by Joseph Ford Cotto, American Thinker: Election integrity is not some paranoid concern. It is a real, documented, ongoing challenge that persists even in jurisdictions that have made serious efforts to secure the vote. Nowhere is that reality more evident than in Florida. Over the past several years, its Republican statehouse has enacted some of […]

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A congressional candidate running as a “100% pro-life” conservative with a “titanium backbone” once said a Georgia law banning abortion after an unborn baby’s heartbeat could be detected was “counter” to the majority of society and passed to satisfy the far right.  Former Hollywood executive Ryan Millsap, who’s running for Congress in Georgia’s 10th Congressional district, says he is fully pro-life. But years ago he said that the state’s heartbeat law was bad for business and urged lawmakers to reconsider pro-life protections, according to multiple interviews unearthed by The Daily Wire.  Millsap said Georgia’s heartbeat law, signed by Governor Brian Kemp in May 2019, was out of step with the western world in an interview with Deadline. He was CEO of the production company Blackhall Studios at the time.  “It was a scary time for those of us in the entertainment industry because a law like that would certainly put Georgia in a very awkward position relative to the modern English-speaking world,” Millsap said in June 2020. “It is a huge disadvantage if you live in a state that has laws on its books that are counter to the majority of society.” In the same interview, Millsap said that the law was only passed because Kemp was bowing to the far right. “The governor’s farthest-right support base wanted it and the governor’s farthest right support base asked him for it and … played a key role in getting him elected,” he said. “That put him in a very complicated position. … I believe the political winds required a bill.” After the bill was first passed by the legislature, Millsap said that boycotts from film studios targeting the state were economically, not politically driven. He said Hollywood was not “trying to impose its values” on the state.  “The production companies don’t care, necessarily, about the moral consequences, one way or the other, of a law. They care about their supply chain and business. And when we pass laws that disrupt their supply chain, it makes us less competitive to London or Canada,” he said in October 2019. “I think that the biggest worry is just whether or not Georgian politicians understand the value of the entertainment industry, understand that it’s a non-political set.”  Millsap also suggested that an injunction blocking the law after it went into effect allowed “business as usual” to move forward, but that the state had “some ground to make up” politically.  The heartbeat law went into full effect in October 2024 when the state Supreme Court ruled in its favor. At least 12 Republican-led states have enacted heartbeat or total bans on abortion.  “Ryan Millsap is a husband and father who believes in the miracle of life, has always been 100% pro-life and supports the state’s law now that the issue has been settled,” his campaign told The Daily Wire. “He believes that the Dobbs decision was correctly decided and that states should address this issue and that no federal funds should be used for abortion.” Millsap, who launched his campaign last month, is running as a political outsider and is campaigning on deporting illegal immigrants, banning congressional stock trading, and supporting cryptocurrency.  “I’m running to smash the status quo and fight back against the radical Left and the RINOs. I bought into their lies, too. But COVID and Antifa made me realize they sold us out,” he said in his campaign launch ad. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he was running “because we need someone with a titanium backbone who doesn’t care about climbing the political ladder but is running to defeat the radical left once and for all and end the reign of radical lunatic liberals and impotent RINOs in Congress.” The other two candidates running for the district are plumber Jeff Baker and state Rep. Houston Gaines. The Daily Wire reached out to both to ask for their position on abortion.  Gaines voted for the heartbeat bill during his time in the legislature shortly after he flipped a state House seat back Republican.  “As a Christian and a conservative, I’m proud to be pro-life and will always stand up for what’s right. When Democrats tried to threaten me, I stood strong and passed Georgia’s Heartbeat Bill,” Gaines told The Daily Wire. “While my opponent joined Hollywood to fight Georgia’s Heartbeat Bill with everything he had, we got it done. Georgia stands for life.” Baker said he is “100% pro-life with exception to health of mother. Abortion in any other respect is murder and is against my Christian beliefs.” “I would support a Constitutional Amendment that states life begins at conception,” he added. Gaines has been endorsed by House GOP leaders like Reps. Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, and Tom Emmer. A debate for the GOP candidates is set for April 12.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** In midcentury television shows, married couples slept in separate beds across the room lest the story insinuate anything inappropriate for young viewers. Today, all bets are off. From highly sexualized movies to television shows to books, sex is everywhere. Beyond fiction, the torrid details of real-life moments are exposed in wildly popular podcasts such as “Call Her Daddy,” tell-all memoirs such as the Duke of Sussex’s “Spare,” and even casual social media posts. We’ve gone from unrealistically modest to destigmatizing everything, and though the case has been made against some erotic and pornographic media, here’s why it’s time to make all talk of sex taboo again. I recently was listening to a top-10 politics podcast when the conversation bizarrely transitioned into intimate details of the host’s sex life. The episode’s topic and the podcast itself had nothing to do with the bedroom or even relationships, but nevertheless, the host went on about private details of his relationship. Needless to say, I was disturbed and a little wary of any future episodes, lest I be further subjected to more unwanted information. I couldn’t help but wonder: What if I were a parent catching up on news with small children in the car? What if I had been listening in an office? What if I were a teenager trying to keep up with the political cycle? There are a million scenarios where sex is an inappropriate topic, the least of which is that I simply don’t want to hear the details of anyone’s private life. Certainly, there’s an irony to talking about sex in order to make a case for not talking about it. But there’s also a difference between talking abstractly about the topic and divulging graphic details. When watching news coverage of wars or crimes, for example, we expect horrible statistics and tragedy, but we also expect a level of discretion. We want a warning before seeing any images of casualties or hearing any gruesome details of an attack. The same is rarely true for sexual content. There’s a baseline assumption that, if you’re consuming modern media, you’ve accepted that nothing is contained to the bedroom anymore. After the sexual revolution, shows such as “Friends” and “Sex and the City” glamorized hookup culture. Whether or not the behavior of ordinary Americans reflected what happened on television, the bedroom door had been cracked open. What was once private became a spectacle. With the internet, we’ve taken off whatever guardrails remained. Unlike broadcast television, there is no regulating body determining what can hit streaming services (nor should there be). And for social media influencers, when the cost of production is a smartphone, there’s no big-name producer to sign off on every word and ensure that nothing goes too far. Sex sells, and every producer, marketer, and influencer knows this. The result is that we’ve commodified sex to the point that it’s no longer seen as an emotional betrayal to discuss personal examples of such an intimate act. If we told stories of emotional intimacy, betrayal, and romance the way we discussed sexual encounters, it would reach reality-TV levels of invasive. But sex has become advertised as a purely physical act, championed by hookup culture as such, separate from the emotional weight it once carried. As mere action and movement, it’s no longer an intimate act meant to be shared only between two people, the pinnacle of romantic love.  And yet, as much as we’ve tried to decouple sex from love and emotion, these things are still intertwined. Advertising and messaging cannot overcome fundamental realities, and because we’ve commercialized sex, we’ve also commercialized romance, relationships, and intimacy. No longer are some moments private and personal, kept special for those involved. Once, some conversations were reserved for a few people, both as a courtesy to those listening and a sign of respect to the interested parties. There were some topics we didn’t share with every passing stranger: relationship drama, family politics, our deepest dreams, and our most cherished moments. It was a matter of propriety and discretion, and also, in some cases, of keeping some memories close to the heart. There’s absolutely a time and a place for sexual education and advice: pre-marital counseling, a book dedicated to relationship growth, or a steamy sex column for married readers. It’s one thing to find such details in a book about relationships or among married confidants, but that’s a far cry from hearing about sex at every turn. And it’s far from the way real-life sexual encounters are recounted and shared today. Whether for clicks, for bragging rights, or to titillate an audience, our culture has turned sex into a commodity that is acceptable to blast to a worldwide audience. We’ve taken some of the most exciting, personal, and private moments of our lives and turned them into flippant conversation. We’ve stripped our relationships bare. And whether as disturbed audience members or the oversharing showman, we all pay the price. *** Jordan Jantz is the assistant editor at IW Features as well as a freelance writer, editor, and website designer.