The right-wing media and policy ecosystem appears poised to escalate its attacks on the basic rights of women as a weakened President Donald Trump lurches toward the end of the first year of his second term. The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world, and it could serve as a rallying point for an increasingly fractured MAGA movement.
Perhaps no event better exemplifies this trend than a recent hire by The Heritage Foundation, which has been in crisis for months after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended a friendly interview Tucker Carlson conducted with white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.
On the back of that scandal, which Roberts seems to have made worse with every attempt at cleaning it up, Heritage has now brought on Boise State University professor and anti-feminist crusader Scott Yenor to head up its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. As conservative pundit Henry Olsen notes at The Atlantic, the decision “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”
New Heritage hire pushes birth control restrictions and rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act
Olsen runs through some of Yenor’s lowlights, including pushing for laws that would let businesses “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage,” and his belief that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
Yenor has repeatedly attacked the Civil Rights Act — a distressingly common phenomenon in conservative media — telling a Mother Jones reporter that the landmark 1964 law “made it impossible and, in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.” Yenor’s opposition to the law extends to racist grievances too. A blog he co-wrote argues that “the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.”
Heritage’s decision to bring Yenor on has generated significant support from right-wing media, suggesting that he’s more of an opening salvo than a random misfire.
Fellow Heritage staffer Emma Waters wrote that it was a “huge win for @Heritage to have Scott on board, and I'm glad he's here.” Her colleague Genevieve Wood reacted to The Atlantic article by writing: “The entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous.” Anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo argued: “Scott's idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate, and, in fact, it's absurd that individuals cannot hire whomever they want in their own companies, with their own money.” (The Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.)
Given Yenor’s recent output at Heritage — his author page currently hosts two pieces of writing — The Atlantic’s premise doesn’t seem invalid in the least. An October 29 blog headlined “RFK Should Grill the Pill” argues that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should consider imposing restrictions on hormonal contraceptives and that his seeming reluctance to do so is “to the detriment of women across the country.” Yenor and his co-author write that the “proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.”
The blog is hardly the first time Heritage has gone after birth control. Roberts took aim at the pill in his own book, writing: “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” As Media Matters previously reported, Heritage’s sprawling presidential transition effort, Project 2025, “suggests restoring Trump-era ‘religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate’ through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage.” A separate Media Matters analysis found that at least 34 of Project 2025’s partner organizations “have spread misinformation about contraceptive methods or championed limiting access to contraception, largely on religious grounds.”
Myths about the supposed dangers of birth control have found purchase in social media and podcasts as well. By early 2024, right-wing influencers spreading misinformation about birth control on TikTok had racked up millions of views. Now, some elements of the Make America Healthy Again movement — which is closely associated with Kennedy — are turning against hormonal contraceptives, illustrated by prominent MAHA podcaster Alex Clark referring to birth control as “poison.” The rejection of safe and proven forms of health care extends to so-called tradwife influencers, who have advised young women to embrace not only a far-right definition of proper gender roles, but also “a general distrust of the government and modern medicine.” One prominent tradwife figure used social media to spread “anti-trans bigotry, opposition to sending women to college at 18, and disturbing messages like ‘any wife who denies her husband intimacy is acting against her marriage.’”
Right-wing media figures urge women to leave the workforce
Yenor’s other piece at Heritage argues that prohibiting single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute and beyond has harmed the school and society at large, suggesting that sex segregation in schools can “be wholesome per se, serving the innate differences between men and women and their somewhat different social destinies.” Elsewhere, Yenor’s writing details those “somewhat different social destinies" a bit more clearly; as Olsen noted at The Atlantic, Yenor has argued: “The Mrs. Degree, with additional credentialing for work, is all you want by graduation day.”
The position that women should largely, or perhaps entirely, eschew careers has become increasingly normalized in right-wing media. The late Charlie Kirk — who also railed against the Civil Rights Act — told a young woman with ambitions to be a surgeon that between her career and a potential family, “you’re going to have to choose which one matters more.” On the off chance his advice wasn’t clear, he added: “There are a lot of successful, 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats, and not kids, and they’re very miserable."
Not only do many right-wing media figures want women to exit the workforce — they also want to make it much more difficult for them to leave a failing marriage. Conservative pundits have attacked no-fault divorce, seeking to reduce women to a second class status and exposing them to greater risk of violence from their husbands.
And over the last year, and especially following Republican losses in November, right-wing media figures have called into question the very right of women to exist as political agents. Fox anchor Martha MacCallum reacted to women voting for Democrats by saying: “I find that very frightening.” Similarly, Newsmax host Rob Schmitt told his audience that “young women in this country have become a very scary demographic.” This impulse is expressed in its most extreme variation by Fuentes, who said that if he were president: “I would just take away the right to vote for tons of people. Women for sure.”
Yenor’s new role at Heritage suggests that the larger right-wing media broadside against feminist gains is likely to intensify, as conservative pundits look to restore long-outdated forms of gender domination. Largely agreed upon pillars of social life in the United States — like the Civil Rights Act and relatively open access to birth control — are now contested fronts in the so-called culture wars, and Heritage is helping to provide the ammunition.
