as well with Santos. Perhaps it is because Santos is neither hapless nor self-conscious. He already is the shameless, morally bankrupt caricature Ziwe tries to mold her guests into. 

The most chilling moments of the interview felt like Santos was meeting Ziwe’s gaze rather than being the subject of it. These were the moments it became clear that while Ziwe’s manipulations were part of a comedic performance for Santos it was truly just who he was. As the interview concluded, Ziwe asked how the country could get Santos to go away. 

“The lesson is to stop inviting you places” she concluded. 

“But you can’t,” he responded with a shrug, confidence oozing. “Because people love the content.” 

The case traces back to a 2022 complaint, filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of four doctors and several anti-abortion medical organizations, that centered on an 1873 federal law prohibiting the distribution of  “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mail. As my colleague Madison Pauly wrote in August after an appeals court ruled that the FDA had acted improperly when it relaxed certain rules surrounding mifepristone.

The Fifth Circuit ruled that the anti-abortion doctors had waited too long to challenge mifepristone’s FDA 2000 approval—and it also found that the FDA had acted improperly in 2016 and 2021, when it relaxed some rules around how mifepristone can be prescribed. 

The Fifth Circuit’s decision contains bad news for parties on both sides of the case. But because of the Supreme Court’s prior order, the ruling doesn’t have much practical effect—at least for now. “This opinion changes nothing on the ground whatsoever,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “Mifepristone is available the same way today as it was yesterday.”

The Supreme Court’s decision on the pill, likely to arrive in the summer of 2024, will have far-reaching effects on abortion access at large, with medication abortion used in more than half of all US abortions. But it’s not the only option for people seeking an abortion. As Pauly wrote: 

Even in the worst-case scenario, where access to mifepristone is wiped out, medication abortion won’t be going away. Since the spring, in anticipation of restrictive rulings from abortion-hostile courts, providers have been preparing to offer medication abortion using a different medication called misoprostol. Typically, misoprostol is used in combination with mifepristone, but it also works on its own—it’s just more painful, and slightly less effective.

In a statement on Wednesday, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called on the Supreme Court to protect reproductive rights.”Pregnant people should be the ones who make decisions about their own health care, and medical professionals should be the ones who make evidence-based decisions about the safety of medications—not judges,” Johnson wrote. “The Supreme Court should reject this clearly baseless and political attempt to interfere with our ability to get health care.”

Correction, December 13: This post has been updated to reflect the name of the Food and Drug Administration.

“There is no justification for the wanton killing of innocent civilians,” the letter reads. “There is no justification for intentionally bombing hospitals, shelters, water supplies, religious sites, or schools. This is no longer an act of defense. It is genocide. While we refrain from telling our bosses how to do their jobs, as congressional interns and fellows, we owe it to the American people to expose the patent malpractice of Congress.” Interns say they signed the letter anonymously due to fear of professional consequences and online harassment. 

The letter also accuses members of Congress of ignoring the will of their constituents in refusing to support a ceasefire. As of December 4, only 55 members of the House and four Senators have called for a ceasefire. However, a Data for Progress poll released last Tuesday showed 61 percent of voters nationwide supported a permanent ceasefire. Interns, who are tasked with answering constituent calls, know firsthand the extent of this support. The letter claims that in 71 Congressional offices, constituents made nearly 700,000 calls demanding a permanent end to fighting in the war.

The letter cites these numbers as evidence that constituents’ voices are being “suppressed” within congressional offices. “In some cases, Members of Congress are not being adequately briefed about the volume or contents of these messages; in several instances, senior staff have deliberately provided inaccurate information about these data to Members,” the letter reads. The interns did not provide specific evidence for the claim that senior staff were conveying inaccurate information to members of Congress. 

The interns join an increasing number of congressional staff at all levels who have been publicly criticizing their bosses’ stances on the war. And last week, NBC News reported that a group of more than 40 White House interns had sent a letter to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris demanding a ceasefire. Hill interns are often in a particularly difficult position, one intern interviewed for this story pointed out, since they must correspond with constituents all day. 

“[On the phone] I’m limited to a very specifically curated response…I can only communicate public statements [the member] has made,” the intern said. “It’s really challenging because I understand the frustration on the other line. I’ve been told a number of times I personally have blood on my hands and I’m complicit in genocide, for working in the office of a representative who refuses to do anything.” In their office, the intern said, the volume of calls asking for a ceasefire has eclipsed calls about other popular issues like gun control and immigration. 

In an interview several weeks ago, one junior Hill staffer, who helped organize the recent Congressional staff walkout for a ceasefire (but was not involved in the interns’ letter), noted that the war has been “especially detrimental” to morale among young staffers. “It does not feel that these members of Congress who alleged to represent their constituents actually know what the constituents want,” the staff member said. “I think it is disheartening to see that many of these staffers are taking on that burden of feeling that they’re the only voices for constituents in the room, because no one else in the senior staff level or in the members office seems to be hearing what the American people want.”

Read the full letter here: 

“I have friends that grew up involved in a church, but the experience that I have is so different from theirs,” Millie says. “If I start talking about it, they look at me like I’m from another planet.” 

Millie began having doubts about her faith in her college years, and by 25, she’d fully separated from her church. Ten years later, Millie, who identifies as queer, is still trying to unpack the toxic lessons she learned as a child, especially regarding the church’s rigid, binary gender roles and its denial that gay people exist. In online forums, some former Christians call this process of unlearning “deconstruction.”

On this journey, Millie found camaraderie in an online community known as “fundie snark” (where “fundie” is pejorative slang for fundamentalists). On fundie snark forums, which exist across many social media platforms, users who refer to themselves as “snarkers” both mock and analyze the lives of Christian influencers. The content can be funny and lighthearted, but for ex-fundamentalists like Millie, these forums can also play a key role in helping them reexamine their past beliefs. 

Fundie snark content is available on TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter), but it is most well known on Reddit. There, r/FundieSnarkUncensored, started in 2020, boasts 169,000 followers and is in the top 1 percent of communities on the site. While it doesn’t exclusively cater to ex-fundamentalists, many spend time on the subreddit. Women and queer people make up a majority of the community, according to multiple members. By picking apart the lives of extreme Christian influencers, ex-fundamentalists say they have the opportunity to understand their own experiences from an outside perspective with the support of others who can relate.  

Many community members attribute the origins of fundie snark to a backlash against the Duggars, whose sect of Christianity emphasizes patriarchal hierarchy in the home. The family gained notoriety in the early 2000s with multiple TV specials and a hit TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting. After the family’s first special, 14 Kids and Pregnant Again, premiered on the Discovery Channel in 2004, fans started a campaign called “Free Jinger” based around their belief that the Duggars’ sixth child yearned to break free from her ultra-conservative upbringing. Discussions on the now-defunct fan forum Television Without Pity, eventually led to a spin-off forum, Duggars Without Pity. When the Duggars‘ new series was announced in 2008, some Duggars Without Pity users didn’t buy the family’s wholesome image. “The Duggar parents strike me as extremely image savvy. I suspect a lot of disturbing stuff goes on behind the scenes,” one wrote. 

The Duggars eventually faced a public reckoning in 2015 when allegations emerged that the eldest son, Josh, had molested his sisters. In 2021, he was convicted of receipt and possession of child pornography. The r/FundieSnarkUncensored thread announcing his arrest had 8,500 upvotes and 3,400 comments, some of which referred to Josh by his nickname on the forum, “Pest.” 

Since then, several fundamentalist families have attempted to replicate the Duggars’ success, including the Plath, Bates, and Rodrigues families, all of whom have large broods of kids and share their everyday lives through either TV shows or social media content. This fresh crop of Christian personalities has in turn become a target for the snark community. 

Millie found her way to fundie snark through the Duggar forums and the Free Jinger campaign, but now her favorite snarking targets are the Rodrigueses. The parents homeschool their 13 kids and enforce gendered dress codes in which the girls must wear long skirts and modest blouses. Though the family lacks the polish of the TLC-ready Duggars, family matriarch Jill posts roughly edited YouTube vlogs with cuts and transitions reminiscent of an old iPhoto slideshow. On r/FundieSnarkUncensored and r/RodriguesSnark, users mock Jill for hawking the dietary supplement Plexus and for her apparent hunger for Christian stardom. (The Rodrigues family did not respond to questions for this story.) 

The Rodrigueses reminded Millie of her own insular IFB family. She felt an acute schadenfreude when the Rodrigues RV broke down, preventing them from making their usual visits to churches to perform hymns. She told me she was happy “it inhibited their ability to go around and indoctrinate more people into the cult.”

Naomi Janzen, a member of r/FundieSnarkUncensored who grew up evangelical (but not fundamentalist), attributes the fundie snark community’s interest in Jill Rodrigues to her seemingly overbearing parenting style. “It’s very much the way I think a lot of us experienced being mothered,” she explained. “So I think it really is this external thing you can critique when you’re not as comfortable critiquing how you were raised yourself.”

Whether snarkers are making fun of the sparse audience for a Rodrigues family musical performance or mocking the hyperfeminine aesthetics of homophobic videos produced by evangelical vlogger duo Girl Defined, the laughs can also facilitate deeper conversations. For instance, underneath a post about mocking a Girl Defined Instagram graphic that reads, “God is not in favor of the LGBTQ lifestyle,” one commenter wrote: “[Jesus] stood up for the outcasts, and he only judged those that were cruel to others…Maybe you two should read your New Testament and do the same.” 

Amanda Waldron is a former evangelical with a masters in social work who now describes herself as a deconstruction coach, helping people wrestling with doubt who want to remain in the Christian faith. She says that after an ex-fundamentalist has moved through the initial shock of their changing faith, humor can be a tool for self-reflection. “Generally, there’s some sort of pain and behind the snark, some sort of truth behind it,” she says. “Snark can be an easy way to maybe move into, ‘Okay, what was this experience actually like for me?’” 

That was the case for another snarker, Noelle Westbrook, who says their “pet fundies” are Paul and Morgan Olliges, a Christian YouTuber couple. The pair are known for bickering on camera, raging against the so-called “culture wars,” and promoting purity culture. Noelle, who was raised Baptist with beliefs that were theologically proximate to those in IFB, sees Paul and Morgan as a reflection of who they might have become had they stayed in the church. “I have absolutely been that judgmental Christian before,” they say. “I was 100 percent a true believer up until I left the church. And so I was equally confidently incorrect about so many things that I did not have education on. I cringe at things that I said in the ’90s.” 

The realizations that come from snarking can have a direct impact on how ex-fundamentalists approach deconstruction. Millie says that fundie snark helped her truly understand how unusual her childhood had been. When her daughter came out as trans six years ago, the news prompted her to seek therapy in order to confront the prejudices she’d learned during her upbringing. For Noelle, meanwhile, fundie snark helped them understand that religious trauma was at the root of their mental health struggles, and they changed their therapy to accommodate that. “I’ve been able to make massive progress in my own mental health journey,” they told me. 

Alexis, a former member of the Churches of Christ, a collection of independent churches that aims to replicate worship exactly as outlined in the New Testament, recalled receiving a book from her church arguing women’s subordination in the home was actually empowering. Alexis said examining her religious trauma through the lens of fundie snark was cathartic. Both Alexis and Millie compared participating in fundie snark to the experience of attending a family reunion: You’re forever linked to this toxic world, but now can comment on it from a removed perspective. She found it helpful when snarkers pointed out how extreme her experiences were, but at the same time, she says, she never felt pitied by the fundie snark community. 

“There’s something really deflating about telling friends or acquaintances who have no contact with fundamentalism some of those stories, because the thing I get a lot is like, ‘I can’t believe that happened.’ Then my energy is spent on kind of convincing them that it did happen, and it does happen,” she says. “One thing that I’ve learned from fundie snark is that it’s not uncommon. It’s extreme, but that extremity is not uncommon.”

Sometimes fundie snark can go too far, moving from critique to bullying. The Reddit page has rules that warn against contacting snark subjects, slut-shaming, and armchair diagnosing. One moderator, Anne, noted that they try to be open to critique, but when it comes to determining what’s acceptable or not, there’s still work to be done. “We’re constantly trying to evolve to recognize microaggressions,” she says. “I appreciate when someone says, ‘This is why that’s not cool to say.'”

Ultimately, several snarkers say they hope fundie snark can provide a learning experience for both fundamentalists and outsiders. They argue snarking supplies necessary context for casual viewers of this content who might not understand how harmful and extreme it can be. Snarkers suspect that the influencers they mock read their content, and some even hope it could prompt them to reflect on their negative impact. “I grew up with some really backwards, really awful beliefs,” Millie says. “But I feel like if I can overcome those things then everybody can.”