Elon Musk, billionaire and chief executive officer of Tesla, at the Viva Tech fair in Paris on June 16, 2023.

Photo: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images

What does EloN Musk firing 6,500 people at Twitter have to do with the Writers Guild of America and actors in SAG-AFTRA going on strike? How is Meta axing 21,000 employees connected to more and more doctors wondering if they have to unionize? And how is this all related to Donald Trump taking a government map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path in 2020 and scrawling on it with a Sharpie?

The answer is that America’s owners have opened a new front in their battle against everyone else, declaring war on the class of technocrats who once were their greatest allies.

In Adam Smith’s famed 1776 disquisition on economics, “The Wealth of Nations,” he ponders the behavior of the “great proprietors” of feudalism. They owned the most valuable property available — i.e., land — and with their income from this property supported a class of attendants and retainers, and, below them, a class of tenants of the land.

But the proprietors gradually lost the taste for this. They eventually wished to consume “the whole surplus produce of their lands … without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

“The Wealth of Nations” is full of this kind of ferocious criticism of the psychology of the powerful, so it’s peculiar how today’s powerful champion the book so frequently. There was even a vogue among male members of the Reagan administration for wearing ties with little pictures of Adam Smith. The most likely explanation here is America’s top apparatchiks don’t waste their time reading stuff.

In any case, Smith’s perspective was generally correct: both about the way societies can develop three different tiers, and the overall view of the people at the top of them. Their vile maxim — all for ourselves and nothing for other people — seems to be reaching a level of virulence Americans haven’t experienced in living memory.

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Like feudal England, America has, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top are today’s great proprietors. The basis of their wealth is no longer mainly held in land but in direct ownership of their own businesses plus financial instruments including corporate stocks and bonds. The top 1 percent owns over half of U.S. corporate stock.

The people just below them are no longer attendants and retainers but technocrats. They’re the people who go to school to develop the specialized skills that are necessary to keep society running day to day: doctors, lawyers, scientists, computer programmers, engineers. (Journalists are also technocrats but among the weakest of the group.) The rest of the top 10 percent — i.e., the 9 percent — owns almost all the rest of U.S. corporate stock.

Then there’s everyone else. They’re no longer tenant farmers, but they still have to get up every day and clock in at Home Depot and Walgreens and Chipotle to cultivate the possessions of the great proprietors. This working class has the least leverage and the fewest options.

In retrospect, it’s clear America’s masters of mankind were shocked enough by World War II to dial the vile maxim back. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Even if you were the son of a National City Bank executive destined to follow in your father’s executive footsteps, you would be able to hear Roosevelt’s message after spending time facedown in the mud on Okinawa, covered in your platoonmate’s viscera.

Thus the great proprietors were willing to share quite a bit with the bottom two classes — for a while. During the three decades after the war, median wages went up hand in hand with productivity. That is, as America overall got richer, so did regular people.

But by the 1970s, the great proprietors had gotten tired of this arrangement. The generation with direct adult experience of how destabilized societies can explode into a worldwide slaughterhouse was retiring and dying. 

So the masters of mankind decided to alter the deal vis-à-vis the working class. This was such a gargantuan success, it’s amazing they pulled it off without bloodshed. If the minimum wage had continued to go up in step with productivity, it would now be not $7.25 but about $25 an hour. A recent RAND study found that if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next 43 years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money flowed in a great flood to the top.

Meanwhile, the technocratic class watched this process with equanimity. Technocrats generally identify upward, and ally themselves with the great proprietors against everyone else. There had been a proprietor-technocrat peace for a long, long time, with the technocrats having the power to garner a big slice of society’s good things for themselves. This included not just money but also prestige and control over their working lives, even as they served as junior partners in the coalition.

The explosion of new wealth in Silicon Valley had also made the boundaries between the two classes enticingly fuzzy. Bill Gates is the son of Bill Gates Sr., who was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle. Billionaire Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, is the son of an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But just as America’s masters of mankind got tired of sharing with the U.S. working class, they’ve now become fatigued with their deal with the technocrats.

Something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America.

It’s difficult to measure or define this. Like Galadriel at the start of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, you have to feel it in the water and smell it in the air. But something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America, as Musk and Trump demonstrate every time they reach for their smartphones and start typing.

It’s partly about money. But the vile maxim is about everything, not just cash. What drives our overlords into a towering rage today is that technocrats still have some power to define reality. And the technocrats keep telling them they can’t have all their heart’s desires instantaneously.

Musk wants to live in a world of berserk ultra-right conspiracism in which all of humanity looks to him for his discoveries about The Truth. When a Twitter engineer explained to him that his engagement was down not because the algorithm was broken, but because people were losing interest in Musk, Musk fired him. Trump wanted to claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, so he just drew that on the map produced by NOAA (where Sean Parker’s father had worked) and made the head of NOAA frightened he’d lose his job. Doctors want to decide what their patients need but are losing that power to private equity.

Right now, we’re just at the start of what will be a titanic war between the masters of mankind and the technocrats. The masters hold most of the cards, including the fact that the technocrats largely don’t understand yet that they’re in a war and are not ready for it. Thus the technocrats will likely be defeated, unless they can do something they’ve never done before: Forge an alliance with the working class.

The post Today’s Class War Is the 1 Percent Versus the People Just Below Them appeared first on The Intercept.

The change of heart was a remarkable admission for a C-suite executive who had paid little public attention to the question of workers rights during her two decades as a leader in corporate America. Yet even as Tomé positioned herself as a friend of the workers who make her company run, she continued to donate money to national Republicans set on gutting worker power and maximizing salaries for America’s top earners.

Tomé has donated over $70,000 in the past decade to national politicians and committees set on rolling back union protections, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. While Tomé has also made donations in recent years to Democratic candidates like Stacey Abrams and the voting rights group Fair Fight PAC, those contributions represent just a small fraction of her overall political giving — and she has made far bigger donations to politicians who are weakening voting rights in Georgia, where UPS is headquartered. 

UPS did not respond to requests for comment. 

Tomé’s professed realignment follows her appointment in 2020 to the top job at UPS, a company with 340,000 members represented by the powerful, and newly revitalized, Teamsters union. Talks between UPS management and the Teamsters over a new contract broke down earlier this month, pushing the union ever closer to a strike on August 1, authorized by over 97 percent of union membership. 

The Teamsters’ militant President Sean O’Brien, who was elected last year, said in a June statement that the Teamsters are not playing chicken with threats of a strike and that UPS should meet the union’s demands to avoid what would be the largest U.S. work stoppage since the 1950s. 

“Executives at UPS, some of whom get tens of millions of dollars a year, do not care about the hundreds of thousands of American workers who make this company run,” O’Brien said. “They don’t care about our members’ families. UPS doesn’t want to pay up. Their actions and insults at the bargaining table have proven they are just another corporation that wants to keep all the money at the top.”

The unresolved issues in the contract negotiation are increased wages for part-time workers, who make up the majority of UPS employees, and offering those same employees a path to full-time employment. Workers and UPS management have already hammered out an agreement to provide cooling systems in new UPS vehicles and to eliminate the current two-tier wage system, which creates a vast difference in pay between junior and senior employees. 

UPS workers “practice picket” at Teamsters Local 804 outside of a UPS facility on July 6, 2023, in New York.

Photo: Brittainy Newman/AP

In 2022, Tomé’s total compensation package was valued at $19 million. That same year, she donated $36,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which supports the campaigns of GOP Senate candidates across the country. Tomé’s NRSC donation followed prior donations to GOP senators, including $5,600 to former Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in 2019, $5,400 to Sen. David Perdue, also of Georgia, that same year, and $1,000 hat tips to GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins. She also donated $5,400 to Florida Sen. Rick Scott in 2018. 

For decades, Senate Republicans have worked to roll back union rights to lower wages and increase the profits of corporate donors, like Tomé, who fill their campaign coffers. In a testament to this commitment, Idaho Republican Sen. Jim Risch sponsored legislation last month to strip unions of the right to enact work stoppages at ports, one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of the West Coast longshoremen’s union, which has held stoppages and slowdowns to maintain some of the highest blue-collar wages in America. 

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Last year, Senate Republicans similarly lashed out at America’s rail workers by voting against a deal negotiated by former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to increase sick days and avert a widespread work stoppage with the potential to disrupt hundreds of miles of U.S. rail. And, in 2021, Senate Republicans introduced national “right-to-work” legislation, which would eviscerate unions by suspending required worker dues.

Tomé has also spread cash around Georgia state politics. In 2017, she donated $1,000 to then-gubernatorial candidate Abrams, one of the few Democrats whose campaigns Tomé has supported. (She donated $2,500 to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and in 2021, $2,900 to Sen. Chuck Schumer and $1,000 to Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Helena Foulkes.) Abrams lost to Gov. Brian Kemp, who is notorious for his efforts to gut voting rights in the state. While Tomé made a $2,500 contribution in 2020 to the Fair Fight PAC, which advocates for expanded voter rights, she went on to donate $7,600 to Kemp the following year.

In 2021, Kemp signed a law that limited absentee ballot access, placed restrictions on food and water in voting lines, and limited the use of ballot drop boxes. He also joined fellow Republican governors to oppose tax credits for workers in America’s auto unions. “We are deeply concerned that Congress is considering legislation that gives union labor a competitive advantage over non-union labor in the electric vehicle market,” the governors wrote. “This legislation is not about supporting emerging technology but is instead a punitive attempt to side with labor unions at the cost of both American workers and consumers.”

As the August 1 strike looms, UPS announced this month that it would delay Tomé’s quarterly earnings call with shareholders until August 8, the latest the call has ever been scheduled since the company first went public in 1999. On her last call with shareholders, the CEO said she was confident a deal was in reach. “While we expect to hear a great deal of noise during the negotiations, I remain confident that a win, win, win contract is very achievable and that UPS and the Teamsters will reach an agreement by the end of July.”

The post UPS CEO’s Political Donations Boost Anti-Union Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 276-page report detailing the PGA’s merger with LIV Golf, the entity bankrolled by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The merger has been widely criticized as an attempt to “sportswash” Saudi Arabia’s sordid human rights record. 

The report, however, also listed the Public Investment Fund’s other public equities, including considerable stakes in many of the U.S.’s largest corporations. 

“What company will dare to cut ties with Saudi the next time its sociopathic leader goes on a wild killing spree?”

Experts interviewed by The Intercept warned that this growing Saudi role in the U.S. economy constitutes a new avenue for foreign influence in U.S. affairs.

“U.S. officials are deliberately keeping their heads in the sand about the national security implications of such massively expanded Saudi investments in every sector of our country’s economic, social, and cultural assets,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the nonprofit human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now, told The Intercept. “What company will dare to cut ties with Saudi the next time its sociopathic leader goes on a wild killing spree?”

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund boasts $700 billion in assets, making it the sixth largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. The Public Investment Fund dramatically expanded its staff — from 50 in 2015 to almost 500 in 2018 — shortly after Mohammed bin Salman became crown prince, consolidating his role as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.

“I think he does have quite a bit of involvement,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Ellen Wald told The Intercept of the crown prince’s role in the sovereign wealth fund. 

Wald pointed to the relationship between Yasir Al-Rumayyan, a Saudi businessman who serves as governor of the Public Investment Fund, and the crown prince, who is commonly known by his initials MBS. “Yasir Rumayyan used to be MBS’s personal banker,” she said.

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Al-Rumayyan was directly involved in a 2017 purge orchestrated by MBS to consolidate his grip on power. In the purge, some 20 Saudi companies were seized and transferred to the sovereign wealth fund. 

One of the firms was a charter jet company used in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence concluded was ordered by MBS himself.

Al-Rumayyan sits on the board of directors of Uber, in which the Senate report notes that the Saudi fund has invested $2.3 billion.

Other Public Investment Fund investments include shares of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, as well as gaming companies like Activision and Electronic Arts. 

MBS, reportedly an avid gamer himself, has overseen an unprecedented investment in gaming. Last year, Saudi Arabia invested $38 billion in gaming through its Public Investment Fund-backed conglomerate, the Savvy Games Group. Savvy CEO Brian Ward has said that the group enjoys the largest startup capital ever provided by the Saudi fund.

Technology firms are particularly well represented in the fund’s list of investments, with billions of dollars invested in Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Adobe, PayPal, and Pinterest.

Despite its vast holdings, the Public Investment Fund reported an $11 billion loss last year. “Berkshire Hathaway they are not,” Wald cracked.

For experts on Saudi’s influence campaigns, the losses raised questions about whether profit is the fund’s primary motive. 

“I think it’s a good argument that their goal is influence and control as much if not more than profit,” Whitson said. “They have endless cash to burn — they don’t need money, they need influence and power.”

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The Saudi fund invested $2 billion in a U.S investment fund run by former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; the cash infusion came just six months after Trump left the White House, where Kushner was both a top aide and conduit for MBS’s interests. Saudi bureaucrats objected to the investment in Kushner’s firm, citing the “inexperience” of the fund’s management as well as “risk,” but they were overruled.

The New York Times reported at the time that the investment “creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.”

Similar concerns have been raised about LIV Golf, which has hosted golf events at Trump golf clubs. Earlier this week, LIV announced that it was relocating its championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump’s Doral golf course in Miami. 

The post Saudi Arabia’s Huge U.S. Investments Lose Money — but Buy Influence appeared first on The Intercept.

Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, his administration ordered ICE to prioritize action against people who posed security risks. A new report from the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that about a third of ICE arrests between February and November 2021, in Biden’s first year in office, involved people who were not considered risks to security or public safety. Half of ICE requests for local authorities to hold a migrant — called “detainers” — during the same period were carried out against people who were not considered security risks. 

“At the end of the day, ICE was not following its own rules.”

“ICE was going outside of these priorities,” said Raul Pinto, a senior staff attorney at the American Immigration Council who drafted the report, of Biden’s orders. “At the end of the day, ICE was not following its own rules.” 

The Biden administration issued guidance on new ICE enforcement priorities in January and February 2021. Former President Donald Trump’s policies made it an official priority to target anyone who was in the U.S. without authorization.

The new Biden guidelines called on the agency to prioritize groups of people considered by the Department of Homeland Security — ICE’s parent agency — to be threats to national security, border security, and public safety, and to use discretion in cases that fell outside of those categories. 

A February 2021 memo required officers to obtain written permission for arrests, detainers, and removals of people who were not considered security risks. The memo also required ICE to collect data on enforcement actions and submit weekly reports of all enforcements and removals. 

In the nine months after that guidance was issued, ICE directed at least a third of its enforcement actions against people who were not considered threats to security. ICE officers approved enforcement action in nonpriority cases 89.5 percent of the time. In 11 percent of the cases reviewed, enforcement action was taken before an ICE officer requested approval.

The report says, “This data suggests that ICE’s pre-approval process did not serve as a significant check on the agency, but largely as a rubber stamp for approval of officers’ actions.” 

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The American Immigration council report was published four days after the Supreme Court ruled against states that had fought the narrowed enforcement guidelines in court. Texas and Louisiana had both challenged the change. On June 23, the high court ruled 8-1 in the Biden administration’s favor, allowing the guidelines to stand. 

The ruling was a win for the White House, which has struggled to enforce some of its efforts to reverse Trump’s anti-immigrant policies with Republican officials seeking to block changes in court. 

The Supreme Court decision also puts pressure on Biden’s administration to more aggressively pursue the humanitarian immigration proposals he ran on in 2020. 

“It’s up to DHS leadership and ICE leadership to ensure that their field level staff, law enforcement officers, are actually doing what the higher-ups are asking of them.”

Immigration advocates applauded the decision, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the agency would resume adoption of the narrowed enforcement guidelines. 

It’s not clear that’s happened yet, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. The court’s decision puts the power back in the Biden administration’s hands, he said: “It’s up to DHS leadership and ICE leadership to ensure that their field level staff, law enforcement officers, are actually doing what the higher-ups are asking of them.” 

The data in the American Immigration Council report covers the first months of Biden’s administration. It takes time to implement policy change in a sprawling agency like the Department of Homeland Security, García Hernández said. But ICE also has a history of slow-walking immigration policy shifts under Democratic administrations — a dynamic that goes back to the Obama administration. “That background makes it reasonable to be skeptical of how willing ICE officers are to shift away from the Trump administration’s heavy-handed enforcement tactics and toward the Biden administration’s more humanitarian-focused approach,” he said.

The White House directed questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not reply to a request for comment. 

Finalized guidelines issued by Mayorkas in September, which went into effect in November 2021, removed some data collection and reporting requirements from the administration’s original policy memo.

Reporting on detention requirements is mandated by Congress, but agencies have tremendous leeway over what information it reports and how it’s reported, García Hernández said: “This is one of the difficulties of tracking what ICE does.”

Immigration advocates said the court’s decision cleared the way for the Biden administration to walk back Trump’s indiscriminate removal policies. Without standardized reporting on enforcement actions, it will be difficult to ensure that happens, said Pinto, of the American Immigration Council. The organization is trying to push the administration to improve data collection on enforcement actions. 

“Had it not been for the data collection requirements in the February 18 memo, we would not know that almost 35 percent of law enforcement actions were for activities that were outside the priorities,” Pinto said. “Data keeping is extremely important for oversight of ICE.”

The post ICE Disobeyed Biden’s Order to Drop Trump’s Blanket Deportation Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public. 

The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”

When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth. 

All the files can be found here. A spokesperson for committee Republicans declined to comment. 

Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health. Later minutes showed that the consensus among the experts leaned toward a lab escape. Yet within days, they were circulating a draft — including to Fauci and Collins — that came to the opposite conclusion, the first draft of which had been finished the same day of the conference call. How and why that rapid turnaround occurred has been the subject of much debate and interrogation.

The authors have said, and repeated during Tuesday’s hearing, that new data had changed their minds, but the new Slack messages and emails show that their initial inclination toward a lab escape remained long past that time. 

Among the scientists testifying Tuesday was lead paper author Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research. In a Slack exchange on February 2, 2020, between Andersen and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, it becomes clear how seriously the authors took the hypothesis that Covid may have leaked from a lab, rather than emerged through natural means, before they ultimately became dedicated to publicly dismissing it. 

“I believe RaTG13 is from Yuanan, which is about as far away from Wuhan as you can be and still be in China,” Andersen wrote, referring to a virus that produced Covid-like symptoms in miners in 2013, a strain that was later stored and researched at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “What are the chances of finding a viruses that are 96% identical given that distance? Seems strange given how many SARS-like viruses we have in bats.” 

Rambaut responded on Slack suggesting they back off such interrogation. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Slack message from Feb. 2, 2020.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Still, said Rambaut, even though the truth would never emerge if a lab was responsible, the researchers had a responsibility, privately at least, to see what lessons could be learned to prevent a future lab escape. “I think it would be good idea to lay out these arguments for limited dissemination. And quite frankly so we can learn from it even if it wasn’t an escape,” he added.

That same day, after having put together the first draft of the paper, Andersen responded to two colleagues who wanted to conclusively rule out the lab scenario: “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely–it’s not some fringe theory.” 

But the paper they were drafting argued the opposite and would be used to label the possibility of a lab leak as a fringe conspiracy, confidently asserting, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

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At Tuesday’s hearing, Andersen said repeatedly that Fauci and Collins had no role in influencing the paper. But Fauci’s shadow hangs over the conversation. “The idea of engineering and bioweapon is definitely not going away and I’m still getting pinged by journalists,” Andersen wrote on February 5, 2020. “I have noticed some of them starting to ask more broadly about ‘lab escape’ and for now I have just ignored them — there might be a time where we need to tackle that more directly head on, but I’ll let the likes of Jeremy [Farrar] and Tony [Fauci] figure out how to do that.” 

Farrar, a British biomedical researcher, was not listed as an author on the paper but was frequently referred to by Democrats during the hearing as the “father” of it. In the messages, he is seen sharing drafts of the paper with Fauci and Collins and asking the authors for edits, at one point in mid-February asking that a lab scenario be downgraded in their paper from “unlikely” to “improbable” — a change that Andersen, the lead author, agreed to. 

An email in the cache from Eddie Holmes, another one of the authors, alludes to “pressure from on high.” In reply to an email that isn’t included in the subcommittee’s report or the documents, Holmes writes, “Anyway, it’s done. Sorry the last bit had to be done without you…pressure from on high.” In previous exchanges, officials with the communications department at the NIH had been asking about the status of the submission. Taken as a whole, the messages undercut the claims that the NIH took a hands-off approach to the paper. 

Email from Feb. 16, 2020.

Screenshot: The Intercept

The new documents also include a message from Nature — where the authors pitched the “Proximal Origin” paper before sending to Nature Medicine — explaining its rejection. Despite the paper leaning heavily toward a natural emergence and downplaying the potential of a lab leak, one Nature reviewer found that even leaving open the possibility of a lab escape would fuel conspiracy theorists, a Nature editor wrote to the authors. “Once the authors publish their new pangolin sequences, a lab origin will be extremely unlikely,” the reviewer had written.

Andersen pushed back against the rejection, assuring the Nature editor that their project had started with the goal of beating back “conspiracy” theories, but that the data and evidence made it impossible. “Had that been the case, we would of course have included that — but the more sequences we see from pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully) the more unlikely it seems that they’re the intermediate hosts,” Andersen responded in an email on February 20, 2020. “Unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s not possible given the data.”

The group edited their paper further to more strongly dismiss the possibility of a lab leak for its later submission to Nature Medicine. The journal’s publication of the paper just a month later effectively ended debate for a year or more as to the origin of the pandemic. 

The post House Republicans Accidentally Released a Trove of Damning Covid Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

Price is one of more than a dozen reform-minded prosecutors who have faced recalls or attempts to restrict their discretion in recent years — part of a backlash to criminal punishment reforms and fearmongering over crime by police and their political allies.

“They were threatening to recall her when she was running for the seat,” said Cat Brooks, co-founder and executive director of the Anti Police-Terror Project, which endorsed Price last year. “Unfortunately in the Bay Area and in other places in the country, this is the new political tactic,” she said. Brooks added that the campaigns follow a pattern: first, character assassination and right-wing attacks, and then a recall.

Price’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The committee registration lists the phone number for Reed & Davidson LLP, a law office based in Los Angeles that serves as a treasurer for political committees. The law office did not respond to a request for comment.

Price, a civil rights attorney, was elected in 2022 on a reform platform that focused on rehabilitation and addressing police misconduct and corruption within the office. She promised to end use of the death penalty, stop charging kids under 18 as adults, establish a conviction integrity unit, and expand services for victims of gun violence.

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In a story that has become familiar to prosecutors across the country who campaigned on reforming the criminal justice system, Price’s opponents began to attack her proposed policies before she took office in January. An online petition for her recall started circulating in February.

The Oakland Police Officers’ Association has blamed her office for worsening crime. And her handling of two high-profile cases of children killed fueled intense internal and public criticism.

Two prosecutors resigned from Price’s office in recent months after she decided not to lengthen sentences for defendants in two cases where children were shot and killed, one by a stray bullet. At least two dozen other prosecutors and investigators have left the office since Price was elected. Several of the departed staffers went to work for San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins — who is widely seen as being close to police and was herself appointed last year after campaigning to successfully recall a reformist prosecutor.

Price’s critics point to the departures as evidence of her failures, but turnover is typical when a new prosecutor takes office. Brooks said, “The hype-up that this is because Pamela is somehow so problematic and that’s why there’s turnover is absolutely ludicrous.”

California has seen several recall campaigns in recent years after reform prosecutors won office from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled, and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón survived a second recall attempt. The attacks on reform-minded prosecutors play up individual cases to highlight what critics say is incompetence in the offices of prosecutors like Price, Boudin, and Gascón.

The visceral criticisms of Price have taken hold just seven months into her first term in office and made it difficult for observers to distinguish impartial criticism from backlash to the reform movement writ large. In the cases of both Price and Boudin, proponents of tough-on-crime policies have drawn a link between criminal justice reform and crimes against Asian Americans.

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17 States Have Now Tried to Pass Bills That Strip Powers From Reform-Minded Prosecutors

“All of this was happening under [Nancy] O’Malley,” Brooks said, referring to the previous Alameda County district attorney. Part of the backlash to the criminal justice reform movement is a law-and-order drum beat that capitalizes on and manipulates people’s fear and pain, Brooks said. “It’s a bunch of false flags,” she added. “Unfortunately, that is a tactic we know that the right uses to prevent solidarity.” 

Since the reform prosecutor movement took off in the mid-2010s, more than 30 bills in at least 17 states have tried to strip power from prosecutors whose policies address efforts to reform the criminal justice system. State lawmakers, often in rural areas, have sought to limit the power of prosecutors elected on reform platforms in far-away cities.

The lines between substantive criticism of elected prosecutors and efforts to undermine their authority have become blurred.

While prosecutors across the political spectrum should be accountable to their constituents, criticism of prosecutors like Price and her peers has been amplified within a larger project to oppose popular criminal justice reform, said Anne Irwin, founder and director of the pro-reform group Smart Justice. “The nascent recall effort in Alameda County is absolutely reflective of a national Republican playbook,” Irwin said.

“The nascent recall effort in Alameda County is absolutely reflective of a national Republican playbook.”

There are parallels to St. Louis, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, where lawmakers impeached Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner last year, she added. Ideological differences typically drive resignations under tough-on-crime and reform prosecutors alike, but the media did not cover staff departures or internal office drama until reform-minded candidates started winning office.

“What’s remarkable is that there has been almost no coverage of how an elected prosecutor runs their office until progressive prosecutors were elected,” Irwin said. “Then all of a sudden, there is intense scrutiny, much of it drummed up by the folks who are backing a recall, to make a case that the progressive prosecutor is a bad manager. But can any of us look back in history and point out whether or not any other tough-on-crime prosecutors in the ’80s or ’90s were good managers?”

Voters in Alameda County watched Boudin’s recall play out. More than a year later, they saw that the recall didn’t make San Francisco a cleaner or safer place, Irwin said. Unlike San Francisco, Alameda County has less money and more people directly impacted by mass incarceration. Those factors could make a recall effort in Alameda County more of an uphill battle.

“The entire Bay Area, including Alameda County, is realizing that the recall of Chesa Boudin was a false promise,” she said. “That will impact how Alameda County voters approach a recall effort against DA Price. There will be a lot more skepticism about a recall of the district attorney being the panacea.” 

Price’s 2022 election was in part response to a push among Oakland residents for reforms to the criminal justice system they said were long overdue. Price beat a more moderate candidate and became the first Black prosecutor with support among communities most impacted by crime. She declined corporate PAC money and raised more than $1 million for her campaign.

Price’s predecessor and 2018 opponent, Nancy O’Malley, had been accused of misconduct and worked against some criminal justice reform efforts. Police unions heavily backed O’Malley’s 2018 reelection campaign against Price. She retired in 2021.

As Price implemented the reforms she ran on, pushback was swift. One prosecutor resigned over Price’s reluctance to enhance sentencing in the stray bullet case and said Price’s office had mistreated victims in Asian American Pacific Islander communities. Another said she had neglected victims of violent crime.

Families of victims have also issued criticisms of Price, saying her office hasn’t implemented strict-enough sentences. Outlets including the New York Post and the Berkeley Scanner, an independent outlet, have amplified criticism of Price’s office and publicized resignation letters from prosecutors who left her office.

The resignations fueled more public criticism that linked Price’s policies to crime in Oakland, which reached 100 homicides for the first time in a decade in the years before she was elected. Within her first six months in office, conservative media began to attack Price’s approach to reform. A recent headline in the national outlet Washington Examiner blared: “Soros-backed prosecutor continues to go easy on murderers.”

The post Campaign to Recall Oakland Reform District Attorney Gets Rolling appeared first on The Intercept.

The shift represents a stark contrast with the hostile relations between Republicans and Muslims over the past two decades, as well as the integration of many younger Muslim Americans into progressive politics. The GOP’s outreach, reported on recently by Semafor and other outlets, also comes at a moment when the current Republican presidential frontrunner is tripling down on the most directly anti-Muslim government policy in U.S. history: the so-called Muslim ban.

At a campaign speech in Iowa last Friday, former President Donald Trump promised that he would bring back the controversial policy. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said.

The notion of a ban was first introduced by Trump early in his 2016 presidential campaign, when it was marketed explicitly as a prohibition on all Muslims entering the United States. After Trump was elected, he instated a ban targeting travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, prompting chaos in airports and inside the government. Later, the Trump administration began referring to the policy more antiseptically as a “travel ban,” modifying it to include restrictions on some non-Muslim countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Yet in his speech in Iowa last weekend, Trump made very clear that the target of his policy would be Muslims, conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism. “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told the audience to applause.

Trump’s statements highlight an awkward contradiction. On one hand, some Muslim Americans, bound by a shared commitment to conservative social values, are enjoying a period of warm relations with the Republican Party and conservative activists who share their opposition to LGBTQ+ education in schools. At the same time, the wildly popular leading Republican presidential candidate — and the center of gravity in the party — is publicly vowing to revive a policy aimed at curtailing the presence of Muslims in the U.S. entirely.

“This will be a challenging moment for the Muslim community, but I do believe that the issue of LGBT education in schools will become a wedge issue,” said Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a progressive human rights organization. “On a state and local level, many conservative Muslim voters will likely vote for candidates who are anti-LGBT, which will mean mostly Republicans, while on a national level, the same people may choose to vote for a Democrat.”

In one sign of warming relations between Muslims and the Republican Party, major Islamic civil rights organizations have spoken out in support of the recent GOP-supported protests aimed at letting parents opt their children out of LGBTQ+ readings in schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has been among the most vocal, collecting hundreds of signatures to demand that parents be allowed to remove their children from gender- and sex-based courses.

CAIR has been a favorite target of the Republican Party and conservative activists over the past two decades, with the group being labeled as a front for terrorism and Islamic extremism. On this issue, however, they find themselves aligned, even applauded, by erstwhile foes.

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR said its positions reflect an agnosticism toward the partisan divide in American politics.

“CAIR defends the rights of Americans to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “We decide our policy position based on principle, not party.”

Protesters react to Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York.

Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The initial ban resulted in chaos at American airports, as people from targeted countries whose documents were otherwise valid found themselves abruptly detained by U.S. border security. In some cases, people with permission to enter the U.S. wound up stranded abroad without recourse, with some even dying or taking their own lives after being trapped in immigration limbo by the measure.

The cruelties and absurdities brought by the ban also impacted many people living in the U.S. who found themselves separated from loved ones. In one infamous case, the Yemeni mother of a 2-year-old Yemeni American boy dying of a terminal illness was forced to fight a legal battle to come and see him in the hospital after being denied entry to the U.S. because of the ban. She was later granted a waiver to the rule, arriving in the U.S. just days before her son died in the hospital.

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The White Supremacy Court Upholds the Muslim Ban

The Supreme Court shot down two versions of the “Muslim ban” as unconstitutional, before finally upholding the measure in a 5-4 decision handed down in 2018.

After taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order lifting the ban entirely. The precedent, however, remains.

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Trump has made reviving the measure a notable part of his reelection campaign, reportedly telling his advisers in May that he would bring back an expanded version of the infamous travel restriction — a policy that he called “beautiful.”

Trump’s renewed vow to ban Muslims from the U.S. comes at a time when some Muslim Americans have begun to gravitate back to the Republican Party. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans tended to vote as a majority for Republicans, by some accounting providing the crucial swing vote that tilted Florida for George W. Bush in 2000.

Many Muslim Americans who found themselves transformed into punching bags for Republican politicians in later years came to rue their decision to support the GOP. Trump’s initial proposal of the “Muslim ban,” which was met with enthusiastic approval by his base, was only the capstone of a long, ugly falling out between Muslims and Republicans.

With tensions around terrorism and U.S. wars in the Middle East ebbing, some conservative Muslims seem to be turning back to the party.

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promotion of a new and improved “Muslim ban” will sour the halting rapprochement between these two groups. Muslim Americans have transformed into solidly Democratic voters in recent decades, with several Muslim members of Congress taking up highly visible roles in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Even during the period when Trump had imposed the ban, however, some exit polls in the 2020 election showed as many as 35 percent of Muslim voters supporting the candidate who had made the legal exclusion of their coreligionists from the country a highlight of his presidency.

Muslim voters who choose to buck Trump’s GOP might find little reprieve in his chief rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2015, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at the time a member of U.S. Congress, sponsored a bill that sought to ban refugees to the U.S. from a number of Muslim-majority countries where the U.S. had conducted military operations. In recent months, DeSantis has also pushed measures through state legislatures banning foreigners from owning certain properties or even enrolling in public universities to people from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These bans provide a window into how lists of targeted nationalities could be used to deprive individuals of rights well beyond travel in the future.

Trump’s remarks in Iowa suggested that he might impose other restrictions for Muslim immigrations, making remarks aimed at radical terrorists in the same breath as those about farm ownership. “We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers,” Trump said. “We don’t want people blowing up our cities, and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

As for LGBTQ+ issues in the Muslim community, Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values said that her community needed to spend more time coming to grips with the specifics of the materials that are becoming an increasingly bitter culture war flashpoint.

“We should be taking those books and educational materials that people have issues with and sitting down on both sides to decipher what the problem is and how we can resolve this. In many cases, people are not even sure what’s in the books in question, and this approach of simply shouting at one another doesn’t help,” said Zonneveld, who recently wrote a piece for the website Religion News Service about the controversy. “One thing to emphasize, however, on principle, is that LGBT people are human beings created by God, just like you and I, and they should not be discriminated against, end of story.”

The post Trump Revives “Muslim Ban” While GOP Courts Muslim Voters for 2024 appeared first on The Intercept.

The amendments, submitted to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, need approval from the House Rules Committee before they can be considered for a vote. The Rules Committee has 13 members, four of whom are Democrats and three of whom are Freedom Caucus Republicans, enough to approve an amendment acting in coalition. 

One of the most direct challenges to the Biden administration is a bill led by Democratic Reps. Sara Jacobs and Ilhan Omar which would block the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine and all other countries. On Monday afternoon, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said he would sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill, championing it in the Rules Committee and giving it a stronger shot of making it to the floor for a vote. On Tuesday, Rep. Paulina Luna, R-Fla., co-sponsored the legislation, raising expectations among its backers that Rules Committee member Thomas Massie, R-Ky., will advocate for it to be ruled in order, which allows it a vote on the House floor.

Other amendments in search of a floor vote or inclusion in the underlying bill restrict military cooperation with a variety of governments accused of human rights abuses, order the declassification of information about past U.S. participation in coups or the operation of death squads, or shift spending from weapons systems toward social programs for troops.

This week’s NDAA fight in the Rules Committee and later on the House floor will be a fresh test for the new populist right — which has taken an isolationist turn away from the neoconservatism that previously dominated Republican orthodoxy — of whether their opposition to the global war machine is talk on a podcast or something capable of marshaling enough support to be a real threat to the military-industrial complex. Still, even with all three Freedom Caucus members on board, amendments hostile to American war policy would still likely need full Democratic support to get a floor vote, a difficult task in a divided party. Last week, 19 Democrats sent a letter to Biden objecting to the cluster munitions transfer, arguably the most significant objection from House Democrats to Biden’s Ukraine policy. But while it was a high number relative to previous efforts, 19 still represents less than one in 10 members of the House Democratic caucus.

“During this year’s NDAA process we’ve seen broad bipartisan coalitions come together around a variety of policies challenging the Executive Branch’s expansive military and surveillance overreach — from preventing the transfer of cluster bombs and demanding war powers votes for Yemen and Syria to oversight over irregular warfare authorities, to limiting government purchases of data about Americans,” said Cavan Kharrazian, foreign policy adviser at Demand Progress, a progressive policy organization. “While we’re dismayed that many good amendments will likely not get floor votes, we are encouraged about the growing cross-ideological base challenging concerning national security policies.”

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In the past week, multiple U.S. allies including the United Kingdom and Spain have voiced opposition to the Biden administration’s support for sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. As The Intercept previously reported, these weapons are banned by over 100 countries and have already killed civilians when deployed by the Ukrainian military, which has obtained some cluster munitions from Turkey. Despite initial promises that only munitions with a low dud rate would be sent to Ukraine, subsequent statements suggest that some weapons being lined up for transfer could have a dud rate as high as 14.5 percent, leaving thousands of explosives primed and unexploded on battlefields across Ukraine. Russia has also used cluster munitions during its invasion — an act that former White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested last year was a potential war crime.

Jacobs and Omar’s amendment orders that “no military assistance shall be furnished for cluster munitions, no defense export license for cluster munitions may be issued, and no cluster munitions or cluster munitions technology shall be sold or transferred.” Gaetz, in declaring his support for the amendment on his podcast “Firebrand with Matt Gaetz,” said, “We have an opportunity with bipartisanship to stand against the warmongering Bidens. These cluster bombs will not end the war in Ukraine.”

In a statement released last week, Jacobs wrote, “Our international coalition is strong because we’re united together and because we’re living up to our values — but sending cluster munitions defies these two tenets. Many of our partners don’t support this move with many having already banned cluster munitions from their stockpiles. We’ve seen Russia’s horrific use of cluster munitions in Ukraine — and we shouldn’t cede the moral high ground by criticizing their actions and then deciding to send cluster munitions ourselves.”

Reining in U.S. Funding of Human Rights Abusers

In another direct shot at U.S. war making capacity, Omar introduced legislation to repeal the Pentagon’s 127e program, which The Intercept previously exposed as a route by which the U.S. wages proxy war, sponsoring death squads or other irregular partner forces with hideous human rights records. While Omar’s legislation would ban the program, Jacobs has introduced a separate measure to curtail it by requiring the Pentagon to vet the groups it sponsors for credible allegations of human rights abuses and consider whether the alliance may damage U.S. interests. 

Other efforts to amend the NDAA to rein in foreign military cooperation would curb assistance to countries accused of ongoing human rights abuses. These include a prohibition on military aid and security assistance to Azerbaijan offered by Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., proposed a narrower measure that restricts weapons transfers in order to put pressure on Azerbaijan to end its siege of Nagorno-Karabakh. Schiff is running for Senate in California, where the state’s Armenian American population wields substantial clout.

Rep. Greg Casar, a first-term legislator who represents Austin, Texas, has quickly carved out space as a leading voice on foreign affairs; he introduced an NDAA amendment to instruct the State Department to examine and report on the democratic backsliding underway in Pakistan, as the country’s military establishment targets former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

A measure by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., requires the Pentagon to report back on human rights abuses carried out by its allies before continuing certain military partnerships in Peru, where a left-wing populist president was recently forced out by the right-wing opposition.

Ocasio-Cortez also introduced a measure requiring the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department to declassify information related to the U.S. government’s role in the Chilean coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. 

She also introduced a separate amendment that makes a similar demand related to the 1964 military coup in Brazil, additionally requiring the Pentagon to explain to Congress what its role there was, and what types of cooperation it offered the resulting dictatorship over the next two decades. Her third historical amendment orders the Pentagon to produce a report on its involvement with Colombian military repression from 1980 to 2000. Legislation from Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., orders the Pentagon to report back on any U.S.-funded foreign security services that have killed journalists in the last five years, an expansion of her probe into the killing of reporter Shireen Abu Akleh by U.S.-funded Israeli forces.

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Congressional Democrats have also proposed a number of Haiti-related NDAA amendments, with one, led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., ordering the Pentagon to submit a new report on its knowledge of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. Another measure from Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., blocks any funds from being used to support military intervention on the island, which the U.S.-installed de facto prime minister Ariel Henry has called for.

An amendment from Reps. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., and Chuy Garcia, D-Ill., would block the use of military force in or against Mexico. 

Reps. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Becca Balint, D-Vt., are attempting to amend the NDAA with conditional restriction on military aid to Uganda, a measure responding to a draconian new LGBTQ+ human rights law that punishes same-sex relationships with life in prison. Two different amendments offered by Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., seek to end military assistance to Guatemala and Honduras over human rights abuses, following a similar amendment from Bush that attempts to limit financial assistance to Cameroon’s military and law enforcement over related concerns. 

Targeting the yet-to-be-settled war in Yemen, Reps. Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and Val Hoyle have all come out in support of a measure blocking the U.S. from assisting the Saudi war effort if it resumes hostilities against the Houthis. The amendment follows a related push from Reps. Ted Lieu, Gregory Meeks, and Dina Titus attempting to extend a moratorium on refueling aircraft participating in the war. Meeks is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Reps. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., are scrutinizing the accelerating violence taking place in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in an amendment seeking a report from the Defense and State departments on the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

Shifting Pentagon Funds to Social Programs

Central to the populist critique of the U.S. military budget is the argument that needs at home are being sacrificed for the war effort. Several amendments flow directly from that sentiment. Casar and Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, are seeking to use excess funds from the enormous military budget to fund child care for active military personnel at home. Like families all across America, active duty military are facing an acute child care crisis, spurred by a lack of affordability and adequate funding for military daycare facilities.

Even U.S special forces members struggle to find adequate family care as they balance rigorous training and dangerous deployments. If passed, the amendment would open up funds beyond the president’s budget request “to fund universal pre-kindergarten programs in schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity.”

Another set of amendments seeks to use the NDAA to redirect military spending toward domestic programs under the auspices of national security. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., introduced an amendment that would authorize the defense secretary to allocate tens of billions into public education and pre-K programs. “It is the sense of Congress that providing high quality public education for all is essential to national security and the ability of the United States to respond to major global challenges,” his legislation reads. Bowman also proposed an amendment scrutinizing military recruitment practices by requiring a report on how Defense Department agencies target students in high school. 

Bush, meanwhile, has introduced an NDAA amendment that calls on the secretary of defense “to protect the future national security of the United States by investing in the housing system of the United States.”

Correction: July 11, 2023, 6:28 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misattributed a statement to Rep. Ilhan Omar. The statement was in fact issued by Rep. Sara Jacobs.

The post The Military-Industrial Complex Is Finally Facing Intense Bipartisan Scrutiny appeared first on The Intercept.

Khosla quickly left the stage amid chants of “Pradeep, Pradeep, the rent is too steep!” When the police arrived, the graduate students had relocated outdoors to the sidewalk where, separated by a glass wall, they continued chanting their demands: “What do we want? Our promised wages. When do we want them? Now!”

While the action ended peacefully, just over a month later, the university charged 59 graduate student workers from the event’s registration list with “physical assault,” “physical abuse and threats to health and safety,” and “disruption of university activities.” Almost half of the people accused deny even being in attendance. 

The university claims workers “bumped” Khosla and stole the microphone. The union disputes the allegations and points to a livestream of the action by a member, which, though blurry, does not show evidence of either charge. The students now face disciplinary hearings for the union action, which could result in probation or even expulsion from the university. 

It was the latest provocation by the university in what workers say is an escalating retaliation campaign against them since ratifying a collective bargaining agreement late last year. The university has now brought multiple sets of misconduct charges against students and workers following three separate union-led protests.

Michael Duff, a law professor at St. Louis University, said the repeated charges speak to a pattern. “You can’t see this in isolation. There’s been a pattern of retaliation against the members involved,” he said, noting that “the nature of this case seems overly aggressive.”

Nearly 50,000 academic workers across the University of California system went on strike for six weeks last winter, the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. They won substantial wage increases, unprecedented new protections against workplace bullying, and immigrant worker protections. 

But since ratifying their collective bargaining agreement last December, workers at UC San Diego say the university has not implemented aspects of their contract like establishing an office to process complaints of workplace misconduct or hiring workers at 50 percent of full-time employment, which is the standard appointment for graduate student researchers. Workers also say there have been dramatic reductions in teaching assistant appointments in certain departments and that two dozen students received unsatisfactory grades for participating in the strike.

“We signed a legally binding contract, and instead of implementing it, they’re trying to punish us.”

“We signed a legally binding contract, and instead of implementing it, they’re trying to punish us,” Udayan Tandon, who was recently elected as a unit chair of United Auto Workers Local 2865, told The Intercept.

Most recently, two UC San Diego graduate student workers and one post-doc were arrested by university police at their homes for writing pro-union slogans on the sidewalk during an action a month prior. Charged with conspiracy and vandalism, some union members believe the arrests are an extension of the pushback student workers have been facing on campus.

“Under the First Amendment, speech restrictions which are based on the content of the speech face strict scrutiny in the courts,” said Will Bloom, a labor lawyer who deals with First Amendment cases. It is “a standard that virtually no restrictions can survive,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the university pursuing felony charges for kids chalking a hopscotch court on the sidewalk outside of the marine center.”

In a public statement on the arrests, university officials said, “UC San Diego supports its community members rights to voice their concerns lawfully. UC San Diego does not tolerate vandalism or other damage to university property.” While the union says it used “washable chalk,” the university claims the students used “materials other than chalk,” costing over $12,000 to repair.

The workers’ arraignment, scheduled for Monday, was delayed because the university has not submitted the cases for review with the district attorney’s office, which they have up to three years to do. As a result, no charges have been filed by the DA at this time. UAW locals 2865 and 5810 rallied outside the San Diego Court House prior to the scheduled hearing to demand the university drop the charges.

“Employers have certain rights to protect property, but the timing seems off to me,” said Duff. “I find it interesting they were immediately taken to jail” despite having left and gone home for a month prior to their arrests. “Normally there would be some legal process before [an arrest] would happen [at a separate location]. That strikes me as odd.”

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After being held in custody for over 12 hours, Jessica Ng said she felt dehumanized. “You lose your autonomy,” said Ng, who is a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Chained to a chair, you have to ask for permission just to use the restroom or to drink water. I sat there for hours, deprived of sleep, not knowing what was going to happen.”

Ng said she doesn’t regret the union organizing she’s done and that “it’s on the university, which hasn’t been honoring our contracts. Instead of seeing our protests as a sign that they need to honor the contract, they’ve been trying to crack down on union activity.”

“It’s been a bit shocking to see just how far the university is willing to go,” fourth-year chemistry Ph.D. student Conor O’Herin told The Intercept. “We went on strike for six weeks, collectively bargained a fair contract, and now they’re refusing to abide by what they agreed to.”

According to workers, the university is pointing to financial strain to justify austerity measures, but Khosla’s half-million dollar raise — totaling nearly twice as much as the next highest paid UC president — says otherwise. The university, led by Khosla, also announced $1.1 billion plans for a new student center and campus housing.

“We are an essential component, and the university acts like it doesn’t have money to pay us while it expands its real estate empire.”

“We are an essential component,” said Daniel Primosch, a third-year Ph.D. student in physics, “and the university acts like it doesn’t have money to pay us while it expands its real estate empire.”

Soon after the contract ratification, workers began hearing about reductions in teaching assistant positions and incoming Ph.D.s from department heads. Last year, Adu Vengal said, the university admitted 44 doctoral candidates to the math department; this year, there were 10. And while historically, masters students would be given teaching assistant positions, the university changed that practice as well, only hiring doctoral students in the spring quarter. “A lot of masters students went on strike to get living wages,” explained Vengal, who is a third-year math Ph.D. student and recording secretary for United Auto Workers Local 2865. “Now they aren’t getting any wages.”

Instead, Vengal said, they began hiring more undergraduate tutors to do the work, which the union filed a grievance for. And then, “in May, the math department announced a restructure that would halve the number of [teaching assistants] per 100 students. After we grieved it, they said they would stop,” Vengal said, “but that’s exactly what this restructuring plan does.” The grievance has not yet been resolved.

These significant reductions in teaching assistant appointments come at the same time that the university has seen a major uptick in the undergraduate population, with an increase of 15,000 enrolled since Khosla took over.

Another major concern for graduate student workers is the university’s continued refusal to hire them at 50 percent of full-time. Their contract stipulates they be paid commensurate with their workloads of 20 hours per week, but in several departments at UC San Diego, workers are getting hired at arbitrary rates of 38 percent or 42 percent. Workers say this used to be common practice prior to the union, but now that it’s in the contract, it’s legally unacceptable. 

“They try to justify it by claiming we work less than 20 hours a week,” said Ahmed Akhtar, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in physics. “In reality, we work more than full-time, and they won’t even pay us for half that. The result is the accumulated theft of millions of dollars.” Workers say this is most common in STEM departments.

Udayan Tandon, left, protests with academic worker activists on May 5, 2023, in San Diego, Calif. “We signed a legally binding contract, and instead of implementing it, they’re trying to punish us,” Tandon said.

Photos: Courtesy of UAW 2865

On the eve of the strike, hundreds of workers received emails from professors warning them they would still need to attend “academic training” activities, which workers say would constitute crossing the picket line. 

Two dozen workers across three departments were given unsatisfactory, or “U,” grades for allegedly neglecting their schoolwork while participating in the strike, which could affect their current and future employment. The university has defended this practice against accusations of union busting by saying the “U” grade was assigned to them as students, not workers. Workers say the university’s manipulation of their dual-status is an effort to circumvent bargained rights and protections — and also pointed out that the class in which they received the “U” grade is a placeholder course to represent their research and that it does not have a syllabus, exams, or written classroom expectations.

On January 26, two overlapping groups of union activists, who say they were unable to successfully reach the professors who had given students “U” grades, “marched on the boss.” First, they approached chemistry professor Jeremy Klosterman, who workers said would not speak to them without conferring with university officials but did agree to a meeting in his office at a future date. Workers say when they arrived at his office for the meeting, a sticky note on the door said he was unavailable.

Then, graduate student workers went to speak with Primosch’s adviser, physics professor Massimiliano Di Ventra, who had recently been the subject of a letter from his former employees to the department asking that he be held accountable for an “abusive” and “punitive” advising style. Di Ventra described the comments in an email to The Intercept as “very hurtful” and “an attempt to maliciously harm my reputation.”

Akhtar said after Di Ventra refused to speak with them outside, students followed him and fellow physics professor Ivan Schuller into class, where they canceled the lecture and called the police. “We were entirely peaceful, but persistent in wanting to address the retaliation,” Akhtar said.

In an email to The Intercept, Di Ventra clarified it was his colleague who called the police because a “mob of around 30 students blocked me in my office for several minutes, yelling and pounding at my door, trying to open it.”

A few weeks later, the university sent misconduct charges to eight of the involved union activists, alleging disruption of university activities, physical abuse and threats to health and safety, and failure to comply and obstruction. The university eventually dropped the latter two, prosecuting the workers on the sole charge of disruption of university activities.

In the official UC San Diego student conduct review report that was produced as part of the trial, the responding police officer said he “did not interpret the crowd to be unruly, violent, or a threat to the campus community.” Despite Di Ventra telling the officer that he was “scared of what the students might do to him,” the report determined that there was no threat to physical health and safety.

On June 29, the accused workers, who Akhtar noted are all leaders in the union, were put on one-year probation, which bars them from participating in future “disruptive” protests under the threat of suspension or expulsion from their program.

O’Herin, who was one of the workers put on probation, said the disciplinary action can not only jeopardize the students’ enrollment, but also impact their decision to engage in union activity in the future. He added about the process, “It’s completely controlled by UC with no oversight from an outside body.” 

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The jury, which consists of students and staff members, is overseen by a chair chosen by the university. “There is a veneer of neutrality, but the facilitator was clearly biased against the union. He went on a rant about how [union activists] need to take responsibility for their actions, which were inherently disruptive union tactics. This is the university intimidating us through a process which they have total control over.”

With the nearly 60 new misconduct trials just beginning, and now three separate legal cases, the two sides seem far from any resolution thought to be settled with a contract. Workers say they will continue to apply pressure on the university until they see the agreement honored.

Tandon, the unit chair — who has not yet had the administrative resolution meeting for his role in the alumni action, which is the first step in the student misconduct trial process — acknowledges organizing is not without risk. He is on a worker visa from India, which puts him in a precarious position as his visa is tied to his employment and education. But he says he’ll continue to fight alongside his co-workers, “not only because peaceful protest is protected by worker rights, but more importantly because I know 48,000 union members are standing right behind me. I’m confident knowing that.”

Correction: July 11, 2023, 1:10 p.m. ET
The article originally said three graduate student workers were arrested recently. In fact, one was a post-doc. The story has been updated.

The post California Grad Students Won a Historic Strike. UC San Diego Is Striking Back With Misconduct Allegations and Arrests. appeared first on The Intercept.

In late June, the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office granted a $9.2 billion loan — its largest ever — to Ford and its joint venture partner, the Korean firm BlueOval SK, to build battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky. The cash injection follows other projects, like a sprawling chip manufacturing plant and close to a dozen solar manufacturing sites across the South.

The loan, issued from the Department of Energy office that drew billions of dollars for investments in green energy under the Inflation Reduction Act, stems from Biden’s pledge to make half of all vehicles sold in 2030 zero emission. That undertaking means more plants that manufacture components of gas-powered vehicles are sure to close in coming years. Those jobs are overwhelmingly union and heavily based in swing states or blue states. While the administration’s investments so far may notch it a win in the war against offshoring and the White House’s perceived threat in the looming menace of Chinese competition, the White House’s handling of the transition to green energy — including where it invests federal dollars and whether it protects union workers’ jobs — will have implications not only for the climate crisis, but also for Democrats’ electoral prospects.

The success of the climate program will require continued federal commitment. Biden is placing a bet that clean energy investments could ultimately work the same way as the military-industrial complex. The military and its allied contractors have made sure to set up bases and/or manufacturing facilities in nearly every congressional district in the country, with extra attention paid to areas represented by key lawmakers. That has produced durable support for ever-expanding military budgets. Whether the same could be accomplished for the clean energy industry is an open question, but so far, Republicans from districts that have won federal awards have nevertheless voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds the tax breaks. By subsidizing the decline of union jobs, the Biden administration risks empowering lawmakers who will then move to end the subsidies altogether. 

“The total lack of consideration for workers could certainly make the difference in 2024.”

“What Biden is doing is politically insane, environmentally bankrupt, and it’s poor economics,” Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and board member of Our Revolution, told The Intercept. “The White House and my old friend John Podesta” — who is overseeing the federal government’s spending of climate incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act — “should have labor-centered guidelines about where these investments are going, whether it’s in purple states like Michigan, whether it’s in Philadelphia, whether it’s in Ohio, there are acres and acres of devastated industrial landscape that need new investment as opposed to cornfields. The total lack of consideration for workers could certainly make the difference in 2024.”

During the 2020 presidential election, Biden won Michigan by just 150,000 votes. It was a hard-fought win for Democrats, who had lost the state in 2016 for the first time in two decades — and it was due in no small part to the United Auto Workers’, or UAW, political machine, which spent just under $10 million on nationwide political donations during the 2020 election cycle and many millions more on political outreach and media in Michigan. That money followed Biden’s promise to be the most pro-union president in recent memory, a claim he has continued to make while in office.

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Ahead of 2024, Michigan Democrats find themselves in a strong position against their GOP opponents. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cruised to reelection with a 10-point margin in November after seizing on the need to safeguard abortion access from GOP attacks, and, for the first time in 40 years, Democrats gained control of both of Michigan’s legislative chambers.

Despite the tailwinds, the Biden campaign will need to court every voter it can to clinch the election in what is still a purple state. Republicans, who will also be vying to gain a Senate seat in Michigan, have signaled that they believe the state is competitive given the election year turnout boost that a Trump candidacy will provide.

The UAW’s 130,000 members in Michigan — almost the same number of votes that made the difference for Biden three years ago — form an important voting bloc. In addition to their individual votes, UAW members are active donors and get-out-the-vote organizers. The union’s newly elected president, Shawn Fain, recently said the UAW would continue withholding the endorsement of its hundreds of thousands of members for Biden’s reelection until more progress was made on supporting members through the green energy transition.

Fain also lashed out at the president when news of the Energy Department loan to Ford broke, reminding him that union support is a privilege, not a right.

“We have been absolutely clear that the switch to electric engine jobs, battery production and other [electric vehicle] manufacturing cannot become a race to the bottom,” Fain said in a June 23 statement. “Not only is the federal government not using its power to turn the tide — they’re actively funding the race to the bottom with billions in public money.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents autoworkers in her Detroit-area district, was similarly critical of the loan. “The federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing the automakers’ expansion into states that are hostile to labor rights,” Tlaib told The Intercept. “The automakers must act fairly towards its union workers, especially after the UAW workers sacrificed so much during hard times for the industry. The rapid transition to electric vehicles that we need cannot come at the expense of the people making them.”

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Union members have already taken losses in the run-up to the Biden administration’s investments in green energy. General Motors, another one of the big three automakers, recently opened a battery plant in Warren, Ohio, where starting wages for union members are about half of what wages were at an Ohio plant the manufacturer shuttered in 2019. Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized GM’s reduction in wages at the new plant, which opened last year. “The government is putting a lot of money into transitioning our economy to a non-fossil fuel economy,” Sanders said in April. “We want to see workers get a fair shake, not just the CEOs of the companies.”

The same week Ford secured a loan for its joint venture, the manufacturer announced it would lay off significant numbers of employees, following a 3,000-person cull in August of last year. While the plants planned for Tennessee and Kentucky will create 7,500 jobs, according to the Energy Department, workers will have to fight for higher wages and benefits while the company continues to downsize its combustion operations.

When it announced the joint venture loan to Ford, the Department of Energy’s loan office project said that it was committed to creating good-paying jobs with labor protections. “[BlueOval SK] is actively engaging with local stakeholders to develop a diverse local workforce and network of suppliers. To ensure the availability of skilled labor for construction, BOSK is constructing the projects under project labor agreements. In addition, [the Loan Program Office] works with all borrowers to create good-paying jobs with strong labor standards during construction, operations, and throughout the life of the loan and to adhere to a strong Community Benefits Plan.”

Yet neither the loan office nor the White House responded to The Intercept’s questions about the community benefits plan, including whether there are legally binding aspects in the loan terms that could provide tangible benefits for workers seeking to unionize in right-to-work states.

Ford, for its part, told The Intercept that it “has every reason to expect that BlueOval SK will pay competitive wages and benefits so they can attract and retain the workforce needed to build high tech batteries. Employees at BlueOval SK’s battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky will be able to choose whether they organize, a right that Ford fully respects and supports,” according to spokesperson Melissa Miller. Asked whether the loan contained any terms to that effect, Miller added, “We’re not able to provide additional details on loan terms.”

Fain, the UAW president, took a different view. “These companies are extremely profitable and will continue to make money hand over fist whether they’re selling combustion engines or [electric vehicles],” Fain said. “Yet the workers get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?”

The post Biden Is Investing in Green Energy Across the South — Throwing Swing State Union Workers Under the Bus appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., delivers remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., on June 23, 2023.

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

This July 4, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley got on Twitter and quoted founding father Patrick Henry. According to Hawley, Henry told the world that “[i]t cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

This immediately generated vast Twitter unhappiness because Henry, while a devout Anglican, never said this.

You might hope Hawley would have absorbed this reality and graciously acknowledged his error. After all, he’s a human being and so presumably can feel shame. He was a history major at Stanford and then got a law degree at Yale. He just wrote a book called “Manhood,” which tells us that to be a man is “to live the truth, to speak the truth, and to live by the truth, always.” The first word in his Twitter bio is “Christian,” and the Ninth Commandment is “thou shalt not bear false witness.”

But you’d hope for this in vain. Expecting basic honesty from Hawley is like expecting an armadillo to fly an F-14. You’re invariably going to be disappointed.

Let’s take a quick cruise through the basic facts here and then speculate about their significance.

Seth Cotlar, a professor of U.S. history at Willamette University, dug up the origins of the spurious Henry quote. The words first appeared in 1956 in a magazine called The Virginian — not attributed to Henry, but as the publication’s own gloss on “the spoken and written words of our noble founders.” To give you a sense of where The Virginian was coming from, Cotlar points out that it dared politicians to speak the plain truth “that the mainspring of the conspiracy to mongrelize white America lies in the powerful, wealthy Jewish organizations.”

How the words of The Virginian transmogrified into the words of Henry and then made the journey into Hawley’s mind is unclear. They appeared in a 1989 book called “The Myth of Separation.” Then, in 2001, a GOP representative from Maryland entered “a sermon given by Dr. Richard Fredericks of the Damascus Road Community Church” into the congressional record, and the sermon attributed the words to Henry. That sermon seems to have subsequently spread widely via email and now appears in many nooks and crannies of the internet.

Beyond Twitter, Hawley was criticized by HuffPost, Talking Points Memo, the New Republic, and Religion News Service. Most significantly, the Kansas City Star editorial board ran an editorial headlined “Josh Hawley Rings in July 4 With Fake Quote With Antisemitic, White Nationalist Roots.”

I did my part by asking Hawley’s communications director whether he was going to correct the false quote. Her only response was, “Relevant tweet thread here to include in your story:”

“I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding,” wrote Hawley on Twitter. “For example: ‘The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission on earth.’ – John Quincy Adams.”

I politely repeated my initial question and got no response.

In other words, all our efforts have had no effect. On the contrary, Hawley has doubled down. His new efforts have the advantage of using real quotes, though with the disadvantage of quoting non-Founding Fathers speaking long after the American Revolution.

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This is distressing, if you’re the kind of person who still has some faint hope that powerful people might care about reality. It’s worth going through some of the reasons that Hawley’s lack of interest in the truth is especially funny and/or horrifying.

First, take a look at Hawley’s book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” (This is just a figure of speech; I wrote a review of “Manhood” and do not recommend that you take a look at it.) As mentioned above, “Manhood” informs us that real men must “speak the truth” (Page 192). It also says:

“Today’s popular culture … tells you to find ‘your truth’ … Modern liberals say there are no permanent truths, only ‘constructs.’” (Page 28)

“For those of an Epicurean persuasion, [masculinity] impinged on the treasured Epicurean right to define your own truth.” (Page 51)

“Self-regard … will consume your life … You won’t risk incurring the wrath of the powers that be by speaking the truth.” (Page 121)

“I am thankful for the opportunity [as a U.S. senator] — to learn, to serve, and to hold fast to the truth.” (Page 126)

“We don’t tell the truth as we ought to. We disappoint others and ourselves.” (Page 162)

There’s a lot more, but you get the gist. Maybe “Manhood” was ghostwritten and Hawley hasn’t gotten around to reading it.

Then there’s the motto of Yale, Hawley’s law school alma mater. It’s “lux et veritas,” meaning “light and truth.” Clearly, this didn’t make much of an impression on him.

Last but hopefully not least, there’s the Bible. Matthew 19:16-19 reads, “One came and said unto him, ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?’ … Jesus said, ‘Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness.’”

Of course, what kind of Christian has time for that nonsense? Especially when there are so many important things to tweet.

The significance of all this is suggestive and quite disturbing. On the one hand, attributing made-up quotes to illustrious figures of the past is a hallowed tradition in American politics. Al Gore and Ronald Reagan have done it enthusiastically, along with many, many others.

But on the other, there’s something that feels new about Hawley’s adamantine refusal to recognize facts, combined with his ridicule of “the libs” for caring about them. The internet has enabled the teeming millions to fact-check falsehoods like this instantly, something that could never be done in the past. If it had been possible decades ago, institutions and cultural norms would probably have forced Hawley to correct himself. But the internet and the self-sustaining cult-like bubbles it creates have also obliterated the power of those institutions and norms. Donald Trump has exploited this most of all, but many ambitious creatures like Hawley are eagerly exploring the trail he blazed.

As George Washington said, “If America ever gets to this point, you guys better watch the fuck out.”

The post This Week, America Failed to Get Josh Hawley to Feel Shame appeared first on The Intercept.

As a state representative, Connolly, known around the region as Big Mike, has become a leading voice in the fight over rent control, housing for all, and social housing, authoring landmark eviction and foreclosure moratorium legislation at the beginning of the pandemic. Connolly has been a DSA member for seven years; he helped found the local Our Revolution chapter after the first Sanders campaign, was Massachusetts co-chair of the 2020 campaign, and served as a Sanders delegate.

Just last week, the Cape Cod chapter of DSA invited Connolly to address their group on his housing justice agenda. This week, however, newly elected leaders of the Boston chapter of DSA introduced a resolution to expel Connolly from the organization — to be voted on at the Cambridge Community Center at 3 p.m. on July 23.

The Boston DSA leadership published a list of charges against Connolly they claim proved he crossed a “red line” and leave him out of step with the organization’s socialist principles. Connolly, though, is vigorously defending himself, and a sizable portion of Boston’s progressive community has come out publicly in his defense. If Connolly survives the motion to expel, it may signal that factionally led expulsion efforts are losing steam inside the organization. 

A member-based organization that works to build democratic socialism in the long term while making gains for the working class in the near term is necessarily going to grapple with questions of whether too much energy is going toward the former or the latter, or whether the two work in concert. Such debates often express themselves over whether to support candidates or politicians who align with many of the organization’s values but work in coalition with some who don’t. In 2021, a faction drew national attention by failing to expel New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman from the DSA, producing backlash among other members who argued the fight was a self-obsessed distraction and a hapless attempt to display political purity for purity’s sake. 

In a nod to that fight, the DSA members pushing for Connolly’s expulsion noted in their resolution that in a September 2022 member survey, 76 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “If a Boston DSA-endorsee has clearly crossed a red line, I would still want to see accountability even if it results in some public-facing ‘noise’ and/or ‘drama.’”

What follows is the full list of the charges leveled at Connolly, along with responses he provided in an interview with The Intercept.

1. Failure to engage with the chapter’s electoral endorsement process since 2016

Connolly sought and received DSA endorsement in 2016. In the 2018 cycle, Connolly said, he actively participated in the endorsement process and spent more than 20 hours answering some 100 questions — some of them open-ended, requiring substantial elucidation. The process coincided with the height of the legislative session and a long-planned summer vacation; Connolly said he asked for an extension of roughly 48 hours beyond the deadline to finish the candidate questionnaire but was denied. In 2020 and 2022, he said, he heard nothing from DSA about the status of the endorsement process, and merely learned it was over when a list of endorsements was publicized. He did not face primary or general election competition in any campaign since 2016. 

2. Endorsing, materially supporting, and making public statements praising politicians/political actors who are fundamentally opposed to socialist reforms

• Endorsed Christine Barber over a DSA candidate in 2020.

In 2020, Christine Barber was an incumbent state representative for Medford and Somerville and was challenged by DSA member Anna Callahan, whom she beat 58 to 42 percent. Connolly told The Intercept that he does not regret endorsing Barber and that, as he argued at the time in a meeting with leaders of Boston DSA, they were making a mistake by bucking serious, member-based immigrant worker groups who were rallying behind Barber. 

Barber was the lead sponsor of a high-profile piece of legislation called the Work and Family Mobility Act, which, among other things, made drivers’ licenses available to all state residents — the top priority of immigrant rights groups in the state amid Trump’s xenophobic crackdown. Connolly noted, “I said to them, there’s a contradiction here, I believe, when this organization is saying we’re going to supplant our judgment for, for example, a people of color-led immigrant justice group that’s been working on this proposal.”

Barber had also been a champion of rent control, casting one of roughly 20 votes for it in the entire chamber, Connolly noted. 

• Endorsed Kevin Honan and Maura Healey.

In 2022, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey ran for governor and faced no serious competition in the primary; her only opponent dropped out before gaining traction. Healey’s platform committed to lifting the statewide ban on rent control, a key step in combating skyrocketing rents and ensuring real affordable housing in Boston and around the state. While Healey is not a socialist, Connolly argued that it was in the interest of housing justice advocates to endorse her and then push to have her platform translated into law.

Kevin Honan was the incumbent state representative who co-sponsored an eviction and foreclosure moratorium with Connolly at the start of the pandemic, a law that has been held up as a model across the country. Housing justice groups roundly endorsed Honan. 

Though Honan’s primary opponent, Jordan Cameron Meehan, was a DSA member, he did not have the endorsement of the Boston DSA, which weakens the chapter’s charge against Connolly. Honan won by 8 percentage points. 

• Used a DSA group chat (that of the Cambridge Neighborhood group) to solicit canvassers for Lydia Edwards’ Senate campaign.

The chat, said Connolly, was his local one, which he’d been involved in for years, and all he did was let people know that, during a special election for an open Senate seat, a canvass for Lydia Edwards was happening. In his district, he said, 95 percent of his constituents voted for Edwards — though the race, which she won, was closer, and Edwards received 60 percent of the vote. In that election, he said Edwards was far and away the superior of the two candidates, particularly on the issue of housing justice, a claim that even Edwards’s DSA critics from the left acknowledge. Once she was in office, she co-founded the Housing for All Caucus with Connolly. 

Whatever the relationship was between Edwards and DSA members before, it has now fully collapsed. “The ‘let them eat cake’ wing of the left is so out of touch with the lived struggle of so many people,” she told the Boston Globe when asked about the effort to expel Connolly. “They will hold their breath for purity and throw a temper tantrum, while they are stably housed, food secure, and healthy.” Edwards dubbed the expulsion leaders “progressive white supremacists,” and when asked by the Globe to explain why, she said, “They are progressive. They also believe they know what is better for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) people. And whether they want to admit it, trusting your perspective of what is better for people of color than people of color telling you … is white supremacy.”

• Twice supported Ron Mariano for State House Speaker

Several leaders of Boston DSA urged Connolly to vote against Mariano for speaker in 2020, he said, but he told them there was nobody running against him, so he didn’t see the point. Other DSA-backed legislators either voted for Mariano or said they would have had they not missed the vote. After his vote, Connolly said, the DSA leaders told him they were disappointed, and he held a 90-minute meeting with them to hear their concerns and explain his rationale. Mariano ran unopposed in 2022, and Connolly voted for him again.

• Praised Ed Augustus, former city manager for Worcester who championed corporate give-aways and housing policy which led to great amounts of gentrification and displacement.

This charge, said Connolly, is “materially inaccurate.” The DSA resolution links to a Twitter post by Connolly that welcomes Augustus to his new role as secretary in the newly created Executed Office of Housing and Livable Communities. “I am excited to welcome incoming Secretary Augustus to this vitally important role! My hope is that he and the Healey Administration will pursue policies to guarantee housing to all residents of the Commonwealth,” wrote Connolly, going on to make the case for a broad social housing agenda. “As a member of the Joint Committee on Housing and a Co-Chair of the #HousingForAll Caucus, I can’t wait to get to work with Secretary Augustus!”

Connolly argued that attacking Augustus out of the gate made no tactical sense, and that his statement was not “praise.” “All things being equal, I think we will accomplish more with Augustus if we welcome him to his new job rather than attack him before he’s even walked in the building,” Connolly said.

This type of defense from Connolly doesn’t land with his more hardened detractors. In fact, it only inflames them further, seeing in it political hackery masquerading as knowing sophistication. “It’s one thing to (allow oneself to) be taken advantage of,” said one Boston DSA member and a sponsor of the expulsion resolution, Peter Berard, on Facebook. “It’s quite another to flaunt being taken advantage of by a group of people as gormless and transparent as Democratic Party hacks, to be publicly stymied and humiliated again and again, and then to self-present as canny realists. You don’t get to act like the mature, thoughtful party, you don’t get to lecture us on any reality. It’s like being lectured on basketball not by the Washington Generals, but by some team that the Washington Generals regularly ignominiously beat.”

Boston DSA member Evan George, a longtime critic of Connolly’s, said that such disagreements on tactics shouldn’t sever a relationship, and taking up the fight against Connolly now distracts from the work they are doing on behalf of candidates currently in the field. “I have been very critical of multiple actions Mike has taken as a state representative, and my public criticism has strained my relationship with him many times in the years we have known each other,” said George in a public statement. “I have disagreed with his use of political endorsements and his willingness to support Democratic leadership in ways that I believe hurt the state of democracy here in Massachusetts. However, these have always been criticisms over tactics and my desire to apply pressure to our elected official’s ‘left’ so they do not so easily slide to the right.” 

• Endorsed a Somerville City Councilor, Matthew McLaughlin, who has been openly hostile to DSA’s program and its members — and who has taken developer money.

McLaughlin, Connolly argued, is a committed progressive who helped win Somerville for Bernie Sanders and has been a powerful ally on the housing justice fight. Asked about the claim of taking developer money, Connolly said he wasn’t sure. “I have no idea,” he said. “Matt is a working-class ward councilor, Iraq war vet, rock solid progressive, tireless canvasser for Bernie Sanders, the first of the current wave of socialists and progressives to be elected to the Somerville City Council, who has been deeply involved in fighting for justice in our community, including countless fights taking on real estate developers and landlords. I haven’t gone through his campaign finance report line by line, but the last thing anyone who is active in our community would think about Matt is that he’s in the pocket of anyone. Isn’t it up to the prosecution to provide the details of their evidence?”

Boston DSA did not respond to a request for comment or backup on the claim of developer money. McLaughlin told The Intercept that he has a policy of not taking developer money, but that he also uses the fundraising platform ActBlue, so sometimes contributions come in and land in his treasury before he returns them. He added that the year Connolly endorsed him, McLaughlin was working closely with DSA to help elect its candidates to City Council, which he said ought to undercut their allegation. McLaughlin represents roughly 10,000 people on the City Council and said a highly competitive candidate will raise something like $40,000 total. 

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The bad blood between a handful of Somerville DSA members, McLaughlin, and other progressives in Somerville dates to an Our Revolution candidate forum in 2021. DSA members running the forum, after managing to take over Our Revolution, blocked a council candidate, Stephenson Aman, a Haitian American organizer who’d grown up in local housing projects, from participating. The local DSA had endorsed a different candidate. McLaughlin and others withdrew from the endorsement process and issued scathing statements in protest. “The movement’s failure to organize low-income neighborhoods after years of activism makes the exclusion of Stephenson, who grew up in affordable housing, all the more problematic,” McLaughlin said at the time. “While Stephenson was denied entry outright, the other candidates of color were the victims of blatantly biased questions meant to humiliate them and promote members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Boston chapter, most of whom are white.” 

While the charge he’s in the pocket of developers is absurd, McLaughlin said, the resolution does get one thing right. “One thing that’s accurate in that statement is Matt McLaughlin is hostile to DSA members. They’re incredibly hostile people,” he said, making clear he was referring to individuals within the group and not the organization itself. “This is a small clique of people who have decided for everybody that this is who we are and what we’re about. They think they are the movement.”

“The fact that I’m mentioned with the governor, the mayor of Boston, and the royal family” — see the final charge, further below — “just shows that this is someone from Somerville with an ax to grind,” he added.

3. Public statements and legislative actions which are in substantial disagreement with the national political platform on Housing for All

• Promoting “landlords for affordable housing” group

From a tactical perspective, said Connolly, it is effective to have an organized group of landlords willing to testify on behalf of rent control and other housing policy reform items. One of his constituents who is a landlord, Melissa McWhinney, has organized other landlords to fight on behalf of tenant protections and for rent control. The entire concept of rent control leaves in place the landlord but merely regulates the rent. So as long as DSA remains an advocate for rent control, even as an intermediary step toward full socialization of housing, it must acknowledge the continued role of landlords, Connolly said. Rather than refuse landlord support, his political strategy is to split landlords into divided camps. 

• Public statements in favor of “fair rate of return/operating income to landlords”

Again, allowing a rate of return to landlords is a central element of any rent control policy, Connolly said. If DSA supports rent control, it supports a fair rate of return to landlords. The hangup over the landlord income is reflective of a lack of imagination among some advocates, he added, who should set their goals beyond mere rent control and toward social housing, which Connolly champions in the statehouse. “Don’t idolize rent control,” Connolly said.

• Publicly advocated for a milquetoast version of rent stabilization that is out-of-step with what the chapter’s members have organized for.

The city of Boston, after the 2021 election of Mayor Michelle Wu, produced a rent stabilization plan that included just cause for eviction, which has been an elusive goal for the socialist movement in cities like New York. But the plan allowed up to a 10 percent increase annually to rent, which some DSA members felt was too generous to landlords. The city needed state legislative approval for the plan, and ultimately Connolly and other DSA-backed legislators decided to support it. In the end, he said, it was preposterous to think that the state legislature would approve a plan to the left of Boston’s, so they decided to back it. 

Connolly added that the repeated attacks on his housing policy agenda were “a real kick in the shins” because he grew up in public housing, is a lifelong renter, has never owned a home, and has been the champion and author of the most far-reaching housing legislation introduced in the state and probably the country. 

4. Public statements which are in substantial disagreement with the national political platform on International Solidarity, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-Militarism

• Support and promotion of the British royal family’s greenwashing junket to Somerville.

This charge refers to Connolly’s decision to attend an event held by Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, when they visited a green-focused co-working space in Somerville.

Massachusetts Peace Action, the most active anti-imperialist organization in the area, has condemned this bullet, saying on Twitter that Connolly “is a leader for peace and justice and has proven it over and over again. We hope @Boston_DSA members will reject the ludicrous attempt to expel him. They should instead honor his work.”

Connolly said that he stood on the floor above Harry and Meghan, looking down at them right near Bunker Hill, which he thought at the time was delicious symbolism. “There was sort of some element of me being a democratically elected representative of this district, having constituents invite me to witness their engagement with this royal couple — it felt to me like it was something good to do for those constituents who it was meaningful to,” he said. “It certainly is in no way, you know, any kind of support or endorsement for anything to do with the imperialism, colonialism, or all of the other shenanigans that have to do with the royal family.”

Update: July 10, 2023
The piece has been updated with a vote count for the Edwards race.

The post Boston DSA Is Moving to Expel One of its Success Stories. Here Are the Charges Against Mike Connolly, and His Defense. appeared first on The Intercept.

The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a “high severity” physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. “It’s been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts,” Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, “including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately.”

The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community’s failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau’s broad authorities to surveil social media content — authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI’s reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them.

The FBI’s $14 million contract to ZeroFox for “FBI social media alerting” replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown. 

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In testimony before the Senate in 2021, the FBI’s then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn flatly denied that the FBI had the power to monitor social media discourse.

“So, the FBI does not monitor publicly available social media conversations?” asked Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. 

“Correct, ma’am. It’s not within our authorities,” Sanborn replied, citing First Amendment protections barring such activities. 

Sanborn’s statement was widely publicized at the time and cited as evidence that concerns about federal government involvement in social media were unfounded. But, as the Senate report stresses, Sanborn’s answer was false. 

“FBI leadership mischaracterized the Bureau’s authorities to monitor social media,” the report concludes, calling it an “exaggeration of the limits on FBI’s authorities,” which in fact are quite broad.

It is under these authorities that the FBI sifts through vast amounts of social media content searching for threats, the report reveals.

“Prior to 2021, FBI contracted with the company Dataminr that used pre-defined search terms to identify potential threats from voluminous open-source posts online, which FBI could then investigate further as appropriate,” the report states, citing internal FBI communications obtained as part of the committee’s investigation. “Effective Jan. 1, 2021, FBI’s contract for these services switched to a new company called ZeroFox that would perform similar functions under a new system.”

The FBI has maintained that its “intent is not to ‘scrape’ or otherwise monitor individual social media activity,” instead insisting that it “seeks to identify an immediate alerting capability to better enable the FBI to quickly respond to ongoing national security and public safety-related incidents.” Dataminr has also previously told The Intercept that its software “does not provide any government customers with the ability to target, monitor or profile social media users, perform geospatial, link or network analysis, or conduct any form of surveillance.” 

While it may be technically true that flagging social media posts based on keywords isn’t the same as continuously flagging posts from a specific account, the notion that this doesn’t amount to monitoring specific users is misleading. If an account is routinely using certain keywords (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter), flagging those keywords would surface the same accounts repeatedly.

The 2015 threat report for which ZeroFox was criticized specifically called for “continuous monitoring” of McKesson and Elzie. In an interview with The Intercept, Elzie stressed how incompetent the FBI’s analysis of social media was in her situation. She described a visit the FBI paid her parents in 2016, telling them that it was imperative she not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland — an event she says she had no intention of attending and which troll accounts on Twitter bearing her name claimed she would be at to foment violence. (The FBI confirmed that it was “reaching out to people to request their assistance in helping our community host a safe and secure convention,” but did not respond to allegations that they were trying to discourage activists from attending the convention.)

“My parents were like why would she be going to the RNC? And that’s where the conversation ended because they couldn’t answer that.”

“I don’t think [ZeroFox] should be getting $14 million dollars [from] the same FBI that knocked on my family’s door [in Missouri] and looked for me when it was world news that I was in Baton Rouge at the time,” Elzie told The Intercept. “They’re just very unserious, both organizations.”

The FBI was so dependent on automated social media monitoring for ascertaining threats that the temporary loss of access to such software led to panic by bureau officials.

“This investigation found that FBI’s efforts to effectively detect threats on social media in the lead-up to January 6th were hampered by the Bureau’s change in contracts mere days before the attack,” the report says. “Internal FBI communications obtained by the Committee show how that transition caused confusion and concern as the Bureau’s open-source monitoring capabilities were degraded less than a week before January 6th.” 

One of the FBI communications obtained by the committee was an email from an FBI official at the Washington Field Office, lamenting the loss of Dataminr, which the official deemed “crucial.”

“Their key term search allows Intel to enter terms we are interested in without having to constantly monitor social media as we’ll receive notification alerts when a social media posts [sic] hits on one of our key terms,” the FBI official said.

“The amount of time saved combing through endless streams of social media is spent liaising with partners and collaborating and supporting operations,” the email continued. “We will lose this time if we do not have a social media tool and will revert to scrolling through social media looking for concerning posts.”

But civil libertarians have routinely cautioned against the use of automated social media surveillance tools not just because they place nonviolent, constitutionally protected speech under suspicion, but also for their potential to draw undue scrutiny to posts that represent no threat whatsoever. 

While tools like ZeroFox and Dataminr may indeed spare FBI analysts from poring over timelines, the company’s in-house definition of what posts are relevant or constitute a “threat” can be immensely broad. Dataminr has monitored the social media usage of people and communities of color based on law enforcement biases and stereotypes. 

A May report by The Intercept also revealed that the U.S. Marshals Service’s contract with Dataminr had the company relaying not only information about peaceful abortion rights protests, but also web content that had no apparent law enforcement relevance whatsoever, including criticism of the Met Gala and jokes about Donald Trump’s weight.

The FBI email closes noting that “Dataminr is user friendly and does not require an expertise in social media exploitation.” But that same user-friendliness can lead government agencies to rely heavily on the company’s designations of what is important or what constitutes a threat. 

The dependence is mutual. In its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, ZeroFox says that “one U.S. government customer accounts for a substantial portion” of its revenue.

Additional reporting by Sam Biddle.

The post FBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers “Threat Actors” appeared first on The Intercept.

Participants in the “Trans Youth Prom” pose for a photo in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2023.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Last week, federal courts in Tennessee and Kentucky moved to temporarily block laws that would ban important health care for trans minors in those states. In their rulings, the two judges — one appointed by President Donald Trump, the other by President Barack Obama — found common ground: Bans on gender-affirming puberty blockers and hormone treatments are highly likely to be unconstitutional.

Both decisions concluded that the bans are grounded in unsupported claims about the risks of gender-affirming care for young people and would cause irreparable harm.

Federal judges, both liberal and conservative, in six states have now blocked laws banning transition-related health care for minors, including a major ruling in Arkansas that permanently blocked such a ban and included over 300 statements of fact countering the state’s fallacious arguments.

Despite the unanimity and unambiguity of recent court decisions, Republicans have made clear that they plan to brute force their eliminationist assault on trans people into legal reality.

Whatever relief we might rightly feel for the blocks on these pernicious laws, the far right knows how to bend legal paradigms to their will through tireless and well-funded campaigns, working through the minority rule of Republican-led statehouses until eventually reaching the Supreme Court. The same playbook hacked away at abortion access until an established right was wholly overturned, and settled law was ripped to shreds.

The far right knows how to bend legal paradigms to their will through tireless and well-funded campaigns.

“State legislatures have systematically moved to attack and erode bodily autonomy,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chase Strangio, an attorney who has been on the front lines of legal battles against the ongoing avalanche of anti-trans laws. “They’ve done it with abortion, they’ve done it with gender-affirming care. It’s the same people, it’s the same organizations, and they’ve been able to do it because our state legislatures are gerrymandered.”

“The question becomes: Are the federal courts or the state courts a check on that?”

Republican state governments have shown they are readied with swift and robust legal responses, should their cruel bans meet federal challenges. Immediately after the Tennessee ruling, the state’s attorney general filed a notice of appeal and an emergency motion to stay the injunction. The state GOP hopes to push their infirm case to a higher court, while aggressively attempting to force through a ban on medically necessary health care as legal proceedings play out.

In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. found the state’s ban to be both definitively unconstitutional and based on a total lack of scientific evidence. An eight-day trial examined ubiquitous Republican claims that gender-affirming treatments for youths are too experimental, harmful, often regretted, and banned by numerous European nations. All claims were found to be false, unconvincing, and contrary to strong evidence.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin nonetheless vowed to appeal the judge’s extensive and detailed ruling, repeating the same discredited lines about “protecting our children against dangerous medical experimentation.”

The appeal will go up to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which — although one of the most conservative federal courts in the country — has already upheld a temporary block on the law in a ruling by a three-judge panel. While this is cause for optimism, success in a full appeal trial is never assured.

In the longer term, should such a case make its way to the far-right Supreme Court — as Republican forces behind these laws desire — the risk of the conservative majority siding with reactionaries over civil rights remains considerable.

“The fascistic attack on gender variance is an unabashed GOP priority.”

Strangio noted that the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court decision, which protects trans and other LGBTQ+ workers against discrimination, is “closely analogous” to arguments in the youth health care cases. He cautioned, however, that “we haven’t had a big trans constitutional case in the Supreme Court. There’s nothing that fully answers the question of what doctrines are going to help us.”

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in favor of religious convictions and against gay rights is hardly encouraging, and the Dobbs ruling underlined the conservative majority’s willingness to see the criminalization of established, necessary medical practices that enable bodily autonomy.

Meanwhile, 491 anti-trans bills have been proposed nationwide in the last year alone and are passing at a frightening clip. The fascistic attack on gender variance is an unabashed GOP priority, especially after hard-line anti-abortion stances appeared to harm rather than help Republicans in the midterm elections.

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Urgency dictates that attorneys representing trans teens and their supportive parents use any and every tool available in court to stop these bans, including appeals to the parents’ right “to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.” Parental rights have long been recognized by the Supreme Court; the Arkansas judge’s decision cited a ruling that called them “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” It is a grim fact that in other terrains, parental rights are invoked by right-wingers to crush pro-LGBTQ+ and anti-racist expression and education.

This uneasy reliance on the parental rights argument is a reminder that the struggle for universal LGBTQ+ liberation will have to go far beyond effective courtroom strategies, lest health care remain accessible only to the parentally supported and well resourced.

Just as Dobbs ended the right to a procedure that was already de facto inaccessible in dozens of states, trans youth health care bans outlaw treatments that are already hard to access, especially for poor trans youth of color and those who lack material resources or parental support.

A victory for trans youth and adults does not only entail stopping anti-trans laws, but also making necessary treatments robustly available. For such a possibility, free, good health care for everyone is a necessity.

Democrats failed for decades to vigorously defend reproductive rights by lending all too much credence to the Christian right’s anti-abortion stance. President Bill Clinton’s famous phrase — that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” — treated abortion as an unfortunate necessity rather than an integral part of bodily autonomy and a public good.

There’s a relevant analogy here between the common liberal treatment of trans kids: that they’re an unfortunate rarity, which should be tolerated but not celebrated. Against such a threadbare defense of trans existence, the violently committed anti-trans right will surely win.

“You have a popular discourse playing far more hostile to trans people, far more open to misinformation, than a federal court is at this stage.”

Liberals putatively opposed to the GOP’s draconian anti-trans onslaught should take heed of the judges’ rulings on trans youth health care. All too many powerful liberal organs — the New York Times perhaps chief among them — have channeled Republican talking points by treating trans children as a site of peril, and gender-affirming treatment for kids as potentially too experimental.

In point after point, however, federal judges from Florida to Tennessee to Arkansas have agreed that arguments treating gender-affirming treatments for youths as untested and dangerous are, quite simply, not based in fact.

“What is clear is that before all kinds of judges, when these bans are tested by what the states are claiming is their evidence, they categorically fail,” Strangio told me. “What that means is that you have a popular discourse playing far more hostile to trans people, far more open to misinformation, than a federal court is at this stage.” Strangio added that “it would be helpful if the center left media were to then cover the cases, after having sparked fear everywhere.”

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The original district court ruling in Arkansas that temporarily blocked that state’s trans youth health care ban was explicit that the law aimed “not to ban a treatment,” since hormone therapies, puberty blockers, and surgeries that can affirm a person’s gender identity are not banned for cisgender minors. Rather, the laws aim “to ban an outcome that the State deems undesirable.”

Republican forces know this; their aim is to eradicate gender nonconformity. It’s unsurprising that they’re barging forward with this effort, regardless of harsh courtroom rebukes.

Claims about dangerously experimental treatments and vulnerable, confused youths lured into transitioning have always been a Trojan horse. Federal courts have now consistently recognized this. At this point, so-called progressives who continue to entertain and echo bunk talking points about medical risk reveal themselves as more interested in eliminationist outcomes than they’d like to admit.

The post Judges Keep Ruling That Anti-Trans Health Care Bans Make Shitty Law. The GOP Isn’t Giving Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

According to investigators from Human Rights Watch, who visited the scene of the attack, her death was caused by a cluster munition, a weapon much of the world has moved to ban due to the indiscriminate harm that they cause to civilians. The salvo was allegedly fired from the Ukrainian side, according to witnesses, and detonated near the woman’s home, killing her and her dog.

“The attack was very scary. Very loud. I was outside and there were a lot of explosions. The wife of my ex-husband came and told me to hurry to get inside,” one witness told Human Rights Watch, according to a report released late Wednesday night. Another witness, who viewed the victim’s body in the aftermath and helped bury her in a local cemetery, said that her “face and body were severely mutilated by the explosion.”

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more.”

As the Ukraine war drags on, the Biden administration is now reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to send more of the bombs to the Ukrainian military. The decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine would likely be seen as a setback to nonproliferation efforts aimed at stopping use of the weapon.

The report by Human Rights Watch analyzing the impact of previous cluster munition attacks carried out last summer by the Ukrainian military found numerous dead and wounded civilians in Izium who were hit by exploding cluster bomblets.

“Ukrainian cluster munition rocket attacks in the city of Izium in 2022 killed at least 8 civilians and wounded 15 more,” the report said, adding that the true number of casualties was likely greater, as many wounded people had been taken to Russia for medical care and not returned.

Although investigators found forensic evidence pointing to Ukrainian culpability, the Ukrainian defense ministry said in a written letter to Human Rights Watch that “cluster munitions were not used within or around the city of Izium in 2022 when it was under Russian occupation.” The town was liberated by Ukrainian forces in the fall of that year.

The Ukrainian military is currently engaged in a much larger counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming other territories captured by Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country in early 2022.

According to the Washington Post, the administration has recently been taking the temperature of members of Congress on the forthcoming decision. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said he was open to giving Ukraine the weapons. When asked by The Intercept, a number of House Democrats declined to say whether they were for or against the move.

The move to transfer cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military comes on the heels of other U.S. initiatives to train Ukrainians on advanced fighter aircraft, and possibly provide them long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russian-held territory. The transfer of cluster bombs to the Ukrainians would be much more ethically fraught.

A Ukrainian civilian removes a Russian cluster munition rocket from a field near the villages of Smolyanka and Olyshivka on April 3, 2022.

Photo: Justin Yau/Sipa via AP Images

Banned Cluster Munitions

Cluster munitions are controversial due to the manner in which “bomblets” are scattered around a targeted area, creating secondary explosions that can cause death and injury even long after a conflict has ceased.

The use of cluster attacks during the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon killed and wounded hundreds of civilians. A decade later, swaths of southern Lebanon are still dangerous for civilians who are periodically killed or maimed by stray bomblets.

The bombs are currently at the center of an international campaign to ban their use in armed conflict. More than 100 states have signed an international convention on cluster munitions vowing not to employ them in war, produce them domestically, or encourage their use in foreign conflicts. Despite public pressure to join, the U.S. has not become a signatory to the convention.

The Russian military has also extensively used cluster munitions during its invasion of Ukraine, including in attacks on populated areas that were said to have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in the early months of the war.

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The Ukrainian military was reported to have requested significant transfers of the munitions late last year, though the Biden administration did not render a decision on the request at the time.

If the decision is taken to approve the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine now, it may reflect frustration with the pace of the Ukrainian offensive, which has so far failed to make significant gains against Russian forces in the country.

In their report analyzing the impact of Ukrainian cluster bomb attacks on civilians in the occupied town of Izium, investigators from Human Rights Watch noted the potential long-term impacts of untargeted, explosive bomblets left around the region and called on both sides to refrain from their use — lest they kill and injure many more in the years to come. As the conflict grinds on, a legacy of unexploded cluster munitions could keep the suffering of the war going long after the guns go silent.

“Cluster munitions used by Russia and Ukraine are killing civilians now and will continue to do so for many years,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, in the report. “Both sides should immediately stop using them, and not try to get more of these indiscriminate weapons.”

The post With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More appeared first on The Intercept.

The Founding Fathers signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, by John Trumbull in 1819.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept / Getty Images

Americans love to talk about our Founding Fathers, with many of us believing they were infallible geniuses. We can tell this isn’t true just by reading this letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:

The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. 

Whoops! Adams thought this because the Second Continental Congress had passed the Lee Resolution on July 2, the day before. The Lee Resolution was actually the first declaration of independence, proclaiming that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.” But July 4 became the date we celebrate because Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had more zing.

The Founding Fathers were mindlessly venerated for hundreds of years, until Americans who weren’t rich white men gained some input on this subject. They remain mindlessly venerated on the U.S. right, which loves them in the same way the U.S. right loves Jesus: i.e., without bothering to pay attention to what they actually said. This doesn’t mean the Founding Fathers were like Jesus, and indeed, many of them were standard-issue grotesques. But some of them did make startlingly progressive and even radical statements that later became inconvenient and hence have largely dropped out of history.

It’s true that words are cheap, and these edicts generally were at odds with the actions of their speakers, especially when any of them held formal power. Still, it’s worth remembering what they said, because 1) it illustrates how complicated humans and history are, and 2) it’s fruitful to pull these things out during political arguments.

The founders were wordy guys, and their writing contains lots of what we today would call “bad spelling.” The following quotes also just scratch the surface of their radical statements. If I’ve left any of your favorites out, please let me know, and maybe I can write a sequel next July 4. 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), American Printer, Publisher, Author, Inventor, Scientist, Diplomat and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

Wealth and Property

In 1783, Benjamin Franklin, who was then the U.S. minister to France, described his perspective on property. This would today place him far to the left of the Democratic Party and would probably cause prominent Republicans to call for his execution:

… the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents & all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity & the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man for the Conservation of the Individual & the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who by their Laws have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms … can have no right to the Benefits of Society who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

Earlier in his life, Franklin made the case for universal health care, paid for with public money, based on the precepts of Christianity:

The great Author of our Faith, whose Life should be the constant Object of our Imitation, as far as it is not inimitable, always shew’d the greatest Compassion and Regard for the Sick …

This Branch of Charity seems essential to the true Spirit of Christianity; and should be extended to all in general, whether Deserving or Undeserving, as far as our Power reaches. … the great Physician in sending forth his Disciples, always gave them a particular Charge, that into whatsoever City they entered, they should heal All the Sick, without Distinction. …

We are in this World mutual Hosts to each other … how careful should we be not to harden our Hearts against the Distresses of our Fellow Creatures, lest He who owns and governs all, should punish our Inhumanity.

Then again, Franklin said some ugly things about “the poor” and also was concerned the Anglo-Saxon whiteness of the colonies would be contaminated by “swarthy” races such as the French and Swedes.

In 1776, Adams endorsed the concept of false consciousness, i.e., that lower economic classes adopt the perspective of those at the top. Friedrich Engels later made that same argument, and it’s now considered a Marxist idea, but as the words of Adams show, it’s as American as you can get:

Such is the Frailty of the human Heart, that very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by Some Man of Property, who has attached their Minds to his Interest.

At the same time, Adams also proposed a solution — the redistribution of property:

[P]ower always follows property. This I believe to be as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are equal is in mechanics. Nay, I believe we may advance one step farther, and affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.

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Gouverneur Morris, a less-famous founder, wrote the preamble to the Constitution, was one of its signatories, and later became a senator from New York. At the Constitutional Convention, he said this about the danger the U.S. would face from the wealthy:

The Executive Magistrate should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes, [against] Legislative tyranny, against the Great & the wealthy who in the course of things will necessarily compose the Legislative body. Wealth tends to corrupt the mind & to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression. History proves this to be the spirit of the opulent. 

America’s children would definitely be more interested in history if they knew this, and also that Morris died when he experienced a urinary blockage and stuck a whalebone up his penis.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Third President of the United States 1801-09.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

Slavery

Of the first 12 presidents of the U.S., 10 enslaved other human beings. (The exceptions were Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams.) In private, they occasionally decried the practice. Near the end of George Washington’s life, he purportedly said that “[t]he unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labor in part I employed, has been [my] only unavoidable subject of regret.” 

Most significantly, Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence indicted King George III for the presence of slavery in the colonies:

[H]e has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

It’s bizarre that Jefferson, who himself owned 600 people over the course of his life, blamed someone else for the existence of slavery. Morally and intellectually, power does not bring out the best in people, as Jefferson himself expressed in one of the greatest veiled self-indictments in history. But the strength of his condemnation demonstrates that everyone understood at the time that what they were doing was pure evil. 

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Decades later, Jefferson recalled that this passage had been “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” I.e., the South employed slavery to a far greater degree than the North, but the North profited enormously from the slave trade.

James Madison (1751-1836), Fourth President of the United States 1809-17.

Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images

The Power and Promise of Education

At the time of the American Revolution, elites across the world believed that they were inherently intellectually superior to the lower classes and had to be in charge for the good of everybody. But some Founding Fathers adopted the then-radical position that all people could learn how the world works and participate in their own governance. In 1822, James Madison, who’d been president until 1817, wrote this letter to William T. Barry, then the lieutenant governor of Kentucky: 

The liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. …

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty. 

I wish I could force you to read the whole thing because it’s an inspiring manifesto about the liberatory power of education, as well as uncannily relevant given the current loathing of education and universities on the right. On the other hand, both Madison and Barry enslaved other human beings, so I don’t know what to tell you.

A year later, in 1823, Jefferson wrote a letter to Adams. I find Jefferson’s faith in the upside of new information technology to be touching, especially here in the early days of the internet. I’m not sure he was right, but I’d like to believe he was:

The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. as yet that light has dawned on the midling classes only of the men of Europe. The kings and the rabble of equal ignorance, have not yet recieved it’s rays; but it continues to spread. And, while printing is preserved, it can no more recede than the sun return on his course. … all will attain representative government … to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, & years of desolation pass over, yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?… You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious atchievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven.

The Electoral College

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Today it’s somehow become conventional wisdom on the right that the electoral college was put into the Constitution to give rural states a greater weight in presidential elections. But at the Constitutional Convention, Madison explained why the electoral college was an unfortunate necessity. It would be best for the president to be elected by popular vote, he said, but the South would never allow it, both because they allowed fewer white people to vote and because they had enslaved so much of their population:

The people at large was in his opinion the fittest [choice to elect the president] in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. … There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Inoculation

Smallpox was once a terrifying scourge across the world, with a death rate among those infected of 30 percent. By 1720, the practice of inoculation, a predecessor to vaccination, had been introduced in the British colonies. However, one of Franklin’s sons died of smallpox in 1736. Soon afterward, Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Gazette about cruel rumors that his child had died not because he wasn’t inoculated against smallpox, but from the inoculation itself:

Understanding ’tis a current Report, that my Son Francis, who died lately of the Small Pox, had it by Inoculation; and being desired to satisfy the Publick in that Particular; inasmuch as some People are, by that Report (join’d with others of the like kind, and perhaps equally groundless) deter’d from having that Operation perform’d on their Children, I do hereby sincerely declare, that he was not inoculated, but receiv’d the Distemper in the common Way of Infection: And I suppose the Report could only arise from its being my known Opinion, that Inoculation was a safe and beneficial Practice.

At the end of his life, Franklin was still desperate to tell parents in his autobiography that they should use human knowledge to prevent disease. 

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret, that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the stake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it. 

Human Nature

In America’s early days, as now, there were many people at the top of society who simply didn’t believe that regular human beings could govern themselves, and hence they had to be controlled by their betters. Such people nonetheless felt compelled by political necessity — then as now — to deliver constant rhetoric about the wisdom of common folk. In 1824, two years before Jefferson’s death, he wrote to a correspondent about the reality behind these disingenuous homilies: 

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. in every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. the last appellation of artistocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all. 

It’s unquestionable that both of the main political parties in the U.S. now are controlled by people who are, in Jefferson’s formulation, aristocrats.

Again, the Founding Fathers did not know everything. In addition to that embarrassing mistake about July 2, Adams supposedly whispered, “Jefferson still lives,” as he died on July 4, 1826. In fact, Jefferson had expired several hours previously. 

But you have to admit it’s cool they both died 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. The founders weren’t saints or heroes, but the fact some of them could think such radical thoughts 250 years ago should teach us not to fear thinking and debating such radical things today.

The post For July 4, Here Are 10 Shockingly Radical Things the Founding Fathers Said appeared first on The Intercept.

The court had taken a sharp right turn after DeSantis selected three new justices with the help of Federalist Society board co-chair Leonard Leo. Leo led a secret panel of advisers that vetted DeSantis’s judicial nominees before he took office.

The revelation came on the heels of a slew of news stories on conservative donors buying influence on the U.S. Supreme Court — where Leo, again, was among the conservative legal activists who helped to install a conservative majority. The top federal court has since made landmark rulings against abortion rights and in favor of business interests. And Leo isn’t done yet: He funnels money to a network of right-wing organizations orchestrating key Supreme Court cases on red-meat conservative issues.

In Florida, Leo was working to overturn a 40-year status quo of judiciary balance and restraint. The state Supreme Court had fostered an image of independence after corruption scandals that forced two justices to resign in the early 1970s. When DeSantis took office, concerns about improprieties disappeared. The governor has a long history with the Federalist Society — he was a member at Harvard Law School — and his judicial nominees are backed by the group.

The ideological project DeSantis is pushing Florida is no secret. He unabashedly appoints political allies to posts across the state. Such picks have shown up in the judiciary, nonpartisan election offices, and state boards that oversee public schools and colleges, medical practices, business, and real estate.

DeSantis’s appointments, budget decisions, and fundraising tactics have come under heightened scrutiny since he announced a presidential run last month. None of the appointments, however, eclipse the lasting change of his state Supreme Court takeover. DeSantis has named five of the court’s seven members, all of whom are members of the Federalist Society.

“I don’t think he’s appointing chumps, but he’s clearly put a more ideological litmus test on his justices than others have,” said Neil Skene, who published an official history of the court. Vetting justices by patronage was common starting under President George Bush in the early 2000s, Skene said, but DeSantis is at the vanguard of making purely ideological appointments.

Leonard Leo speaks at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2019.

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

He is not the first to award contracts to donors or administrative posts to political operatives, but DeSantis does it at an unprecedented scale. The thoroughness of his cronyism has had a chilling effect in Florida: There is a perception among politicians and residents alike that nothing can get done if you’re seen a DeSantis foe, said Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Petersen said. Public servants are dismayed at what’s happening to their state, she said: “People are afraid of him.”

No Diversity Policies

After the scandals in the 1970s, successive Florida governors sought to improve the diversity of viewpoints on the state Supreme Court.

“The idea behind all of that, of course, is to make sure that all of Florida is represented on its highest court,” said Craig Waters, who worked at the court for 35 years and was its communications director until he retired last year. “It makes sure that a state Supreme Court does not become an echo chamber, but a true debate society. If you have members of a state Supreme Court that are careful of each other and watching each other, it prevents anything happening that might lend itself to a lack of public trust and confidence. It’s very important that the justices police each other.”

That stopped under DeSantis.

“What I see today is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

“What I see today,” Waters said, “is a court that lacks diversity and that lacks that internal policing mechanism that has served it so well in the past.”

Shortly after DeSantis made his first appointments, the court started chipping away at its diversity programs.

In 1949, the state Supreme Court founded the Florida Bar, an association that regulates attorneys. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the bar sought to diversify the judiciary along ideological, ethnic, and gender lines and to address judicial discrimination. The association convened a diversity symposium in 2004 and issued a report with recommendations to help improve diversity and strengthen its independence. In 2010, the Florida Bar created a committee to address diversity and inclusion.

When DeSantis’s allies arrived on the court, threats began coming down: The bar would be dissolved if it didn’t get rid of its diversity initiatives. Soon enough, the attacks proved effective. In 2021, the state Supreme Court ordered that the bar association amend its continuing legal education, or CLE, policy and eliminate a requirement for diversity among speakers and panelists in its continuing educational programs. The fight even made its way to the American Bar Association, which changed its own policies in April 2022 to bring the group into compliance with the rules imposed on the Florida Bar.

Florida Bar spokesperson Jennifer Krell Davis told The Intercept that the association had not changed its diversity programs, but that it adhered with the court’s order to eliminate diversity requirements in CLE programs. She declined to comment on a question about the court’s alleged threat to dissolve the association. “Our Leadership Academy, Path to Unity and Diversity grant programs (and others) continue to thrive under our Diversity and Inclusion committee,” Krell Davis said.

In February, the state Supreme Court went so far to dissolve the court system’s Standing Committee on Fairness and Diversity and eliminate its fairness and diversity training for judges.

The court’s public information Director Paul Flemming said the court’s opinion was self-explanatory. “The opinions of the Florida Supreme Court speak for themselves,” Flemming said. “I would refer you to what is written there: ‘Quotas based on characteristics like the ones in this policy are antithetical to basic American principles of nondiscrimination.’”

DeSantis Court Picks

How the state Supreme Court arrived here is the story of DeSantis’s picks. The court’s current chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, took an unusual path to the bench. He had previously been a Republican political operative and worked in the Trump administration as general counsel to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Muñiz was deputy attorney general and chief of staff to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy chief of staff and general counsel to the former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and deputy general counsel to former Gov. Jeb Bush.

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When DeSantis took office, Alan Lawson, a conservative and the most senior judge on the bench, was in line to be the next chief justice of the court. Court staff had been preparing for his ascension and budgeting for his administration when Lawson abruptly announced in April 2022 that he would retire. Lawson went to work as a partner at a new law firm in Tallahassee run by Republican political operatives who had broken off from one of the state’s top GOP law firms, Shutts & Bowen. Lawson told the Washington Post his decision to leave court was purely personal.

That July, less than four years after he was appointed to the state Supreme Court, Muñiz became its chief. Lawson was the first justice to be passed over for chief despite his seniority since 1976, said Skene, the expert on Florida courts. “He was not of the solidly Federalist Society group and Muñiz was,” he said. “Muñiz had a much more political job before that.”

Another DeSantis pick, Renatha Francis, worked at Shutts & Bowen before she was appointed to the court in 2020. Her original nomination was nullified because she hadn’t been a member of the bar for 10 years, as required by the state constitution. She was nominated again in 2022.

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The web of allies and appointments DeSantis has woven across the state overlaps with and influences the court. In May, after another justice abruptly stepped down to take a job at a DeSantis-linked insurance company, the governor appointed Meredith Sasso to the state Supreme Court. Several months before, DeSantis had appointed her husband, Mike Sasso, to the board of the former Reedy Creek Improvement District, where the governor has been embroiled in a battle with Disney. DeSantis appointed Sasso and four other Republicans to the board in February, including a major GOP donor and a co-founder of the far-right group Moms for Liberty who is married to the chair of Florida’s GOP.

Four days after Meredith Sasso joined the bench, her husband resigned from the improvement district board. Had Sasso remained on, it would have raised questions about his wife’s ability to participate in court decisions related to Disney without presenting a conflict of interest.

Similar questions may soon face Charles Canady, another justice who was appointed by former Democratic Gov. Charlie Crist. Canady’s wife Jennifer was elected last year to the Florida state House and quickly co-sponsored a bill that would ban abortion beyond six weeks. DeSantis signed the six-week ban into law in April, but its implementation is pending an ongoing court challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban. Jennifer Canady has been floated as the state’s next speaker of the House with DeSantis’s blessing.

“That poses a really difficult kind of situation for Canady because basically every law that gets passed and might be up for court review will come through the House of Representatives,” Skene said. “It certainly creates this interesting proposition where husband and wife might be at the head of two different branches of government.”

Cronies Everywhere

What makes DeSantis different from his predecessors is that his actions are overtly political, said Ben Wilcox, research director and co-founder of Integrity Florida, a government watchdog. DeSantis has reshaped Florida politics far beyond the judiciary, from the boards of public schools to boards of medicine.

“Because DeSantis has such an aggressive agenda, that’s why you’re seeing all these appointments to school boards, universities,” Wilcox said. “He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The governor, for instance, overhauled the board of trustees at the New College of Florida and installed conservative activists. One pick to the board was the architect of the war on critical race theory. The new board quickly fired the college president and replaced her with the former Republican speaker of the Florida House. He, in turn, tapped a GOP lawmaker — whom his office had previously suspended from a county position after he was charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer — to become the next president of South Florida State College.

“He’s really trying to push his agenda in pretty much every chance he has.”

The lawmaker, state Rep. Fred Hawkins, had no higher education experience, and the school lowered the education requirements for the position just three days before he submitted his application. Three finalist candidates withdrew their applications after the governor’s office contacted members of the board, the Herald Advocate reported. Hawkins got the job.

Hawkins would prove to be yet another loop in the tangle of DeSantis cronies. Before arriving at South Florida State, Hawkins sponsored a bill that gave DeSantis power to appoint the board for the Reedy Creek Improvement District, where Disney is based. The move came just under a year after DeSantis signed a bill to revoke Disney’s special tax status after the entertainment giant publicly opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney sued DeSantis in April, claiming the governor weaponized the state government to retaliate against it for making First Amendment-protected speech.

DeSantis also stacked the state’s two medical boards, including an appointment for a real estate broker whose wife DeSantis had installed in a real estate appraisal board. Both medical boards voted last year to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth.

Lobbyists

DeSantis repeatedly leveraged his position to bully Florida political figures — from elected officials to lobbyists in the state — into supporting his ambitions and pet causes.

“What he is doing, and what is now being reported, is his shakedown of lobbyists,” said Petersen, of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

DeSantis’s chief of staff organized government officials to solicit campaign contributions from lobbyists, NBC reported earlier this month.

“Shaking down legislators, you know: ‘Give me your endorsement, I haven’t signed the budget yet,’” Petersen said. “And damned if he did not retaliate against those people. You can see it in the vetoes. It’s stunning.”

“What he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians. We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

The governor’s allies have also gone on to enrich themselves. In September 2020, shortly after former Florida Republican House Majority Leader Dane Eagle lost in the Republican congressional primary for a U.S. House seat, DeSantis gave him a new job. Eagle, a commercial real estate broker, was appointed as the executive director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. In January, less than two and a half years into the job, Eagle announced that he would join the government affairs team at Ballard Partners, one of Florida’s biggest international lobbying firms, with extensive ties to Donald Trump.

“DeSantis continues to use his political position as Governor to feed the grift of his allies, by gifting them positions their unqualified for, allowing contracts to be diverted towards friendly vendors and pleasing donors with bills that he signs into law,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who represents parts of Orlando, in a text message. “It’s unethical and feeds into people’s distrust of the Governor.”

With DeSantis’s budget for 2023 to 2024, critics saw a governor intent on funding his top causes at the expense of Floridians’ real concerns. DeSantis cut funding for projects to protect public lands and prevent flooding that were pushed by Democrats and Republican lawmakers who resisted his requests for endorsements in the presidential primary.

“It’s becoming more and more clear as all of this information is coming out that what he’s doing, he’s doing for the sole purpose of his political ambition — and to the detriment of Floridians,” said Petersen. “We’ve got real problems in Florida.”

The post DeSantis Stacked Florida’s Supreme Court With Cronies Who Wage His War on Wokeness — or Else appeared first on The Intercept.

Birds chirped as the 76-year-old traced the 75,000 acres of mining claims on the edge of her community with her finger. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a fearsome wolf hovering above a rugged mountain range. The wolf is the calling card of the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, or PARA. The local group monitors industrialized mining in the Patagonia Mountains, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Schafer is president of the board.

“This is our new logo,” she said, picking up a pamphlet with the wolf on the front. The old mascot — a cute cartoon dog — no longer matched the moment. A vigilant pack animal sent a more appropriate message.

“We think of ourselves as local watchdogs,” Schafer told me. “We pay attention to what’s going on with the companies and the agencies, and then we bark really loudly to the big dogs, who have the staff, the knowledge, and the experience to do what is necessary.”

The big dogs, Shafer and her allies believe, are needed now more than ever. Last month, the Biden administration announced the “first-ever” inclusion of a mine in a federal program that expedites permitting for high-priority projects. In this case, it was the extraction of minerals from the Patagonia Mountains to support the president’s green energy agenda — manganese and zinc, specifically, for producing electric vehicle batteries and fortifying renewable energy installations, among other purposes. In the weeks since the announcement, the Forest Service has issued permits advancing large-scale drilling in the area.

The operation is the Hermosa project, which encroaches on the Coronado National Forest, an hour southeast of Tucson. The company is South32, an Australian spin-off from global mining giant, BHP Billiton. The program, FAST-41, was created in 2015 to streamline the federal permitting process. The Permitting Council, an agency with a nearly $100 billion portfolio in government infrastructure projects, oversees the program.

The administration’s support for the mine follows President Joe Biden’s 2022 determination invoking the Defense Production Act, which ordered an increase in domestic mining of “critical” materials sufficient to create a large-scale battery supply chain and move the nation away from fossil fuels and foreign production lines. Manganese was singled out as critical. Congressional passage of the Inflation Reduction Act also called for increased domestic mining in the name of green energy.

With an initial estimated outlay of $1.7 billion, South32 anticipates a lifespan of 22 years for Hermosa’s zinc deposit and 60 years for its manganese deposit. Full production is slated to begin in 2026 or 2027. Company executives celebrated their FAST-41 inclusion with the Permitting Council’s director in a press call last month. Hermosa project President Pat Risner drew a direct line between Washington’s goals and his company’s aims.

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“These policies pave the way for a vast domestic expansion in electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable power production,” he said. “South 32’s Hermosa project is the only advanced mine development project in the U.S. currently that could produce two federally designated critical minerals as its primary products, those being manganese and zinc.”

Shafer was blindsided by the news. “That really wasn’t on our radar screen at all,” she said the first time we spoke. In the month that followed, PARA cranked up its advocacy like never before, organizing with larger NGOs and telling any reporter who would listen about the project’s extraordinary ecological stakes.

Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, points out locations on maps outside her home in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

PARA’s Lawsuit

Last Tuesday, the calls for help became a call for action. PARA, with support from the nonprofit advocates of Earthjustice and the Western Mining Action Project, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Forest Service and the supervisor of the Coronado National Forest, where the mining activity is concentrated. Several of the region’s environmental organizations — and its most experienced litigators — joined as co-plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson Audubon Society, and Earthworks.

The groups alleged a series of Forest Service violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the rushed release of two permits for exploratory drilling projects in the Patagonias last month. One of the projects is overseen by South32 in conjunction with the high-priority Hermosa project. According to the lawsuit, the permits impede recovery of the threatened Mexican spotted owl and the yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as disrupt federally protected migration corridors for endangered jaguars and ocelots. (The Forest Service declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Drilling could begin at any time.”

Hermosa project at South32 is not named in the lawsuit. In an email, Risner suggested PARA’s ecological concerns were overstated.

“With a surface footprint of just 600 acres, the Hermosa project is a fraction of the size of most mining projects and keeps sustainability at the core of our approach,” he said before the lawsuit was filed. “Hermosa has also had in place for more than a decade a robust biological monitoring program.”

PARA and its supporters called on the court to declare that the Forest Service broke the law and quash the agency’s authorizations. The moment demands urgency, they argued: “Drilling could begin at any time.”

View of the Patagonia Mountains from the Borderlands Wildlife Preserve in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 20, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

A Sky Island

The weekend before PARA and its allies filed their lawsuit, Shafer and her partner, Robert Gay, an architect and journalist, invited me on a bumpy drive deep into the mountains to survey the Patagonias’ rivers and canyons and offered their take on current fight and its wider implications.

The Patagonias are an iconic member of the “sky islands,” a network of mountain ranges that rise up out of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Home to an estimated 100 endangered or threatened species, the mountains contain the largest cluster of mammal species anywhere north of Mexico, more than 500 species of birds, the highest density of breeding raptors on the planet, the most reptile and ant species in North America, and the most bee species on Earth.

The virtually unmatched biodiversity has made the town of Patagonia — with a population of around 900 residents — a world-class birding and wildlife research destination for generations. The town is also a launching point for the famed Arizona Trail, an 800-mile hike that traverses the state from north to south. More recently, it’s become home to a growing gravel bike scene, with riders pedaling through the mountains to reach the stunning San Rafael Valley, one of the last unbroken stretches of grassland ecosystems in the American Southwest.

Together with the unique abundance of flora and fauna, outdoor recreation has made Patagonia a hub in the “nature-based restorative economy” of Santa Cruz County. According to a 2021 University of Arizona study that PARA and other conservation groups in the area helped produce, the attractions generate tens of millions of dollars for local businesses and residents.

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Though the battle over mining in the Patagonias goes back generations, this latest iteration is frustrating activists on the ground for reasons particular to the present moment.

Shafer and Gay are both diehard environmentalists. An “Earth Day is every day” flag hangs outside their home. They are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and would never say otherwise, but they are just as concerned about biodiversity loss and the planet’s unfolding sixth extinction. For them, a mine that would accelerate one cataclysm in the name of combatting another is unacceptable.

The minerals needed for a green energy revolution can be found elsewhere in the world, Shafer argued: “There’s no other place to go for Mexican spotted owl. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Jaguar. Ocelot.” The frustration in her voice rose as she ticked off the names.

Harshaw Creek runs through Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Wild West

In the U.S., mining is governed by a law President Ulysses Grant signed in 1872. With scant regulations, the Wild West-era statute has undergone little substantive change in the century and a half since. Technology, however, has changed. The lone Civil War veteran busting his back hoping to strike it rich in a national forest has been replaced by multibillion-dollar corporations with the most advanced extraction tools money can buy.

In the Patagonias, the main hub of activity centers around an old mine water treatment site run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, or ASARCO. In the 1960s, the endeavor collapsed in a storm of bankruptcy and environmental damages, including pollution of Patagonia’s water.

Decades later, Arizona Mining Inc., owned by billionaire mining tycoon Richard Warke, purchased the land. South32 bought out Arizona Mining in 2018, in a $2 billion sale that marked one of the biggest mining deals of the year.

The area surrounding the old ASARCO site is largely national forest land, which South32 is actively exploring, as well as ranches and other parcels of private property. The privately held land is shrinking though, with South32 buying up properties one by one in recent years.

“It’s very, very active out here right now,” Shafer said. “These mountains, unfortunately, are chalked full of valuable minerals.”

For Shafer, the heart of the matter is water. Patagonia relies on the mountains entirely for its water, but the range’s hydrological significance doesn’t stop there. The mountains are the headwater of Sonoita Creek, which flows into the Santa Cruz River that provides water for more than a million people.

“The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

When ASARCO was running its mine in the 1960s, the company’s chief problem was water; it would fill the mine’s shaft and the company lacked the technology to keep it out. Facing the same challenge today, South32 has received permission from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to run up to 4,500 gallons of water per minute through one of its two water treatment plants, then dump that water into Harshaw Creek, a tributary to Sonoita Creek. At max capacity, Shafer noted, that would mean more than 6.4 million gallons of water flowing into the Harshaw on a potentially daily basis.

“We don’t know how much water they’re taking out and using on site, but that’s how much they are permitted to discharge into the Harshaw Creek,” Shafer said. “The community’s concern is: What is this going to do to that ecosystem?”

“This is my version of tree-hugging,” Carolyn Shafer, board president of Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, said in Humboldt Canyon in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023. “My favorite canyon is whichever one I’m in,” but Humboldt Canyon holds a special place in her heart.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

“Desiccate and Saturate”

A small stretch of the Harshaw has perennial water. Monsoon season aside, the water tends to lap around a person’s ankles. The rest of the creek is typically dry. What 6.6 million gallons of water a day would do — and more when the heavy rains of late summer hit — is difficult to fathom.

To put the town at ease, South32 released a video last year. The minerals the U.S. government seeks lie below the water table under the Patagonia Mountains, the company explained. South32 would drop the table by pumping water out. The water would then pass through a treatment plant before being dumped into the Harshaw. This would create “a cone of depression” around the well site, allowing safe underground work.

“Most of the discharged water will soak back into the ground. Some will evaporate or be used by vegetation, but most will recharge the aquifer without ever reaching the town of Patagonia,” the company said. Even in the event of a 100-year, 24-hour flood, the increase would not have an “adverse effect” on the hamlet, South 32 said, nor did the company “expect that wildlife would be negatively affected.”

PARA consulted with hydrological experts and responded with a video of its own. Noting that South32 planned to pump “the equivalent of 10 Olympic-size swimming pools per day” into the Harshaw every day for up five years, the experts predicted the creek would quickly go from almost entirely dry to constantly flowing, carrying any undetected contaminants from the mine wherever it ran and heightening flood risks during monsoon season.

As we prepared to head out for our drive into the mountains, Gay pulled out a poster he made, detailing the expanse of water South32 expects the town of Patagonia to receive in the event of the 100-year flood — and how it would cover the town’s properties. “When you look at that closely,” he said, “it’s 70 percent of the lots now.”

In Patagonia, the problem would be too much water. In the mountains, it would be the opposite. “My fear is it’s going to dewater the mountain,” Shafer said. “If it dewaters the mountain, it kills the plant life. If it kills the plant life, there’s no place for this incredible biological diversity to survive. That’s my bottom line, but that’s not speaking as the organization. That’s speaking as Grandmother Carolyn.”

“It’s feast or famine,” Gay added. “I call it desiccate and saturate.”

A dewatering and water treatment facility at the South32 Hermosa mining project along Harshaw Creek in Patagonia, Ariz., on June 17, 2023.

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

Hoping for a Miracle

Patagonia’s paved roads disappeared in the rear-view mirror. Gay’s beat-up 4Runner crept slowly over the rough terrain. Approaching the old ASARCO site from the north, we passed abandoned mining tunnels from decades before, ranches that had been sold to the mining company, and others that soon might be.

“It is a patchwork of extreme complexity,” Gay said, leaning forward on the wheel. “Just a snarl, between the bumpiness of the land and the irregularity of the property lines.”

At a town council meeting last month, South32 presented its plan for managing the convoys of trucks that would run these roads, hauling minerals for green energy out of the mountains. In the early stages, it would be 62 heavy trucks, 26 buses, and 139 passenger vehicles daily. The flow would increase as the project became fully operational, at which point more than 200 heavy-duty trucks — in addition to the buses and passenger vehicles — would come through.

Given the landscape, traffic at that scale would require significant road work and with it, the obliteration of the mountains’ otherwise serene quiet. Like the water in Harshaw Creek, the change was difficult to imagine.

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore,” Patagonia Vice Mayor Michael Stabile said in an interview in the Patagonia Regional Times. Stabile was a founding member of PARA, though he no longer works with the organization. “They’re going to flood us with water,” he said. “And they’re going to flood us with trucks.”

“Patagonia in 10 or 15 years won’t be recognizable anymore.”

Days before we met up, Shafer had a similar moment of unsettling clarity. “I just realized I have shifted into grief about what is happening here,” she said. “Because of the realization of how special this is to me and that I will not be able to come out here for at least seven years, and when I do get to return, what will it be like?”

South32’s assurances about safeguarding the ecological systems were cold comfort for Shafer. “There’s nothing legally we can do to stop it. What we can legally do is mitigate the potential damage. That’s what we’re working very hard to do,” she said. “But unless something under the definition of miracle happens, there will be destruction by industrialized mining in these mountains.”

“The disaster of that,” Shafer said, “is that this is one of the regions of the world most in need of protection for species survival.”

A flag outside Carolyn Shafer’s home declares “Earth Day is every day.”

Photo: Molly Peters for The Intercept

The Cathedral

There was little to see at the old ASARCO site. A locked gate. A handful of “no trespassing” signs. We turned around and headed west into Humboldt Canyon, where work is currently overseen by Barksdale Capital Corp., a Canadian company specializing in mineral exploration — the kind that precedes a company like South32.

“I am in a stronger relationship with the natural world in this canyon than I am in any other canyon,” Shafer said, as we passed under a majestic spire of twisted rock. “This is a spiritual experience for me — full of experiences of dear friends of mine.”

Years back, Shafer officiated her friends’ wedding in the canyon. The couple was among PARA’s original founders. The groom was Glen Goodwin, an old-school Arizona cowboy who, in 2014, detected extensive water contamination stemming from the Patagonias’ old mine sites — including sites that are revving back up again today. Goodwin died last year. His ashes were spread in Humboldt Canyon.

The road twisted deeper into the mountains until coming to a stop in a clearing. Shafer got out and leaned against a tall pine tree, listening to the birds. “For me,” she said, “this meets the classic definition of a cathedral.”

On our way off the mountain, we stopped to watch mule deer grazing in a field. We dropped Gay off in town before leaving for the tour’s final destination: the perennially flowing stretch of Harshaw Creek.

Willow trees lined the way, along with massive Arizona sycamores. We walked down to a particularly beautiful bend in the creek. Shafer mentioned a paper she recently heard about discussing the mental health benefits of birdsongs.

“When you live with something all the time, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “But I have birdsong all day long, and it is something I do appreciate.”

Shafer is the last of PARA’s original core still living and working in Patagonia. “Two are now dead, two have moved out of country,” she said. She knows that stopping the mine is next to impossible, but then, the same could be said of her.

Shafer’s mission now is making the cost of doing business in the Patagonias match the value of the place. “I’m sorry if you’re not going to get a 25 percent profit margin,” she said. “If you have to live with 5 percent to honor what is here and you don’t like that, then go away.”

She leaned forward, smiling, and added in a whisper, “It wouldn’t hurt me if you left.”

The post Biden Fast-Tracked a Green Energy Mine in One of Earth’s Rarest Ecosystems. Arizona Locals Took It to Court. appeared first on The Intercept.

Lester, in sending his invitation to the high-dollar affair being held at a secret location, used his Villages Inc. email and instructed attendees to RSVP to his Villages assistant. 

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Lester was appointed by DeSantis last year to a five-year term on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Aside from the incongruity of putting an official from one of the state’s largest developers on an environmental conservation commission, the fundraiser hosted by Lester represents a further blending of official state business with campaign fundraising.

While DeSantis is presenting himself as capable of making good on his rival Donald Trump’s unfulfilled pledge to root out corruption in politics, DeSantis recently came under scrutiny when his administration was revealed to be pressuring state lobbyists to donate to his campaign. Ten Florida lobbyists told NBC News that at least four different DeSantis administration officials had been soliciting contributions from lobbyists with business before the governor and legislature, which some of them described as a “prisoner’s dilemma.” 

The DeSantis administration did not respond to a request for comment, but officials there have previously insisted that administration staff do not lose their First Amendment rights to donate to DeSantis and raise money for him, though ethics experts have highlighted the blurry lines and the risk of an appearance of corruption.

When DeSantis flew 48 Venezuelan asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard last September, The Intercept reported that the flights had been contracted to an aviation firm with ties to top Florida GOP officials close to DeSantis. The firm, Vertol Systems, contributed to the campaigns of the Florida Legislature’s appropriations chief, who himself oversaw the budget containing the contract for the flights, as well as his DeSantis transportation-appointee father.

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In January, The Intercept reported that Lester warned local county commissioners that if they bucked The Villages Inc. on a key tax break for further development, he could call DeSantis at any moment. “Just remember one thing,” Lester reportedly told one commissioner. “I’m a big person, you’re a little person. I can squash you anytime I want.” DeSantis eventually removed the commissioners from elected office, and they were prosecuted by a local Republican state attorney on extraordinarily dubious charges. Lester did not respond to a request for comment.

The invitation lists a dinner and VIP reception for two as costing $13,200. Couples who skipped the VIP portion and only attended the dinner got in for just $6,600 total.

“We didn’t drain it,” DeSantis said recently in New Hampshire, referring to Trump’s proverbial swamp. “It’s worse today than it’s ever been by far.” But it appears the only swamps being drained on DeSantis’s watch are ones that can be paved for development projects by his politically connected corporate allies. 

The post DeSantis State Government Appointee Holds DeSantis Fundraiser in The Villages appeared first on The Intercept.

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”

After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

An email from David M. Morens, senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Anthony Fauci until his retirement last year.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Morens is a 25-year veteran of NIH who serves as a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Fauci until his retirement late last year. Other scientists on the email exchanges include Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance; Robert Garry of Tulane University; Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney in Australia; Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research; and Angela Rasmussen, who works at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada. They have all been outspoken proponents of the natural origin theory of Covid’s emergence. Jason Gale, a journalist at Bloomberg, also participated in the email exchanges, which were first obtained by investigators from the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

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The email Morens wrote concerning FOIA, which was sent from his Gmail account, contradicted a footer under his signature line: “IMPORTANT: For US-government related email,” it said, “please also reply to my NIAID address.” Morens did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scott Amey, the general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said the conduct described in Morens’s email could potentially violate agency regulations, including the Department of Health and Human Services’s email records management policy, and potentially civil and criminal record retention laws.

“His comments in that email are certainly worth an investigation by the agency, the agency inspector general, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department of Justice,” said Amey.

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The email that contains Morens’s statements was part of a broader exchange in which Morens and his scientist correspondents denounced media coverage by The Intercept and other publications concerning the origins of Covid and harshly criticized those who take seriously the possibility that the virus emerged from a research accident in Wuhan, China. They also laid out their own arguments in favor of a natural origin for the virus.

“The lab leakers are already stirring up bullshit lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity our way — which is what this is about — a way to line up the [gain-of-function] attack on Fauci, or the ‘risky research’ attack on all of us,” wrote Daszak in one email on September 7.

“Do not rule out suing these assholes for slander,” wrote Morens in response.

In a separate email, Morens slammed scientists such as Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, calling them “harmful demagogues.” He also lamented the media’s platforming of such figures.

“They need to be called out. Because I am in government I can only fo [sic] this off the record, but I have done do [sic] again and again,” he wrote. “Some of them are knowingly promoting false equivalences [sic]. If they interviewed a Holocaust survivor, they would say they have to give equal time and space to a Nazi murderer. They have no shame.”

You can read the full set of documents here.

On Thursday, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, sent a letter to Morens about the documents the subcommittee obtained.

Documents in the possession of the subcommittee, he wrote, “suggest that you may have used your personal e-mail to avoid transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), potentially intentionally deleted federal records, and acted in your official capacity to disparage your fellow scientists, including by encouraging litigation against them.”

The committee also highlighted a July 2021 email sent by Morens in which he described getting approval from “Tony” — an apparent reference to Fauci — to give an interview to National Geographic about the origin of Covid.

“For many months, I have not been approved to talk about ‘origins’ on the record. But today, to my total surprise, my boss Tony actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins,” Morens wrote at the time. “I interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.”

Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, right, and ranking member Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., left, listen to witnesses during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing about the origins of Covid on April 18, 2023, at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The committee in its letter said that this email raises “concerns that you may have knowledge or information suggesting Dr. Anthony Fauci … wished to influence the COVID-19 origins narrative without his ‘fingerprints.’”

“This is all very troubling,” wrote Wenstrup in his letter to Morens, “and raises serious questions.” The select subcommittee has asked Morens to produce a variety of additional records, including from his personal email account, and to sit for an interview.

Ethics experts consulted by The Intercept also expressed concern about Morens’s comments on FOIA compliance.

“When you evade laws that are meant to make government more transparent and accountable, that is very bad,” said Delaney Marsco, the senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “It is bad for public trust in government. It is bad for agency culture. The ethical implications are bad.”

This is a breaking story and will be updated as needed.

The post Top NIH Official Advised Covid Scientists That He Uses Personal Email to Evade FOIA appeared first on The Intercept.