Michael Brown spent his March 18 WorldNetDaily column being angry that a pop singer is promoting completely legal medication:
It is one thing to push pills that could lead to death because of overdose or abuse. It is another thing to push pills that are designed to kill. But that’s just what one young pop star is doing – a pop star with 36.7 million Instagram followers.
I’m speaking of Olivia Rodrigo, and the pills she is pushing – more accurately, the pills she is giving away – are abortion-related pills. What could be deadlier than that?
I knew nothing about Rodrigo or her mission until our eldest granddaughter, Elianna, a 2023 graduate of Liberty University, sent me a screenshot of this post on X dated March 12. It contained a picture of a woman’s hand holding some condoms whose packaging reads, “Funding abortion? It’s a good idea, right?”, along with two packets containing the “emergency contraceptive” pills. (Presumably, the woman whose hand was in the picture is the one who posted it. At present, it has 12.8 million views and more than 38,000 likes.)
The post was captioned: “free planb at @oliviarodrigo in st. louis tonight … thank you @MOAbortionFund.” (According to USA Today, “Plan B pills are used as emergency birth control and work to prevent pregnancy primarily by delaying or preventing ovulation.” Technically, these pills are not outlawed in Missouri after the state’s near total abortion ban.)
To paraphrase, “Yes, thank you, Olivia, for helping us terminate any life inside our wombs before it even has a chance!” How tragic.
In fact, Plan B does not cause abortion — it’s a form of contraception. He further perpetuated that lie with the headline claim that morning-after pills like Plan B are the “deadliest pills of all” and ranting that the pills “are designed to kill.” The fact that Brown considers contraception to be exactly the same as abortion tells us how much of an anti-abortion extremist he is. But rather than be truthful about the issue, Brown went on a personal attack against Rodrigo and her mother:
But before we condemn Rodrigo, let’s put her activism in context.
She, along with her mother, who was born in 1974, grew up in the Roe era, with abortion as the law of the land. Presumably, the “right” to abortion has been as normal to them as going to church on Sunday or watching college sports on Saturday is normal for other Americans.
And so, women born in the Roe era might debate whether or not abortion was morally right, but there would be no debate as to whether a woman could legally choose to abort. That was a given. The fear and dread now experienced by two generations of Roe era, pro-abortion women has been palpable since the overturning of Roe in 2022. How can this be happening, they wonder.
As for sexual activity out of wedlock, a Dec. 19, 2006, headline on the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute website claimed that, “Premarital Sex Is Nearly Universal Among Americans, And Has Been For Decades.” That was back in 2006.
Brown, of course, continues to think only his opinions are valid and he has every right to be judgmental against people not as right-wing as he is:
These, then, are the ethics of the day. Forget about self-control and abstinence. (Who even thinks about that?) Have all the sex you want with whomever you want. Just do it safely. And if there’s an accidental slip up? Then go to Plan B! And remember: We dare not be judgmental!
As for those white-supremacist, bigoted, Republican men who dare to tell us what a women can and must do with their own bodies, this is how we push back. Young people, unite!
Let’s remember, then, to turn our moral outrage and grief over Rodrigo’s actions into prayers for this younger generation (including Rodrigo, who certainly believes she is doing good). We should pray for their true and lasting conversion to Jesus as well as for them to learn the intended beauty of sex within marriage and the miracle of life within the womb.
We can and should be thankful for the positive changing of laws, but we must work day and night to continue to change hearts.
Brown didn’t explain how his judgmental and dishonest extremism could possibly change the hearts of anyone.
Brown followed up with a March 20 column further complaining that young women don’t think like he does and are “woke” (whatever that means):
Commenting on a Finland-based study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Oskari Lahtinen, the author of the study, said, “The gender divide was probably most surprising to me. Three out of five women view ‘woke’ ideas positively, but only one out of seven men.” This reflects a similar phenomenon observed in other countries, and, in America, particularly in the younger generation. But why?
While trying to downplay the significance of all this, Rose Horowitch began her March 12, 2024, article in The Atlantic with this ominous-sounding summary: “Judging by recent headlines, young men and women are more politically divided now than ever before. ‘A new global gender divide is emerging,’ the Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch wrote in a widely cited January article. Burn-Murdoch’s analysis featured several eye-popping graphs that appeared to show a huge ideological rift opening up between young men and young women over the past decade. The implications – for politics, of course, but also for male-female relations and, by extension, the future of the species – were alarming. A New York Times opinion podcast convened to discuss, according to the episode title, ‘The Gender Split and the Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World.” The Washington Post editorial board warned, ‘If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.'”
Horowitch downplayed the data because, “The much-theorized political rift has yet to show up in actual voting behavior.” But the rift itself cannot be denied, and the Finland study provides further documentation. The question, again, is why?
While discussing this on the way to the airport with my assistant Brandon, who is very well read and quite astute, he suggested, “Could this explain why ‘Barbie’ was such a massive success in contrast with the recent, very woke, male-oriented superhero movie series, which have bombed?” The former appeal to young women; the latter to young men. And young women lean much further to the left; young men much further to the right. On the surface of things, without doing a deep demographic dive into the viewers of these movies, this makes perfect sense.
Brown then parroted a study hyped by right-wing Fox News host Greg Gutfeld claiming that “those who identified as left-wing were most likely to report lower mental well-being”:
In my view, Gutfeld might be confusing the symptom with the cause. In other words, rather than “wokeism” being “an avenue for people who are mentally unwell,” the reality is that “wokeism” leads to mental unwellness.
This would correlate with the higher percentage of woke females (especially in the younger generation) who in turn struggle with higher levels of anxiety and depression.
But that still doesn’t explain the gender divide. Why are more women woke?
[…]It is generally understood that girls mature more rapidly than boys. On the flip side, girls tend to be more touchy-feely than boys, and emotional responses are often considered more acceptable among women than men. (How many times have we been told that it’s OK for a man to cry? Women don’t need to be told this.)
To the extent, then, that today’s culture puts more of an emphasis on feeling rather than rational analysis, and to the extent that woke ideology is feeling-oriented more than fact oriented, it makes sense that more women would be woke than men, especially among young people.
The same would hold true for the finding from Finland, cited above that, “women in fields such as social sciences, education, and humanities” are more woke than those “who worked in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics].”
And because woke ideology is not based on truth and it turns people inward on themselves, it is unhealthy emotionally.
Perhaps what we’re witnessing today relates to that old Churchill adage, “Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.”
Today, this is also working itself out along gender lines, not in a hard and fast way but in a consistent enough way that it can be documented.
Does this explain it all?
Nope. Brown did not bother to define what “woke” is, apparently choosing to believe that any opinion or belief that diverges even slightly from his right-wing evangelical ideology is “woke.”