On International Women’s Day, 2026, Amy Coney Barrett spoke at The Lensic in Santa Fe, New Mexico to promote her book that spreads hateful and reactionary rhetorics. As part of the Supreme Court, she helped to overturn the right to abortion in the US, leaving it to the discretion of states to decide on the human rights of people. This decision has led to the medical neglect of thousands of women across the country and has even caused preventable deaths in pregnant women. With abortions illegal in many states, countless women must choose between bearing unsafe or undesired pregnancies, and risking prison for getting prohibited medical procedures.
Because of her dangerous and reactionary rhetoric, because of her position of power, we stand on the firm belief that people like her should have zero platforms to speak out; she has stripped women across the country of the right to access necessary health care and has cemented the role of women as incubators over human beings. We wanted to get as close as possible to shutting down her platform to speak in Santa Fe. We also wanted to challenge attendees going in to see ACB speak, who claimed to care about women, to disrupt her. This matriarch of patriarchy should not be able to speak without disruption. “The right to free speech” is not a valid reason to hear someone who has cemented, in the US Supreme Court, that women cannot be in control of their own lives.
The president of St. John’s College (who helped organize the ACB event) claimed that “Sunday’s event [was] an opportunity for dialogue from diverse viewpoints.” Similarly, attendees claimed wanting to “hear out” Amy Coney Barrett. We have heard enough reactionary viewpoints! It’s not a dialogue if the person speaking has taken away the rights of women.
One student of St. John’s College cited “free speech” as the reason why he attended ACB’s talk. He claimed to disagree with her point of view and thought that “it would be wonderful if she gets her mind changed.” Why should people in power like ACB just change their mind, when the material conditions that keep them rich and powerful go undisturbed? If there is no organized force to keep people like that in check and to hold them accountable for their crimes against the masses, nothing will change. That is why we must expose all enemies of the people as criminals. With the power of exposure, masses of people can have their collective political conscience raised, building forces of people who can get organized and fight for righteous change.
On the point of exposure, we equally call out groups like TPUSA who slither onto college campuses like UNM and NMSU and even high schools to spread their similarly hateful rhetoric on the stance that they are using their free speech for “debating.” These “debates” being whether women are fully actualized human beings or nothing more than just their sexual organs, whether all immigrants are criminals who should be deported, or whether drug addicts should even qualify as people. What this actually accomplishes is to lay the groundwork for reactionary politics in the minds of young students, who then go on being unable to point out and challenge contradictions in our society, as if everything simply has just “two sides to every story.” This is not free speech, this is dangerous rhetoric being spewed by people who care nothing for the masses. Reactionary rhetoric that brings forth material harm to the most oppressed must never be supported or listened to. It must be loudly disrupted and shut down at every turn.
That is why we protest and strive to shut down those types of reactionary rhetorics, with potentially dangerous consequences, like Amy Coney Barrett and Turning Point USA, that cowardly hide behind words like “debate” and “free speech,” to force them out and expose them as the enemies they are. To distinguish a hard political line: that oppression of women is part of the American Nightmare and it will not cease until it is toppled down by the masses of people who are most oppressed by the system.
Dare to Struggle 