Time after time, sensitive documents, that were legally required to be kept intact and which ought to have been deposited with the National Archives, were torn into tiny pieces and thrown to the White House floor. Following these childish displays of petulance and/or ignorance of protocol, Trump’s staffers had to perform the absurd and degrading job of sweeping up and storing the pieces so as to try to keep the most powerful man on Earth out of more legal jeopardy, since destroying and making disappear government documents is, obviously, a crime, a violation of the Presidential Records Act. And, once the gophers had rescued the fragments, lowly paid civil servants were then given the unenviable job of scotch taping them back together again.
At first glance, there is something humorous about this image, something of the childish, drunken, rules-flouting ne’er-do-well billionaire in the 1981 movie Arthur. But Dudley Moore’s character in that movie was, ultimately, loveable — and redeemable. Think about Trump’s actions for a New York minute, and there’s precious little loveable about them, nor is there anything visibly redeemable in Trump’s snarling, vindictive personality. In fact, there seems to be a deep-rooted humiliation instinct playing itself out here. These are the actions of a man who doesn’t care about wasting his underlings’ time; doesn’t worry about the messes that he makes and the fact that other people inevitably have to clean those messes up; doesn’t pause to consider how other people feel when they step in to protect his rear-end from the trouble that he routinely, almost deliberately, gets himself into.
As president, Lyndon Johnson would frequently hold discussions with underlings while on the toilet, or while toweling off after a shower. He did so, apparently, to show, in the crudest way possible, who was boss. Trump’s paper-shredding frenzies, and his subordinates’ back-bending labors to rectify the damage, fit the same unpleasant “I’m the big shot around here” mold.
They are also uniquely hypocritical given that Donald Trump pummeled Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election campaign for her use of her personal email address to conduct some official government business while she was serving as President Obama’s secretary of state. In the run-up to the election, the Republican candidate said that Clinton’s email scandal was so serious that electing her would produce a “constitutional crisis.” He called for an investigation into President Obama, alleging that he hushed up the Clinton email scandal. And, in seeking to use the issue as a lightning rod for his fevered crowds, he averred that the email hoopla was a scandal “bigger than Watergate.”
It was, of course, all a charade, an exercise in manufactured outrage and demagoguery. Trump didn’t give two hoots about communications security or about the preservation of records. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself, as well as his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were all routinely mishandling official government documents. Ivanka and Jared did exactly what Clinton was accused of doing — they used personal email accounts to carry out government business. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, used a series of personal email accounts to carry out White House business. Several other senior staff were also called out for similar actions. And Trump, when he wasn’t using an unsecured personal cell phone to tweet out threats against his enemies, was, it turns out, ripping government documents into itsy-bitsy pieces.
This behavior was written about early in Trump’s bizarro presidency. What wasn’t known until the National Archive revelations was the scale of the mishandling of official records.
A goodly number of the papers that Trump tore up were, apparently, inconsequential: articles that he had scribbled gossipy Sharpie notes on, personal letters, print-outs from websites he had browsed. They might well be the kind of everyday detritus that one could throw away without giving it a second thought. But others were more consequential — policy memos, drafts of executive orders, and so on. This is, after all, a president whose minions drafted executive orders, which Trump ultimately didn’t sign, to use the military to seize voting machines after he lost the November 2020 election. This is also a president who brought unprecedented pressure to bear on his deputy, Mike Pence, to somehow “overturn” the election and refuse to allow Congress to certify Biden’s victory. Some of the papers Trump took with him down to Florida were, apparently, classified documents.
Slowly but surely, all of this contempt for the structures and rules of governance is being laid bare by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol breach. Come the spring, that committee will almost certainly start holding public hearings. Trump’s taped-together papers will be paraded before the public. The shredder-in-chief himself should be, too. He ought to be subpoenaed to testify — both on his role in promoting what was, in essence, an attempted coup against the republic, and also his behavior in shredding, or absconding with, documents that, by law, belonged in the National Archives.
The first question he should be asked is: “Can you think of a good reason, Mr. ex-President, that the person who, in 2016, called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up for using a personal email account, shouldn’t himself be tried for deliberately mishandling official government documents?”
The Trump wing of the Republican Party (and by “wing” I mean three-quarters of the bird) has continued its post-election vengeance tour apace, stopping recently at the Republican National Committee (RNC) to pummel two of the party’s far right congresspeople for being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger have been dealing with this Trumpian agita for a while now, but the RNC forcefully took it to a whole new gear.
“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement denouncing the recalcitrant duo. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
…and all manner of cats came blasting from the bag. That 1/6 horror show, the one that killed five people, is “legitimate political discourse?” Starting now, or is this retroactive back to, say, Appomattox? The RNC issued a non-reversing reversal — “We didn’t mean the violent protesters!” — while no lesser light than Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came down with both feet on the idea that the attack on the Capitol was anything other than “a violent insurrection.”
So it came to pass that the violence at the heart of Trump’s crusade has finally split the party most visibly in two. The most powerful Republican congressman and the most powerful Republican, period, are at each other’s throats while partisans of each side line up to denounce the other. If the Republican Party splits for real, not just cosmetically or in a momentary fit of pique, the ultimate irony will be the fact that McConnell and his ilk are primarily responsible for the creation, care and feeding of the violently racist horde at his gate.
Faced with this context, I can’t help but be surprised to hear those I keep company with describe the Republican Party as “anti-American.” “Really?” I ask myself. “Since when, exactly?” Because while some immigration activists and many others within the big tent of the left have valiantly sought to stake a claim to the word “American” and give it a positive meaning rooted in democracy and inclusion, the cynic in me always returns to the fundamentally violent and racist roots of the United States, which was formed through a crucible of genocide and slavery by white supremacists who more often than not believed God put them there to plunder and conquer. Leave out the God part, and the butchery was still exceedingly and attractively lucrative.
At its peak, slavery was this continent’s first billion-dollar industry, containing the original nucleotides of American-style capitalism, right down to the concept of a thoroughly fungible, eternally replaceable and therefore cost-efficient workforce. This peerless crime — still bereft of justice save for the easy cracking of statues — is the banner to which the modern Republican Party has flocked to.
The party has embraced brazen racism and its right-wing militant banner-carriers with the kind of gusto not seen since George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama State House bleating about, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” It is no accident that the scaled heart of the party burns brightest in the presence of its father/king, an egotistical cartoon caricature who would happily put half the country to the torch if it garnered positive coverage from Fox News.
People want to know what Donald Trump was doing while his minions violently sacked the Capitol, seeking to murder his vice president. I imagine he was laughing. On the inside, the outside and everywhere between, laughing fit to split. January 6, 2021, was the best day of his life.
Simultaneously, in 20 years the Republicans have never missed a chance — by way of war, legislation or both — to loot the Treasury and enrich their wealthy friends. Trump pulled it off in December of 2017, to the tune of almost $2 trillion. Speaking of history, some of the people who get a slice of that Treasury pie go on to fund increasingly violent right-wing groups and their protests, which like Trump’s rallies serve to make “the movement” seem larger and more menacing than it actually is.
Case in point: The Ottawa truck strike, which was originally focused on vaccine mandates but has devolved into a seething cauldron of every galaxy-brained conspiracy theorist who can find their way there. It is supposed to look organic, this truck protest, sui generis and therefore troubling to the status quo… except for the fact of the millions of dollars flowing into the protest across Canada’s southern border. Expect very similar protests to start popping off on this side of the lakes, and soon. Ottawa, I strongly suspect and fear, was a testing ground for a new level of right-wing hostility. Cops do fine against unarmed protesters. Facing down a wall of snarling Macks and Peterbilts? I mean, assuming they don’t agree with the ones behind the wheel.
So, some boxes to check. Racist? Yes. Violent? Yes. Organized? Yes. Funded by wealth? Yes. Shock troops (i.e. analogous to KKK cells spread nationally)? Yes.
Anti-American?
Well… one may sugarcoat history until the cake collapses on itself. This country was forged in violence; that even a garbled Second Amendment exists at all speaks to the passion with which some hold to a right to deal death as they please and choose. Violence is and has always been the “American” way, a truth that has inspired millions of others to oppose it and its racist peddlers at all available turns.
It’s all out there now; a majority of Republicans aren’t interested in even pretending to be anything other than exactly what they are. The racism, the mob mentality, the denial of bare-faced fact: The Republican Party has been actively feeding this beast since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, when the North and South exchanged political parties over the basic question of human worth and dignity. A reckoning for all those years spent stoking the simmering flames of hate to keep the party base engaged could prove to be the cul-de-sac where final ownership of the party is decided once and for all.
And that’s the best part of all: This is Mitch’s Republican Party as much as it is Trump’s. Racism, violence, plunder and fear: In the end, they both believe in fundamentally the same things, and that is as American as an 18-wheel Freightliner gleaming in the conquered desert sun. Call them “anti-American” if you need the sugar, but the taste of it won’t change.
The Biden administration and congressional leaders of both parties have launched a full-frontal assault on the integrity of Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization. This decidedly mainstream nongovernmental organization (NGO) — which is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, boasts more than 10 million members worldwide and is cited frequently by U.S. government agencies — was embraced by most leading Democrats until it released its latest report last week regarding systemic violations of international humanitarian law by Israel, a very close U.S. ally.
The 280-page report systematically examined Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian population into zones of control, dispossession of land and property, segregation, restrictions on economic and social rights, home demolitions and forced evictions, family separations, and other human rights violations. It made a very strong case that such practices collectively constitute the legal definition of apartheid — that is, serious human rights violations “perpetrated in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.”
Despite the compelling nature of Amnesty’s investigation, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides immediately called the well-researched report “absurd,” and State Department spokesperson Ned Price roundly rejected the report’s conclusion as well, adding “the Jewish people must not be denied their right to self-determination” — even though there was nothing in the report questioning that. Price prevaricated when asked by a reporter why the State Department was so quick to denounce Amnesty in this case while being quite willing to cite Amnesty authoritatively when it criticized governments opposed by Washington.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) falsely claimed that Amnesty’s detailed report on Israeli violations of international humanitarian law constituted “delegitimizing the existence of the State of Israel” — despite absolutely nothing in the report questioning Israel’s legitimacy in any way.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), without offering specifics, accused Amnesty of slander and misinformation, baselessly claiming that the organization was “denying Israel’s right to exist.” The Senate Democrats’ de facto foreign policy spokesman insisted that the Israeli government actually “values human rights,” despite findings to the contrary in countless well-documented reports from Amnesty and other human rights groups.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that implementing Amnesty International’s recommendations to challenge Israel’s apartheid policies in the West Bank “would threaten Israel’s existence.”
Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) made clear that the Democratic Caucus remained solidly in support of the Israeli government against human rights groups, insisting that Amnesty was “fuel[ing] hatred against Jews” and pledging that, “Our Democratic House Majority will continue to stand with Israel and Jewish communities in efforts to end the spread of misinformation and the vilification of Israel and Jews.”
Other congressional Democrats jumped on the attack. A joint statement by Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), Brad Schneider (D-Illinois), Lois Frankel (D-Florida), Elaine Luria (D-Virginia), Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina), Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota), Brad Sherman (D-California) and Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts) explicitly denied well-documented Israeli human rights abuses and insisted that Israel was actually a “vibrant democracy where all citizens, regardless of religion or race have rights.” These prominent Democratic lawmakers insisted that “the biased report is steeped in antisemitism,” and claimed that Amnesty’s willingness to criticize well-documented violations of international humanitarian law was part of “Amnesty’s broad, decades-long campaign to criminalize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.”
In addition, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) called the report “outrageous and anti-Semitic.” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) referred to the report as a “hysterical demonization of Israel” that would “incite hatred” and “violent antisemitism.” Similarly, Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada accused Amnesty of “fanning the flames of Antisemitism.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) accused them of “unjust and libelous attacks.” Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) claimed that the report intended to “delegitimize Israel, a robust democracy, and will only serve to fuel rising antisemitism.” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Florida) claimed the report was designed “to delegitimize” Israel. Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York claimed it would “only serve to incite antisemitism against Jews worldwide.” Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas called the investigation “lies” that would “incite antisemitic behavior against the Jewish people” and “incite violence.”
A review of these statements reveals that the objections were based in part on the accusation that Amnesty had labeled Israel as an “apartheid state” — a phrase that the 280-page report never explicitly used, even as it documented the ways in which Israeli policies toward Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere do indeed constitute a form of apartheid.
Indeed, in recent years, as the discrimination against Palestinians in areas controlled by Israeli state has become increasingly severe and institutionalized under a series of U.S.-backed right-wing governments, multiple other human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli group B’Tselem, have also started using the term apartheid in regard to Israeli policies, as have world leaders including former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, among others.
And, despite claims by a number of these Democratic critics that there is no comparison with South African apartheid, Black South African leaders, including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Cyril Ramaphosa, have also acknowledged the accuracy of the apartheid label to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
A second charge by Biden officials and congressional leaders was that Amnesty International was unfairly singling out Israel for its criticism. In reality, over the past dozen years, Amnesty International has published over 2,000 reports, and only 35 have been about Israel.
Nothing in the report was antisemitic. Indeed, over a dozen prominent Israeli NGOs have penned a letter defending Amnesty from these spurious charges, noting how “the struggle against antisemitism in the world is being weakened by the unbearable, inaccurate and instrumentalized use to which the antisemitism accusation is lodged for political ends, in order to avoid debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards the Palestinians.”
Given these brazen misrepresentations, it is doubtful that the Congress members or Biden administration officials who are criticizing the Amnesty report have actually read it fully. What mattered was that it challenged a basic premise of U.S. Middle East policy: that Israel is — as described in the 2016 Democratic platform — a beacon of “democracy, equality, tolerance, and pluralism.” This assertion has for decades been used to justify tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to arm that country’s right-wing governments, block the United Nations Security Council from taking action to resolve the conflict, defend Israeli war crimes, and advance the notion that it is the Palestinians under occupation — not the Israeli occupiers — who are responsible for the failure to reach a negotiated peace settlement.
What may have also provoked such a fiery reaction is the section of the report which appears to be referring to the United States. It reads, “Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people.”
It is this recognition that the United States has a moral and legal responsibility to end its support for violations of international humanitarian law committed by strategic allies that has led so many leading Democrats to side with the Republican right in its attacks on Amnesty International.
Amnesty has been the subject of vitriol from the right wing for decades, going back to its criticisms of U.S. allies like the Shah of Iran and the Thiệu regime in South Vietnam in the 1970s. This intensified in subsequent decades when the organization reported human rights abuses by U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships and paramilitaries, exposed the massacres by U.S.-backed Indonesian forces in East Timor, criticized torture by U.S. interrogators in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, and documented the large civilian death toll in airstrikes by U.S.-armed Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and U.S.-armed Saudi forces in Yemen. While Amnesty was at least as critical of repression by Communist regimes and other autocracies outside the U.S. orbit, the organization’s willingness to challenge the official U.S. line regarding friendly dictators was deemed unacceptable.
This time, however, as an indication of the rightward drift of the Democratic Party, the Biden administration and congressional Democratic leaders have agreed with the Republicans that research documenting violations of international humanitarian law by U.S. allies can no longer be tolerated. They have decided to take the political risks of attacking the world’s leading human rights organization and lie about the contents of its reports to justify U.S. complicity in human rights abuses.
Why would so many prominent Democrats risk alienating so many people in their base — including millions of liberals who have long supported Amnesty and other human rights groups — by making demonstrably false charges against this beloved and well-respected NGO? Perhaps they assume that relatively few people will actually read the report and that enough of the public will believe their false claims about it to undermine Amnesty’s reputation for fairness.
Amnesty’s reputation for critiquing human rights abuses across the board has been one of its greatest strengths. The organization has been critical of human rights abuses regardless of the violator’s ideology, geopolitical alignment, ethnicity, religion or anything else. Indeed, Amnesty’s most vehement critics have tended to be from anti-imperialist activists who allege that Amnesty reports about human rights abuses in China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been fabricated in order to advance Western interests.
Yet Amnesty has been a thorn in the side of successive administrations regarding arms transfers to dictatorial regimes and other human rights abusers. The organization’s reports have fueled movements to end U.S. culpability in war crimes, which threaten the profits of politically influential arms exporters. Perhaps the Biden administration and its supporters are making these false accusations that Amnesty International actually seeks to “delegitimize” or “unfairly single out” Israel in the hopes that it will damage Amnesty’s reputation enough that reports about violations of international humanitarian law by other U.S. allies will not be taken seriously either. If the Biden administration and Democratic congressional leaders can get away with attacking Amnesty International for its criticisms of Israel’s violations of international law, they could also start attacking Amnesty for its criticisms of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and other U.S. allies.
Given the preeminence of Amnesty International in the global human rights movement, this is nothing less than a frontal attack on the human rights community as a whole. Making statements that are so demonstrably untrue is a desperate attempt by Democratic Party leadership to destroy the reputation of the thousands of activists, researchers, informants, and others who have in many cases risked their lives to document human rights violations around the world. In order to discredit Amnesty and related global campaigns for human rights, these Democrats are allying with defenders of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies who share their fear of empirical studies that expose human rights abuses — and, unable to find anything of substance to challenge, they are resorting to misrepresenting and attacking the researchers.
This is indicative of the Democratic Party’s shift to the right on foreign policy in recent decades. Even when Democratic leaders initially rejected calls for sanctions on white minority-ruled South Africa, they opposed military aid to the regime and were outspoken in their opposition to apartheid. By contrast, today, they support unconditional military aid to Israel, deny that the system imposed by that right-wing government on the occupied West Bank is a form of apartheid and attack reputable human rights groups that present evidence otherwise. The Democrats figure that with so many people scared of a Republican takeover of the House and Senate in November, human rights supporters will be reluctant to challenge their war on Amnesty and other groups.
This may end up hurting the Democratic Party, however. With Biden administration officials, both the House and Senate majority leaders, heads of both the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, and scores of other congressional Democrats joining Fox News and the Republicans in attacking, misrepresenting and outright lying in an effort to discredit and marginalize one of the world’s foremost human rights organizations, people may start wondering whether they can support both human rights and the Democratic Party.
We’ve been here before, you and I, right here at the fulcrum between controlling COVID-19 and letting it run wild. Here we are again, swaddled in the dented surety that doing the same thing over and over will bring about a different conclusion, just because we really really want it to… wait, strike that: Just because capitalism really, really wants it to. The rest of that “we” is most of us, baggage stacked down in the dripping darkness of steerage, waiting for the next viral iceberg to smack this gilded, hollow ship in half, again.
In March 2020, then-President Trump declared a national state of emergency over the pandemic, and an avalanche of states went under some version of a lockdown. Almost immediately, Trump began hectoring his own scientific experts to downplay the dangers of COVID-19 as he pushed to “reopen” the economy as soon as possible. It was a hard sell: Even as the jobless numbers swelled into the millions and businesses began closing all over, a clear majority of the country believed in the science of masking, cloistering and social distancing. Some 25,000 people had died from COVID by then, a number that, in our innocence, many of us found almost too appalling to contemplate.
“Around two weeks ago,” I wrote in that late March 2020, “when the first wave of closures — the schools, the ballgames, the bars — began to roll across the country, a clock began ticking in my head. How long will it be, I wondered, before some rich person goes on TV and starts quacking about ‘getting the country going again,’ because they’re losing money? Flash-forward to this past Sunday morning, and wouldn’t you know it, some self-satisfied capitalist was on one of the cable networks arguing that ‘low-risk,’ low-wage workers (who are the economy even as they seldom benefit from the economy) should go back to work and just let the virus ‘burn through’ their ranks.”
That quacking reached a crescendo the following spring, and various state and local governments chose to let their collective guard down in the name of making money for our financial overlords. The result: A massive surge of COVID obliterated our hopes and drove us back indoors again. The winter of 2020-2021 was upon us, and the red death held sway over all.
The following spring brought widely available vaccines, actual vaccines that actually work. Millions lined up to get their shots, although millions also flatly refused to give the vaccines a second thought because doing so became tied to fealty to Trump and his doomed attempt to overthrow the election he’d lost in November. The efficacy of the vaccines was blunted, and when President Biden promised new hope that summer, he and the rest of us were confronted with the one-two punch that were the Delta and Omicron variants. Down into the darkness we went again, with a death toll today totaling over 900,000 souls at a clip of about 2,500 per day.
Over all those days, weeks, months and now — God help us — years, I sounded warning after warning after warning: Capitalism cannot be allowed to drive the bus when it comes to dealing with this, or any pandemic. “We’ve tried it their way for going on two years now,” I wrote this past November, “and all we have is close to a million people dead to show for it. The very corporations clamoring to rush people back into infected work spaces are the ones funding Republicans who rally their people to resist the vaccines. They have no interest in public health. Their goal is private wealth, and as far as they are concerned, wealth must be extracted at all costs.”
It is therefore with a despair verging on the inexpressible that I observe the nation’s leaders now lining up to displace science with profit, for the third time since this nightmare hamster wheel got to spinning. Only this time, it is not the Abbotts of Texas or the DeSantises of Florida leading the march; that would merely be common on this trainwreck of a timeline. No, this time it’s New York, New Jersey, California, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Oregon — Blue states all — for openers, and with more sure to follow.
Disabled and immunocompromised people will be hit hardest by this new dismissal of effective public safety measures.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have made it clear that it is far too soon after Delta and Omicron to begin dickering around with masking, one of the most effective basic prophylactics against random infection. As for the Biden administration, well, this charge toward ersatz normalcy came after the president pointedly said last week that decisions like these would be made by the states, and not the federal government… and it’s an election year.
“The moves highlight how even local officials who installed sweeping safety measures early in the pandemic are now preparing to live permanently with the virus,” reportsThe New York Times. Watch for that phrasing — “live permanently with the virus” — as it will be everywhere soon. Sounds all stiff-upper-lip, right? Loosely translated, it means, “This is the course that promises the most profit, and must be adhered to without question.”
In other words, the capitalists are sick of your bullshit, it’s time to give up. They’re mightily weary of fighting for ground they thought was secure. Yes, you may die horribly at the hands of such twisted, profit-driven priorities. So long as you die coughing with a dollar in your hand while reaching, reaching for something to buy, you will have done a proper turn of service to your society as this third COVID winter plays incubator for the future.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, many observers noted that, terrifyingly, he would soon be the sole person in charge of determining whether or not to use the U.S.’s vast nuclear weapons capability. He would have the power to end life on Earth in a matter of minutes.
As Barack Obama and Joe Biden were preparing to hand the nuclear codes over, the outgoing vice president warned against any preemptive use of the terrible weapons: “Given our non-nuclear capabilities and the nature of today’s threats — it’s hard to envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be necessary,” Biden said in January 2017. Biden added that he and Obama had “made a commitment to create the conditions by which the sole purpose of nuclear weapons would be to deter others from launching a nuclear attack.”
Despite Biden’s encouraging remarks that the United States likely wouldn’t employ the “first use” of nuclear weapons, Trump was inheriting a nuclear weapons apparatus with far more continuity than rupture from previous administrations. The United States had not, in fact, adopted an explicit “no first use” policy during the Obama administration, despite relentless lobbying from nonproliferation experts. And, as he did with so many aspects of the U.S. national security state, Trump took the existing nuclear powers and authorities and expanded them to enrich weapons contractors and satisfy the reactionary requirement of maintaining U.S. global military hegemony.
Four U.S. presidents have issued reports known as a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), dating back to the Clinton White House in 1993. The Trump administration’s NPR was typically bellicose. Contrary to Biden’s urging in 2017 that the “sole use” of nuclear weapons should be in response to a nuclear attack, Trump’s review significantly widened the aperture for their use. That report, whose author is still unknown, referenced using nuclear weapons to deter “non-nuclear aggression,” a phrase widely understood at the time to include cyber, chemical and biological attacks.
President Joe Biden’s administration is now in the final stages of completing his own Nuclear Posture Review, scheduled to be finished early this year. For nonproliferation experts and anti-nuclear war activists, the signs are not promising. In September, Leonor Tomero, a Biden appointee tasked with overseeing the review, was forced out of her job in what was described as a bureaucratic reorganization but was widely understood to be a power grab by the national security state. Prior to her sacking, Tomero was trying to bring official U.S. nuclear policy in line with Biden’s previously stated “sole purpose” philosophy. Biden’s National Security Council had previously issued two documents to provide guidance on the White House’s nuclear priorities, neither of which adopted a “sole purpose” policy.
Even more worrying was Biden’s first defense budget, which signaled the administration would continue Trump’s two new nuclear weapons programs: a sea-launched ballistic missile and the creation of low-yield nuclear warheads. There are rumors among nonproliferation activists that the administration may ultimately scrap those programs when it releases its review, but the sense among experts is that those programs are low-hanging fruit. The overall reliance on nuclear weapons is not expected to change in any meaningful way, despite 55 Democratic members of Congress calling on Biden to adopt a “no first use” policy and to stop the deployment of Trump’s two new nuclear weapons systems.
Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Quincy Institute and longtime nonproliferation expert, offered a blistering assessment of the Biden nuclear policy so far: “It is not a rational response to external threats but is driven primarily by domestic factors including a hubristic strategy of nuclear supremacy, partisan politics, and entrenched arms lobbies with formidable influence in the Pentagon and Congress,” Cirincione wrote earlier this month.
Part of the U.S. nuclear posture is called a declaratory formulation — that is, a public statement signaling both to allies and adversaries when the government might use nuclear weapons. Ever since President Truman became the first and only head of state to drop a nuclear bomb — two, in his case — the U.S. declaratory position has been deliberately ambiguous. Hawks say that strategic ambiguity keeps potential enemies on their toes, and provides comfort for allies like Japan who rely on U.S. nuclear deterrent capability. Nonproliferation and peace activists argue that strategic ambiguity is not necessary and is indeed counterproductive in lowering the likelihood of nuclear war.
Although Biden is not expected to adopt a “no first use” or “sole purpose” standard in his forthcoming NPR, the benefits of doing so could be enormous. “Announcing that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks on the United States and its allies and partners […] would clearly signal a policy course change and renewed U.S. global leadership toward reduced reliance on nuclear weapons,” writes Steve Andreasen of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
China is the only country that has a clear, caveat-free “no first use” policy, which the country initially declared in 1964 and has since repeatedly publicly reaffirmed.
The Biden administration is at risk of going in the opposite direction. “Instead of sole purpose, the Pentagon bureaucracy wants Biden to go back 12 years to Obama’s 2010 review and adopt weak language that would allow the use of nuclear weapons in multiple scenarios, including cyberattacks,” warns Tom Collina, policy director at the Ploughshares Fund, a nonproliferation organization.
The simmering conflict on the border between Ukraine and Russia is almost certainly exerting domestic political pressure on Biden to take a more hawkish, Cold War-era stance on nuclear weapons. Ironically, the conflict in Eastern Europe is exactly the type of situation that shows the absurdity of even the implicit threat of nuclear weapons. There is substantial risk that either the U.S. or Russia could misinterpret the others’ moves, resulting in escalatory tit-for-tat retaliation that would be disastrous with conventional weapons, but truly catastrophic with nuclear weapons.
Still, far too many national security state officials and their associated think tanks believe a nuclear war can be won. The Pentagon and its private sector partners have a massive financial incentive not only to retain the U.S.’s current posture, but to increase the nation’s reliance on nuclear weapons. Biden could change that if he wanted to. Whether he’ll listen to his own words from 2017 remains to be seen.
During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, claims of Russian misinformation and disinformation were ubiquitous on cable news, Twitter and op-ed columns. Public discussion of misinformation has since skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, usually focusing on harmful anti-vaccination media coverage on, for example, Fox News and Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. There are, of course, no shortage of Fox News segments praising anti-vaxxers until they die, generally by hosts who themselves have gotten the vaccine. Rogan’s anti-science, I’m-just-asking-questions shtick is also a serious threat to public health.
Although these are real problems that require profound solutions, there’s an emergent category of would-be misinformation debunkers who should be treated with a great degree of skepticism — specifically, members and partners of the national security state.
There is a not-so-subtle push happening right now to increase the Department of Homeland Security’s role in “combating misinformation.” A recent post on the human rights-focused legal blog Just Security is a good example of this phenomenon. The two authors, a retired brigadier general and a former communications adviser at DHS, argue that misinformation should first and foremost be understood “as a growing threat to America’s security.” To respond to these threats, DHS should “adopt an integrated or ‘whole-of-department’ approach to countering MisDisMal [misinformation, disinformation and malinformation] in key areas under its purview, such as election security, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, disaster response, and public safety.”
The authors suggest a public facing anti-misinformation campaign could be modeled on the “If you see something, say something,” initiative, instituted after 9/11. It’s worth noting that even that seemingly benign poster campaign was more than it appeared, and was riddled with controversy. In 2015, the ACLU sued the government over the program, alleging that the reports generated by the program were discriminatory and resulted in unconstitutional surveillance and data collection. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within DHS created a website to partially address this concern during the 2020 election, called “Rumor Control.” That site addressed disinformation specific to the electoral process but seems to have done little to tamp down the increasing belief among Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen.
The “See Something, Say Something” campaign is a perfect illustration of the dangers to civil liberties posed by involving DHS more thoroughly in countering disinformation. On the surface, it sounds impossible to object to: Who would oppose alerting the authorities to a suspicious package? But the implementation of that program was incredibly and predictably discriminatory: Muslims, Arabs, and people perceived to be either of those identities were over-represented in the reports that were generated, according to an ACLU review.
Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was asked by reporters last month about the connection between misinformation and what DHS classifies as “domestic extremism.” Mayorkas said his agency was seeing “a greater connectivity between misinformation and false narratives propagated on social media and the threat landscape,” and that “false narratives about a stolen election have an impact on the threat landscape.”
For many liberals, Mayorkas’s comments are likely a welcome development after years of DHS and the FBI ignoring the threat posed by the far right. But just like “See Something” posters, there was a barely disguised push to expand the security state in Mayorkas’s remarks. “The use of encrypted channels of communication, it’s posed a challenge to law enforcement well before Jan. 6 2021,” he added. “That is, quite frankly, another element that makes up the threat landscape for us.”
Here again we see how a seemingly unobjectionable premise — Trump’s lies about the 2020 election are harmful — is transformed in the hands of the security state into a justification for increasing its surveillance capacity. Federal law enforcement has been waging a public relations fight against strong encryption, which protects digital communications from outside surveillance, for years. It’s to be expected that they would instrumentalize the very real threat of right-wing violence toward their own ends. A broad coalition of privacy advocates and organizers from the civil liberty champions the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the centrist Third Way have fought against attempts to weaken encryption, with varying degrees of success.
The Obama years provide an even better example of the dangers posed by using local and federal law enforcement to supposedly combat what are ultimately political issues. When Obama and his team came into office, they were determined to leave the rhetoric of the global “war on terror” behind. However, that doesn’t mean they left behind its substance or surveillance tactics. The new phrase of the hour was “countering violent extremism” (CVE), and government contractors shoehorned that phrase into many proposals, because that’s where the money was.
As a result, a cottage industry of CVE-providers sprang up, working in a public-private partnership with the FBI and DHS. On the surface, this approach was a break from the draconian surveillance of Muslim communities that was ubiquitous under George W. Bush. For many Muslims, however, there was far more continuity than disruption between the two approaches.
Under CVE, rather than fearing a new member of the mosque might be an informant, the local leaders themselves, including imams, teachers and counselors, were tasked with surveilling their communities and reporting so-called suspicious activity. “The result of generalized monitoring — whether conducted by the government or by community ‘partners’ — is a climate of fear and self-censorship, where people must watch what they say and with whom they speak, lest they be reported for engaging in lawful behavior vaguely defined as suspicious,” the ACLU wrote to Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, in 2014.
Although these CVE programs purported to be ideologically neutral, the overwhelming majority of their funding was directed toward spying on Muslim communities. The Brennan Center for Justice found that under Obama, “the federal government awarded 31 CVE grants totaling $10 million, with only one going to a group that even partially focused on far-right violence.”
These programs relied, either implicitly or explicitly, on bogus “radicalization” theories that purported to be able to identify the early signs of violent urges or so-called terrorist ideologies. What they actually did was criminalize protected speech and association rights, and treat reasonable political opinions, such as harsh criticism of U.S. imperial policy in the greater Middle East, as precursors to indiscriminate violence. These theories adopt a “conveyor belt” metaphor that sees a linear progression from radical political beliefs or increased religiosity to violence. This manufactured threat of imminent violence is then used to justify surveillance and targeting for investigation.
It’s understandable, if misguided, to believe that the powers the U.S. government has directed at Muslims and other oppressed and persecuted communities can now be redirected towards the threat posed by white supremacist groups. There are very real risks to U.S. democracy, limited and insufficient though it is, that fall under the umbrella of disinformation. Lack of public trust in government and media is a complicated phenomenon that needs to be seen in the context of neoliberal reforms from the 1970s onward that deliberately sought to destroy the idea of a public good, as well as elite-led catastrophes like the war in Iraq and the global recession in 2008. However, the way to combat misinformation and a lack of public trust is not by directing more surveillance and police toward the problem, it’s by building trust in public institutions by meeting people’s material needs.
The argument here is not that the state, per se, has no role in providing honest information to the public, batting down bad information and securing election infrastructure. All of those tasks are necessary, and only the federal government has sufficient resources to achieve those ends. The issue is which organs of the state claim these authorities, and toward what end. DHS, FBI, and the rest of federal law enforcement say they want to counter misinformation. The problem is that these agencies have a clear record of spreading misinformation themselves — and causing harm with every new campaign that purports to keep us safe.
As COVID-19 continues to rage, another health crisis persists — one that is decades long. In the first year of the pandemic, the United States hit the devastating milestone of 100,000 overdose deaths, a nearly 28.5 percent surge from the record numbers we saw the previous year. Now, fentanyl is the leading cause of death in Americans ages 18-45. The reaction from many of our leaders has been to call for more arrests and criminalization, but this response is rooted in fear, not science. We have spent the last 50 years trying to treat a public health issue with a criminalization response, yet people are dying of overdose at record rates. This response is clearly not working.
The evidence is clear: Criminalization worsens public health outcomes. From making the drug supply more dangerous, to deterring people from getting help out of fear and stigma, to denial of economic opportunities and supports for people with drug arrests, the associated consequences have been dire. Besides, sending someone to jail or prison doesn’t keep people from using drugs. In fact, deaths due to drug and alcohol intoxication have increased more than 600 percent in state prisons between 2001 and 2018.
It’s time for a new approach. Oregon has taken the bold step that we should adopt across the U.S.: Decriminalize drug possession and increase access to health services. In the year since the state decriminalized drugs through a ballot initiative (Measure 110), and with only about 10 percent of the allotted funding distributed to 70 community-based organizations so far, Oregon has already been able to provide peer support, harm reduction, evidence-based treatment, housing and job assistance to more than 16,000 people.
Prior to this measure passing, Oregon ranked last in access to treatment and recovery services.
And yet, since the passage of decriminalization, many local media outlets in Oregon have fixated on a lack of citations from police for drug possession. (Under Measure 110, people found in possession of small amounts of all drugs receive a citation and $100 fine instead of being arrested.) This is a distraction, and the wrong way to measure the program’s success.
In fact, decriminalization efforts shouldn’t involve police. Police involvement often harms people who use drugs. Addressing drug use through the criminal legal system has contributed to mass incarceration and family separation, and has saddled people with criminal records that affect their ability to get housing, employment and live full lives. It has allowed public officials to neglect their responsibility to support people, and instead inflate police departments to become military-style operations while continually divesting from health and support services that people desperately need. Even some police will tell you that their options for response are limited and that a different set of tools are needed. Since decriminalization has taken effect in Oregon, thousands of harmful drug arrests have been avoided.
Some call Oregon’s efforts an “experiment,” but they are already grounded in evidence: They’re largely based on the successful model adopted in Portugal over 20 years ago. Within a few years of implementing decriminalization in Portugal, the number of people voluntarily entering treatment increased significantly, while overdose deaths, HIV infections, problematic drug use and incarceration for drug-related offenses plummeted. And Portugal is not an anomaly. Many other countries, including Switzerland and the Czech Republic have implemented varying degrees of decriminalization with similar success.
The logic is simple. When people are given access to health services and no longer fear being criminalized if they seek them out, they are more likely to do so. And if we address the full range of people’s needs — including harm reduction services, housing and even job assistance — versus just mandating abstinence, we are able to actually get people on solid footing and better address the underlying factors that contribute to chaotic drug use. We’ve seen this in Portugal and are getting a glimpse of it in Oregon.
Even though Oregon’s move is a huge step forward, there remains more work to do, such as removing quantity thresholds and police altogether, inclusion of expungement and resentencing for past drug arrests and convictions, and ensuring access to things like overdose prevention centers and safe supply. As we work to decriminalize drugs in other states and federally, these additional provisions, such as increasing the amount of drugs that would qualify as personal possession — should be strongly considered, in order to truly embrace the public health alternative this is meant to be.
Decriminalization is a shift a majority of people want to see. According to the latest polling, 66 percent of Americans support removing criminal penalties for drug possession and investing in health services. While Oregon may be the first in the U.S., it certainly won’t be the last. Since this measure passed, we have seen over half a dozen other states and Congress introduce legislation that would decriminalize drug possession.
Amid the twin crises of overdose and criminalization, we owe ourselves and our communities a different approach — one that empowers people to live healthy and free lives. Decriminalizing drugs and creating access to care are necessary steps in that direction.
In the continuing conflict between the United States and Russia, the central issue has always been the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from its original boundaries in Central Europe during the Cold War. Recent efforts to incorporate Ukraine into NATO have greatly aggravated Russian suspicions, contributing to Russia’s rationale for their massing of troops on Ukrainian borders.
It is true that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a repressive leader with a poor human rights record, but that is no reason for the U.S. to risk undertaking a war. On the issue of NATO expansion, Putin has a legitimate complaint. If Ukraine were to join NATO, it would establish a U.S. ally on Russia’s southern border with the potential of U.S. military bases being aimed against Russia. We must consider this counterfactual: How would the U.S. respond if Russia were planning a military alliance with Mexico or Canada? There is no way of getting around the fact that NATO’s expansion has been profoundly destabilizing.
It is important to consider the historical context of Russian grievance: It is a matter of record that in 1990, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that it would not expand NATO into the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe. In exchange, Gorbachev agreed not to oppose the upcoming reunification of Germany. Gorbachev fulfilled his part of the deal — Germany was reunified without Soviet objection — but then the U.S. promptly began laying plans to expand NATO. By 1999, the former communist states of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic all joined NATO, disregarding the promises made to Gorbachev. Then, NATO continued expanding into most of Eastern Europe, as well as three former Soviet states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russian officials have repeatedly objected to what they describe as U.S.’s bad faith regarding its past promises not to expand NATO.
Some former officials contest this history. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently stated: “The idea that we somehow crossed some line with the Russians, I think, is a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, just like the idea that somehow Jim Baker, all the way back in 1990, said we would never move east. What we were talking about at the time was East Germany… Nobody was even imagining Czechoslovakia or Poland or Hungary at that time.” These claims are very doubtful. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has released a large number of previously classified documents that strongly suggest that — as Russian leaders have argued — the U.S. did indeed promise not to expand NATO, and that this promise extended beyond East Germany. I will quote from the summary of the documents, written by Archive staff:
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. [Emphasis added.]
Clearly, present-day Russian complaints about U.S. deceptions regarding NATO’s expansion have a foundation in the historical record.
The U.S. expansion of NATO reflected an attitude of recklessness and hubris. According to former Defense Secretary William Perry, the predominant view of Russia in the Clinton administration was: “Who cares what they think? They’re a third-rate power.”
At least some senior figures were alarmed by the U.S.’s arrogance. Former CIA Director Robert Gates later criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, arguing that it was a bad move since Gorbachev was “led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
In 1995, 20 former U.S. officials wrote an open letter stating that NATO’s planned expansion risked “convincing most Russians that the United States and the West are attempting to isolate, encircle, and subordinate them.” The letter also stated that the Russians “pose no threat to any state to the west, nor is there any evidence of an imperialistic surge among the Russian people.” Even Paul Nitze — an architect of the Cold War and a longstanding anti-Soviet hardliner — signed the letter. Then in 1997, veteran Soviet expert George F. Kennan declared, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era.” U.S. policymakers were warned about the likely consequences of their actions.
Given the central importance of NATO in the current conflict, one might wonder: Why was the alliance even necessary after the end of the Cold War? During the early 1990s, no one really knew what NATO was for, and the whole alliance was becoming a bit of a joke. It was a “security” organization in search of a mission, without any real security threat. In 1992, a headline in Jane’s Defense Weekly declared, “NATO Seeks Significance in a Post-Cold War Climate.”
The real reason for preserving NATO — and ultimately expanding it — was to promote U.S. prestige and power, and also to benefit vested interests associated with what President Dwight D. Eisenhower once termed the military-industrial complex. In 1993, retired U.S. Admiral Eugene Carroll spoke with remarkable frankness about NATO’s real purpose:
Let me tell you one of the reasons you keep hearing so many contrived arguments for continuing the NATO alliance. It has been very, very good for the militaries of the countries involved…. If NATO goes away, all those jobs go away; all those lovely chateaus, and chauffeurs and railroad cars go away. It’s something that has been very enjoyable for a good many years, and the fact that there is no longer any requirement for it doesn’t mean they don’t want to keep a good thing going.
NATO’s expansion benefited the U.S. military, U.S. weapons manufacturers, and their counterparts in Western Europe. Eastern European states were eager to join what many viewed as a “prestigious” organization as a symbol that they had finally arrived on the world stage.
None of this had anything to do with security in any meaningful sense, since Russia was, for the most part, acting in accord with U.S. and Western interests. Indeed, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president at the time, was widely viewed as a pro-U.S. stooge. U.S. officials were so appreciative of Yeltsin that they intervened in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure that Yeltsin won. Time magazine even produced a caricature of Yeltsin on the cover, holding a U.S. flag, under the title “Yanks to the Rescue.” The Time subtitle read: “The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.” Russians have long resented this U.S. interference in their electoral processes.
In undertaking these interventions, the U.S. was laying the groundwork for future conflicts with Russia. If U.S. officials were looking for trouble and seeking to increase global insecurity, they could not have done a better job.
Given all these historical affronts, it should come as no surprise that the Russian people longed for a more authoritarian leader — like Putin — who would stand up to the increasingly distrusted U.S. Despite his authoritarian style, Putin has been inarguably popular and has dominated Russian politics since first coming to power in 2000.
U.S. officials cannot go back in time to correct past mistakes; in all probability, they will never regain Russia’s trust. However, we do have an opportunity to deescalate tensions. The key Russian demand is a firm U.S. guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. U.S. officials should be open to this demand, as a basis for a full settlement, and should forgo their obsession with relentlessly projecting U.S. power through NATO. Surely this outcome would be better than a new Cold War with a nuclear-armed Russia, which is becoming a serious risk.
President Joe Biden’s agenda has stalled out in Congress. He’s facing low approval ratings and a potential Republican wave in November’s midterm election. The announcement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement was seen as a chance to reset the narrative, in Washington-speak, and give party activists some reason for enthusiasm in what could be a grueling and demoralizing year. In reality, nominating a new justice, even one in the mold of the bench’s most liberal member, Sonia Sotomayor, may be little more than placing a fig leaf over a fundamentally anti-democratic institution.
On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, should he get the chance. He’s now poised to fulfill that promise, and if he’s successful it will mark the first time that a Black woman will sit on the bench in the court’s history. The response has been completely predictable, with conservatives using racist tropes to discredit a nominee before she’s even been named, right-wing Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn pushing an anti-labor candidate, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arguing that considering identity is necessary but not sufficient to evaluate who should sit on the bench.
Perhaps most notable, though, is the lack of obstruction Biden is getting from the two senators who have, until now, thwarted his most progressive agenda items. Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have served as alternating saboteurs of Biden’s social spending package, and the party’s voting rights and election reform agendas. When it comes to the court pick, however, they’ve fallen in line, at least for now.
Manchin recently said he was “anxious” to confirm Breyer’s replacement, and that he was open to voting for a candidate more liberal than the outgoing justice. Sinema has been characteristically obtuse about her position, saying only in a statement that she was looking forward to “thoughtfully examining the nominee.” Neither Manchin nor Sinema have voted against any of Biden’s lower court nominees, and the feeling within the party is that they’ll ultimately support whoever Biden puts forward.
There are a few theories to account for Manchin and Sinema’s apparent lack of obstructionism. It could be that a Supreme Court nominee is such a momentous occasion that intra-party conflicts can be put to the side. In Sinema’s case, it could be that she fears opposing Biden’s pick could add fuel to the growing campaign to primary her in 2024.
More likely is that each of them understands two things about the Supreme Court. First, and most obviously, that the composition of the current court won’t fundamentally change with Justice Breyer’s retirement. It will overwhelmingly still be a 6-3 conservative court, and is likely to stay that way for years. Second, is that the Supreme Court — like the filibuster in the Senate — is a deeply reactionary institution that has almost always existed to thwart, rather than further, the expansion of democracy in the United States. From pro-slavery decisions like Dred Scott v. Sandford; to the racist “insular cases,” which created second-class status for people in U.S. territories and colonies; to opposition to the New Deal; to the post-1970s era, the court has been reliably on the side of white supremacy and the interests of capital.
Unfortunately, most liberals have a completely backwards view of the court and its history. The famous Warren Court, which began in 1953 with the elevation of Earl Warren to chief justice, looms large in the minds of liberals for its groundbreaking rulings, including ending formal school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, mandating publicly provided criminal representation in Gideon v. Wainwright, and ensuring a right to privacy Griswold v. Connecticut, a crucial pillar in securing abortion rights less than a decade later under Roe v. Wade.
But even with Warren at the head, the Supreme Court was only reliably liberal during a brief period from 1962 to 1969. Otherwise, the court has consistently been dominated by conservatives. Since then, the court has consistently moved to the right, a dynamic that only accelerated under former President Donald Trump. Despite this undeniable trend, liberals continue to imagine the court’s role as a protector of minority rights, rather than a champion of big business and anti-majoritarian rule.
Liberal opinion of the court did decline by the end of the Trump years, now standing at a 46 percent approval rating. Still, arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts had a 55 percent approval rating among Democrats in December 2021, only 2 points shy of his approval among Republicans. Democrats gave the Supreme Court as a whole an approval rating of 58 percent as late as September 2020, although that dipped 8 points the following year. Support for the court from liberals seems to be very closely tied to the ideological balance of the court, rather than the court as an institution.
The uncritical hero worship of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is just the most obvious manifestation of a core belief among liberals. Namely, that the court, for all its faults, is a necessary, natural and often progressive institution in U.S. life. That also helps to explain why there is approximately zero interest from mainstream liberals in fundamentally changing the court, either by adding seats, instituting term limits, ignoring its rulings or abolishing it altogether.
For all the signals that Democrats will probably be able to muster 50 votes for Biden’s choice, the actual confirmation is at least a month away. New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a Democrat, was hospitalized this week after suffering a stroke. Early reporting says it was mild, and that Lujan should be able to return to work in four to six weeks.
There’s also still time for Republican opposition to eat away at either Manchin or Sinema. For the moment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his leadership team are reportedly trying to play down early opposition, believing they don’t have the votes to stop whoever Biden picks.
The rest of the party, however, isn’t following McConnell’s cue. Potential Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz called Biden’s commitment to nominating a Black woman “offensive.” Sen. Josh Hawley, another presidential hopeful, said it was an example of Biden’s “hard woke left” ideology, and accused the administration of being “race-obsessed, gender-obsessed in terms of trying to deconstruct genders.” Arguably the chamber’s most open bigot, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, said he wanted a court pick “who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog,” and who wouldn’t “try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker said Biden’s nominee would be a “beneficiary” of “affirmative action.”
Whether Manchin would actually support a court nominee significantly more liberal than him remains to be seen. He’s previously put offers on the table, only to rescind them as negotiations progressed. Where Sinema stands also remains to be seen. If Biden chooses D.C. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recently issued a major ruling in favor of federal unions, either senator could discover a previously unknown objection to them. But if they both go along with Biden’s pick even if she has a history of liberal opinions, that tells us how comfortable conservatives in both parties are with the Supreme Court right now.
This past week has shown the clear and present danger that Trump represents to the survival of United States democracy. As the committee investigating the January 6 attempted putsch has revealed, Trump and his inner circle were willing to do just about anything to maintain their hold on power. Trump himself has, this week, shown just how politically depraved he is: In a statement that he released online, he berated former Vice President Mike Pence for having not “overturned the election.” And at a pep rally in Texas, Trump all but promised that he would pardon those who participated in the January 6 storming of the Capitol.
This is all so far down the lawless, fascist, paramilitary rabbit hole that even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has spent the past six years enabling Trump’s every attack on democracy, mildly pushed back, saying that he was “not in favor” of pardons being issued for the January 6 coup-plotters. Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps Trump’s most odious and opportunistic of cheerleaders, also chimed in, saying that the ex-president’s promise was “inappropriate.”
But these are milquetoast criticisms, equivalent to trying to put out a five-alarm fire with teacups full of tepid water. And even those criticisms are a rarity. Over the past year, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly huddled with the ex-president at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and talked over strategies to retake the House in 2022, despite the fact McCarthy initially held Trump responsible for the coup attempt of January 6. After Trump’s latest outrageous comments, there was nary a peep of discontent or discomfort from McCarthy.
There are tools to bar Trump, as an instigator of efforts to trigger an insurrection, from ever running for public office again. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War, which specifically bars insurrectionists from office, is tailor-made for the Trump situation; yet the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress, including Senators McConnell and Graham, wouldn’t in a million years dream of alienating their base by using this mechanism against Trump.
It is, once again, a stunning example of political cowardice in the face of this concerted and escalating effort to destroy U.S. democratic norms and institutions.
As correspondent John Nichols, my colleague at The Nation, has pointed out, Trump’s promise to pardon those who take up arms on his behalf is redolent of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s behavior in the run-up to his seizing absolute power and declaring the Italian Fascist Party to be above, and outside of, the law. It is also reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s behavior — both in the 1920s when he helped instigate a putsch attempt against the Weimar Republic, and in the 1930s when, as chancellor, he used the pretext of the Reichstag Fire to destroy the remnants of democratic governance in Germany and to replace it with explicit dictatorship, the rule of the Führer.
When powerful, charismatic leaders, whose words and gestures sway tens of millions of people, embrace paramilitarism and tell their followers who pick up guns and throw bombs on their behalf that they are misunderstood heroes, they set the stage for a historical catastrophe.
An increasing number of democracy scholars, both in the U.S. and abroad, believe that the U.S. is currently so polarized, and its democratic binding principles so frayed, that there is a real risk of civil unrest, or even conflict, surrounding the 2024 elections. And Trump is actively stoking this risk, apparently having calculated that his personal interests are best served by once again cranking up the rage machine, by once more pandering to and encouraging his own personal storm troopers. In a country as heavily armed as is the U.S., this is a diabolically dangerous calculus.
Trump isn’t just looking in the rearview mirror. He’s not simply chewing the cud about what happened in the dying days of 2020 and the opening weeks of 2021. Instead, he is showing every sign of looking forward. In his endorsements of conspiracist candidates, Trump is seeding the ground for “Stop-the-Steal” true believers to take control of state elections apparatuses in 2022, and for increasingly extreme, and anti-democratic GOP candidates to be elected to Congress and the Senate. In his building up of a vast financial war chest, he is laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential run, supported, he hopes, by the newly elected Stop-the-Steal gang. And in his embrace of the January 6 plotters, Trump is giving a clear signal that, over the coming years, he is likely to support paramilitary groups, to condone political violence aimed at his opponents, and to cheer on those who have no moral or political limits when it comes to aiding and abetting his efforts to return to power.
Yes, Senator Graham, I’d say all of that is indeed “inappropriate.” But I’d also say it’s fascistic, both in the means it uses and in the ends that it seeks to secure. I’d say it’s treasonous — a personal power grab obscenely wrapped in the fluttering flags of a strongman’s deluded followers. And I’d say it’s blood-thirsty — a gambit that knowingly puts lives at risk by encouraging militias and paramilitary groups to go after those who stand in the way of their vision and their political priorities.
There can’t be a middle ground of compromise with a man like Trump. He is, now, quite explicitly waging war on the country’s constitutional system. It’s long past time to trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and to banish, forever, this vicious gargoyle from public office.
Remembering the reality of death, fearing it, welcoming it and trying to understand its uncanny nature is what I do as a human being. Being a philosopher adds to the existential gravity of the reality of death. The truth is that someday all of us will become food for worms.
In the last days of 2021, we have had to face the reality and tragedy of death in the news. The trial involving three white men who chased 25-year-old unarmed Black male Ahmaud Arbery, a chase which led to him being shot and killed by one of the white men, brought back memories of his tragic death.
The trial of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse who killed two men and wounded one brought back memories of the suffering of the families of those two men, their hearts broken beyond repair. There is no victory gained because of their deaths.
And just stop and think about the man who, on November 21, 2021, drove his SUV into a gathering of people at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, which led to the deaths of six innocent people, including an 8-year-old boy. Over 60 others were injured. Each death took away an irreplaceable individual, as all deaths do.
Indeed, it is partly our individual, existential distinctiveness that makes death even more weighty, tragic and a deep conundrum. When I hear about the death of others, I frequently feel it in my bones: Damn! There is no other like that person. Where did they go?
Imagine the exponential questioning, suffering and pain when we calculate that as of this writing, in the U.S. alone, more than 800,000 irreplaceable persons have died from COVID-19, and worldwide, the number is over 5,000,000. When we hear about those global numbers, it is important that we become attuned to actual deaths, the cessation of millions of consciousnesses, stopped, just like that. This process of cessation is never just about how people have died, but that they have died. We’re back to the uncanniness of death.
Just a few days before the death of my father in 2014, I asked him a question about death, his imminent death, perhaps the sort of question some might find insensitive or inappropriate. I posed the question to my father as my partner and I slowly began walking toward the exit of the hospice room: “So, what are your thoughts now about dying?”
My father’s response, although he had not spoken much at all that day, partly because he was under the influence of heavy painkillers, and had begun the active stage of dying, was short: “It’s too complex.”
He mustered all his energy to say that. Perhaps I had anticipated something more pensive, something more drawn-out. After all, while unknown to both of us, this was the final question I would ask him, and the final spoken words that he would say to me before he died. His last words to me were consistent with our mutual grappling with the meaning of death. Until the very end, he spoke with honesty, courage and wisdom.
While not a professional philosopher, my father loved wisdom, and had the gift of gab. Our many conversations touched on the existence of God, the meaning of love, and, yes, the fact of death. I have known many who have taken the mystery out of death through a kind of sociological matter-of-factness: “We all will die at some point. Tell me something I don’t know.” I suspect that many of these same people have also taken the mystery out of being alive, out of the fact that we exist: “But of course I exist; I’m right here, aren’t I?”
In retrospect, my father and I refused to allow death to have the final word without first, metaphorically, staring it in the face. We were both rebelling against the ways in which so many hide from facing the fact that consciousness, as we know it, will stop — poof!
Even when we close our eyes, there is still the experience of phosphenes — the visual phenomena, like floating stars and squiggles — that we see behind our lids. So, closed eyelids don’t come close to mimicking death. Even being asleep radically falls short, because most of us dream, and for those of us who have dreamless nights, we still wake up.
Death, however, is not a thing, it’s not an object. Death is nothing, it is no thing. Ludwig Wittgenstein expresses it this way: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.” So it would seem that death involves the demise of the perceiver, and, as such, one can’t possibly say, “I’m dead.”
My father and I were more like Søren Kierkegaard than like Leo Tolstoy’s fictional character Ivan Ilyich, who desperately avoided the inevitability of his death. For us, death was, in the language of Kierkegaard, “by no means something in general.” We understood that death is about me, him and you, meaning that death is impersonal in its universal grip, and yet profoundly personal. We tarried with its unapologetic finality. We took to heart the words of Michel de Montaigne: “Amidst feasts and pleasures we should always keep in mind the remembrance of our condition, never let ourselves be so carried away with pleasures that our memory fails to remind us how many are the ways that our happiness can fall prey to death, how many are the ways she threatens us….”
As I have thought deeper about the meaning of death, it now occurs to me that my father and I both knew about dying, but not about death. Dying is a process; we sometimes get to count the days, hours, minutes or seconds — but for me to die, there is no conscious self who recognizes that I’m gone or that I was even here. So yes, death, as my father put it, is too complex. Perhaps there was a deeper wisdom being communicated by my father. Possibly, he was saying to me that death is a problem for the living; it is from “this side” of death (the side of life) that the meaning of death eludes us.
And yet, life itself is also filled with mystery. The fact that we exist at all is pregnant with layers of inscrutability. After all, this is the only time that I’ve ever been on this planet, within this solar system, this galaxy. It is the only time for each of us, though we seem to forget this as we are often preoccupied with texting, career planning, rushing here and there. It’s not like we’ve done planets and existence before or death before, as one might have one’s first drink and then others thereafter. Then again, as explored below through the lens of Jainism, for example, perhaps we have been here before through a process of reincarnation.
There is something powerfully humbling and breathtakingly ecstatic about these deeper, existential “one-time” events. My students recently reminded me that while I was teaching, I said in the form of a eureka moment: “Hey! We’re on a planet!” It is moments like this that the quotidian recedes while the strangeness of our existential predicament is uncovered.
That we are on a planet is, for me, at such times, uncannily unfamiliar. Like death, it is not “something in general.” Add to this the fact that each person is irreplaceable, that there is no other like you in a universe whose diameter is 93 billion light-years, well, I tremble at the thought.
The English author Douglas Adams captures what I mean where he writes, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
It was in February 2020 that I wrote the introduction to a series of interviews that I would subsequently conduct on the theme of death and religion. Our first reports of COVID-19 were in December 2019. My initial aim in conducting the interviews was not influenced by the deaths caused by COVID-19. However, as the interviews progressed, it became clear to me that the overlap was hard to ignore. In fact, I personally heard from readers who communicated that the interviews helped them because so many people were dying of COVID-19. The overall personal sense of precarity no doubt also encouraged those readers to write to me. I would like to think that it was partially the courage of probing the meaning of death, the refusal to look away, that was helpful. What had begun as a philosophical inquiry became a balm for some.
The interviews themselves — from the perspectives of Buddhism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Jainism, Taoism, Atheism, Islam and Ìṣẹ̀ṣe (the Yoruba religion) — expressed fascinating worldviews that offered a plurality of different ways of narrating the meaning of death.
As symbolic systems/discursive frames of reference they attested to our human capacity to be touched by the fact of death, to make sense of it, and to respond to its mystery in deep symbolic and discursively differential ways.
I embarked upon these interviews because I’m a philosopher who, at his core, is passionate about “Big Philosophical Questions.” I want to know about the fundamental structure of ultimate reality, whether God exists or not, the nature of the “good life,” the limits of human knowledge, the essence of beauty, and why there is something rather than nothing. Regarding such complex questions, I find myself bracketing “Truth” (with a capital T). While the aspiration is there, the actual attainment of “Truth” is deeply uncertain. Very often, this state of not knowing leaves me profoundly melancholic. It is not just our seeming incapability to answer these questions with any certainty that generates this emotion, but the possibility that there are no absolute answers and that life, as William Shakespeare’s protagonist Macbeth says, is “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
We don’t seem to be able to glimpse what is behind or beyond death’s veil. Nevertheless, the interviews provided a panoply of complex stories and conceptual paradigms in terms of which to think about death. Even after the interviews, the unknowability of death is where I continue to tarry. There is so much to learn, paradoxically, about what is unknowable.
Buddhist scholar Dadul Namgyal explained that we cannot have life without death, and that death is often a problem because we cling to material objects. Death is also a problem because we possess habits of self-obsession and attitudes of self-importance. Death and life are impermanent, and it is understanding and accepting this continual change and renewal that speaks not only to life, but to its flipside.
Moulie Vidas, scholar of Judaism, while emphasizing the importance of the separation of the soul from the body, placed more emphasis upon the intellectual and spiritual energy within Judaism that aims at shaping a particular kind of life.
As a Roman Catholic, Karen Teel framed death as a conviction that we derive from love and that we will return to love. Like Vidas, though, Teel also emphasized the importance of this life. She doesn’t feel terribly interested in persuading others to believe what she does about life after death. In fact, she even grants the possibility of being wrong. In a matter-of-fact fashion, she says, “Whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not anyone believes in it.” Teel is far more interested in working toward creating a more just world.
For Jainism scholar Pankaj Jain, the body perishes, but the soul continues a journey through the process of transmigration. The soul reincarnates in any of the many species on the planet. Such an infinite process is contingent upon just how nonviolent the journey of the soul has been through its different lives. This side of the veil of death consists of trying to completely purify the soul through absolute nonviolence.
Brook Ziporyn, scholar of Taoism (or Daoism), also stresses the importance of non-fixity. For example, a human being is only one modality of being. What is important is malleability. As in Buddhism, there is emphasis placed upon detachment, where we free ourselves of various prejudices and our prior values and goals.
This process of constant change allows every new situation to “deliver to us its own new form as a new good.” Also, in this view, there is no need to fear death as we are constantly in the process of “letting go” so that we are, in essence, the same as the “Transforming Openness.” In other words, despite the changes that we undergo (for example, life and death), there is no final closure. Within this narrative, forgetting is exalted as the highest stage of Taoist/Daoist cultivation. Being alive, at this moment, is, as it were, being in the middle of the nothingness or formlessness that is before and after our lives. All of this is part of the same indivisible whole.
Like Judaism and Christianity, according to Leor Halevi, Islam is also concerned with divine justice, soteriology (human salvation) and eschatology (the end of time). And while Islam, through the Quran, conceives of Jesus and Abraham differently than do Judaism and Christianity, there is a shared understanding of the separation of the soul from the body. However, in Islam, that separation is temporary as the body and the soul are necessary to fully constitute the person, whether dead or alive. Before the resurrection, the soul will be confined to the grave or dwell in heaven or hell. What kind of life we must live to be with Allah depends, according to Halevi, on who we ask: a theologian, a mystic, a local imam or a jihadist. Yet, there is a final judgment where Allah assembles the jinn (“supernatural beings”), animals and humankind in a gathering place. According to Halevi, “There, every creature has to stand, naked … before God. In the trial, prophets and body parts such as eyes and tongues bear witness against individuals, and God decides where to send them.”
Jacob Kehinde Olupona, scholar of the Yoruba religion, pointed out that among the Owo Yoruba people, death (Iku) is compared to the hippopotamus, whose extraordinary weight no one can carry and whose presence one can’t escape or run from. This rich description of death captures my sense of the gravity of facing our ineluctable finitude; it is something that bears upon the living and which, we cannot in the end, avoid.
Within the context of the Yoruba tradition, death is not the end, but marks a continuation to another realm, one where the living dead exist within the context of the sacred cosmos. One who dies in very old age is seen as “a fulfillment of one of the cardinal life quests.” Such individuals transition to the ancestral world. To die young isn’t celebrated as it is seen as a rupture in the process of accomplishing one’s mission on Earth.
I knew that there would be some shared assumptions, narrative differences and incompatible perspectives about the meaning of death as I conducted the interviews. The interviews have confirmed for me that my father was right when it comes to death: It’s too complex.
Knowing my father, though, he didn’t mean that one should relinquish the search because of its complexity or throw up one’s hands in utter despair because there is no absolute evidence that there is something of transcendent significance beyond death. The interviews reinforced, for me, just how confounding death is. Even atheist philosopher Todd May was willing to imagine a form of atheism that could involve “a spiritual bond uniting all people or all living beings.” He sees this as a view that would not require a transcendent deity, though he is very clear that it would still not be his form of atheism. So, the complexity persists.
I offer no solid epistemological grounds here — just hope, which is not simply a reaction to gloom, but a form of courage that tarries in the face of the abyss that is death. Because death is not an event in life, we are restricted, condemned to play out these deep narratives from this side of the grave. After all, as human beings, we are Homo narrans, storytellers, as Calvin O. Schrag says, who find ourselves within stories already told and who strive “for a self-constitution by emplotting [ourselves] in stories in the making.”
The multiple interviews that I conducted underscored how human perspectives regarding death are limited, marked by context, culture, explicit and implicit metaphysical sensibilities, communities of discourse, aesthetic frames of reference, diverse ontologies and “final vocabularies,” as Richard Rorty would say. Perhaps they are all limited and imperfect attempts to approach something that evades full description from different angles and using different strategies. Is there really something there, beyond just the fact that we die, and the narrative frameworks that we treasure to make sense of that fact?
I would like to think that there is “something” that stirs the souls of human beings, that quickens our narrative and symbolic capacities/strivings to make sense of that which we may not be able to capture in full. In this case, perhaps each religious worldview “touches” something or is touched by something beyond the grave, something which is beyond our descriptive limits, which exceeds our attempts at mimesis vis-à-vis death. I realize that this view has its limits. Indeed, one might say that it leads to an absurdity. After all, what can possibly touch us from beyond death, if death is in fact no thing? Is it unreasonable to ask about what exists after death when, as some would say, by definition, death is nothing?
Again, my father’s wisdom comforts: The answer is too complex. At no point, though, did my father mean that there is or is not something on the other side of death.
That which is “too complex,” for me, has embedded within it a sense of hope. For me, therein lies a significant feature of the meaning of death. What it ultimately means is an open question. That fact alone is both frightening to me and yet filled with a mysterious hopefulness. In the end, the meaning of death remains a mystery. For me, this fact wisely counsels us in the way of profound humility.
As we await President Joe Biden’s nomination to fill the Supreme Court seat that Stephen Breyer will vacate this summer, many commentators are saying the nominee will not alter the ideological balance of the court. The 6 to 3 split in favor of the right-wingers will not change. But each new member transforms the dynamics of the court. “The Court changes every time there’s a new face. The dynamics are different” when a new justice joins the court; “that is the way the system works,” Justice Harry Blackmun told Professor Philippa Strum in a 1993 interview. Biden has a golden opportunity to replace Breyer with a progressive justice — one who could help lay the foundation for a political shift in the future.
An examination of Breyer’s voting record in the areas of criminal justice and civil rights reveals that he has been out of step with his fellow liberals on the court.
Breyer cast a smaller percentage of liberal votes than any other Democratic appointee with whom he served on the court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), according to a January 24, 2022, report by professors Lee Epstein, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn.
This divide between Breyer and his liberal colleagues is particularly apparent in cases involving defendants’ rights and civil rights litigation.
Breyer’s Pro-Police Record in Search and Seizure Cases
Breyer’s disproportionately pro-police votes were most prevalent in search and seizure cases.
In 2013, Breyer cast the deciding vote to reach a 5 to 4 majority in Maryland v. King, joining John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They held that police could take DNA samples without specific suspicion of criminal activity or consent from anyone arrested for a serious offense, just for the purpose of investigating other crimes.
Breyer once again cast the fifth vote for police in the 2016 case of Utah v. Strieff. Edward Strieff was stopped with no probable cause or reasonable suspicion after which police discovered he had an outstanding warrant. The court said the prosecution could use the evidence against Strieff because the warrant was independent of the illegal stop. This case gives the police an incentive to violate the Fourth Amendment because they know illegally seized evidence will still be admissible in court.
Likewise, Breyer provided the fifth vote in favor of police in Navarette v. California, a 2014 case in which the court held that an anonymous tip that a person was driving erratically would support a traffic stop by the police.
Breyer’s Votes Against Affirmative Action and Gay Rights
In affirmative action cases, Breyer’s votes also often differed from those cast by his liberal colleagues.
Breyer voted to strike down the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program in the 2003 case of Gratz v. Bollinger because its ranking system gave an automatic point increase to racial minorities instead of making individualized determinations. John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ginsburg dissented.
Unlike Sotomayor, who voted with the majority to uphold the affirmative action program at the University of Texas, Breyer dissented in the 2016 case of Fisher v. Univ. of Texas. The 4 to 3 majority held that the use of ethnicity and race as admission factors was narrowly tailored for a compelling interest in diversity.
In 2014, Breyer did not join Ginsburg and Sotomayor who dissented in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. The 6 to 3 decision held that an amendment to Michigan’s constitution that prohibited state universities from considering race in its admissions process did not violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
Over the dissents of Ginsburg and Sotomayor, Breyer voted with the majority in the 2018 case Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The court held 7 to 2 that the cake shop could refuse on religious grounds to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Biden’s Nominee Should Be a Progressive Black Woman
Biden has vowed to name a Black woman to the high court. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the third Black justice and the sixth woman (and significantly the first Black woman) in the court’s 233-year history. Of the 115 justices who have served on the Supreme Court, 108 have been white men. The current court has no former public defenders or civil rights attorneys.
Likely candidates to replace Breyer have very different records on social justice issues.
The most progressive jurist reportedly under consideration is Ketanji Brown Jackson. A judge serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Jackson was confirmed to the position vacated by Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland by a Senate vote of 53 to 44 last year. All 50 Democratic senators and three GOP senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted for her.
President Barack Obama appointed Jackson to be a U.S. district court judge in 2012. Jackson, who graduated with high honors from Harvard College and was editor of the Harvard Law Review at Harvard Law School, clerked for Breyer.
Having served as a public defender, Jackson would be the only Supreme Court justice to have represented criminal defendants since Thurgood Marshall. Jackson represented several Guantánamo detainees. When she was an associate at a corporate law firm, she filed amicus briefs that supported challenges to Bush administration detention policies, including the detention of a lawful permanent resident arrested on U.S. soil as an enemy combatant with no charges.
In her first opinion on the D.C. Circuit Court, Jackson, writing on behalf of the 3 to 0 panel, struck down a policy instituted by the Trump administration that had curtailed the bargaining power of labor unions representing more than a million federal employees. She joined a three-judge circuit court ruling in December 2021 that disallowed Trump’s claim of executive privilege to withhold White House documents from the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.
When she was a federal district judge, Jackson penned a strong opinion in 2019 rejecting a claim made by Donald McGahn — Donald Trump’s White House Counsel — who argued that he had absolute immunity from testifying before a committee of the House of Representatives. Jackson famously wrote, “Presidents are not kings,” adding, “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.” And when she was on the district court bench, Jackson voted to stop the Trump administration’s efforts to fast-track deportations.
Biden is also reportedly considering California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger. She clerked for Stevens and Judge David Tatel of the D.C. Circuit Court. Kruger also served as deputy assistant attorney general in Obama’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and as acting principal deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration. She has a mixed record on Fourth Amendment cases — writing one opinion that said police couldn’t search a woman’s purse without a warrant after she refused to produce a driver’s license, and another opinion upholding a California law requiring that police collect DNA samples and fingerprints from all people arrested for or convicted of felonies.
Michelle Childs is in the running for Breyer’s seat. She has served as a U.S. district judge since Obama nominated her in 2010. Biden nominated Childs to the D.C. Circuit Court in December 2021, but her nomination was put on hold because she is a candidate for the Supreme Court vacancy.
Childs is supported by Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the third most powerful Democrat in Congress. His endorsement of Biden’s candidacy was pivotal in his election as president and Clyburn urged Biden to appoint Childs to the D.C. Circuit Court. Both GOP senators from South Carolina — Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott — strongly back Childs. When asked whether he would support another nominee, Graham replied, “It would be much more problematic,” even though he was one of three Republicans who voted to confirm Jackson to the D.C. Circuit Court. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) also praised Childs, calling her “a tremendous, tremendous candidate.” Unlike many other prospective candidates, Childs, who attended University of South Carolina School of Law, does not have an Ivy League pedigree.
But Childs is not favored by progressives because she “overwhelmingly represented employers accused of violating civil rights and gender discrimination laws in the workplace,” The American Progressive reported.
Former prosecutor Leslie Abrams Gardiner, a federal judge in Georgia, is also being considered to replace Breyer. Before her appointment to the bench, Gardiner represented large corporations including Bank of America and Google. Her sister is voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.
Non-judges in the candidate pool include Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she has worked for voting rights and against job discrimination and police brutality.
Some racist Republican senators are already preemptively attacking Biden’s nominee. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) said in a radio interview that anyone Biden chooses would be a beneficiary of “affirmative racial discrimination.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told HuffPost, “The Republicans have already moved beyond racial dog whistles and directly to racial sirens. They’ve done it for a Supreme Court nominee before anyone has been named,” adding that they “have decided they would rather stir up an ugly portion of their base rather than try to evaluate these candidates on their own.”
But fortunately, the filibuster does not apply to Supreme Court nominees. All Democrats and some GOP senators, including Collins, Graham and Murkowski, will probably support Biden’s choice. Childs, however, may well be the front-runner, with Clyburn pulling out all the stops to get her on the court. As Annie Karji wrote in The New York Times, “It is a blatant effort to call in a political favor in the form of a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court and, perhaps, the most consequential test yet of the Biden-Clyburn relationship.”
Now is the time for activists to make their voices heard and push for a truly progressive Supreme Court justice who will likely serve for decades.
The rising tensions between Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO countries — and the resulting discourse in U.S. media — show that American leaders love an international crisis.
In a crisis, the American public is often discouraged from asking questions — and when they do, militarism is usually the answer.
Even as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky discourages panic and downplays the idea that a Russian invasion is imminent, American officials are portraying armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine as inevitable — and U.S. military support of Ukraine as necessary.
“What’s the alternative?” asked retired Brigadier General and former Defense Attaché to Moscow Peter Zwack in an interview on NPR. “Do we just let them get invaded, or do we make the cost so high on the ground-level military — but also the diplomatic and the economic?”
The choice being put forward is between military action or inaction; to opt for “inaction” is presented as an abandonment of Ukraine. Zwack’s prescription is “lethal weapons” — specifically Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
And the U.S. is delivering. In just over a week, the U.S. made four shipments of weapons to Ukraine — a move that has U.S. arms manufacturers anticipating soaring profits for their shareholders.
The particular kind of crisis story that American officials are deploying in the situation with Ukraine is a familiar one: An underdog faces a threat from an authoritarian regime, so the United States must come to the rescue with a military response.
In an interview on NPR, Republican Representative and Chair of Congress’s Ukraine Caucus Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania offered a historical analogy often invoked by American officials to justify military action.
“When we defended Kuwait in Operation Desert Shield,” Fitzpatrick said, “we sent a message to the world that you cannot violate the territorial integrity of an independent nation. And Ukraine should be no different. We have to send a very strong and unequivocal message to Vladimir Putin, which would also be a message to Xi Jinping, to Kim Jong Un and other bad actors around the world that this is not OK to do.”
Fitzpatrick’s interviewer didn’t question his response. But his example of U.S. military action in Iraq in 1991 shows exactly why it’s critical to question the narrative being pushed by U.S. media, especially during times of crisis.
In Fitzpatrick’s account of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. appears to be a bystander responding to Iraqi actions. But his story conveniently omits the fact that just prior to its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq counted the U.S. as an ally — one that supplied it with weapons during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It also ignores that the story did not end with Desert Shield.
The U.S. quickly shifted its supposed defense of Kuwait into its own invasion — Operation Desert Storm — of Iraq. In that assault, the U.S. killed some 100,000 Iraqis and shattered the country. It then imposed catastrophic economic sanctions on Iraq, which were responsible for the deaths of another million Iraqis. It accompanied this policy with air patrols of Iraq, and bombed the country intermittently over the next decade. And finally, the U.S. invaded once again in 2003, occupied Iraq after and maintains about 2,500 troops there to this day.
Cherry-picking past examples of U.S. intervention excludes vital context and falls short of telling the whole story. Narratives like these obscure ongoing, longstanding military operations and other policies that make the world more dangerous and which have no end in sight.
Still, there are moments when officials share details that unintentionally reveal that U.S. involvement in the crisis on the Ukrainian border is far more complicated than they have been acknowledging.
With 8,500 U.S. troops readied for deployment, a journalist asked during a White House press conference if sending forces to the countries that NATO counts as its “Eastern Flank” might escalate the situation rather than calm it. “We’ve had troops in the Eastern Flank countries for decades,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied.
Indeed, the U.S. maintains an enormous, nuclear armed military presence in Europe — and in the years leading up to the current crisis, it has spent millions of dollars arming Ukraine in particular.
Since the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, in which Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the U.S. has sent hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine — in 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020 — including its celebrated Javelin missiles.
Psaki’s admission begs some follow-up questions: If U.S. troops and weapons have already been in Ukraine for years — and in Europe for decades — but their presence has not deterred Russia from mobilizing troops to the Ukrainian border, why does the Pentagon think that more weapons and troops will do so now? And could it be, perhaps, that this same U.S. militarism is a cause of rising tension in Eastern Europe, rather than its solution?
It would be wrong to minimize the potential devastation of a Russian invasion of Ukraine should one occur. But U.S. actions are raising tensions rather than resolving them. While they speak of Ukrainian sovereignty, it is clear that U.S. officials are primarily preoccupied with Russian military aggression that they see as threatening a world order that the U.S. presides over. And as Representative Fitzpatrick makes clear, they also want to send a message to China and other states that they consider hostile.
Ultimately, increased U.S. militarism in Eastern Europe — as history has repeatedly made clear — will only make the situation worse.
Talk of a primary challenge to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is ramping up in the wake of the Arizona Democrat’s decision to protect the filibuster at the cost of passing voting rights legislation.
Over the weekend, James Carville, one of the doyens of Democratic Party strategy-making, averred that Sinema would lose if she were challenged by Rep. Ruben Gallego, a charismatic ex-Marine who represents Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. CNBC reported that Democratic Party donors were so fed up with the first-term senator that they were now planning to finance a primary run to unseat her.
In 2018, Sinema won a squeaker of an election against Martha McSally. McSally was a particularly weak candidate who struggled to connect with Arizona voters, and who would go on to lose a second Senate race two years later, this time against Mark Kelly. The two victories were crucial to the Democrats in ultimately building a Senate majority.
Yet, during the past few months, Sinema, along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, has made it all but impossible for the Senate to pass two crucial packages of legislation — the Build Back Better Act, and voting rights protections to counter state-level GOP efforts to constrict the franchise.
Sinema protested Build Back Better’s high price tag, but when push came to shove, she actually seemed more concerned about its efforts to rein in Big Pharma. Where Manchin engaged in constant — albeit ultimately fruitless — negotiations with the White House over reshaping the bill in ways he felt he could get behind, Sinema was more of a cypher. Colleagues in Congress reported they simply didn’t know what she wanted and thus couldn’t really engage in negotiations with her.
As for voting rights legislation, she delivered a spirited defense of the filibuster as a needed guardrail to protect bipartisanship, despite the fact that bipartisanship is largely a dead letter in this Senate, and despite the fact that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rammed through former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees without any allowance for filibusters against them.
As a result, Sinema has handed veto power to a GOP that is determined to block any and all of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda for the coming years. She also made it all-but-impossible for federal laws to be enacted to protect voting rights in the face of an onslaught of restrictions being voted into state law around the country.
But progressive anger at Sinema goes beyond her intransigent position on the filibuster. Grassroots activists in Arizona increasingly view Sinema as beholden to big money. Last week the New York Times reported that less than 2 percent of the $1.6 million the senator raised in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from small donations under $200. At least as damning in the eyes of the Democratic grassroots is the fact that large amounts came her way from GOP donors and from conservative PACs, including one affiliated with Fox News.
As Democratic strategist Carville pointed out, this rage has accumulated over the last year, and is now reaching the point where it places Sinema on increasingly shaky political ground. While she has considerable support among Republican and Independent voters in Arizona, even back in September — before she stood in the way of implementing voter protections — fewer than one in five of the state’s Democrats had a very favorable view of her.
That contrasted with her Democratic colleague, Senator Kelly, of whom 42 percent of Arizona Democrats had a very favorable opinion. That same poll showed that four out of ten of the state’s Republican voters looked upon Sinema favorably — which might bode well for her in a general election but won’t help her (and could well hurt her) if she faces a serious challenger in the primaries.
Back in October, a Data for Progress poll found that a slew of candidates, including Representative Gallego, as well as the mayors of Phoenix and of Tucson, would beat Sinema in a head-to-head primary race, and that Gallego would beat her even in a multi-candidate race. There haven’t been similar polls since Sinema’s blockade of the voting rights legislation, but it’s hard to see how that will have improved her standing among Democrats in her home state.
The prospect of a credible primary challenge against Sinema is, in the wake of her actions over the past months, increasingly likely. The newly formed Primary Sinema Project, part of the Change for Arizona 2024 PAC, is raising money to channel to local groups that are laying the groundwork for a primary challenge. Two other PACs, Nuestro and CrowdPAC, are also working on developing viable challengers to the senator, as is the grassroots group LUCHA, which is tapping into an ActBlue fundraising effort to primary the sitting senator.
The blue-ing of Arizona didn’t occur in a vacuum. Sinema and Kelly won their Senate seats, and Biden won the state’s 11 Electoral College votes, at the back-end of years of organizing by unions, by immigrants’ rights activists, by racial justice organizers, by progressive groups like Indivisible, and others. Sinema has, in the past few months, squandered the good will of pretty much all of these groups.
The senator is likely banking on the fact that two years is an eternity in politics, and that, by 2024, all will have long been forgiven and forgotten. She might be right; but it’s equally likely that these organizations, spurned and ignored by the senator they played a critical role in electing, will do everything in their power to replace her when the opportunity presents itself.
In late January, the Saudi-United Arab Emirates (UAE) coalition carried out an airstrike on a prison in Yemen, killing more than 90 detainees and injuring many more. Among the rubble was a fragment of the weapon used to do it. On it was a Raytheon Technologies manufacturer code. A few days later, the CEO of Raytheon, Greg Hayes, was discussing the escalation of the war in Yemen and Ukraine when he said, “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”
The Biden administration, ignoring its promises about Yemen from a year ago, is embracing the escalation of the war as they refuse to suspend any support to Saudi Arabia. Raytheon, a company that sees profits from the war in Yemen, gave President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign over half a million dollars in 2020.
In early November of 2021, the Biden administration announced a massive arms sale of $650 million worth of medium-range missiles and missile rail launchers to Saudi Arabia. The primary contractor for these weapons is Raytheon.
Aisha Jumaan, the Yemeni founder of Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, called out the responsibility of arms supplying companies like Raytheon, saying, “I would like to ask Greg Hayes, what would you say to the family members of those who were killed by your weapons? How would you feel if your family was targeted by these arsenals?”
Finding United States-manufactured weapons in Yemen is nothing new. In 2018, a bomb later identified as a Lockheed Martin product was dropped on a Yemeni school bus, killing more than 40 children.
When people discuss who is winning the war in Yemen, the answer will never be the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, or the UAE. Weapons companies funded by the U.S. taxpayer through Pentagon contracts are who’s winning the war. Weapons manufacturers that reinvest their money into political campaigns like President Biden’s are who’s winning the war.
With Saudi Arabia remaining the number one buyer of weapons from the U.S, these companies make millions — sometimes billions — of dollars arming the Saudi-UAE led coalition, and Biden took campaign donations from all of them. According to OpenSecrets, Biden’s campaign took $527,010 from Raytheon, $447,047 from Lockheed Martin, $726,873 from Boeing, $416,276 from Northrop Grumman, and $237,104 from General Dynamics.
U.S. companies are coming out on top at the expense of 30 million Yemenis, and the president’s political campaigns benefit from the companies’ ability to make so much money off conflict.
On February 4 of last year, President Biden announced to the world that the U.S. would be ending “offensive” support for the war in Yemen. Peace activists rejoiced for a moment but were quick to ask Biden what “offensive” really meant. What wasn’t “offensive” about Saudi Arabia and the UAE waging war and maintaining a blockade on a sovereign country like Yemen? Activists asked him what the announcement meant. Members of Congress asked for clarification as well. They never got answers. A year later, bombs are raining down on Yemen’s main cities while the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia remains unimpeded, and manufacturing codes of Biden’s campaign donors are still found in the rubble left behind by war crimes.
On the anniversary of Biden’s announcement promising to end offensive support to Saudi Arabia, the situation on the ground is worse than ever. Airstrikes have gone up in the first year of Biden’s presidency, compared to former President Donald Trump’s last year in office. Fuel and food are still not allowed to flow freely into Yemen because of the Saudi blockade. Fuel shortages are causing hospitals to risk losing power as they try to treat the countless children who are malnourished. Worst-case estimates say that a child dies every 75 seconds in Yemen.
Blaming Biden for his refusal to act isn’t enough now. His campaign donors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin benefit from the carnage. Their executives feel comfortable enough with that fact to admit it openly in their meetings.
In 2018 and 2019, when President Trump refused to act, Democrats and some Republicans in Congress made it a point to pass a War Powers Resolution to signal to the White House that Congress does not consent to the U.S.’s role in Yemen. Lawmakers in Congress must introduce and pass a new War Powers Resolution for Yemen soon if they are serious about ending U.S. complicity in the war.
On October 28, the White House released an upbeat statement asserting that the president had successfully negotiated a Build Back Better (BBB) framework with Sen. Joe Manchin and other recalcitrant Democratic senators. It was, of course, wildly optimistic. Two months later, having already negotiated the size of Biden’s signature legislation down from more than $3 trillion to not much more than half that amount, Senator Manchin pulled the plug on the entire package.
The demise of Build Back Better represented, for Biden, a humiliation. It was not only a public relations disaster, but, more importantly, it (temporarily, at least) killed off a series of vital social infrastructure and environmental investments, from child tax credits to the creation of a truly national infrastructure to sustain the growing electric vehicle fleet on United States roadways.
Now, with midterm elections only nine months away, Democratic leaders are scrambling to find parts of the bill that they can salvage and deliver on legislatively. Yet, it may ultimately prove no easier to break the bill down into component parts, each of which could pass by a bare-majority vote in the Senate, than it was to pass the overall package last year.
Senator Manchin, who is reveling in the outsized power that his opposition to BBB has generated for him, denies that he is currently negotiating a new legislative framework with the White House. But behind the scenes, some efforts do seem to be underway to resurrect key elements of BBB, so that Democrats don’t approach the midterms entirely empty-handed.
On January 20, Biden told reporters that he thought it likely that BBB would be broken up into individual bills, so as to fast-track hundreds of billions of dollars of clean energy investments and tax credits, in particular.
Biden has some reason to feel optimistic on this. After all, Senator Manchin is on record — for whatever that is worth these days — as supporting some of the climate change components of the legislation. Yet, despite this, the president’s upbeat language regarding the possibility of bold legislation passing in the current sclerotic Senate environment came off as naive, rather than as the sober thinking of the great inter- and intra-party negotiator that Biden fashions himself as being.
Each time BBB is redesigned in a way that suits Manchin’s mood, the progressive wing of the party — which threw its support behind the $1 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill only on the promise that the Senate would then pass BBB, and which already feels cheated by Manchin’s subsequently having sabotaged the legislation — loses more of its priorities. There’s no guarantee that they will agree to break up BBB if it means ultimately sacrificing key pieces of social infrastructure legislation, as well as tax credits that encourage Americans to buy union-made products.
Indeed, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) has called on the Senate to pass BBB in its entirety by March 1, so as to allow Biden to tout its passage in his upcoming State of the Union address. CPC head Pramila Jayapal, who put her political credibility on the line by breaking with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other so-called Squad members, and voting for the infrastructure legislation without simultaneous passage of BBB, has been scathing in her criticism of Manchin’s opposition to the latter legislation, saying it showed a “lack of integrity.” The CPC’s feeling of betrayal will make it harder for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to rally enough Democrats to pass a series of individual policies that lose the overarching transformative character of BBB and replace it with a Manchin-dictated wish list.
And even if progressives can work with Manchin, perhaps in exchange for his being willing to throw his support behind some of their other priorities, such as reining in the uniquely high drug prices Big Pharma charges in the U.S. market, it’s possible that, at that point, the other Senate holdout, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, will step in to put the kibosh on that.
For while Manchin has expressed distaste for Big Pharma’s squeeze on U.S. consumers, Sinema has gone to bat in defense of the pharmaceutical behemoths and against price restrictions in recent months. And, despite the fact that her path to the Senate was paved with good statements and intentions on the environment, she has shown that she is willing to stand in the way of the much-needed environmental investments contained in BBB in order to get her way on protecting the pharmaceutical industry, which has become a vast source of contributions to her campaigns over the past few years.
It’s possible that Biden might yet be able to square this circle. It’s possible that his much-touted negotiating skills will indeed kick in and somehow find points of agreement (and mutual trust) between progressives, Manchin, Sinema, and all the other parts of the Democratic constellation. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
In the nearly two years of this pandemic, we have endured not only illness, loss and social isolation, but also the mentally exhausting calculations of how to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe under constantly changing variants, infection rates and vaccine protections.
From early on, we had to learn to avoid falling into what psychologists refer to as “all or nothing” thinking — the logical fallacy that either a given situation is a complete success or total failure. Many of us used this distorted way of thinking to conclude that if we couldn’t be completely isolated from potential infection, then we might as well not even try.
This false dichotomy was obviously a bad method of risk assessment — the equivalent of someone claiming they can drive drunk every day because they did it once. But it was tempting in its simplicity, and some of us were more susceptible to it than others.
We all knew (or were) a friend who said she might as well go to restaurants since she was already facing exposure at the workplace. We all had (or were) the uncle who argued in the Zoom call planning an outdoor reunion that some weakness in the plan meant that we might as well just gather comfortably inside without masks.
Over time, however, most of us learned to think more in terms of probabilities than absolutes, shades of gray rather than black or white — even as we might have different opinions about the levels of risk and reward in various activities.
You might think that this collective learning process would have helped in recent months as we found ourselves confronted with the latest new variables in the ever-evolving COVID calculus: a mostly vaccinated population and a new Omicron variant that is highly contagious, less lethal for most vaccinated people than its predecessor, but still very dangerous for vulnerable populations.
Instead, politicians, CEOs and even public health leaders have led a coordinated campaign of regression back into the simplistic and disastrous variant of “all or nothing”: We can’t completely eradicate COVID, so let’s stop even trying to reduce and slow its spread.
As is often the case, our two political parties have used different emotional and cultural appeals to justify their support for the same disastrous policy of letting COVID rip through the population.
For two years, Republicans have railed against the injustice of pandemic restrictions without acknowledging the realities of the virus that makes them necessary. To return to the family metaphor, they have acted like children who think that rules meant to keep them out of danger are “unfair,” and they jump on any sign of parental inconsistency to claim that none of the rules make sense.
Their “all or nothing” arguments, more understandable in preteens than in senators, are that Anthony Fauci was wrong at first about masks so he must be wrong about everything; vaccines don’t prevent all infections so they don’t prevent any infections; 2020 lockdowns didn’t end COVID so they did nothing.
Democrats, by contrast, see themselves as the only adults in the room, caught between Republicans who deny the seriousness of COVID and leftists who refuse to acknowledge the reality that the virus is here to stay. In reality, much of what the left demanded is for Joe Biden to simply deliver on his own campaign pledges of adequate masking, testing and air ventilation in order to have schools and workplaces be open with a reasonable degree of safety.
While Republicans act like irresponsible children, Democrats strike the grating pose of parents who respond to a reasonable question from their kid about a friend whose parents have more lax rules with inanities like, “Oh and I suppose if Teddy Johnson jumped off the Empire State Building, then you would too!”
That was certainly the energy that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave off last December when she sneered at a reporter who simply wanted to know why the Biden administration wouldn’t make COVID tests freely available like in many other countries.
The problem for Biden and other Democrats is that these measures, along with temporary measures paying workers to stay home during peak virus spikes, entail a sustained policy shift toward investing in schools, public health and employee working conditions — all of which are anathema to the donor classes of both parties who have been pushing for a return to “normal,” by which they mean U.S. capitalism’s minimal social safety net and business oversight.
So Democrats have turned to their own more sophisticated version of “all or nothing” logic: gaslighting the calls for basic public health measures coming from epidemiologists and the left as extreme demands for permanent lockdowns in a fruitless effort to fully eradicate COVID. When teachers (and many parents) asked for temporary remote learning to allow schools to adequately prepare for Omicron, for example, Democratic mayors in Chicago and elsewhere twisted this into a call for endless school closures — and then accused teachers of not caring how students would be impacted by an awful demand that they never made.
The turn that Democrats have made in recent months toward embracing the Republican policy of giving up the fight against COVID is catastrophic today, and ominous for the future. One in five health care workers has left the industry since the start of the pandemic — and the current crush on hospitals will likely worsen that trend, which could prove disastrous if a future variant that’s more lethal than Omicron emerges.
Then there’s our culture’s increasing desensitization to mass death. In January, there were around 2,000 COVID deaths a day, at the same time as our public discourse has been filled with conservatives and liberals alike complaining that we’re overly concerned about COVID.
The glimmer of hope is in the signs that many people have not followed this charge into illogic and cruelty, and have retained the critical facility for avoiding the false binary of surrendering to COVID because we can’t defeat it.
There is the national wave of student walkouts to demand better pandemic safety policies in school buildings, which has provided critical support for educators who have been demonized as somehow selfish for raising the same concerns. And there was the massive blowback that Psaki got after her dismissal of making testing more available, when the Biden administration was forced to implement the very distribution of tests that Psaki had mocked as unrealistic.
But we need much more. Public expectations need to be raised in the same way they were raised around COVID tests after Psaki’s gaffe. We need ventilation in public spaces, universal paid sick leave, releasing people from COVID-infested prisons and paying workers to stay home. We need a COVID justice framework that is identified with the left in the same way as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.
When we raise these demands, socialists are the ones said to be engaging in “all or nothing” extremism. When we support Medicare for All instead of Obamacare, or demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement be abolished, we are accused of making the perfect the enemy of the good and refusing to see a middle ground.
But there’s nothing extreme about wanting everyone to have the right health care and migration, or that the richest country in the world keep spending money to protect us from a plague. That the ruling class thinks these basic demands mean we want everything only shows how determined they are to give us nothing.
My job at the Mississippi NAACP is to safeguard the civil rights of those in my state and fight for current and future generations.
When I think about the challenges facing Mississippi, they come down to the “haves” and the “have-nots.” It’s about power — who has it, who’s working to maintain it, and who lacks it.
Two policy issues confronting states, particularly Southern states, include closing the health insurance coverage gap and redistricting. These issues impact people’s quality of life and undermine both physical health and the health of a strong democracy. It appears that states that did not accept Medicaid expansion are also more likely to draw district maps that disadvantage Black, poor and marginalized voters.
Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a provision called for the expansion of Medicaid eligibility. This would allow more low-income Americans up to age 64 to access affordable health care. As this expansion was not federally mandated, states were left to decide what course to take. Mississippi (one state in a group of 12 other Republican-led states) has chosen not to expand access, thereby creating a Medicaid expansion gap where 130,000 Mississippians have no options for affordable health care.
There is no legitimate rationale for refusing to expand Medicaid and close the health insurance coverage gap. Many reports have described the health and economic benefits of closing the health insurance gap. Analysis by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that were Mississippi to expand Medicaid, 202,659 adults would be insured, and 110,860 fewer adults would skip needed care because of its costs. The state would create an additional 21,700 jobs from closing the health insurance coverage gap. However, political posturing has resulted in inaction by the state’s leaders.
Conversely, we know redistricting, or the drawing of state and congressional lines, is also influenced by politics — particularly by who has power and who does not. Those in power have the wherewithal to draw new district lines to serve their own needs, interests and ambitions, rather than the communities which elected them.
Simply put, both issues are about resources. Medicaid expansion ensures thousands of Mississippians have access to life-or-death health services. Redistricting is about determining community resources that will impact children and families for years to come. It’s also a way to expand the franchise of voting, while ensuring community members have a say in who represents them.
By denying expanded access to health care and drawing gerrymandered district lines, elected leaders essentially silence the community, preventing already-marginalized people from making progress.
If we want to ensure all people can thrive, we must consider the connection between redistricting and Medicaid expansion. Most Americans want Medicaid expansion. Gerrymandering, however, silences the will of voters and prevents Mississippians and other Americans from accessing life-saving care. This isn’t how it should be. It isn’t how it has to be.
Advocates are pushing back. From Michigan to Ohio, from New York to North Carolina, groups are coming together, filing lawsuits and pressing their legislatures to create fair maps. In several states across the country, voting rights advocates are challenging newly drawn maps, noting they are racially discriminatory and/or constitute gerrymandering. Three have also refused to participate in Medicaid expansion: Alabama (whose maps are grounded in racial discrimination), Georgia (whose maps also represent racial discrimination) and North Carolina (whose maps reveal both racial discrimination and gerrymandering).
The 12 states, including Mississippi, that have not expanded Medicaid are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, North and South Carolina, North and South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Where do we go from here?
We fight back. We unite. We support our colleagues in states where redistricting has yet to begin.
Studies from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) show that since 2014, when the ACA coverage provisions took effect, there has been a narrowing of the gap between insured and uninsured adults, as well as the gap found in uninsured adults not seeking care due to cost. This is in large part the result of Medicaid expansion. In another CBPP study, those in Arkansas and Kentucky were reported to be likelier to have basic care like a personal physician or receive an annual check-up, compared to Texas, which like Mississippi, has not expanded. Understanding this data helps.
The Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP has been working heavily on redistricting for several months, seeing many ups and downs as we’ve pushed for information to be shared as a series of legislative voting moments have drawn near.
Republicans control the House and the Senate in Mississippi. They have a supermajority, which oftentimes means they can pass what they want, when and how they want it.
The Mississippi NAACP presented an equal representation redistricting plan, though. House Republicans approved a different plan, 76-42. A new district under the Republican plan stretches over 300 miles, making it too large for a single leader to effectively represent it. Mississippi Today noted that “House Democrats, who oppose the plan, said it created a district too large for incumbent 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson — or anyone — to adequately represent. The proposed district would move a large portion of southwest Mississippi from the 3rd to 2nd District.”
As a Black man who grew up in Hazlehurst in Mississippi’s southwest 2nd district, I have seen firsthand what it looks like when rural areas go without. The legislative map will cause more people to go without.
I care for my community. This desire to ensure those within my community are cared for and have someone fighting for them has been wrapped up in my existence for decades. I will never stop caring, I will never stop this work. I invite my fellow Mississippians to join me. We must involve ourselves in every legislative decision, from Medicaid expansion to the way districts are drawn. We are learning that no decision can be made in isolation.
On January 18, Judge Taylor Swain of New York’s Southern District confirmed Puerto Rico’s eighth amended Plan of Adjustment (POA), setting into motion the closure of the largest municipal debt restructuring deal in the history of the United States. The POA modifies approximately $33 billion of the central government’s debt as part of Title III — the bankruptcy-like process established under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) — which has already cost Puerto Ricans $1 billion.
Since its announcement, the POA has been touted as putting an end to five years of brutal structural adjustment. For instance, Natalie Jaresko, executive director of the unelected Financial Oversight Board that has dictated Puerto Rico’s finances since 2016, celebrated the POA as a “new chapter in Puerto Rico’s history.” Gov. Pedro Pierluisi suggested that while the POA is “not perfect,” it ultimately protects Puerto Rico’s vulnerable public sector. In contrast, a multisectoral coalition of teachers, labor, pensioners, students and activists expressed immediate rejection of what they call the “plan del tumbe” (the shakedown plan). These groups have long been demanding a comprehensive debt audit, calling attention to the POA’s everyday implications, and resisting its confirmation by mobilizing online, in the streets, the legislature and the courts.
Hundreds of protesters march at the federal court in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on November 8, 2021, in rejection of the Plan of Adjustment.Sarah Molinari
Rather than a “new chapter,” the POA affirms a debt that has not been meaningfully audited and that forecloses the pursuit of legal action against banks and underwriters as well as debt illegalities that the Financial Oversight Board itself previously challenged in court. Despite rhetoric from powerful political and financial elites in Puerto Rico and the United States, the POA will bring little relief to Puerto Ricans struggling under the weight of crushing austerity in an archipelago that is increasingly geared towards attracting foreign capital and incentivizing the settlement of wealthy North Americans in Puerto Rico as a means of boosting an anemic local economy while Puerto Ricans are increasing forced to migrate in search of economic stability.
As a result of persistent public pressure, the confirmed POA does not cut public retirees’ pensions as earlier versions had proposed, but it does freeze defined benefit pensions for active public school teachers and judges. Additionally, despite Governor Pierluisi’s comments that the POA protects the public sector, there is no doubt that since the passage of PROMESA, Puerto Rico’s public sector has been significantly scaled back and weakened in order to service the debt in a process that the POA upholds and enshrines. Hundreds of the archipelago’s public schools have been closed and the public university’s future remains uncertain, while teachers, police, doctors and nurses have been leaving in record numbers for the continental U.S. due to stagnant wages, cuts to benefits and dwindling resources. For example, in Puerto Rico lost nearly 12 percent of its population between 2010-2020. The slow-motion collapse of the public sector certainly predates the POA and even PROMESA, but it is important to note that the POA does nothing to rebuild or stabilize the public sector. The gutting of the public sector and the failure to address it once again reveals that the POA is not about improving everyday life for Puerto Ricans by protecting them from the effects of predatory debt or austerity. Rather, it is about protecting Puerto Rico’s profit-generating capacity (mostly for those outside of the archipelago and a small class of Puerto Rican elites — the “criollo bloc”) and (eventually) restoring its ability to borrow unencumbered.
Debt service projections rely upon a mix of structural and fiscal reforms (austerity) and an economy propped up by the anticipated disbursement of federal funds to address the hurricanes, earthquakes and the pandemic that the Puerto Rican government does not control. Furthermore, economic indicators point to Puerto Rico returning to budgetary deficits by 2036. All this throws into question the sustainability of a POA projected 25 years into the future and Puerto Rico’s ability to fulfill basic public services. Nonetheless, mainstream media portrayals present the POA as a necessary “resolution” to the bankruptcy and a step toward Puerto Rico’s recovery. A quick search of news related to the POA will show headlines peppered with laudatory phrases proclaiming the imminent end of Puerto Rico’s financial woes. It has even been framed as a crucial step towards Puerto Rico’s political and financial sovereignty.
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Natalie Jaresko and David Skeel, the executive director and chairman of the Financial Oversight Board, position the POA not only as a resolution to Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy but also its indeterminate political status. According to Jaresko and Skeel, “Congress is unlikely to step in to make a determination on status until Puerto Rico gets its financial house back in order. Puerto Rico’s crushing debt load has been one of the biggest obstacles to achieving this. That obstacle now has been removed.” Behind the façade of benevolent concern, Jaresko and Skeel’s op-ed makes clear the POA is part of a colonial infrastructure that simply hands down decisions that shape Puerto Rico’s future seeks to strip Puerto Ricans of their political agency. The imposition of mechanisms for financial capture and debt coercion is not a way of resolving Puerto Rico’s colonial status — it is its continuation.
Perhaps the greatest issue with the POA that should not be lost in discussions about whether the plan will lead to a financial recovery for Puerto Rico is that the POA charts a future largely absent the input of the Puerto Ricans who will be most impacted by its devastating effects for generations to come. The POA was conceptualized by the Financial Oversight Board, or “La Junta” as locals call it, and facilitated by the Puerto Rican legislature.
The POA contradicts everything that Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable populations — those most likely to be affected by austerity related to debt servicing — have demanded in order to make life more livable, healthy and safe in Puerto Rico. And this has been made clear during the countless protests that have often accompanied La Junta’s meetings in both Puerto Rico and the diaspora where Puerto Ricans and others in solidarity have attempted to make their voices heard in the rooms where Puerto Ricans’ futures are being decided without them. Additionally, Judge Swain was appointed to oversee the debt restructuring process despite having no experience with Puerto Rico and has shown little willingness to take seriously the concerns being expressed by Puerto Ricans about debt restructuring process.
Every step in the path to the POA’s confirmation has functioned to further remove decision-making power from the hands of Puerto Ricans. The POA’s failure to listen to, let alone address, Puerto Ricans’ very real concerns contributes to the feelings expressed by many that the debt, the failed disaster recovery and all of the financial chicanery devised to lure millionaires to the archipelago have seemingly combined to create a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans. In other words, the POA helps bring into being a future where if Puerto Ricans aren’t actually absent, their ability to have a say politically has been severely curtailed.
The Plan of Adjustment provides Puerto Ricans with more uncertainty than resolution, especially since the temporality of debt does not resolve — but rather complicates — the relationship between past, present and future obligations. The POA renders impossible a comprehensive debt audit or an economic plan that responds to working people’s needs, all while endorsing illegal debt and failing to hold the individuals and institutions responsible for indebting the public accountable. Ultimately, the POA leaves colonial, social and environmental debts unresolved and fails to bring a true people’s “resolution” to the debt crisis. Rather than technical solutions adjudicated in the courts among consultants, unelected overseers and lawyers, real resolution might take shape through a reckoning process that interrogates what is owed to whom and the United States’ debt to Puerto Ricans for more than a century of colonial violence and exploitation. A true resolution to Puerto Rico’s so-called debt crisis would include debt cancelation and reparations for historical harms, not payouts for Wall Street vultures who treated the archipelago like a casino.
In January, Ohio health care providers launched a challenge to block a new abortion restriction enacted in December 2021, which threatens to shutter clinics across the state. Based on misinformation, the bill tries to establish medically unnecessary restrictions and narrow the range of health care facilities that can provide abortion care. This comes not long after Ohio lawmakers introduced a bill banning all abortions completely, and at the same time as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark case affirming the legal right to abortion care. Emboldened by the looming end of Roe, extremists in states from South Carolina to South Dakota are cracking down on abortion access — half of all states in the country are certain or likely to ban abortion if Roe is overturned.
In the face of these kinds of restrictions and attacks, we’re seeing a nationwide crisis of abortion access, and self-managed abortion — when a person ends their own pregnancy on their own terms, outside of a traditional clinic setting — is an increasingly relevant option.
I self-managed my abortion a few years ago in college when my birth control failed and I got pregnant. I wasn’t in a position where I wanted to have a child — I wanted to continue my education, I wanted a chance to focus on exploring and becoming confident with my gender identity, and there was also no way I’d be able to afford raising a kid yet. So, I knew I needed an abortion.
But there were already so many restrictions on abortion access in Ohio at the time, including state-mandated “counseling” meant to discourage people from getting abortions, a 24-hour waiting period and restrictions on public funding for abortion care. These restrictions have the biggest impact on people like me who are young, queer, and/or have low incomes or disabilities, as well as others who face systemic inequities in health care, including people of color, rural and immigrant communities.
Ultimately, I couldn’t afford to go to a clinic for an abortion. At the time, I didn’t know that there were resources like abortion funds that exist to help people afford their preferred method of abortion care. This and other factors contributed to me wanting to end my pregnancy on my own terms.
I researched online for different ways to end a pregnancy, and I was able to induce a miscarriage using herbal remedies. I was relieved to be able to safely end the pregnancy, and this holistic method was best for me, but I also know that some people aren’t able to get the information they need to assess whether herbal methods could work for them because there are so few resources and so much stigma surrounding these methods. However, herbal remedies are not the only method of self-managed abortions. I am glad to hear that I could have also ordered abortion pills to take if I would have chosen that method. Abortion pills are FDA-approved, and can be used to safely and effectively end a pregnancy at home, but there are still many medically unnecessary restrictions governing access. At the time I sought my abortion, I was worried I could have faced legal consequences for seeking medication abortion — here in Ohio, anti-abortion extremists have misused abortion restrictions to try to prosecute and punish people who self-manage their abortions. Throughout the last two decades, dozens of people have been prosecuted for self-managing abortions, and several states have laws criminalizing self-managed abortion explicitly. The impact on vulnerable folks, including young people and communities of color, goes further and creates a chilling atmosphere of stigma and scrutiny.
All people, from Ohio to Texas, deserve the chance to make our own decisions about how to pursue abortion in a way that best fits our circumstances. Anyone who decides to end a pregnancy should be able to have their abortion in the way they want — with the control in our hands, surrounded by the people we love and with the support we want. Ohio’s new abortion restrictions threaten to criminalize even more people, including health care professionals, and it will be more important than ever that we protect people’s ability to choose for themselves how and when they want to get an abortion. As we fight against these bills, we must also fight against policies that criminalize self-managed abortion.
My self-managed abortion allowed me to get where I am today, with a fulfilling career advocating for reproductive justice, and a vibrant community of friends and loved ones. Everyone deserves that same chance, and anti-abortion politicians shouldn’t stand in our way. So, I urge each of you to join me in calling on your representatives to put a stop to abortion bans. All people should be able to get the health care they need without shame, unnecessary restrictions or fear of criminalization.
We often hear that the U.S.’s founding documents, courts and institutions make it immune to despotism, but this claim is simply false and erases our country’s troubling history with white supremacy — one the GOP is poised to reinvigorate. During Reconstruction, for example, Louisiana experienced dozens of coups and massacres at both the local and state levels. These escalated after white supremacists refused to concede defeat in the state election of 1872, opting instead to set up a shadow government under losing candidate John McEnery. The paramilitary arm of the shadow government — the White League — tried (and failed) to oust the legitimate governor and his allies in the “Battle of the Cabildo” in 1873. Instead of arresting and prosecuting the conspirators, state and federal officials allowed them to plan their next coup, which successfully toppled the state government in the “Battle of Liberty Place” in 1874.
Failing to prosecute the white vigilantes and the insurrectionists of Reconstruction, the U.S.’s first attempt at multiracial democracy, all but ensured their eventual success. This pattern played out across the South as the old enslaving class spread racist fears of nonexistent Black insurrections to successfully promote a frenzy of racist violence in a bid for power. Perhaps we might tell ourselves that white vigilantism is “unconstitutional” and would never survive the courts, but the unfortunate truth is that the Supreme Court has historically condoned these tactics. In the 1876 Cruikshank ruling, the justices decided that the white paramilitaries who murdered roughly 150 Black Louisianans in 1873 did not violate their civil rights because the Bill of Rights only applied to states, not to private individuals. White conservatives understood the ruling as granting them immunity from prosecution for murdering Black Americans and enacted a wave of racist violence months later in the election of 1876 that formally ended Reconstruction.
We sit at just such a juncture, where Donald Trump and members of his administration tried repeatedly to overturn the results of the 2020 election. We now know that Trump officials, lawyers and campaign staff explored a variety of strategies designed to overturn the election results, including a mid-December unsigned executive order directing the recently installed Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller to seize voting machines. Trump allies, meanwhile, met with Republican senators two days before the mob attack on the Capitol to discuss the now-notorious coup PowerPoint detailing how Republicans might install Trump on January 6 and then declare martial law. Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, texted at least one member of Congress, “I love it” regarding the planned coup. While it is true that some of Trump’s foot soldiers who staged the Capitol breach have faced repercussions, its architects continue to hold meaningful power and influence and are successfully removing the guardrails that staved off their last coup attempt.
Although prominent Democrats hope that it is possible to “out-organize voter suppression,” our history suggests otherwise. After the formal end of Reconstruction, white vigilantes used intimidation and violence to negate the 15th Amendment (which guaranteed Black men the right to vote), but overwhelming Black majorities in some districts enabled Black voters to elect Black state representatives like Robert Smalls in South Carolina.
White conservatives, who campaigned under explicitly racist slogans like “This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule,” could not stomach so brazen an affront to their fundamental commitment to white power. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, Southern states with large Black populations rewrote their state constitutions to destroy the last vestiges of Black political power, using poll taxes, literacy tests and even a grandfather clause that allowed poor and illiterate whites to vote so long as their grandfather had been able to vote during slavery, when Black Americans could not.
Like today’s voter purges and restrictions pushed by the Republican Party, the Jim Crow constitutions of the 1890s used race-neutral language to target Black voters, ensuring that even if a handful were able to vote, they would never be able to wield power. As Robert Smalls protested at the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, “this convention has been called for no other purpose than the disfranchisement of the negro.” The new Jim Crow constitutions accomplished precisely that, cutting Black registration from 130,000 to 5,000 in Louisiana, 147,000 to 8,600 in Mississippi, and 147,000 to 21,000 in Virginia. In Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court even declared these measures constitutional in 1898. Despite the clear targeting of Black voters, the ostensibly race-neutral language meant that, as with Cruikshank, the court refused to intervene to uphold the 15th Amendment so long as it meant protecting the rights of Black Americans.
Our political system is already skewed by deeply gerrymandered districts designed to maximize Republican power, and although a majority of Americans support an end to partisan redistricting, Republicans are further expanding gerrymandering in states like North Carolina, where Trump garnered 49 percent of the vote in 2020, but where the GOP is are now positioned to claim 70 percent of the House seats.
On top of this effort, Republican legislatures are making it harder to vote, passing laws restricting voting hours and methods in 19 states while creating new criminal penalties for handing out water in Georgia and for encouraging potential voters to request a mail-in ballot in Texas. To make matters worse, Republican-controlled states including Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona passed laws handing control of elections from nonpartisan boards to partisan officials. A slate of new far right Republican candidates for secretary of state who control election returns and certification in key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, meanwhile, refuse to concede that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. If we fail to act to protect voting rights and overturn these laws, Democrats will likely face a substantially more repressive landscape in 2022 and 2024.
While Republican election rigging and insurrectionary efforts create a dire situation, it is one we might be able to navigate with robust First Amendment protections. The mass protests of the civil rights movement, for example, inspired the Johnson administration to pass a series of reforms including the Voting Rights Act.
That’s not to say this kind of mass mobilization would be easy or without risks, but a movement similar to the “militant nonviolence” of the civil rights era could overcome the racist authoritarianism of the GOP. Almost in anticipation of this possibility, Republicans passed a slate of state laws making it easier for police to arrest protesters and for vigilantes to run them over with their cars. They did so at the very moment that they made it easier to overturn elections but harder to vote. Under those circumstances in GOP-controlled swing states, protesting a subverted or overturned election means taking enormous bodily and legal risks, severely constraining the right to assemble when it would be most needed.
The same might be said for the Republican attack on education, again waged at the very moment the GOP expanded voter suppression and anti-protest laws. Republican-controlled legislatures passed or are in the process of passing laws that make it illegal to teach the U.S.’s racist history or its impact on systems of power. Officials and administrators in GOP-controlled states have banned professors from testifying in court to overturn voting rights restrictions in Florida, banned books dealing with racism from public libraries in Texas, and promoted a nationwide campaign of threats and intimidation against school board members.
These attempts to ban teaching and writing about white supremacy harken back to antebellum slavery, when enslavers banned abolitionist teaching and literature, burned abolitionist pamphlets, and murdered abolitionist authors, printers and activists like Elijah Lovejoy. Historically, this approach to abolitionist writing made it extremely difficult and dangerous to oppose white supremacy, contributing to the misinformed and reactionary white Southern society that seceded from the U.S. to defend slavery in 1860.
Fortunately, our history also shows that there are things we can do.
We can wage an organized campaign to demand bills creating a free, fair and transparent democracy. We already have exactly that legislation sitting in the Senate, blocked by a Republican filibuster that is itself a relic of Jim Crow. We can, today, exert overwhelming pressure on legislators to pass bills protecting our right to vote and guaranteeing a truly representative democracy with robust First Amendment protections. We can also demand the Department of Justice (DOJ) take every available opportunity to investigate and hold accountable the organizers of the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol. Although we have often failed on this front, the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act and the creation of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1957 raised the costs of white vigilantism and show that a genuine commitment to justice can turn the tide of white supremacist organizing and violence. Historically, failing to take aggressive action against white vigilantism all but guarantees escalating white vigilantism and the creation of some form of apartheid regime.
While we work to improve our existing institutions and hold them accountable, we can also embrace a culture of mutual aid and public good against which white conservatives cannot prevail. From Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, we have generations of equal rights and abolitionist activists whose wisdom we can employ. They remind us that elite white minoritarian rule is genuinely unpopular and that working together to care for one another not only improves our lives but forces the state to be more responsive to the needs of its people. Our history demonstrates that together, we can defeat this white backlash, protect our democracy and build powerful new coalitions that bring together organized labor and racial justice movements. We must. Our future depends on it.
From the federal mask recommendations suspended in May to White House COVID coordinator Jeffrey Zients’s December pronouncement that the unvaccinated are to blame for “the hospitals you may soon overwhelm,” the Biden administration has organized its COVID response around an ethos of personal responsibility.
COVID is spun as a pandemic of the unvaccinated even as the vaccinated can also spread the virus. Vaccines and their boosters, importantly protecting the vaccinated from hospitalization and death, appear nothing of the public health silver bullet they’ve been positioned to be, presently offering only 10 weeks’ protection against symptomatic infection with the now circulating Omicron variant.
Such a campaign against the unvaccinated represents both bad politics and bad public health.
Many of the unvaccinated aren’t ideologically motivated. Skepticism and hesitancy mark as much a failure of vaccine access, including the absence of a national door-to-door campaign to convince the 84 million Americans walking around without a single COVID shot to get vaccinated or to physically transport them to an appointment. Winning their trust is critical in controlling the outbreak stateside.
Other patients may refrain from vaccination even when it puts them in great personal danger. Jesse Rouse, photographed here in November suffering his second bout of COVID in Minneapolis, was reported to be unvaccinated at the time after he previously underwent a double lung transplant. Researchers have proposed that lung transplantees are especially vulnerable to respiratory infection and should be vaccinated for COVID.
Some people may refrain from vaccination for medical reasons – including confusion or conflicting information about how vaccination might interact with their health conditions or treatments.
Regardless of why particular people remain unvaccinated, thrusting culpability fully onto individuals is a harmful move. Like Ronald Reagan’s campaign against “welfare queens,” presuming public health problems emerge primarily from bad actors and individual decision-making obfuscates the systemic and structural roots of the failure of the U.S.’s response to the pandemic.
Much like Trump, the Biden administration appears repeatedly intent on turning the COVID page, no matter the state of the pandemic itself. The May mask recommendations, which stated that vaccinated people could stop wearing masks in most indoor spaces, were textbook on that account. The administration later ignored an October report from public health experts recommending free testing at a pace of 732 million tests per month in preparation for a holiday COVID surge:
The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment — endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again.
Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.” But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”
Early in December, Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki scoffed at reporter Mara Liasson’s query about why the U.S. doesn’t just pay for home COVID tests for every American household like other countries do instead of making Americans submit for reimbursement from insurance companies that have routinely failed to pick up the bill. “How much is that going to cost?” Psaki asked.
Should a government that had voted $768 billion for the Pentagon, $24 billion more than Biden requested, just pay for COVID tests? Yes, April Wallace replied in the Washington Post. Yes, it should:
I am a dual citizen of the United States and Britain, now living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I am able get rapid antigen tests anytime I want to, at no cost and with no hoops to jump through. I know that Americans pay more than $20 for a package of two tests — if they’re in stock. Here you can walk into your local pharmacy, and they will just hand you packs of seven tests at no charge. In my neighborhood I can also go to the local recreational center and collect packs of tests free for my family, or swing by a coronavirus testing center.
It turns out the reimbursement for home tests wasn’t to start until mid-January anyway:
The administration has already said that the plan will not provide retroactive reimbursement for tests that have already been purchased, which means that any tests you buy for the holidays will not be covered.
The Biden no-plan, expanded to a whole four rapid tests per household and three masks for each American, appeared to be phase one of a campaign of further eroding American expectations. As self-described “shitposter” @fingerblaster tweeted about what’s missing:
Wild that the most unhinged republican president in history sent us $2000 checks back when we had like 12k cases a day and now we have 300k cases a day and a dem president who’s like “lol not my problem go to work jack”
The more august New York Times reported on the end of monthly child benefits millions of Americans were depending on:
The end of the extra assistance for parents is the latest in a long line of benefits “cliffs” that Americans have encountered as pandemic aid programs have expired. The Paycheck Protection Program, which supported hundreds of thousands of small businesses, ended in March. Expanded unemployment benefits ended in September, and earlier in some states. The federal eviction moratorium expired last summer. The last round of stimulus payments landed in Americans’ bank accounts last spring.
These benefit programs, as modest as they were, saved thousands of Americans from COVID deaths.
A March 2021 FamiliesUSA report summarized research showing a third of COVID deaths were tied to the lack of health insurance. The effect was multiplicative: “Each 10% increase in the proportion of a county’s residents who lacked health insurance was associated with a 70% increase in COVID-19 cases and a 48% increase in COVID-19 deaths.”
Controlling for stay-at-home orders, school closures and mask mandates, another study, first posted November 2020, estimated that lifting eviction moratoriums state-to-state resulted in between 365,200 and 502,200 excess coronavirus cases and between 8,900 and 12,500 excess deaths.
Omicron’s Delta Strain
So, public health clearly extends beyond necessary prophylaxes into necessary social interventions. But if there was any doubt about which constituency the political class serves instead, in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cut down its recommendation for quarantine upon COVID exposure from 10 days to five. The act was decidedly in response to pressure from employers, notoriously Delta Air Lines’ CEO Ed Bastian in a letter that Delta proudly posted.
The Delta letter summarized the scientific literature in favor of its request in two sentences. The science is in reality more nuanced, marked by a variety of definitional complications.
Omicron, like new variants before it, is almost certain to evolve out from underneath the vaccine effectiveness that Delta Airlines cites as, full-stop, protection enough. Permitting COVID variants to circulate on Delta planes or elsewhere increases the chances they can evolve enough to circumvent medical and non-pharmaceutical controls.
Other drawbacks refute such summary boosterism. Omicron is already associated with increased reinfection. The variant’s other impacts on clinical courses and epidemiology are likely to be geographically specific, depending on a variety of local factors, including pre-existing immunity and the state of non-pharmaceutical interventions. What works as an intervention under one set of conditions does not necessarily hold under all.
More meta, the speed at which new variants are being allowed to evolve is outpacing even the frantic pace of the research conducted. “Flattening the curve” extends beyond our hospitals to research efforts aimed at discovering how to better control COVID.
In other words, under a more infectious Omicron, a variety of interventions, one layered atop another, is necessary, rather than stripping them back to serve criteria pretending to be scientific.
This isn’t the first time the airline industry tried to bend basic COVID science to its financial advantage. JetBlue CEO and reopen proponent David Neeleman funded and helped coordinate a Stanford University study that whistleblower complaints showed used a testing kit that erred on the side of false positives. By these tests, the study concluded the COVID virus was more widespread in the public and therefore, given the underlying number of deaths in the study population, was less dangerous of a pathogen.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, proving Lysenko on the Potomac, ran interference for Delta and other employers in the face of the twists and turns obvious in the COVID literature. Fauci parroted Bastian’s arguments nearly to the letter:
There is the danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated who are asymptomatic for the full ten days, that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running. So the decision was made of saying let’s get that cut in half.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky once fought back tears over the likelihood of COVID mass deaths. Now, like a meat plant manager thinking only of the bottom line, she defends sending people back to work still infectious:
There are a lot of studies [from other variants] that show the maximum transmissibility is in those first five days. And [with Omicron] we are about to face hundreds of thousands more cases a day, and it was becoming very, very clear from the health care system that we would have people who were [positive but] asymptomatic and not able to work, and that was a harbinger of what was going to come in all other essential functions of society.
In short, the combination of economic compulsion and traumatic bonding that sent millions of workers into unprotected workplaces the pandemic’s first two years now represents state policy. The denialism for which liberals punch down on Trumpists is the labor law of the land. It is now a key part of the administration’s public health campaign.
“I’m not letting COVID-19 take my shifts,” one recent CDC ad declared. “My job puts me at high risk for COVID-19 exposure. I got vaccinated because it’s better to be protected than to be out sick.”
Another CDC post shamelessly used the U.S.’s privatized health care system as a cudgel of class discipline: “Hospital stays can be expensive, but COVID-19 vaccines are free. Help protect yourself from being hospitalized with #COVID19 by getting vaccinated.”
In that spirit, Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein waxed optimistic on the economy. The depletion of personal savings would drive low-paid workers back into the labor market during a pandemic, Bernstein cheered.
“We are intent,” Jeff Zients declared mid-December, “on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this.” The vaccinated are presented as pure enough of soul to get back to working the gears of the economic machine. The unvaccinated are cast, to appropriate Hillary Clinton’s characterization, as a basket of eschatological deplorables.
Zients, a Biden campaign donor, was the CEO of investment firm Cranemere and director of Obama’s National Economic Council before becoming COVID czar with no public health experience. His primary portfolio of priorities was always apparent.
The quarantine switcheroo follows CDC’s changing recommendations for school distancing from six feet to three, which it now pretends is the virus’s limit. In reality, even six feet isn’t enough for the airborne virus. But in changing it to three, CDC could legally accommodate efforts to stuff students back in brick-and-mortar schools without changing day-to-day public health precautions.
Keeping kids out of school can have terrible impacts on learning outcomes and emotional well-being. Keeping kids in school, potentially leading to the deaths of other students or teachers in school, and older adults back home, can incur a different kind of emotional damage. Both risks serve as more the reason for bringing the outbreak under control with a full-spectrum intervention.
The CDC’s position, sending students back to school without controlling the outbreak, is geared toward other aims. It’s about putting the economic cart before the epidemiological horse. The kids need to go to school so that the parents can go to work.
Comedian Roy Wood Jr: CDC just said you only need to quarantine if you on a ventilator. But if ya ventilator got wheels and a battery pack you gotta take yo ass to work.
Author Alexander Chee: If you have to deploy the military to support hospitals you may have spent your budget on the wrong part of the system given the challenges we actually face.
Designer Char: CDC okays pull-out method as “eh, good enough.”
The administration is too full of itself to see it is losing the country. Its caustic claims about “the science” aren’t supported by the science, further undercutting research as a trusted source of both state strategy and public response.
The original 10-day quarantine that the CDC changed was grounded in the evidence-based realities of the virus itself, specifically its incubation time, generation time and serial interval. At the same time, the 10 days aren’t a matter of essentialist measures of central tendency.
Against CDC Director Walensky’s characterization, it’s about the variation in patients’ infectious periods. Some patients exit out of their infectiousness early, in the five days Walensky cited. Others can be infectious much longer. No one knows who’s a late bloomer in transmission. As a matter of practical public health intervention, it’s an unknown.
A public health campaign must therefore institute mask and quarantine policies that cover for the late transmissions, so that they don’t serve as the means by which the outbreak rolls on — particularly as Omicron’s infectiousness approaches that of measles and a 100% attack rate can still result from even a small group of infectious people walking around.
Instead, we have slashed public assistance, shortened quarantines, offered no-to-little remote schooling, hired few community health workers, conducted little genomic sequencing of the virus, and let hospitals get overrun. The CDC gave in upon the subsequent furor around the shortened quarantine by adding only a recommendation — not a requirement — of a negative rapid antigen test before workers returned to work.
Beyond trying to circumvent the rancor of partisan criticism, why did Trump and Biden alike aim at pretending the pandemic away? Biden’s trajectory is illustrative that capitalist realism has a way of eating away at even good faith efforts at addressing existential threats.
In October 2020, candidate Biden put the failings of his opposition in perspective: “We’re eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. I do.”
“This crisis,” President-elect Biden added, “demands a robust and immediate federal response.”
A year later, President Biden pivoted: “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level,” months after many state governors had lost or abandoned their emergency powers to impose mask mandates and shelter-at-home orders.
Other countries see federal jurisdiction differently, as if the very health of their ostensible constituencies has something to do with governance.
While the U.S. daily breaks record COVID caseloads, some other countries appear to be of another world. COVID long-hauler Ravi Veriah Jacques reported these January 2 caseloads from abroad:
New Zealand – 51
China – 191
Taiwan – 20
Japan – 477
Hong Kong – 18
China’s reactions are both broader and triggered more quickly, with the public health results to show for it. Xi’an, a metropolis of 13 million people in Shaanxi Province, underwent an arguably arduous lockdown upon the emergence of 175 COVID cases. Western media has played on the difficulties in obtaining food in the city over the 12 days’ quarantine, but not the campaigns to alleviate those problems.
Some may argue the Biden administration’s reaction is better late than never, but that’s not how controlling COVID’s lightning strikes works.
As epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace models, whatever the intervention, there’s nothing worse than dithering. Given the insidious nature of the virus, we are routinely six weeks too late if spikes in cases, rather than anticipatory planning, are the trigger. Repeated delays mark U.S. COVID planning — among them, the spread of the original wave out of coastal cities to the rest of the country in spring 2020 and the arrivals since of Delta and Omicron stateside.
Rapid Confusion Test
It happens that the mass at-home testing the Biden administration passed over in October, setting up a program several months too late, is itself already a failure. Big picture, like vaccination, it represents yet another technicist intervention that, while necessary, is also insufficient. It’s more of a grand gesture that detracts from the administration’s refusal to pursue multilevel systemic public health programming.
The specifics of such a rollout and the tests themselves also get in the way. It’s much more than a matter of rapid tests permitting an exit out of the shots for the deplorable unvaccinated, as the Biden administration feared. It’s also not merely a matter of doctors defending their testing territory, as rapid test proponents argued.
Among several intrinsic errors that biotech consultant Dale Harrison explores around the rapid tests, there is the difficulty of self-administering them:
One important note is that at-home antigen tests will give VERY poor results (both high false-positives and high false-negatives) if you are sloppy or misuse them.
These are complex molecular assays and the EXACT usage is critical. You MUST read and follow every single detail in the instructions to get a reliable outcome….
The difficulties extend beyond administering the tests. Interpreting them is a difficult task; it is swayed by our hopes as well as by technical matter:
Now comes the tricky part… what happens if you get conflicting test results.
Let’s say you get a positive result on an at-home antigen test (like the BinaxNow) and decide to take it again “just to be sure”.
Then you get a negative result on the 2nd Binax test. Now you schedule an appointment to get a PCR test.
A couple of days later, it comes back negative.
ARE YOU INFECTED? Absolutely positively YES!
If you’re non-symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results … a positive and two negatives in any order.
In that case, it is 56-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 5600% more likely!
And if you’re FULLY symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results, it is 20-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 2000% more likely!
Even if you get ANOTHER PCR test and THAT test comes back negative as well [Binax+ Binax- PCR- PCR-] you are still 4-times more likely to be infected than not … 400% more likely!
And it does NOT matter the order of the test results … the math holds true regardless.
Even medical doctors conducting these tests in clinics stumble:
I know this seems VERY counter-intuitive and even most doctors who prescribe these tests (other than Infectious Disease specialists) tend to NOT understand this!
And when faced with multiple conflicting test results, most medical people will incorrectly select the LAST result as the “correct one”.
This is a DANGEROUS mistake! Again, outside of certain specialties, few medical staff are trained to think in terms of Bayesian statistics.
Vanity Fair’s palace intrigue set the COVID Collaborative of high-end epidemiologists recommending the holiday testing surge against the administration that ignored them. But that isn’t quite right. Both sides agree on turning public health into an individualistic (and commodifiable) option:
Once [ex-Harvard epidemiologist and now chief science officer at the eMed diagnostic company Michael] Mina began to advocate for rapid home tests, he encountered the same mindset: doctors “trying to guard their domain.” Some doctors had long opposed home testing, even for pregnancy and HIV, arguing that patients who learned on their own about a given condition would not be able to act on the information effectively. Testing, in this view, should be used only by doctors as a diagnostic instrument, not by individuals as a public-health tool for influencing decisions.
The U.S. approach sticks the American people with the job of administering and then interpreting the conflicting results of multiple tests. The false positives might be low in part because nearly 100 percent specificity aligns with peak viral load. But, as Harrison describes, even should the test be administered correctly, the false negatives are legion and the results of one test do not necessarily change the implications of previous ones.
Techno-utopianism offers another iteration of blaming the victim if the outcome goes south: “It’s your own fault you didn’t do the test right.” Don’t let the easy lines on the lateral flow ag card confuse matters. Against Mina’s insinuation, it’s decidedly unlike a pregnancy test.
There is also the matter of what happens when organizing society’s access to work and recreation around such tests collides with a run on the tests at local stores already suffering supply chain problems, making the tests both unavailable and priced beyond working people’s budgets.
If, on the other hand, the Biden administration hired and trained a million community health workers to go door-to-door across the country administering these tests for free — like really free — we wouldn’t be in such a free-for-all, if you’ll excuse the phrasing.
If such teams had been put in place from the beginning, they may have been able to build the trust necessary to successfully introduce a variety of time- and place-specific public health interventions that would likely have minimized the duration and impact of each wave of the pandemic.
Surprising the Supposedly Surprised
What’s interesting about Harrison’s direct and clearly written posts is that his recommendations are framed by the context of what the U.S. can, or is willing to, offer right now: not much.
Yes, everyone should be able to test themselves whenever they wish, all the time. But the U.S. chooses to position itself as unable to pursue such a public health program. Should the sensitivity and specificity reported on the test boxes match their actual outcomes? Yes, they should, however righteous the original testing went into bringing the products to market. Should the efficaciousness and effectiveness of vaccines match? Yes, that would be nice.
There are expectations that individual American consumers hold about solutions — cheap and immediately effective — that the market repeatedly promises but can’t deliver. In this case, the multifactorial virus doesn’t cater to such an ideal of a single packet solution. And the public health response we need, and the market treats as a rival, is starved to near-death.
The U.S. government, and governments around the world, treat the capitalism that helped spring the COVID virus out of commoditized forests as more real than the ecologies and epidemiologies upon which the global system depends. To protect that mirage of a difference, each new variant that has since emerged is strangely presented as the beginning of the pandemic’s end, resetting the next round of denialism, instead of alerting us that in reality, without a change in public health practice, we’re caught in a daisy chain of viral evolution.
Each “surprise” that the COVID virus refuses to cooperate with such an expectation, acting in its own interests instead of ours, also serves to protect the system from the implications of its refusal to act. Surprise — pretending we don’t know what we know — is itself an ideological project. The business of governing a system in decline, after all, is about managing expectations. All is well, get back to work, until, suddenly, it isn’t, as it always was.
From the virus’s vantage, the resulting public health dithering and half-measures serve the virus as both escape hatch out of our control efforts and selection pressure to evolve around those campaigns. A combo that leads to the worst of epidemiological outcomes.
If we wish to unplug out of this trap, we have to organize together against our rulers and their financers. We must deploy a full-spectrum intervention that drives the COVID virus under its rate of replacement.
That requires we reject not only Washington’s business bipartisanism, but also the core model of our economy around which our civilization is organized. That’s no small matter, of course, but with climate change and other pandemics also in the wings, likely our sole option out.
On January 21, a coalition of forces led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) carried out an airstrike in Yemen that is now confirmed to have killed at least 87 people. As many as 266 were also wounded in the strike, which targeted a detention center in the northern city of Sa’ada that reportedly housed African migrants. Fragments of the bombs bore a unique manufacturing code for Raytheon, one of the largest U.S. weapons contractors. On the same day, the coalition bombed a telecommunications building in Hodeidah, a crucial port city that has been the site of several major battles over the course of the conflict. That strike caused a nationwide internet outage that lasted for days, resulting in delays to the limited humanitarian relief that’s allowed into the country.
“I’m still trying to process that 24 hours ago, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates disabled an entire country’s internet service while committing various massacres around Yemen and this isn’t top news everywhere,” tweeted Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State who was born in Yemen.
The strike on the prison was one of the deadliest in recent years, but is largely in keeping with the Saudi-UAE coalition’s tactics since the beginning of the war, which will soon enter its eighth year. The conflict has resulted in famine, sickness and instability throughout the poorest country in the Middle East, if not the entire world. The recent strike on the prison was preceded by a Houthi attack on Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE. Three people were killed and six were wounded in those attacks. The Houthis have controlled the capital, Sana’a, since 2014, and are opposed by Saudi Arabia and UAE. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the Houthi attacks in a statement, but declined to comment to The New York Times when asked about the deadly strike on the detention center.
The war is almost entirely absent from U.S. mainstream media headlines, despite the U.S.’s evolving role in the conflict since its inception, and its increasingly direct involvement in hostilities. On Monday, the U.S. Air Force intervened to stop a Houthi air attack on UAE, the second in a week. Houthi forces have regularly attacked Saudi targets over the course of the war, but they typically haven’t struck inside UAE until recently.
The war in Yemen is often described in U.S. media as a proxy war of sorts between Saudi Arabia and UAE on one side and Iran on the other, in the form of the Houthi movement. While it is true that the Houthis receive support from Iran, their movement began in northern Yemen in part as a response to corruption and heavy-handed governing by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh. He was swept out of power in 2012, during the Arab Revolutions, and succeeded by the hapless Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. In 2014, the Houthis took control of the capital, Sana’a, and Hadi fled the country the following year, which was also when Saudi Arabia and the UAE began their bombing campaigns. Since then, Hadi has been the internationally recognized president, though within Yemen and the broader region, he is largely seen as controlled by Saudi Arabia.
In addition to these forces, there is another player in the conflict: southern separatists who initially wanted to reestablish the south as its own state, as it was prior to unification in 1990. They rescinded that demand as part of peace negotiations in 2020, but the power-sharing framework known as the Riyadh Agreement hasn’t been fully implemented. The UAE has supported the southern movement to shore up its own access to the area’s natural resources and ports, which has caused tensions with Saudi Arabia, which sees southern independence as a challenge to Hadi and what’s referred to as the legitimate government.
This multifaceted war between local movements and their international sponsors, very much including the United States, remains one of the most intractable conflicts in the world. “Ensuring peace in Yemen necessitates redressing the current balance of power between the Houthi movement and the various forces ranged against it by pressing the former to negotiate a settlement,” writes Hussam Radman in a new report from the Sana’a Center focusing on Saudi’s role in southern Yemen. The paper recommends implementing the Riyadh Agreement, with the hope that the “Houthis could be encouraged to soften their stance if an agreement succeeds in addressing corrupt practices and political patronage that opposition groups see in Hadi’s government.”
At least 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and face lasting economic uncertainty. Inflation is rampant, especially in the south, not only as a byproduct of the conflict but as a tool of war and control as factions vie for control of the central bank. A recent report from the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver found that Yemen had lost out on $126 billion in potential economic growth over the course of the conflict.
President Joe Biden made a commitment to end the conflict in his first major foreign policy speech in office. He cut off some support for the Saudi-led coalition in February 2021, breaking with the two prior U.S. administrations. The United States had previously been supplying intelligence and refueling support for Saudi and UAE air power, which ended under Biden.
Despite those pledges, Biden greenlit a massive, $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia last November. The administration justified the sale on the grounds that the air-to-air missiles are categorized as “defensive weapons,” an absurd pretext that falls apart on even the slightest scrutiny. Even one of the conflict’s most ardent critics in Congress, Sen. Chris Murphy, joined in the administration’s circular logic.
Biden is reportedly considering redesignating Houthis as a “foreign terrorist organization,” following their attacks on the UAE. That decision could have disastrous effects on the civilian population, as humanitarian organizations often cease providing aid that could be seen as supporting a State Department-designated “terrorist” group. Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, harshly criticized the idea. “There’s little evidence that these designations do anything to produce better outcomes,” Duss tweeted. “They’re just a way to appease DC hawks, hobbling US diplomacy and constraining non-military options in the process.”
Unfortunately, for all of Biden’s talk about ending the war and isolating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his administration has done exactly the opposite. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with bin Salman in September, ostensibly to discuss human rights and to further peace in Yemen, but the administration has maintained the status quo regarding Saudi Arabia, bin Salman and the coalition’s posture toward Yemen.
The United States doesn’t have the capacity or the right to dictate the specific outlines of a durable peace in Yemen, but it has helped to prolong the conflict by disingenuously taking one side even as it pretends to be an honest broker for peace. That’s been true for the prior two administrations, and is true for Biden’s as well.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin ran for office using the tactic of berating teachers for pushing critical race theory (CRT) on school kids. As was the case around the country, in district after district and in red state after red state, the candidate was largely attacking a straw man. CRT is a complex academic idea, generally taught in universities rather than in K-12 classrooms. But the effort to paint educators as “race warriors” and white parents as victims of a conspiracy to make their children reject God and country proved a vote winner with anxious white suburbanites. Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide office in Virginia since 2009.
Now, in his first days in office, the new governor is provoking another battle over school classrooms. But unlike the artificial brouhaha over CRT, this one is a battle in which he stands to sustain significant political damage. Hours into his governorship, Youngkin signed a confrontational executive order allowing parents to opt out of local mask mandates in schools, and to send their children into classrooms maskless, despite the still-lethal danger that the Omicron surge poses, particularly to immunocompromised children and educators.
The executive order played well with Youngkin’s most dyed-in-the-wool Republican supporters, and with the broader GOP base around the country, but there’s scant evidence that a majority of voters either nationally or in Virginia actually support ending mask mandates during a surge of the pandemic’s most contagious virus variant to date. Indeed, even before Omicron displaced Delta as the dominant variant, Quinnipiac polling from last September showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans wanted to keep school mask mandates in place. A Monmouth University poll from that same month found that roughly two-thirds of parents in Virginia, specifically, supported mask mandates in schools, and a majority supported the University of Virginia’s decision to disenroll students who refused to declare their vaccine status. A Washington Post poll put the number supporting the mask mandate in the state even higher, at 70 percent.
In the wake of Youngkin’s executive order, seven districts in his state announced that they would sue to block implementation of the order. The school boards from the districts included those representing Fairfax County, Prince William County, and the cities of Alexandria, Arlington, Richmond, Falls Church and Hampton — large northern districts containing affluent suburbs of D.C., in which Youngkin had managed to peel away enough voters from the Democrats in November 2021 to eke out a two-point win. Now, after being in office only a week, many voters in these same suburbs are enraged by his signature policy to date.
This is a crisis entirely of the politically inexperienced Youngkin’s own making. He could, quite simply, have said that he personally opposed mask mandates, but recognized that Virginia’s constitution gave local school boards the power to supervise the schools in their districts. Instead, he lit a fuse while standing perilously close to the dynamite.
The irony here is that Youngkin rode to power on a huge tactical error by his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, who went on record saying that parents shouldn’t always control what their children learn in school. He was talking about the need for sex education, and for some lessons on the country’s troubled racist history. McAuliffe didn’t say it very diplomatically, but the basic idea animating his statement oughtn’t to have generated too much controversy. Virginia was, after all, home to Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital; has a centuries-long history of slavery to grapple with; and banned interracial marriages into the 1960s. Surely, an honest reckoning with this history is long overdue in Virginia’s classrooms. Yet Youngkin saw an opening, and relentlessly attacked McAuliffe for this, repeatedly saying on the stump that education should be left in the hands of parents and localities. He also promised to lead a national movement against progressive educational policies and curricula. In doing so, and in carving out a niche for angry parents to try to reclaim local control over an education system they saw as beholden to state and national interests, Youngkin laid down a template for the Republicans’ midterm elections strategy for 2022: accuse Democrats of educational over-reach, and promise voters that if they elect Republicans, decisions about the classroom setting will be left to localities rather than to state officials.
However, when it comes to the executive order against mask mandates, Youngkin himself isn’t even pretending to hew to that strategy. Instead of leaving education decisions in the hands of local policy makers, he is trying to impose a centralized education-cum-public-health policy, dictated from the state capital, that many parents fear will put their children’s health at risk, and, by extension, their own health, as well as that of their elderly relatives.
Youngkin’s dilemma here is that he isn’t just responding to the animating issues of the Virginians who voted him into office last November. If he were, mask mandates would be largely a non-issue for him this early in his governorship. But, since his upset victory in Virginia’s November election, he has risen from being an unknown on the national stage to being talked about by Fox and other conservative media as a possible presidential candidate in 2024. The Youngkin formula is seen as a winning one: Trumpite political tricks, but delivered with the patter of a sophisticated, suburban, polite financier.
And so, the newly elected GOP governor of Virginia finds himself now playing to a national audience — a far more treacherous terrain to navigate. Republicans with national ambitions are outdoing themselves in their efforts to limit the power of public health officials to set in place economic and educational restrictions. At the forefront of this is a visceral hostility to mask mandates. An Axios poll from late last summer found less than one in three Republicans supported school mask mandates. Governors Ron DeSantis, in Florida, and Greg Abbott, in Texas, have taken the lead in crafting public policies to pander to this sentiment, though governors in South Carolina, Arkansas, and many other states have also pushed back against mandates both for mask-wearing in public, indoor settings and also for vaccinations in schools, businesses and for federal agencies.
Republicans hoped Youngkin’s win presaged a breakdown of the electoral coalition that propelled Joe Biden to the presidency in the November 2020 election. They thought he had, in honing in on critical race theory, found a formula that would win back many of the affluent, educated and only vaguely socially liberal white suburbanites who once upon a time reliably voted Republican but who were repelled by Trump’s extremist, irrationalist presidency. Now, the Virginia governor’s magic seems somewhat less spectacular, his vulnerability on mask mandates a sign of the fragility of the coalition that the Republicans hope to build. Youngkin’s position might play well in Texas or in Florida, or in an overwhelmingly Republican state like Mississippi, but it isn’t necessarily a winning policy stance in Virginia, a critical swing state that Republicans very much hope to hold onto over the coming election cycles.
Youngkin’s emphasis on local control over schools helped propel him to power. Now, his pandering to the anti-maskers of the GOP base, and his denial of local districts’ right to keep mask mandates in place, risks alienating the same voters who propelled him to power. The GOP thought that riling up parents over schooling would prove to be their winning ticket. Now, in Virginia, they are seeing that policies around schooling can be just as treacherous for Republicans as they were, last November, for the Democrats.
My first class for the Spring semester begins in a couple of hours. I still do not know if I’m teaching in person or moving the class online. Governor DeSantis says I’m teaching in person. The university, where I work, says I’m teaching in person.
“I have tenure. Why the hell am I teaching in person?” I ask my partner.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Do you think I’m going to die?” I ask.
“Good news: we’re all going to die,” he says, and this makes me laugh in a macabre way. We’re both poets. He teaches at Harvard and flies back in a couple of weeks.
I walk into my home office and play music. The playlist I want is bizarre, but at least I’m clear on what I want to listen to: Aphex Twin’s “Alberto Basalm,” Tristen’s “Baby Drugs,” Schubert’s “Trio No. 2” and Hole’s “Malibu.”
I apply makeup and think: What would Courtney Love do? Courtney Love is disabled. What if Courtney Love were a poetry professor about to teach in person?
She’d cancel, I decide. She would definitely cancel.
I change my mind. No, she would mask up, walk in the classroom and say, “Well, here we are.”
***
In Fall 2021, I did not deliberate as much about teaching in person. I just did it.
I had applied for this job as a creative writing professor at Florida State University (FSU) three times. Twice, I had been rejected. When the job ad appeared, yet again, I nearly did not apply.
“Why give them the chance to reject me again?” I asked my partner.
“The search committee changes,” he said.
So I applied a third time. And landed the job.
I was thrilled. I returned to teach at my alma mater. As an undergraduate, I had appreciated neither the education at FSU nor the 14 practicing writers on faculty. I was just an in-state student who could not afford out-of-state schools.
***
On the road to teach in person, I call my colleague, the novelist Mark Winegardner, and say, “Mark. What are we doing? Talk to me like I’m your high-risk disabled friend. And I’m about to teach in person.” “You’re vaxxed, right?” Mark says.
“I’m vaxxed and boosted and I’d take a fourth hit if they’d give it to me,” I say.
“I think you’ll be fine. But don’t take my word for it. Do what you think is right,” he says.
“I just passed a COVID testing site. The line of cars is out of this world,” I say.
***
In the Fall, I felt a sense of camaraderie about teaching in person.
I’m tenured, I thought. What can I do with my tenure? Okay, I’m not going to sit at home and luxuriate. I’m not going to teach online because I have job security. Not while adjuncts and grad students and staff have to be there, in person, on the job.
I’m a disability rights activist, so I know how much it means when allies show up. And I know how much it hurts when allies don’t show up.
But I’m no martyr, no moral authority. I cuss like a sailor. I have been a coward on more occasions than I’ve been a hero.
In the Fall, this felt like an adventure. Recklessly going into the unknown.
***
But now here we are. Omicron is blowing up. What are the risks?
***
It probably helps if you know that I was born disabled due to Agent Orange. My dad was drafted into Vietnam in the 70s (“what a stupid war,” he has said), and he served as a pharmacist in Long Bình. He sat on a barrel and he dispensed pills.
That barrel he sat on? It contained Agent Orange. Then again, so did the fields around him. Did I get my disability from the barrel or the fields? Does it matter?
My parents, reformed hippies, wanted me to have all the information. So even though I was a kid, I learned about the potential for my own death. Each surgery came with a new talk about “the risks.”
“Do you understand the risks?” my parents would say.
***
Am I teaching in person? What are the risks? Not just for me, but for my students. Where is the uprising of professors? Where is the change.org petition?
Percy Shelley, of all people, keeps popping into my mind: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
If that’s true, then I am the legislator. I am the keeper of attendance.
I could turn this car around. I could send one email: “We’re going online.” I could disobey my superiors and the State. But I don’t. I go in there, double-masked, and say to my students, “Welcome to class.”
***
To my critics, who wonder, “Why don’t you just get an accommodation?”
Have you applied for one? Would you risk additional exposure to visit your doctor’s office for his or her signature on the paperwork? Would you risk possible re-traumatization since your university wants your complete medical history from 1981? Would you be fine with all of this even if your university decides to decline your request? Or would you wish that you had never asked?
If you never ask, then you are never denied.
If you are never denied, then there is no record.
If there is no record, you can take your classes online. Wait to be reprimanded. Reply, “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of dying.”
***
Though I may feel alone, I am not alone. Mia Mingus has just published “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths” on her blog. One part of the essay reads, “We know the state has failed us. We are currently witnessing the pandemic state-sanctioned violence of murder, eugenics, abuse and bone-chilling neglect in the face of mass suffering, illness and death.”
I do not have answers.
I am walking into class, again, in 20 minutes. Dramatic Technique.
Today we will talk about Sarah Kane’s play Crave. Kane was a queer, disabled playwright. Here is one of the lines from her play that I’d really like to believe: “You’re never as powerful as when you know you’re powerless.” Another line? “I have a bad bad feeling about this bad bad feeling.”
The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol takeover have subpoenaed a wide variety of people, from Trump officials to grassroots activists. And on January 19, 2022, two more were called: Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey, the leaders of the “Groyper” movement, a white supremacist outgrowth of the “alt-right.” Fuentes believes that “genocide” is being committed against white people, and rails against immigration, the “LGBTQ agenda” and feminism. While relatively minor characters on the national stage, Fuentes and Casey are important to know about for three reasons.
The first is that the Groypers are one of the more successful groups among the openly white supremacist wing of the alt-right, and they have been able to attract mainstream support. The second is if Fuentes and Casey “were involved in the planning and coordination of the January 6 attack … it would show tight collaboration between true white supremacists and the former administration,” according to Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Third, the committee specifically pointed out that Fuentes and Casey had “received tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin from a French computer programmer.” Calling for — and then cheering on — the takeover of the Capitol after receiving foreign funding would put them in a different category than many of the other involved groups which seem to lack foreign financial connections.
From 2017 to 2020, Casey was the leader of white supremacist group Identity Evropa (later rebranded as the American Identity Movement), which window-dressed traditional white supremacist views to give itself a better public image, which the movement called “optics.” Early on, the group was also closely aligned with racist leader Richard Spencer. Meanwhile, Fuentes was one of the most visible young activists who went from more traditional conservatism to overt white supremacy. As the star of the alt-right has fallen, the Groypers represent those who have chosen to infiltrate the ranks of the Trumpists in order to push them even further right.
The alt-right burst onto the scene in 2016 as members hitched their horse to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and he embraced them in turn. This included both wings of the alt-right — one a new generation of open white supremacists like neo-Nazis, the other, the “alt-lite,” more moderate ideologically and which included people of color, Jews and gay men.
For many decades, it was unheard of for a major party’s presidential candidate to openly embrace white supremacists, and the alt-right took this opportunity to expand into a mass movement. The alt-right movement peaked early with the August 2017 “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. After it ended with the murder of anti-fascist Heather Heyer, their largest public event also became their downfall.
As Trump’s presidency went on, many in the alt-right bailed on him because he wasn’t as overtly racist or antisemitic as they’d hoped he would be. One of the major groups in the movement, Patriot Front, walked away from Trump to organize a more politically radical and independent path. (Patriot Front concentrates on propaganda like stickering, and holds periodic unannounced marches where members appear masked to hide their identities.) Others, like Richard Spencer, withdrew into relative inactivity, in part because of the Sines v. Kessler civil lawsuit over the organizing of the Charlottesville demonstration. Spencer was one of the defendants found guilty and was ordered to pay a hefty sum.
But some did not give up the movement that Trump had summoned, and which the alt-lite remained active in. In fact, many Trumpists — including the Proud Boys, but also regular Republicans — were becoming more aggressive and violent. January 6 made this clear. And the Groypers became the major grouping from the racist alt-right that moved in on these more ideologically moderate political circles.
While not everyone on the alt-right made this switch, it does show that for some, there was a straight line between Charlottesville and the Capitol breach. As a teenager (he is now 23), Fuentes had already been radical — radical enough to go to Charlottesville, even as other groups in Trump’s camp with extreme politics, like the Oath Keepers, stayed away. Identity Evropa, meanwhile, was one of most prominent groups there. (Casey was later deposed in Sines v. Kessler for the group’s role in the rally.).
Casey took over Identity Evropa later in 2017, and in 2019 rebranded it as the American Identity Movement. However, on November 2, 2020 — the day before the presidential election — he announced its dissolution and entrance into the Groyper movement. For Casey and his cadre, this marked an end to their strategy of independent white supremacist organizing, instead turning to entryism — the tactic of joining a larger organization or movement in order to turn it toward one’s politics.
In 2019, Fuentes built his Groyper movement by attacking those on the far right whom he deemed too moderate; this included Turning Point USA President Charles Kirk, right-wing political pundit Ben Shapiro, and even Donald Trump Jr. Using the brand “America First Movement” — whose fundraising vehicle is the America First PAC (AFPAC) — Fuentes organized competing conferences at the same time as more mainstream events like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
But even though he holds minimally camouflaged white supremacist positions, Fuentes has been able to attract mainstream support. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) was the keynote speaker at an AFPAC conference, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) has called for Fuentes to be removed from the federal “no-fly” list. Fuentes has been praised by Ali Alexander, the organizer of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, while Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers bragged that Fuentes called her “based” — an alt-right term denoting that someone’s views are aligned with their movement. And conservative commentator Michelle Malkin has positioned herself close to the Groypers, dubbing herself their “mommy.” While it is certainly unusual that a white supremacist would attract the support of people of color like Malkin and Alexander, Fuentes himself is of Mexican heritage.
Regardless of the actual impact of his words, Fuentes’s statements before the Capitol breach are coming back to haunt him. In November 2020, he called for right-wingers to be “more feral” and to “storm every state capitol until January 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Two days before the Capitol attack, he said on his livestream, “What can you and I do to a state legislator — besides kill them? We should not do that. I’m not advising that, but I mean, what else can you do, right?”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, on January 6, Fuentes “wore a VIP badge to Trump’s speech.” Fuentes and Casey were later on the Capitol grounds, where Fuentes called on the crowd to “break down the barriers and disregard the police.” Their America First flags were seen at the rally — including at least one inside the Capitol, held by California college student Christian Secor, who was later arrested.
Afterward, Fuentes advised his followers to “destroy your phone, your SIM card, all that information.” And the aftermath also brought a fallout between Casey and Fuentes.
The January 6 committee has ordered Fuentes and Casey to turn over documents by February 2, 2022, and submit to interviews by February 9. But it may be the foreign funding that becomes their biggest problem, especially if — as with the Oath Keepers — they are charged with “seditious conspiracy.” According to the committee, the FBI “is reportedly scrutinizing to assess whether the money was linked to the Capitol attack or otherwise used to fund illegal acts.” (Before committing suicide, a French programmer gave Fuentes $250,000, while Casey received $25,000.)
Casey has put on a brave face, saying he might invoke the Fifth Amendment — unless “they televise my appearance,” in which case “I absolutely will do it.” But it remains to be seen what look he has come February.
A common refrain in the Trump era was that despite all of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic ambitions, he was too incompetent to carry out a wholescale remaking of U.S. society. There’s no question his four years in office had a profound, disastrous effect on the people and communities his administration targeted — immigrants, Muslims and trans people, just to name a few. Plus, his openly fascist rhetoric — and sometimes actions — significantly emboldened the far right. However, both his legislative agenda, and to a lesser extent his exercise of executive authority, were likely hampered by his lack of experience in elected office and overall laziness, lack of discipline and inattention to detail.
Many advocates understandably fear that Trump’s eventual Republican presidential successor, whoever they are, could combine the most toxic elements of Trumpism with a greater degree of technocratic skill. A more-competent Trump could do even greater damage to U.S. political infrastructure, like the refugee resettlement system that Trump dismantled, that could take decades to rebuild. A more-competent Trump could also potentially shepherd through a legislative agenda that far exceeded Trump’s, which consisted primarily of a standard-fare Republican tax cut for the wealthy.
Currently, the most likely GOP successor to Trump seems to be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who regularly ranks as Republicans’ top choice in the 2024 presidential primary if Trump declines to run. Trump’s polling lead over DeSantis appears to be narrowing in recent months, though any surveys this far out should be taken with a grain of salt. Everything in DeSantis’s public record suggests that he poses a serious threat to democracy, the working class and marginalized communities. DeSantis recently signed into law some of the nation’s most stringent anti-critical race theory legislation, and ordered a review of the state’s university system to determine if professors were “indoctrinating” students into a “stale ideology,” clearly a reference to ideas ranging from anti-racism to socialism. He’s also pushing a bill that would prevent teachers and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when learning about the history of racist oppression in the United States.
DeSantis has also recently staked out his position as more anti-vaccine, anti-booster than Trump himself. In December, the Florida governor refused to say if he’d gotten a COVID booster when asked by Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve done whatever I did, the normal shot,” DeSantis said. DeSantis got the Johnson & Johnson single dose in April, and stonewalled in October when asked if he would get a booster.
These statements, as well as DeSantis’s rising stature in the national Republican Party, seem to have rankled Trump. In comments that were widely understood to be directed at DeSantis, Trump criticized politicians who wouldn’t say if they had gotten a COVID booster shot. Many Republican politicians had in fact gotten the booster, “but they don’t want to say it. Because they’re gutless,” Trump said on the far right One America News Network. “You gotta say it — whether you had it or not.” (At a rally in December, Trump told the crowd that he’d gotten the booster. They booed him in response.)
Several days later, Axiosreported Trump has been calling DeSantis a “dull personality” in private meetings. Also, in that report, Trump aides claimed the former president was angry that DeSantis hasn’t pledged not to challenge Trump in the 2024 GOP primary, should he run again. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman tweeted that she’d heard similar frustrations from those in Trump world, who said Trump thought DeSantis should be showing him more “deference.”
DeSantis, for his part, has taken shots at Trump as well. On the conservative “Ruthless” podcast, the governor said one of his biggest regrets since taking office was not being “much louder” in opposing Trump’s calls for soft lockdowns as COVID initially spread throughout the country and world.
DeSantis also appears to be shoring up support from conservative media stars to build a parallel track of public support, separate from his standing with Trump. On the anniversary of the January 6 storming of the Capitol, the Florida governor gathered “nine prominent social media stars in Tallahassee,” Politicoreported. Blaze TV’s Sara Gonzales told Politico it “would be a mistake for DeSantis not to run,” and that many conservatives were “hungry for someone with the guts to speak for them without fear of repercussions, but also without the obvious baggage that Trump carries.”
However, despite the simmering tensions between the two men, neither appears eager to engage in an all-out attack on the other. Last week, Trump told reporters that he has a “very good relationship” with DeSantis. He reminded them of his early support for the Florida politician when he was a relatively unknown congressman making a longshot bid for governor. DeSantis “won the [gubernatorial] election the day I announced that I was going to give him my endorsement,” Trump said on the call. He made similar comments to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters in a forthcoming book, underscoring the degree to which Trump believes he’s responsible for DeSantis’s success. “Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump told Peters.
Despite the emerging personal rivalry between DeSantis and Trump, the two are ideologically nearly identical, and also govern in a similar manner. DeSantis reportedly rules Florida with an iron fist and demands total fealty and loyalty, just as Trump does. “Ron DeSantis is essentially the speaker of the House, the president of the Senate and the chief justice of the Supreme Court right now,” one Republican legislator recently toldPolitico. Another GOP state legislator said in the same report that it’s “well known you can’t go against him. If you cross him once, you’re dead.”
In another clear echo of Trumpism, DeSantis is pushing for the creation of a new, so-called election police force. The new sub-agency, whose proposed official name is the Office of Election Crimes and Security, would operate under the Department of State, which is controlled by the governor. Voting rights advocates are understandably alarmed, citing the extremely low levels of deliberate voter fraud and arguing that the goal of the new sub-agency is to depress turnout, particularly among Black voters and other groups historically targeted for harassment.
Also worrisome is a new proposed congressional district map released by DeSantis’s office, an incredibly rare phenomenon. “DeSantis’ map would cut in half the number of African American districts from four on current proposed congressional maps to two, while boosting the number of seats Donald Trump would have won in 2020 to 18 from the 16 on the map currently being considered by the GOP-led Florida Senate,” Politicoreported.
The 2024 primary will semi-officially start this year, after the November midterms. Trump hasn’t announced whether he’ll run, but all signs suggest that he will. DeSantis is a young, popular, far-right politician who doesn’t command the base of the party like Trump does, but comes closer than any other potential challenger at the moment. Ever since Trump’s upset victory in 2016, those on both the right and the left have wondered what Trumpism without Trump might look like. In DeSantis, we could be seeing an answer.
I know for a fact that there’s no one inside the Swanson Center for Youth or the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) looking out for the health and safety of my son. And now, due to the OJJ’s new no-visitation COVID policy, I can’t be there for him, either.
As COVID-19 numbers spike among children across the country, parents are understandably growing more and more worried about their kids. While families, teachers and lawmakers all struggle to navigate keeping young people safe amid a constantly evolving pandemic, one group of children gets increasingly neglected from care: those in the incarceration system. I should know — my son was incarcerated by the state six years ago at the young age of 13 and remains under the OJJ’s “care” at Swanson youth prison in Monroe, Louisiana.
Louisiana notoriously has one of the worst youth incarceration systems in the country. Amid a pandemic, the conditions at youth prisons have become all the more inhumane. At Swanson, where my son is held, the facility claimed that they kept up with sanitization, but my son was in the infirmary with COVID for three months, and they refused to share any information about his well-being. I later learned there were times he could not eat or breathe. I still worry about his general health because he has told me about mold in the showers, which makes it clear that the prison is not a clean or safe place. I’m sure every parent can understand how traumatizing is for me to not know the state of my child’s health.
Although the pandemic has worsened conditions in youth prisons, this abusive treatment has been ongoing since the moment my son was placed behind bars. I have seen him bruised and black-eyed during visits, and no one has been held accountable. He recently told me that he and the boys in his dorm had to barricade the door from other boys in Swanson who were trying to hurt them. He and his dormmates couldn’t sleep because they were too afraid. The proof is endless: The conditions at Louisiana youth prisons are unacceptable. There are countless reports of abuse and carelessness, which during the pandemic has led to COVID-19 outbreaks, and other gross mishandlings from the people who are supposed to be in charge of these young peoples’ safety. It’s no surprise then, that these conditions lead to youth attempting to escape.
Given Swanson’s history of horrific abuse, it’s unfathomable to me that Gov. John Bel Edwards could support the rebuilding of the prison. Reports of these instances of violence and abuse are swept under the rug so that the OJJ can open a new facility and grow their profit. Our economy in Monroe is invested in these prisons, but our community deserves better jobs. I have personally tried to talk with numerous people at the OJJ and other officials, including the director of Swanson, but they refuse to be held accountable for their cruelty or try to reimagine our economy.
We have known for a long time that youth prisons are ineffective at keeping communities any safer, but we continue to waste money on them. When state recidivism rates are commonly as high as 75 percent, there’s no question that youth prisons are not the rehabilitative places they claim to be. There are no GED programs, mental health services, job opportunities, skills training or preparation for life after incarceration. Kids are also largely unable to communicate with their families, and when they can, it is always under the supervision of Swanson guards, who are often undertrained to make up for staff shortages. These are the same staff members who physically abused my son. How are we supposed to talk freely when they’re listening to every word?
Most Americans across the country agree that youth prisons are not the answer: Seventy-eight percent of Americans support providing financial incentives for states and municipalities to invest in alternatives to youth incarceration in the communities most affected by youth prisons, such as intensive rehabilitation, education, job training, community services, and programs that provide youth the opportunity to repair harm to victims and to provide communities with life-affirming work. We should be putting our well-being first instead of falling on “tough on crime” approaches that disproportionately lock up Black kids more than their white peers.
My son deserves to be kept safe from abuse, illness and unnecessary cruelty. Young people need mental health services, supportive housing and fair access to education to mitigate crime by attacking the root causes. Swanson, like all youth prisons, only serves to punish kids for their mistakes, not help them grow and learn. We need to shut them down now and rebuild our systems in a way that actually helps our children.
Eighty-four million Americans remain unvaccinated against COVID-19. Nearly no one has knocked on their doors to explain why a vaccine is a good idea. Even at this late date, now is a good time to start.
As with COVID testing, thousands of newly hired community health workers are needed to hit the streets and back roads to convince people that vaccines are safe and necessary. Daily conversations, some over the course of many weeks, are needed to turn millions of skeptics or the disconnected into participants. This would be the kind of program the Biden administration proposed, if still in an inadequate form, for contact tracing before the inauguration and never pursued after.
Certainly, the ongoing bloodbath — only inches deep but wide as a lake — isn’t just a matter of the present administration. Trump’s vindictive inaction helped kill half a million Americans the first year of the outbreak. Biden’s smug insufficiency, however, will likely add another half a million by spring. But more pointedly, it’s as much a matter of the U.S.’s structural decline that produced the holes in our public health coverage. Beginning nearly 50 years ago, public health was increasingly abandoned or monetized under the neoliberal program.
Public health spending clearly saves lives. Ten years ago, health policy analysts Glen Mays and Sharla Smith found that U.S. mortality rates from preventable deaths — including infant mortality and cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer — fell between 1.1 to 6.9 percent for every 10 percent increase in local public health spending.
Yet this crucial spending has dropped. In 2018, the Trust for America’s Health reported on the effective decline of public health funding.
The report described the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement Program as the only federal program that supports state and local health departments to prepare for and respond to emergencies. Except for one-time bumps for the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, core emergency preparedness funding had been cut by more than one-third (from $940 million in 2002 to $667 million in 2017).
The report went on to identify precipitous declines in public health funding at the state level. Thirty one states cut their public health budgets from FY 2015-2016 to FY 2016-2017, with spending lower that year than in 2008. The budget cuts during the Great Recession were never restored.
The impact was felt at the local level, too. Local health departments cut 55,000 staff in the decade following the Recession. By this system’s logic, an acute emergency is also grounds for such cuts. Thousands of health staff were furloughed during the COVID outbreak — cuts attributed in part to declines in more lucrative elective surgeries. One in five health workers have left their jobs during the pandemic.
The Trust for America report went on to describe the incoming disasters for which the U.S. appeared unprepared in 2018. They sound like headlines of the past year: weather disasters; flooding; wildfires; extreme drought; hurricanes; infectious disease outbreaks; and deaths of despair due to factors including racial disparities, opioids, and regional disparities that continue to drive distrust of government.
Trust for America placed particular focus on pandemics and the need to fully fund the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, the Hospital Preparedness Program, the Project BioShield Act and PHEP.
The report recommended increasing funding for public health at all levels of jurisdiction — federal, state and local. It called for preserving the Prevention and Public Health Fund, increasing funding to prepare for public health emergencies and pandemics, establishing a standing public health emergency response fund, and surge funding during an emergency to avoid the delays that were apparent in the Ebola outbreak, the swine flu pandemic, Hurricane Sandy and the Zika virus outbreak.
Trust for America concluded with a recommendation for a national resilience strategy to combat diseases of despair, for preventing chronic disease, and for expanding high-impact interventions across communities.
While it is important to consider recommendations for increased funding and preparedness, it’s also crucial to take a step back and consider the system under which these suggestions are being made. Trust for America’s recommendations were wrapped in the worst of language and precepts. The report accepted the class character of the state. Public health is a means of cleaning up messes that capitalist production produces. Public health outcomes were pitched in terms of returns on investment.
All terrible. And yet, in the present context, such recommendations are radical, if only in pushing back against the damage of an empire at the end of its cycle of capital accumulation, organized around helping billionaires squeeze what’s left of the commons and turning decades of social infrastructure back into bunker money.
Anti-Public Health — at Home and Abroad
We find an analogous fallacy in U.S. COVID policy abroad. While the Biden administration has taken a stance in favor of waiving TRIPS rules against vaccine generics for COVID, tech billionaire and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates, funding WHO efforts, effectively sets U.S. foreign policy on the matter.
there are only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving a vaccine from, say, a J&J factory into a factory in India, that, it’s novel, it’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all. The thing that’s holding things back in this case is not intellectual property, there’s not like some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines.
The reality is something different. Last month AccessIBSA and Médecins Sans Frontières identified 120 companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the likely capacity to produce mRNA vaccines. Human Rights Watch reported:
“Global vaccine production forecasts suggesting there will soon be enough Covid-19 vaccines for the world are misleading,” said Aruna Kashyap, associate business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The US and German governments should press for wider technology transfers and not let companies dictate where and how lifesaving vaccines and treatments reach much of the world as the virus mutates.”
Two months earlier, The New York Times had investigated the possibility:
“You cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA: Those people don’t exist,” the chief executive of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, told analysts.
But public health experts in both rich and poor countries argue that expanding production to the regions most in need is not only possible, it is essential for safeguarding the world against dangerous variants of the virus and ending the pandemic.
Setting up mRNA manufacturing operations in other countries should start immediately, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, adding: “They are our insurance policy against variants and production failure” and “absolutely can be produced in a variety of settings.”
Both at home and abroad, pharmaceutical industry apologists propose nothing can be conceived, much less pursued, unless the largest companies make billions in profit. Our men of the year are to be treated as no less than gods with rocket wings. Few of the respectable establishment have described, much less denounced, the fallacy.
Others have been much more truculent in their commentary, connecting increasing wealth concentration with COVID failures:
Economic historian Matthias Schmelzer started one Twitter thread early December: “The global concentration of capital is extreme: The richest 10% own around 60-80% of wealth, the poorest half less than 5%, according to just published World Inequality Report.”
Americans For Tax Fairness reported: “America’s billionaires got $1 TRILLION richer in 2021, a 25% gain in collective wealth that will go largely untaxed.”
Union organizer Jack Califano encapsulated the damage of such an arrangement: “COVID has been a perfect illustration of how our government now works. In a crisis, it will provide benefits, but only the absolute minimum it determines necessary to protect the system from political upheaval. And then, as soon as stability is restored, it will take them away.”
The Pandemic ThinkTank has taken up the core matter in similarly direct terms. In a report it released in November, the ad hoc group — comprised of a social psychiatrist, disease ecologist, medical anthropologist, epidemiologist, critical care physician and county official — unpacked the origins of the COVID trap that the U.S. placed itself in and offered a plan of escape other than “go to work.”
The team described how social systems set the ways epidemics spread, the damage that accrued in the American system of disease control long before SARS-2 showed up, the history of successful public health efforts before that destruction, and what a working public health system looks like:
Several lessons emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and frame our approach to planning for the next pandemic.
First, there are three ‘partners’ in this enterprise: the government, the public health establishment, and the communities. Each partner has an important role to play in ensuring that we learn these lessons and can meet the next challenge with a better chance at survival. But there is an underlying issue of excess power held by the American oligopoly and the politicians allied with them. They profit in power and wealth from the array of policies David Harvey (2019) labeled ‘accumulation by dispossession’.
Any serious examination of pandemic threat must confront the danger contained in such one-sided power. Part of the way in which the oligopoly has gained and maintained power is by undermining communities and destroying their organizations. While this is good for short-term profit, it poses an enormous threat to long-term survival. Rebuilding community power is an essential part of epidemic control.
Rebellion as Intervention
So, there are minds stateside who understand both disease and the country in ways the establishment that rejects their counsel does not. In contrast to the president’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci and a CDC that repeatedly places commerce and empire before people, Pandemic ThinkTank explicitly counsels a rebel alliance:
Local health departments must, in many municipalities and counties, foment revolution.
This, like most revolutions, must occur in secret and with interactions with community groups in places like neighborhood bars, playgrounds, houses of worship, and barbershops/beauty salons.
In order to bring communities into condition for improved public health and for pandemic prevention and response, the health department must have the social and political muscle to pressure the elected executive into reforming the relevant agencies.
The health departments themselves must feel the pressure of empowered communities to establish egalitarian planning councils that will produce plans acceptable to and supportable by the various elements that form the local communities.
Unlike the COVID Collaborative of establishment epidemiologists who, like the CDC, push a more individualistic approach to public health, we can see why the Pandemic ThinkTank holds no direct line to the president. Indeed, ultimately, it’s going to take everyday people from beyond the Beltway to help bend epidemiology back into a science for the people.
Younger epidemiologists are taking on that spirit, turning on Biden and their better-connected colleagues in confrontational terms for which most journeymen are punished:
Perhaps with the COVID Collaborative and ex-Harvard epidemiologist and now chief science officer at the eMed diagnostic company Michael Mina in mind, Columbia University’s Seth Prins tweeted: “Turns out lots of blue check public health experts moonlight as pandemic profiteers.”
Ellie Murray, of Boston University’s School of Public Health, tweeted: “Honestly baffled by people who claim the COVID plan put in place by the president of the united states, ‘leader of the free world’, was so fragile that an assistant professor tweeting on her coffee breaks could undermine it, & that *isnt* somehow worse than the plan just failing?”
Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, who wrote his own critique of Biden’s COVID year, followed up: “There’s ‘a lot to unpack’ about how the only substantive criticism the media has been willing to pursue wrt Biden’s pandemic response is failing to make a consumer product (rapid tests) available to individuals.”
From abroad, Botswanan doctor Letlhogonolo Tlhabano weighed in: “I’m an intensivist and have been taking care of COVID patients since this pandemic begun, and the new AHA guidelines are idiotic. We’re not martyrs. The CDC guidelines are also motivated by the need to protect capital, and not necessarily by any science. We’re on our own.”
Science organizer and biochemist Lucky Tran commented: “We are not ‘learning to live with COVID’. When we give up on protecting our healthcare systems, workers, the immunocompromised, and the vulnerable, in reality we are ‘surrendering to COVID.’”
It really speaks to the tenor of our times when March for Science retweets Black radical Bree Newsome on the out-of-pocket costs of COVID testing.
I tried warning people about Biden’s pandemic-related policies before the inauguration, twice, and wrote a book titled Dead Epidemiologists,underscoring the mortally wounded thinking of even some of the field’s best and brightest practitioners.
The advocacy work of these younger scientists, however, may signal that our ugly future also offers hope. A more recent invitation to my millennial colleagues that we had a world to win reminded me of the generation-appropriate Marx t-shirt I’m getting my kid for his birthday: “You’re A Wizard, Harry.”
Of course, I don’t have all the answers on how we’ll get through this shit show — to use the technical term. I’m always learning alongside this new generation.
I experienced a bout of my own booster hesitancy, born out of the ethical quandary in which Gates trapped us all. Why a third inoculation for me when much of the world hasn’t gotten stuck a single shot? The utter shame of it, with the appropriate symptoms of a red face and shortness of breath. I finally concluded that being alive allowed me to use what little power and platform I had to argue for a different public health order the world over.
For ending a pharmaceutical industry focused on commoditizing health and reinvesting in a public health organized around our shared commons here and abroad is the only way out of this pandemic in any short order. Otherwise, we are left to letting the virus burn out on its own by something like 2025, as early models projected. The Black Plague in Europe eventually ended after eight years. Unless we act now to restore an active, on-the-ground public health mobilization helping people block-by-block and farm-by-farm, we will be forced to assimilate the possibility that we are to suffer a pandemic of a similar duration.
