It’s the hypocrisy, stupid. That’s what pundits from The Nation to the Washington Post fail to grasp about the onetime romance between former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. Harris’s apologists would have…
You can roll the silkscreens on those “Kamala in 2020” T-shirts now. The first-term U.S. senator from California made it official on January 21, 2019: She will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency. The announcement was equal parts…
Come fire or flood (or wall), the federal government never seems to run out of money to throw at its war on sex workers. On Tuesday, January 8, 2019, President Donald Trump signed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization…
The battle over free speech raged in courtrooms, on college campuses, and on social media in 2018, with wedding cakes for same-sex couples and the federal government’s attack on sex workers taking center stage. In no particular order, are the…
Seattle-based sex worker and blogger Maggie McNeill devoted a recent post on her site The Honest Courtesan to an intriguing document: two pages purportedly culled from a report prepared for Demand Abolition, a group that aims to eradicate the commercial sex…
U.S. Border Patrol supervisor and confessed serial killer Juan David Ortiz stalked sex workers in and around Laredo, Texas — picking them up off the street, driving them to deserted patches of freeway, then shooting them in the head during a two-week…
Introduction: April 2018 — The FBI Seizes Backpage.com, and the McCains Rejoice Hours after news broke on April 6, 2018, that the FBI had seized the online listings giant Backpage.com and arrested seven current and former executives of the company,…
The Federal Government Has Been Waging a Trojan-Horse Assault on Sex Workers U.S. officials couched the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in March 2018, coupled with the FBI’s takedown of the online listings giant Backpage.com weeks later,…
FOSTA/SESTA: What Is It? The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) is federal legislation that establishes new civil and criminal liabilities for interactive websites regarding content that involves sex work. Signed into law by President Donald Trump at a April…
Federal prosecutors in Phoenix recently filed a new, superseding indictment against seven former owners and executives of the online listings giant Backpage.com. Dated July 25, the complaint largely reprises the dozens of allegations that formed the basis of the original…
