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.

Friday afternoon, the House narrowly passed a defense bill full of Republican culture war priorities. Hopeful efforts earlier in the week to rein in U.S. foreign policy fizzled out by week’s end, including an amendment to block the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine and other countries. On this week’s Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, and The Intercept’s Deputy Editor Nausicaa Renner to discuss how a bipartisan bill to prevent the Biden administration from sending cluster bombs to Ukraine went from gaining momentum to being undermined by another bill introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Transcript coming soon.

The post Cluster Bomb Fight in the House 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.

Related

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 fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop in Paris, France, sparked days of protests across the country. This week on Intercepted, host Murtaza Hussain is joined by Yasser Louati, a French political analyst and human rights advocate to discuss how Merzouk’s death struck at the fault lines underlying social discontent building in the country and the increasing power of the police.

[Intercepted intro theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Murtaza Hussain: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Murtaza Hussain.

In recent weeks, France has been rocked by a wave of protests, triggered by the French police killing of a 17-year-old teenager.

[Protest sounds.]

Alexis Christoforous, ABC News: Now to the riots rocking France after the police killed a 17-year-old. President Emmanuel Macron promising a thorough investigation after public buildings were set on fire over the weekend.

Monika Jones, DW News: France’s interior minister says police arrested more than 700 people on the fifth night of unrest across the country. The family and friends of the 17-year-old who was killed by police conducted a private funeral.

MH: On June 27, during a traffic stop, a French police officer shot and killed Nahel Merzouk, a French teenager of North African descent. Although the officer said he’d been endangered and feared for his life, a video of the shooting later emerged suggesting otherwise.

The riots in response to Nahel’s killing, mostly led by teenagers, spread throughout France, and French authorities have met them with force. France has been rocked by different types of unrest in recent years. In 2018, the Yellow Vest Movement spread throughout the country. And, just earlier this same year, in response to a pension reform by President Emmanuel Macron’s government, people began to protest and riot once again.

Our next guest has been tracking these uprisings and what they mean for the future of French society. We’re joined by Yasser Louati, a French political analyst and human rights advocate based in Paris. He is currently the head of the Committee for Justice and Liberties, a transnational human rights and civil liberties organization.

Yasser, welcome to Intercepted.

Yasser Louati: Thank you for having me, Murtaza. It’s a pleasure.

MH: Yasser, in the last week of June, protests erupted in Paris after a police officer shot a 17-year-old boy named Nahel Merzouk. First of all, can you tell us, who was Nahel, and walk through what exactly took place?

YL: Well, Nahel was a 17-year-old kid, as you mentioned in your introduction. He was stopped by two motorized police officers, and the first bit of information we got in the news was that he tried to ram the police officer or to run him over. And the policeman, fearing for his life, resorted to using deadly force. Nahel had no criminal history whatsoever. He was the only child of a single mother.

The news broke out and, of course, the defense of the policeman was already the mainstream narrative. Well, just a couple of hours later, a video emerged on social media showing the policeman being away from harm, and that, while talking to Nahel, he was pointing his gun at him. We could hear, in the audio background, one of them was saying, “I’m going to shoot you in the head,” and the other one saying, “Shoot him.” And that’s when the car starts moving forward, and then the shot is heard, and the car just runs into a red light.

Now, fast forward less than 24 hours later, a third occupant of the vehicle came forward and shared his side of the story, and said Nahel had already been stopped previously, before the video was being recorded. And the policemen were quite aggressive with him and started beating him with their guns, so the guy pulled out his gun and started beating on him with the handle.

The bit we see in the recording was that Nahel had already been beaten and, according to the passenger, he was fainting. And him driving an automatic car and not being in parking mode, as he lost consciousness from being hit, he released the brakes, the car moves forward, and then the cop shoots him.

Now, like in any situation of this kind, the police always uses a piece of legislation of the Homeland Security Code called Article 435-1, and that article was passed in 2017 to broaden the definition of self-defense for the police. It says, anytime the policeman fears for his life, in case of absolute necessity, he can resort to using his weapon, even if it means shooting to kill.

So, the policeman used that, and it turned out, from the videos we have been seeing so far, he was in no danger. He was away from the car. He was actually on the side, and he nevertheless shot the kid, point blank, in the heart. And the emergence of this video, even more [so] with the testimony of the third occupant, is what actually lit the banlieue of France throughout the national territory.

MH: How common are shootings like this in France? Obviously, in the United States, it’s pretty well documented that police shootings and cases of police brutality are part of the public consciousness. In 2020, obviously, there were big nationwide protests over a particular police killing. Does this happen often in France, that there’s someone stopped at a traffic light, and someone shot?

YL: No, it’s not, we don’t have… the figures in the U.S., for us Europeans, are quite staggering. I mean, every time we hear and see the amount of people getting killed at the hands of the police, I mean, to us, it’s like a parallel universe.

In France, you have to remember, we do not have the same political culture, we don’t have the same history, and we do not have a massive circulation of firearms. However, in the case of the police, last year alone, 13 people got killed at traffic stops at the hands of the police, and these figures have exploded since the passing of this piece of legislation back in 2017, the infamous Article 435-1.

This means that one person per month has been killed. And many NGOs have been pointing to this piece of legislation saying that this has actually encouraged policemen and [policewomen] to resort to deadly force, even when it was not necessarily, let alone justified.

To compare with another police, for example, in Germany, it was one for the past ten years; that’s how the police behave in Germany, in comparison to the French police. To us, witnessing all of these shootings and people getting killed for not stopping when the police summons them. First, we say, not stopping when the police asks you should not be a death sentence. And second, the policemen and [policewomen] using deadly force, even if it means hiding behind the piece of legislation that allows them to, is not acceptable.

Why? Because, how come the gendarmerie — which is the military police — does not have as high a body count as the police, but only the police has this problem? It’s because — and this is, of course, not really official — but the police, or the Ministry of Interior — or the Home Office, for our British counterparts — has adopted a very loose definition of this piece of legislation.

So, there has been quite an encouragement, so much so that this policeman’s lawyer some years ago — so, today, he’s defending the killer of Nahel — years ago, this very same lawyer said that this piece of legislation is going to create a massive problem of police shooting in France.

MH: You wrote in a recent article for The New Arab that the riots are “an indication of a deeply divided society.” Can you talk about what the divide is in France, or the divides are in France, that have been opened up by the shooting? I think that, it seems to me, from spending time there and just analyzing the situation, is that there were these fault lines in society anyway, and the shooting sort of precipitated them opening.

Talk about what exactly we are seeing, or what social divides are we seeing in France that have been revealed to them now?

YL: An event could summarize these divides, in light of the killing of Nahel, is the fundraiser for the policeman who killed Nahel, which collected a million euros within 24 hours, which is obscene for a country like France. This is not America, where you can raise millions of dollars in donations. This is, when you hit the million euro mark, you are in the top zero-point-one percent in terms of a fundraiser.

On the other hand, the fundraiser for Nahel barely collected, at the time of counting of the million euros, barely reached 200,000 euros. So, not only [have] people turned to GoFundMe — and, by the way, I’m naming and shaming them for refusing to shut down this fundraiser. So, we have people ready to open a fundraiser and collect money for Nahel’s killer, and being perfectly fine that he killed a 17-year-old, and you have those on the other side saying this is unacceptable, and identifying more with Nahel, and saying, this could have been me, this could have been my son or a friend of mine.

So, this is in light of police killings, but if you want to expand a little bit [on] this outlook on France: of course, there is a racial divide, which is a taboo in France. You know, the racial question is not supposed to be spoken of because, officially, the Republic is colorblind. The famous notion of universalism, that somehow we are within a universal… how can I say… universe. And, somehow, that race plays no role in our interactions between one another.

However, though the French Republic proclaims to not recognize, to quote the Constitution, “No race, no community, no religion,” etc., people are treated based on their ethnic background, based on their skin color, and based, of course, on their religious affiliation. So, that’s already a deep divide. And all governments, since the end of the colonial era, have refused to address it, to address the remnants of colonization in French institutions, how colonization has actually founded the current republic under which we live since 1958. And they have all refused to see how French people who have been of second, third, and fourth generations in France, with the French citizenship, who identify with France and are part of the landscape, are still feeling the brunt of the racial divide.

And, of course — and this one might speak more to the white majority — we have now a deepening and widening divide when it comes to class. The initiation of the neoliberal policies in the early 1980s under a socialist government — that of Francois Mitterrand, elected in 1981 — has actually started a dismantling of the welfare state as it was founded [following] the liberation of France.

And Emmanuel Macron represents the acceleration, or the latest stage, of the dismantling of the welfare state, and then creating a class of very well-to-do people, who benefit from the macro-policies passed by the various governments, and the working class, which are now… in French, we speak of déclassement, people who are actually losing their class status, and moving downward on the scale, meaning going from, let’s say, middle class to poor, if not very poor.

So, these are basically the three divides we see in France so far.

MH: Over the last few years, there was a very famous protest movement in France which many people in the United States were interested in called the Yellow Vests. And these Yellow Vest protests, obviously, they had a lot of very evocative imagery, and you could see images of riots and property damage or whatever else taking place in France. It was very evocative for many reasons.

Can you talk about what the difference is between the Yellow Vest protests and these most recent protests? Are they a different segment of society? Was the scale of the process different? How would you characterize the difference, and what’s salient about the differences between them?

YL: Well, unlike most protests in France, historically speaking, which usually start from Paris and then expand beyond the capital city, the Yellow Vest Movement actually started outside of Paris, in what we call Le Provence, which means the cities and towns and smaller towns that are in the countryside, etc.

The Yellow Vest Movement was a trigger, because of the taxation on gas and, of course, some kind of boiling anger towards Emmanuel Macron. The Yellow Vest Movement was identified as being predominantly white, and that is why many people coming from the banlieue, and from the NGOs, and the grassroots movements that were historically anchored in the banlieue and the antiracist struggle, didn’t necessarily identify with the movement at first, even while the movement was being crushed.

Why? Because the Yellow Vest Movement was a moment where many people, including myself, said, join the club. Because, while Blacks, Arabs, and Muslims were demonstrating against police brutality, against state violence, especially in light of the antiterrorism measures post the Paris attacks of 2015, the fact that they face discrimination in access to resources, access to housing, to higher education, and this access discriminates against them.

Many people said, where’s the white majority to call this out? So, we are facing unfair policies, and when we call them out, we get brutally crushed.  So, when the Yellow Vest Movement started, many people looked at it like, OK, it was some kind of white majority movement, even though many union leaders came, actually, from a North African and Sub-Saharan background.

The difference here with what happened post the killing of Nahel is that, immediately, people thought of the 2005 uprisings, meaning that there has been a buildup of anger over the past 18 years, and that those same Blacks and Arabs who have been repressed for the past, let’s say, 18 years, you have to think of all the anti-Muslim laws passed under successive governments, the permanent Islamophobia in mainstream French society, the rise of the far right. The fact that the counter terrorism policies post-November 2015 have massively crushed Muslim organizations, Bali organizations, have criminalized organizers… well, this time, people, even myself — I’ve been active for quite a few years now — I was surprised by how quick it spread outside of Paris, and the level of anger that was displayed as we saw it in various videos.

So, the comparison between the Yellow Vests Movement and that of the last couple of weeks stands only in how it has been received, or they have been welcomed by the government: with police brutality, more repression. But, one notable difference: when the Yellow Vest Movement was attacking property, rioting, shattering showcases, and walking on the Champs Elysees, nobody spoke of ethnicity.

But, in this case here, though Nahel was born in France, his mother was born in France, and only his grandparents came from overseas, and the fact that our Fox News today — BFM Television, or CNews — they’re starting putting on display the faces of the rioters and highlighting their first names, saying, see, their names are not white European names, and therefore these are not social uprisings, this is an ethnic riot, the same way the 2005 uprisings were dismissed as being riots of the Islamists, of the Blacks and Arabs who failed to integrate.

One famous article about that is an interview of a rightwing columnist called Alain Finkielkraut to Haaretz, the newspaper based in Tel Aviv, and he spoke of ethnic riots against France. And this is, of course, the same tool governments have used to dismiss the more profound question of social inequality, police brutality, lack of representation, and class disdain.

MH: Yes, that narrative is very popular with outside observers of France, who see France as sort of a laboratory of ethnic conflict, and project their own preconceptions or even desires onto what’s going on there, particularly in regards to ethnic conflict and refutation of a multicultural society. And yet, the reality is much more complicated, as you said.

Can you tell us a bit about who is exactly protesting in these uprisings? We see a lot of footage, and it strikes me that a lot of them are teenagers, as opposed to organized groups or nongovernmental organizations. Or, you know, something with more direction, or even more adult participation. It seems like a lot of very young people.

Can you tell us a bit about what people are seeing in France, and who exactly is going into the streets, or has been going into the streets in the last few weeks?

YL: Well, as you mentioned in your question — actually, the answer lies there. [It’s] the fact that it was — I can’t say “mostly,” because there were also, maybe, people who were above the age of 18 — it was very young people that were not part of any organizations, and that were not part of a structured movement to organize these uprisings and turn them into a political force, or at least benefit from the gained momentum of the initial anger.

What changes, again, with 2005, is that this time we have had social media, so the profiles of people who participated in the demonstrations and the uprisings, is that we have seen people of all types. You know, you had the person who was angry because of what happened, because they had personally experienced dozens of episodes of humiliation at the hands of the police. Just a quick reminder to our listeners: if you are Black or Arab in France, you are 20 times more likely of being stopped and searched by the police, and that’s according to the ombudsman. Now, you factor in the fact that you are being stopped 20 times more by the deadliest police in continental Europe, you can imagine that this anger only builds up, because this is not a question of isolated events; it is official policy to behave as an occupying force, and to make fear change camps, as many politicians say.

Others, of course, were just moved by the video itself. To them it was, OK, enough is enough, I’m going to take to the street. And, because there was no organized movement, they went to the street and then they figured out what to do as they were outside. And, of course, you had many people who were there because there has been this call, or this kind of second moment, saying, alright, people are doing it, and I’m going to start doing it.

To answer many people who said, “Yeah, but why are they attacking the Apple Store in the city of Strasbourg, or why are they looting and taking things from supermarkets,” well, I’ve got two comments on that. First, take a look at what people were taking from these supermarkets: food, shampoo, basic necessities. So, the proper question wasn’t, “Why are they taking it?” The question is, “Look at what they are taking, and what would make them do such a thing.” I mean, they didn’t steal gold, they didn’t steal luxury items.

On the other hand, in a society spoiled by consumerism, in a society that teaches, to quote Jacques Séguéla, a famous public figure in France, he said, in primetime, “If you do not own a Rolex by the age of 50, you are nothing. Your life is a waste.”

So, how do you want these kids who are constantly told that your value is based on how much you own, that the day the opportunity comes to smash a window and take an iPhone, they’re going to go and say, no, I’m not going to do it? I’m not justifying it. I’m just saying, these riots are a direct result of the kind of values we teach through our mainstream media. And it’s also a direct result of policies that can only feed anger and resentment.

And, I mean, honestly, I really dismiss the ethnic question, because many of the rioters — or, actually, the looters — were actually white kids from upscale neighborhoods. Many of them got caught. They were coming from the bourgeois suburbs of Paris and the west side suburbs, like the 78th department. And you have been to France, so you know how it is divided here. They came from Versailles, etc., and they were rioting and looting. What do they know about police brutality? What do they know about racism? They are the ones benefiting from all these unfair policies, yet they were found looting, and rioting, and smashing windows to steal, for example, electronics and iPhones.

MH: Yasser, I wanted to ask you a bit about, again, these young people who are protesting, and sort of the things that are driving them in terms of emotional or psychological sentiments. I was watching a very interesting interview with a kid who was being interviewed during some of the riots at a grocery store, and he said something to the effect that: if you want to kill kids, we’ll loot. And, for us, it’s revenge.

Can you talk about the aspect of how people see these moments of social breakdown as a chance to settle some sort of score with society? And, in the minds of kids like this, what is the score that they’re settling?

YL: Well, if you grow up as a Black, Arab, or Muslim kid — and I’m, you know, just painting everyone with the same brush, just to make it simple — you feel that you are not part of mainstream society, you are constantly told that you don’t belong here. If you are a Muslim, you are part of a triple threat, a threat to the national economy, you are taking our jobs and you are all welfare kings and queens. You are an identity threat because you are threatening France’s multi-secular identity, etc., and you are a national security threat. And this is constantly being repeated to them.

When they go to school, they are constantly being policed in terms of how they dress, whether they fast the month of Ramadan or not. And, if they want to go through public schools and then to higher education, they are constantly reminded that if they come from the wrong neighborhood, they can’t make it to the prestigious school, the prestigious school they are targeting. So, when you have people who are not necessarily politicized, people who are not necessarily activists with a sharp outlook on French society, of course, they’re going to feel like they are being left out.

So, when the day comes that they see anger being spilled into the street, they’re going to feel more being part of that anger than being part of that segment that calls for a return to calm and order. And a simple answer would be: the banlieue have been calm for the past 18 years since the 2005 uprisings. What have been the benefits? None whatsoever. People are more poor. People have less access to resources. People are facing even more discrimination at all levels of society. And they feel that, whether they vote or not, it makes no difference.

So, to quote a mayor in France: we are not dealing with PhDs in legal theory and political science. We are talking about human beings who have been packing doses and doses of anger, and the day there is an outburst, they feel they are part of it.

[Intercepted mid-show theme music.]

MH: Can you mention a bit about the issue of inflation recently in France? And the reason I bring it up is that there’s been some coverage in the wake of the riots that, although the precipitating cause was a police shooting, the statistics in France are quite jarring in terms of the rise of food prices, cost of living, and so forth.

There was actually a study done, published by a publication here which is a bit of a conservative publication called Compact Magazine, but it pointed to a very staggering stat that food consumption in France has gone down precipitously in the last few years, owing to people scaling back on their purchases due to this inflation. And, in some of these cases of people who were arrested for rioting, they are stealing, as you mentioned, very basic necessities: paper towels, ice cream, one person was stealing Kellogg’s cereal. And when they were interviewed, they said, “well, I’m doing it because Kellogg’s is expensive.” And another man who was arrested for stealing groceries, when arrested, he said, “I took peaches and apricots because I haven’t eaten fruit in a year.”

So, this shooting of Nahel seemed to take place against a very economically stressed environment. Can you talk a bit about how that’s been playing out in France leading up to these events?

YL: For those who are looking at France through the lens of Emily in Paris on Netflix, I’m going to disappoint you a bit. I mean, we have a poverty rate of 14. 6 percent in France; that’s over nine million people in France living below the poverty line. We are about 63 million people in France. The figure is huge for a small country like ours; we’re not talking about the U.S., or bigger countries like Germany, or elsewhere. The inflation rate for the past few years has been going up and down, but around the six percent mark.

So, yes, the killing of Nahel actually happened after accumulation of grudges towards the policies being carried by Emmanuel Macron, the scaling back of unemployment benefits, the scaling back of welfare benefits, while taxation on the rich has been maintained at a level that is obscene. Some of the billionaires in France pay almost zero percent in taxes, and I know this is something quite familiar for those who speak of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and the likes in the U.S. Here in France, this has fed a profound anger towards the government, that has been seen as working only for the CAC 40, which is the top 40 companies in the stock market, and only benefiting to the top one percent.

If you look now at the past, let’s say, six years since Emmanuel Macron came to power, we had the Yellow Vest Movement triggered because of taxation on gas, but the demands were about purchasing power, about work stability, about salaries, and more fiscal justice. After the Yellow Vest Movement, we had the pension reform [protests]. And the pension reform [protests], again, was brutally crushed by Emmanuel Macron, the same way Macron crushed the Yellow Vest Movement. We saw bloody repression in the streets, we have seen people being maimed. One journalist had his testicles amputated because the police beat him while he was on the ground filming.

We also had the problem of how Emmanuel Macron has refused or actually kept parliament from voting in favor or against the pension reform, which means he used Article 49-3 of the French Constitution, which allows the president to pass a bill without it being voted on in the halls of Parliament. So, the level of poverty we have seen has been dramatically increasing due to the policies of Emmanuel Macron alone, but one episode that people now tend to forget is the Covid-19 episode.

We have seen people falling below the poverty line, again, because they were the ones being affected by mass firing of people, people being dismissed at a much bigger scale. Why? Because many companies used the Covid-19 as an excuse to get rid of their working force.

And, just to finish on that, if you may allow me, Murtaza, is the killing of Nahel happened within the hundred days that Emmanuel Macron called for after the pension reform, after passing his law against the will of the people, despite massive opposition in the street, and the totality of unions being against it, which is a rarity in France. The fact that, in Parliament, he feared a vote against it. He said, now it is time for appeasement, and I’m going to give ourselves a hundred days for appeasement. Well, the killing of Nahel happened within those 100 days. And we saw that the anger on police brutality only put on the table again the rising poverty in France, and the feeling that this government is not working for them.

MH: I wanted to ask you a bit about the reaction to these protests, particularly from those opposed to them, or those who you could say were more towards the right, even before these events took place. And very notably, I wanted to ask you about a statement by a French police union that was issued during the protests, which seemed almost like a call for civil war in response to the uprising.

Tell us a bit about that police union statement, and also about what the far-right parties — including the Front National — have been saying about these protests since they started.

YL: Well, the center of gravity of French politics has moved way into the hard right, if not to the far right. It does not mean the whole of France is pro-Le Pen or calling for the return of fascism, it just says that the media have been massively owned by big corporations that are pushing for this agenda of law and order coming from the hard right. And we have seen Emmanuel Macron choosing to have Marine Le Pen as his prime opponent. Why? Because both of them agree on the socioeconomic policies to be implemented.

For those who don’t follow French politics, Marine Le Pen was never seen as an acceptable or capable or competent candidate. She was always seen as a daddy’s daughter inheriting a political party, and that no one would take her seriously because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But when she backtracked from calling on leaving the European Union — the famous Frexit after Brexit — when she canceled her call to leave the Eurozone, the single currency for most of the European Union member states, then she became a worthy opponent, someone to be considered as a legitimate, what you call in French, présidentiable, a person who could become eventually a president.

Macron knew that if he went head on with people like Jean Luc Mélenchon, who’s coming from a tradition of the historic Socialist Party, and leftwing, left-leaning socio economic policies, there was going to be debate on the reforms Emmanuel Macron passed, which failed to materialize in true trickle down economics. He would have had a hard time challenging Jean Luc Mélenchon, because Jean Luc Mélenchon, though he’s got many flaws, was good on these issues, and could push back against Macron.

In the case of Marine Le Pen? No, it was very easy. The only difference between the both of them is not even identity politics, it’s how identity politics is framed. That’s it. But the policies, ultimately, were the same.

Speaking about this police union, Alliance Police, it is also a notable episode here. Alliance Police is a police union close to the hard right, if not the far right. It has become the main, or at least one of the main police unions, the ones that are constantly lobbying the government for more police powers, less accountability, more use of weapons, etc. And Alliance Police, right in the midst of, I think, the first night or the second night of the uprisings, Alliance spoke in terms that, honestly, it was the most primitive racist language you could come up [with] from 19th century colonial France, literally.

I’m going to give you a few excerpts: “In the face of these barbaric hordes, we must impose our will. This is not a time for union action, but for a fight against the undesirables. We are at war, and the government better take note.”

We have to put this in light of how Macron has shut down several NGOs just for challenging racism, Islamophobia, or for representing Muslim communities. They didn’t even challenge the Republic or the government. They were just about organizing specific segments of the population.

This union published this press release and nothing was discussed about it, at least in mainstream media. They were only upset about many representatives coming from the left refusing to dismiss the uprisings, and calling out police brutality before the events and after. And I think Emmanuel Macron was in favor of it. We have to remember that he refused to call out Marine Le Pen for representing a party that was set up by admirers of the Vichy regime; the Vichy regime which had welcomed and collaborated with the Nazis. The cofounders of the Front National — now National Rally — are notorious Vichyites.

And the fact that the current Minister of Interior, Gérald Darmanin, actually called out Marine Le Pen, quote-unquote, saying, “You are too soft on Islam, not Islamism, and I mean, my words, Islam,” end of quote.

So, yes, the far right and the right have been fanning the flames of identity politics, and Emmanuel Macron has not done anything to challenge that, unfortunately.

MH: You know, the French police have a very checkered history, to put it lightly, in terms of brutality against protests, particularly against minorities in France. And there’s one particular incident which I find very shocking, and I think a lot of Americans don’t know about, which is the 1961 massacre of French Algerians that took place by the French police.

Can you talk a bit about that incident, and the legacy of it? And it seems to me that the legacy of it is very lightly acknowledged in France at all, given the scale of what took place.

YL: Well, first, the 17th of October, 1961, massacre had actually been forgotten by mainstream politics for decades, nobody ever spoke about it. But when Maurice Papon, the orchestrator of this massacre, was being tried for his role in the deportation of Jews — I will come back to that in a second — then people started mentioning, oh yeah, you know, on the 17^th of October 1961, Maurice Papon had ordered the killing of peaceful unarmed Algerian demonstrators in Paris for daring to demonstrate in favor of Algerian independence.

So, we had a rally organized, actually, out of Nanterre, where Nahel is from … what a coincidence. We had demonstrators crossing the bridge towards Paris and, as they were marching with their flags, etc., towards the capital city, the police was sent to crush them. Statistics put the number of victims at around 300 people getting killed in one night. Bodies piled so much that the police dumped them in the Seine River, and no one in Paris actually stood between the police and these Algerians.

But the person who orchestrated this massacre, Maurice Papon, one could beg the question: Where is this guy coming from and who allowed him to do that? Well, first I’m going to remind [listeners of] the genesis of our modern day police in France.

The police as we know it today, the Police Nationale, centralized in Paris under the direct authority of the Ministry of Interior, was founded on the 23rd of April, 1941. The decree that signed the foundation of this police is Philippe Pétain, the famous white dude with a white mustache, who shook Hitler’s hand and collaborated with him.

The first — between 15 quotation marks — accomplishments of the French police under the leadership of a dark ideologue called René Bousquet. René Bousquet, heading the police, went to the SS in France, their head being Carl Oberg, and told him, the police can be of great help. His first accomplishment in 1942 was the rounding up of Jews in the Vel’ d’Hiv circus and handing them over to Nazi Germany.

After that episode in 1945, the police was never purged. That’s the taboo in France, and that’s why we never celebrate the birth of the French police. No one was sacked, no one was held accountable, the police was never purged. And, among the people who rounded Jews in the southwest of France, Maurice Papon was kept in place, found himself heading the police in Paris, and then, of course, if you’ve been OK with deporting thousands of innocents because they are Jews, it won’t be a problem to kill Algerians by the hundreds, especially in the midst of the conflict in Algeria.

I had a heated debate a couple of days ago on TRT World with a conservative columnist, because she couldn’t make the connection between today’s violence with the genesis of the police. Well, it’s in direct continuity. If you don’t purge an institution [of] its fascist elements, and you allow this ideology to be passed on from one generation to the other, so much so that the head of the police in Paris, in the midst of the Yellow Vest Movement, was called Didier Lallement. Didier Lallement was called a Nazi, a Nazi, by former Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who also was a conservative under Jacques Chirac.

So, we cannot come today and say, where is this coming from, without taking a look at the deeper and darker history of the police, and seeing that the French Republic has always been OK with this type of police, and never once tried to reform it, to say the least, and turn it into a force to protect and serve. The police today, especially under Macron, is there to protect the regime, and that is why Macron will never challenge the police.

MH: So, Yasser, you’ve been documenting and observing these fault lines in French society for some time, institutionally, culturally, politically. You wrote last year an article which is quite prescient about this issue of security laws and their abuse by the police, that, “To truly reform the police, it is clear that the entire French Republic must be reformed in the process.”

Can you tell me what you meant by that, in terms of the scale and type of reforms that would need to be seen? And how could the French Republic move in a direction such that these expressions of pent-up frustration, anger, don’t explode every few years, as they are at the present?

YL: Well, I saw this coming with the state of emergency, when the government of Francois Hollande passed the state of emergency after the November 13th attack in 2015. And, during those two weeks, hundreds of raids were carried against Muslim homes, Muslim places of worship, Muslim businesses. I was in the field back then, visiting families and documenting all the brutal raids, most of which were warrantless, because the state of emergency allows the police to do so.

But with the passing of the state of emergency into law — which made it permanent, which means the police can raid any house without any search warrant — the passing of the law on mass surveillance in 2014, just a couple of years after these total revelations. Instead of acknowledging the dangers of mass surveillance, the French government passed a law to allow mass surveillance, among other things, demand that service providers send all your browsing and connection and downloading data to the government.

This, of course, spelled no good news. So, you have these massive powers being given to the executive branch of power, the weakening of any checks and balances. A police that has become heavily armed at disproportionate levels, minorities being used as scapegoats, and the banlieue as laboratories for repression. You also have a rise in poverty and anger among the working class.

To me, it was obvious: the regime is becoming scared of the people. They needed a scapegoat to justify the passing of these measures. Had the government said, we are going to pass these extreme measures against the majority of the population, all French people would have said, hell to the no. But, when you pass these laws against Blacks and Arabs and Muslims, those who have almost no representation in the halls of power, no representation in the media, many people felt, well, it’s OK. Like, you know, who cares about these people? These laws now are being used against the Yellow Vest Movement, the pension reform, etc.

The fact that I spoke of the police as unreformable, if the word exists in English, is because the police, as we know it today, is only the most vulgar reflection of how French institutions are authoritarians, over centralized, and gangrened with the racist legacy of colonization.

We have to remember that the birth of the police was in 1941 under Vichy, but we can’t reform this police unless we adopt a new republic. Why? Because, since the French Revolution in 1789, we have had, so far, five iterations of the republic, which means the passing of five republics based on a new constitution. The constitution under which we live today was passed in 1958, and it was passed through a coup d’etat in favor of Charles de Gaulle, who wanted to come back to power.

This constitution is not really a constitution for a democratic republic; it’s more a compromise between a monarchy and a republic. The president, yes, gets elected by universal suffrage. However, the president chooses his prime minister, can dismiss the national assembly, can pass bills without going before a parliament. He’s legally unaccountable. He’s head of the army, etc., etc.

So, at the same time, we have a justice system that is not fully independent. The prosecutor, for example, is designated by the Ministry of Justice, part of the executive branch of power. So, here, already, we don’t have a separation of powers. And you add to it that the National Assembly especially is not capable of keeping the government in check. Why? Because today, the National Assembly, who are MPs who vote and debate — or supposedly debate — legislation, are unable today to challenge the government. Another example that I spoke about earlier: they couldn’t vote for or against the pension reform, because the president said “no vote,” right?

So, with these weak checks and balances, when we have an over centralized republic, when we have no separation between the three branches of power, and, on top of it — the fourth power being the media — is 90 percent [in] the hands of about ten billionaires: How in the world can we expect to have a functioning democracy, where a president gets elected and does whatever he wants as long as he remains in power? A weak parliament that just passes legislation at the will of the president, and not just a system to at least keep the government under control.

So, that’s why the police cannot be reformed unless we reform the republic.

MH: Yasser, thanks so much for joining us today.

YL: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

MH: That was Yasser Louati, a French political analyst and human rights advocate based in Paris. He is currently the head of the Committee for Justice and Liberties. A transnational human rights and civil liberties organization.

[Intercepted end-show theme music.]

And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan Mixed Our show. And this episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted. And definitely do leave us a rating or review, it helps to find us.

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Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post A Teen Slain by Police Uproots France appeared first on The Intercept.

The post Notice 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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With Ukraine’s Cluster Bombs Killing Its Own Citizens, Biden Readies Order to Send More

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.

For years, Kapustin has maintained public links with two notorious American neo-Nazis: Robert Rundo, the founder of the street fighting gang Rise Above Movement, and Christopher Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine and leader of a group that terrorizes drag events in the U.S.

While Kapustin has been a regular fixture for years among European extremists, he gained minor popularity among American neo-Nazis when he started co-hosting a podcast in January 2021 with Rundo, a Charlottesville riot defendant now facing extradition to the U.S. from Romania. On the multiepisode show, the two men — avid mixed martial artists — discussed the benefits of “active clubs,” which are essentially fascist fight clubs that have sprouted up all over the U.S.

But Kapustin, who also goes by his call sign “White Rex” (his personal MMA brand) or uses the last name “Nikitin,” has contacts that go further into stateside neo-Nazism.

In July 2021, he also appeared in another two-and-a-half hour podcast with Pohlhaus, a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps who only months ago, with a revolver strapped to his hip, led his so-called Blood Tribe in a protest of a drag event outside Akron, Ohio. The relationship appears ongoing: Pohlhaus has told his followers on the Telegram app in recent weeks that he wants to help his friend “Denis” in Ukraine and plans to travel there to establish a neo-Nazi pipeline of volunteer soldiers to the cause.

In the wake of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s regime weeks ago, Kapustin illustrates just how radical some of the faces of armed opposition to Putin really are. Following RVC’s cross-border operations, which featured American-supplied Humvees and other armored vehicles, reports rightly pointed out that the RVC and its politics could provide a boost for Russian propagandists who frequently accuse Kyiv of being a kind of Fourth Reich.

Mostly composed of Russian ultranationalists with the stated goal of overthrowing the Russian Federation, the RVC is undeniably affiliated with the far right, with members often seen wearing patches with neo-Nazi symbols. Kapustin is also a known figure to German authorities, who allegedly had him banned from the European Union’s Schengen area for his violent neo-Nazism and connections to the extremist MMA scene. The Ukrainian government, for its part, has repeatedly maintained that the RVC isn’t officially part of its war effort or under its control, though the government admitted that it cooperates with and feeds intelligence to the controversial Russian partisans.

Pohlhaus, known to his followers as “The Hammer,” has recently emerged as one of the more public and militant figures in the world of online American neo-Nazism. With confirmed links to Riley June Williams, the January 6 attacker who allegedly stole a laptop from Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office, Pohlhaus moved to Maine last year and began building a property for an all-white community where his Blood Tribe could “train.”

This year, Pohlhaus and his group made headlines for twice showing up to drag events in Ohio and allying with NSC-131, another underground neo-Nazi group based in New England that recently threatened a New Hampshire drag story hour. At his last Ohio protest in April at a fundraiser for LGBTQ+ youth in Columbus, Pohlhaus, who never saw combat as a Marine, paced with his masked followers as they waved a swastika flag and did the “Sieg Heil” salute to eventgoers.

Members of the Russian Volunteer Corps pose for photos during a blood donation event for the Ukrainian army in downtown Kyiv on June 3, 2023.

Photo: Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

Anti-Putin Fighters

Though he previously showed little interest in the war in Ukraine, Pohlhaus told his followers this week, in both an interview on an underground neo-Nazi podcast and in a lengthy message on Telegram, that now was the time to join the war and help neo-Nazis like Kapustin.

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“I will be going personally with a squad of mostly vets who have committed to the task,” Pohlhaus wrote in a message viewed thousands of times on Telegram, explaining that “if everything goes correctly,” he would become the “[neo-Nazi] liaison for the anglosphere in Ukraine.”

In almost daily statements, Kapustin and the RVC publicly ask for recruits with military experience to “join the corps” and provide forms for direct contact to their recruiters through Telegram. (The RVC press account on Telegram has not replied to The Intercept’s requests for comment about links with Pohlhaus and the Blood Tribe.)

“We see the glorious opportunity in this conflict,” said Pohlhaus. “Because the American military is staying out of it, we get the chance to participate [under] OUR banner.”

Though Pohlhaus has been known for grandstanding online, he is an extremist who translates his words into activism: He once organized a national counterprotest on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and explained how to hypothetically use sniper attacks on the food supply chain in a streamed video.

He told The Intercept that his pledge to join the fighting in Ukraine is serious.

“I love Denis and I want to do everything I can to help him succeed,” Pohlhaus wrote in a text message. “It’s going to probably take us a couple years to be there equipped.”

He claimed that he will visit Ukraine to assess the situation firsthand.

“Of course,” he said. “A vacation.”

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Whether Pohlhaus would be allowed entry into Ukraine is another question. With an ongoing civilian flight ban in Ukraine, Pohlhaus would have to enter the country through bordering nations like Poland, the usual border of entry for foreign volunteers, or Romania, a country that has recently shown a willingness to arrest extremists from abroad. Both countries are in the NATO alliance, with policing and intelligence apparatuses that cooperate with U.S. authorities.

The Ukrainians, for their part, have shown very little interest in allowing neo-Nazis like Pohlhaus to join their war effort. As far back as October 2020, Ukrainian intelligence made a public show of deporting two American members of neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division. Both men (one of whom was a Marine dropout) were attempting to join elements of the country’s military efforts in the eastern Donbas region, which at the time was the site of trench warfare with pro-Russian forces.

Kacper Rekawek, an expert on the flow of foreign fighters to the war in Ukraine and a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project, says that while there are neo-Nazis from abroad in Ukraine, the problem shouldn’t be overblown.

“It’s certainly not as bad as the Russian propaganda wants us to believe,” said Rekawek. “The caution is warranted, and what I see is there is excitement amongst those far-right types, online and offline.”

According to Rekawek, there are very few neo-Nazi foreigners fighting on the front lines, while groups like CasaPound in Italy, another fascist and nationalist political organization, have sent “observation” missions to Ukraine.

“Some of them take some supplies, they’re usually medical, or some tactical gear, but of course, not weapons,” Rekawek said, who added that “talk of a pipeline” of neo-Nazis into the war is exaggerated. While groups like the RVC have called for new recruits, non-Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking foreigners who once joined the war in droves, regardless of political ideology, don’t typically last on the front lines, nor can they be trained as effectively for combat.

“The capacity of these guys to offer meaningful change on the front lines is limited,” said Rekawek, referring to far-right travelers operating within the Ukrainian war effort. “These organizations are no charity, they’re not there to train you.”

There were initial fears among counterterrorism experts that the war in Ukraine could potentially attract a global movement of neo-Nazis, leading to the formation of an Islamic State-like network. But a year and half into the war, most authorities acknowledge that Ukraine hasn’t yet become a destination for the far-right movement.

Nonetheless, American law enforcement officials have voiced serious concerns about people like Pohlhaus traveling to Ukraine, fighting in the war, and then coming home. At the outset of the invasion in March 2022, an internal Customs and Border Protection report warned that American extremists interrogated at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York before their departure flights were on their way to “join the conflict.” The bulletin openly wondered what kinds of skills those types of “foreign fighters” could learn in Ukraine that could then “proliferate” in “U.S.-based militia and white nationalist groups” once they returned home.

Whatever the outcome of his latest call to volunteer for the conflict, or if it’s simply a bluff to attract more funding to his personal cause, Pohlhaus acknowledged it could be a while before the Blood Tribe appears in Ukraine. He told his followers that it would take time to pool resources and even vehicles in order to be autonomous on the front lines.

“At the end of the day, this is very much Ukraine’s issue,” said Rekawek, who thinks that far-right elements within the Ukrainian military structure could be a problem when it comes to European Union or NATO membership for the country. “It’s up to Ukraine to call the shots. And it will certainly be an issue, but further down the line.”

The post Russian Militia Has Links to American Neo-Nazi and Anti-Trans Figures appeared first on The Intercept.

The news made Rodrick’s remarks at the vigil even more urgent. “My brother was convicted of the murder and rape of Stacey Stites, and since that time, we’ve been living a nightmare that we cannot wake up from,” he said. “The reason I say it’s a nightmare is because the truth is out there, but nobody is willing to look at it or to pay attention to it. Evidence is out there that proves my brother’s innocence, but nobody is admitting it into the court.”

“I say, let all the evidence be looked at and heard and give him a new trial,” he continued. “We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

“We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

Reed, who is Black, was sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stites, who was white. Her body was found on the side of a country road just outside Bastrop, Texas. Sperm recovered from Stites’s body was eventually matched to Reed, which prosecutors called the “Cinderella’s slipper” linking Reed to her death. But Reed insisted he was innocent; he said he’d been having an affair with Stites, who was engaged to a white police officer named Jimmy Fennell. Fennell denied the possibility of an affair, claiming that he and Stites had a loving relationship and she didn’t know anyone named Rodney Reed. Fennell was questioned several times but was never seriously considered as a suspect.

In the decades since Reed’s conviction, a host of evidence has emerged showing that Reed and Stites did know each other and Fennell was aware of their dalliance, dismantling the state’s theory of the crime. Evidence of Fennell’s propensity for violence has also surfaced; in 2008, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman while on duty and in uniform. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it. Meanwhile, the courts — most notably the CCA — have shrugged their shoulders and rebuffed Reed’s efforts to win a new trial.

In a pair of rulings issued on June 28, the CCA again denied Reed’s pleas, which the court has now done at least a dozen times since 2000. Each time, the court has flatly rejected the mounting evidence of Reed’s innocence, often in ways that mischaracterize the evidence or interpret the law to make the revelations meaningless. In the most recent rulings, the court trivializes nearly every detail that casts doubt on Reed’s guilt.

I have covered Reed’s case for more than 20 years and have repeatedly fielded questions from people bewildered by the CCA’s position. Dozens of witnesses have come forward with information that supports Reed’s account and points to Fennell as the more likely killer, including friends of Stites’s and Fennell’s law enforcement colleagues. How can the court discount every single one of these witnesses? There are no good answers. The conclusion I’ve come to is one that is beyond the law and something that veterans of Texas’s criminal legal system have grumbled about for years: There are just some defendants the CCA judges don’t like and will steadfastly rule against, regardless of the evidence that might support their bid for a new trial or release. Rodney Reed is one of them.

A Secret Affair

When Reed was first questioned by police in connection with the murder, he denied knowing Stites aside from what he’d seen in the news. It was only after his DNA came back as a match that he relented and said the two had been having a clandestine affair. Although the CCA has pointed to Reed’s initial denial as undercutting his claim of an affair, which they deemed “manufactured and implausible,” it isn’t hard to see why Reed might have withheld this information: Even in mid-1990s Texas, a Black man dating a young white woman engaged to a white cop would have been a risky endeavor.

With the DNA match to Reed, the state devised a theory of the crime. Stites left the apartment she shared with Fennell around 3 a.m. to make the 30-mile commute to the grocery store in Bastrop where she worked the early shift stocking produce, only to be waylaid by Reed. Traveling on foot, Reed somehow stopped Stites’s vehicle, overpowered her, then raped and strangled her with her own belt — all presumably inside the truck — before dumping Stites’s body on the roadside and leaving the truck in the Bastrop High School parking lot.

Prosecutors didn’t offer any conclusive evidence demonstrating how all of this might have taken place. And the timeline itself was predicated on information that Fennell provided to investigators. He wasn’t awake when Stites left that morning, he told them, but he filled them in on what he said was her normal routine. Inexplicably, the cops failed to search the apartment the couple shared, even though it was the last place Stites was known to be alive. Days after the murder, the state released the truck to Fennell, who immediately got rid of it.

Although Reed’s trial attorneys promised to deliver evidence of his alleged affair with Stites, they fell far short, calling to the stand only a few witnesses, each with some connection to the Reed family. The defense was hamstrung by the fact that they had done little work to prepare for the capital trial. Records reflect that they only began working on the case in earnest a month before jury selection — hardly enough time to conduct their own investigation into who might have known what. They repeatedly asked the judge to postpone the trial but were denied.

In contrast, prosecutors told the jury that they had interviewed anyone with a plausible connection to the case — including all of Stites’s co-workers at the grocery store — and found no one who could back up Reed’s story. Investigators talked to “every boyfriend, every co-worker, every friend, every family member, everybody,” prosecutor Lisa Tanner told the jury. “Nobody connects them. Nobody. Folks, this secret affair was so secret that Stacey Stites didn’t know about it. That’s how secret it was — because it didn’t exist.”

Rodney Reed waves to his family in Bastrop County District Court on Oct. 13, 2017, in Bastrop, Texas.

Photo: Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman via AP

Straining Credulity

It wasn’t long after Reed was convicted that other witnesses started coming forward. Not only did they confirm a preexisting relationship between Reed and Stites, but they also shared stories about Fennell’s jealousy, racism, and volatility — indications that he knew about the relationship and was furious about it. Every time, however, the CCA rejected the evidence.

There was a woman named Mary Blackwell, for example, who said she’d been in a law enforcement training class with Fennell. In an affidavit she provided to Reed’s lawyers in 2004, she said she heard Fennell tell a fellow trainee that if he ever caught his fiancée cheating on him, he’d strangle her with a belt. Texas prosecutors pointed out that no one else had admitted to hearing the comment, leading the CCA to discredit Blackwell’s story.

More recently, the CCA’s reflexive dismissal of witnesses whose claims call the state’s case into question has bordered on the absurd. In 2021, a judge in Bastrop presided over a nine-day evidentiary hearing that featured dozens of witnesses, including friends of Stites’s from work, members of law enforcement who knew Fennell, and former inmates imprisoned with Fennell. The witnesses testified that Stites and Reed had been involved in a relationship, that Fennell knew about it, and even that Fennell had confessed to Stites’s murder. None of these witnesses had any connection to Reed or his family.

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Among the witnesses was a co-worker of Stites’s named Suzan Hugen, who testified that she and Stites were friends. She said she was aware that the relationship between Fennell and Stites was off; among other things, she’d seen finger-shaped bruises on Stites’s arms, which the younger woman tried to hide. Hugen also said that Stites had introduced her to her friend “Rodney.”

Hugen provided this information to the state well before Reed’s 1998 trial, yet it was never turned over to Reed’s attorneys. In fact, it wasn’t until just before the evidentiary hearing commenced in 2021 that the state finally made Hugen’s information available, along with statements from three other individuals that suggested other grocery store employees might also have known about a relationship between Stites and Reed. The decades-late disclosures prompted Reed’s lawyers to file an appeal claiming that the state had violated its obligation to turn over exculpatory information to the defense as required by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Brady v. Maryland.

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Despite overwhelming testimony in favor of Reed, the judge presiding over the evidentiary hearing fully embraced the state’s position that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible. Judge J.D. Langley signed off on findings written by the state, concluding that only the state’s witnesses, including Fennell, were reliable.

Reed’s attorneys challenged the ruling before the CCA, arguing that Langley had abdicated his responsibility to make independent determinations about witness credibility by simply adopting the state’s proposed conclusions, which were rife with errors and factual misrepresentations about various testimony, including Hugen’s.

In one of the rulings released on June 28, nearly two years after the evidentiary hearing concluded, the CCA lamented the errors — it listed several in a footnote with the caveat that the list was “by no means exhaustive” — before undertaking its own assessment of the witnesses’ credibility. Ultimately, the CCA concluded, as Langley had, that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible, save for one man whose father lived in the apartment just below Stites and Fennell, who reported hearing violent arguing on multiple occasions.

The man, Brent Sappington, said that he and his father, Bill, who has since died, approached a prosecutor the family knew at church to report what they’d heard. According to Sappington, the prosecutor, a man named Ted Weems, told them to hush up because investigators already had their suspect. Weems testified that Bill had reported the fighting upstairs, but he denied discouraging the family from coming forward. The CCA credited Sappington only to the extent that Weems “corroborated” his account; where the stories diverged, the CCA concluded that Weems was the one telling the truth. Sappington explained that he was initially hesitant to come forward because Fennell was in law enforcement and he feared his story would be dismissed, an explanation the court found to be an excuse that “strains credulity.”

Several other witnesses provided similar reasoning, saying they didn’t come forward sooner because they feared retaliation from a law enforcement community that they expected would protect its own. The court repeatedly found this explanation unconvincing. Other witnesses, who said they didn’t realize that what they knew was important, were dismissed as likely fabricating their recollections. While it’s true that memory can be tricky, the CCA failed to engage with any nuance and instead deployed a false-memory blanket across multiple witness statements as a one-stop discrediting device.

“For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed.”

Where Hugen was concerned, the court stated that the account she offered was “unremarkable, even mundane.” The judges also took aim at her recollection about seeing bruises on Stites’s arms, concluding that jurors would not have believed that since no bruises were found on Stites’s arms during the autopsy.

As for the state’s alleged Brady violation, the CCA concluded that the information Hugen had was “immaterial” since one witness had previously testified at Reed’s trial that she’d seen Reed and Stites together at the grocery store. Hugen’s account wouldn’t have added anything, the judges wrote, despite the fact that Hugen had no connection to the Reed family, and had her information been disclosed in a timely way, it would have offered Reed’s defense another avenue of investigation.

The court took the position that other witness statements were immaterial because the state had deemed them dead leads. In other words, if Texas prosecutors decided that the statements were meaningless, then they had no obligation to turn them over — a bastardization of Brady’s disclosure requirement that would afford prosecutors total discretion over what evidence is released to the defense. Although prosecutors cited their Brady obligation in releasing the witness information to Reed’s attorneys in 2021, the CCA’s opinion seemed to endorse the notion that it would have been perfectly fine for them to leave the information forever buried in the state’s files.

“The Whole World Will Know”

That the CCA would rule against Reed is neither new nor surprising — nor is the judges playing mental gymnastics with legal standards to get them to their desired result.

For decades, the court has been a myopic, hegemonic institution, composed largely of middle-aged, white, male jurists who were former prosecutors — a mix of factors that has created an insulated worldview within the court’s chambers in Austin. When the current presiding judge, Sharon Keller, first ran for a seat on the court back in 1994, she described herself as “pro-prosecutor,” meaning, she told a reporter, “seeing legal issues from the perspective of the state instead of the perspective of the defense.” That view has dominated the CCA bench for the last 30 years and reflects its approach to the Reed case.

The judge who wrote the June 28 opinions was its newest member, Jesse McClure, a former prosecutor-turned-Houston district court judge who was appointed to the bench in December 2020 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Notably, he is only the third Black CCA judge since the court’s establishment in 1891. One judge, Scott Walker, dissented from the rulings but did not explain why.

Reed’s lawyers are frustrated. “For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed. He is an innocent man,” Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project, said in a statement. “Texans should be outraged that prosecutorial misconduct is going unchecked, and the state is being given a license to cheat — even if it means sending an innocent man to his death.”

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Pucher said Reed’s legal team is considering all its options, including asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. Meanwhile, a separate legal effort to obtain DNA testing on key crime scene evidence, including lengths of the braided belt used to strangle Stites, is ongoing. Texas has long fought Reed’s bid to have the evidence tested; predictably, the CCA sided with the state, offering a novel interpretation of Texas’s DNA testing law to block Reed’s access. The dispute made it to the Supreme Court on a technical point, and this spring, the court ruled in Reed’s favor, sending the case back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rodrick is frustrated by the CCA’s continued hostility toward his brother, but he has vowed to keep fighting. At the vigil in Washington, D.C., he recalled something that his mother, Sandra, told the court back in 1998 when Reed was convicted. “She said, ‘You may try to take my son’s life, but I guarantee you the whole world will know about it.’”

The post Dozens of Witnesses Say Rodney Reed Is Innocent. Texas Court Says They’re All Wrong. 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.

Centrist and right-wing economists continue to advocate for laying off workers and engineering a recession to address inflation. But why not set price controls instead? This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by James K. Galbraith, a professor of government and business relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Galbraith has an extensive history of working in government, including as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and an economist for the House Banking Committee. Galbraith and Grim discuss the implementation of price controls by the U.S. government, how it brings down prices, how the Biden administration has used it and could use it more, and how Galbraith’s father — economist and politician John Kenneth Galbraith — was instrumental in setting price controls during World War II.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to an on-the-road edition of Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

At the very end of 2021, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Isabella Weber published a short op-ed in The Guardian that surprised her, and everybody else, by going viral in a very bad way.

The leading lights in her field annihilated her for it. Paul Krugman called her “truly stupid,” and lesser-known figures called her much worse. Her crime had been to strike at the heart of free market economic orthodoxy. Weber suggested policymakers should learn from the past and do something directly about soaring prices, rather than trying roundabout solutions like slowing down the entire economy and engineering layoffs.

But the idea that the government could ever have any direct say in setting prices raises profound questions about the nature of the economy, and whether it falls properly within the sphere of democratic control, or whether it lives outside of it, like some other worldly force that we can only communicate within indirectly. Yet, that’s not how it really works.

So, when Weber raised the example of American policy in the 1940s — which was guided by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith — she had to be ridiculed, rather than treated seriously. During the Roosevelt administration, Galbraith was a top official at the Office of Price Administration, which was in charge of, yes, setting prices.

The idea Weber put forward was anything but radical. Here’s what she wrote in The Guardian: “Today, economists are divided into two camps on the inflation question: Team Transitory argues we ought to not worry about inflation, since it will soon go away. Team Stagflation urges for fiscal restraint and a raise in interest rates.

“But there is a third option,” she writes. “The government could target the specific prices that drive inflation instead of moving to austerity, which risks a recession. To use a metaphor,” she went on, “if your house is on fire, you would not want to wait until the fire eventually dies out. Neither do you wish to destroy the house by flooding it. A skillful firefighter extinguishes the fire where it is burning to prevent contagion and save the house. History teaches us that such a targeted approach is also possible for price increases.”

Now, it’s been quite a journey for Weber since that pile on. Much of what she argued has been proven to be correct and, two years later, she’s now a sought-after advisor by major industrial economies.

She was recently the subject of a profile by reporter Zach Carter in The New Yorker, and her critics, meanwhile, have been made to look foolish. Larry Summers, for instance, has consistently attacked the Biden administration for too much spending, which he says caused inflation, arguing that the Fed needed to heavily raise interest rates in order to get unemployment up to something like six percent.

Here’s one appearance he made on Bloomberg, where he called for millions of people to be thrown out of work. Now, since this is an audio-only podcast, you can’t see that he did this interview while literally on an island getaway, with the ocean as his backdrop.

Bloomberg Host: Doesn’t the Fed, Larry, have to push people out of jobs? I mean, right now, everyone is earning money, and able to pay up as much as they need to for goods and services. But, in order to bring inflation down, they’re going to need unemployment at four-and-a-half, five, five-and-a-half percent. I don’t know what NAIRU is right now, but maybe you have a view. Is that going to bring a political backlash?

Larry Summers: Matt, my guess is that things are much less good than the Fed has supposed. My estimate would be that the NAIRU is now near five percent. I don’t see how you can fail to think that the NAIRU has risen substantially when you look at how much there’s been an increase in vacancies at a given unemployment rate — what economists call “the beverage curve” — when you look at the big increases in quit rates that we’ve seen, when you look at wage behavior.

And I add all that up and I see a difficult situation where I think that, to start bringing down inflation, we’re going to need to get above the NAIRU; that’s probably somewhere in the five percent range. And I think we do have to achieve some meaningful amount of disinflation. So, I’ve said that I’d be surprised if we get to the two percent inflation target without an unemployment rate that approaches or exceeds six percent.

RG: There’s a tiny bit of jargon in this clip, but it should be understandable. When the Bloomberg host refers to NAIRU, he’s talking about the concept of the non-accelerated inflation rate of unemployment. That means that if unemployment is below what we think is the NAIRU, we will have inflation. The theory goes, if the true NAIRU is five percent, then we have to have at least five percent unemployment to avoid inflation.

The other jargon in there is the target of two percent inflation. That means that the Fed is trying to manage the inflation rate, so it hovers right at two percent — not below and not above — and the Larry Summers tool to get there is to try to guess what the NAIRU is and push unemployment above that level.

It just so happens that his guess was wildly too high of a number, but that’s OK for big corporations who benefit from higher unemployment, because they can then pay lower wages, hire more easily, and break unions. So, what he’s framing here as an academic dispute is, in reality, class war. The unemployment rate today is just 3.7 percent, yet inflation is falling fast. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now, one economist who did defend Weber at the time was the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, economist James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin. I first met James back when he was advising House Democrats on how to respond to the great financial crisis in 2008. They didn’t take his advice, and we all paid the price.

Now, as some of you already know, during the pandemic, when they closed DC schools, we moved our family up to southern Vermont where public schools were still open in person. It was the best decision we could have made. And, coincidentally, it turned out that James was, by Vermont standards, one of our neighbors.

We came back up here for a visit recently, and recorded the episode on his porch at the home he grew up in, and where his dad wrote some of the most influential economic works of the mid-20^th century. Galbraith’s ideas became the target of the neoliberal counterrevolution launched by Milton Friedman, which is sadly, in many ways, still dominant today.

Here’s my interview with James Galbraith.

RG: How did your father wind up here? I mean, you told me this story once, but I’d love to hear that again.

James Galbraith: Well, this was 1947, and he was just returning, I guess, to Cambridge at that point — no, he was still in New York. They were looking for a summer place, came up to, to Newfane, were staying at the inn which, half of the building was also the jail. And as far as I know, he wandered up the hill on the basis of somebody’s recommendation, saw this house and property, and bought it, without having notified my mother that he was [doing that].

RG: As if he’d gone off to get eggs.

JG: Sort of, yes. And my mother came up and eventually looked at it. She noted in her diary that it was a Charles Adams landscape, because the meadows were very unlike what you see now. They were basically scrub, the forests were far from being mature, the farming had been abandoned, I don’t know, some decades previously. But they were not, the forests were not fully grown up.

And, over the front meadow, you could see the beavers had arrived relatively recently, and so the beaver swamps were full of dead trees.

RG: And when was this house first built?

JG: Parts of it were built in — the year we have is 1776, which I think is accurate. But then it was expanded, until the last part, which is the kitchen, was probably built in the 1920s.

RG: You had mentioned it ties into Revolutionary War history. Correct me if I’m wrong, it was something about the way that, when they cleared some of these forests for farmland, it produced a population boom, that then was hitting its stride right around the time that…

JG: Yes, it’s interesting. We’re on a hilltop here, and the original settlement was on the hilltop, so this is part of the original settlement. At the time, the forests were entirely cleared, and they were cleared from the hills down because the trees were thinner. The soil was very bad, but the trees were thinner; those two things went together. But it made it possible to clear out a patch and get a crop in, [in] a short period of time, the short season.

And as the settlements, which are all around here — you see stone fences, and old roads, and cellar holes that have long since been abandoned — but as the settlements became denser, they moved down the hills, and encountered thicker trees, but better soil. And the result of that was, effectively, increasing returns in agriculture, and that meant that the population expanded very rapidly.

So, that explains why you had a crowd of teenagers that were available in 1777 to go off.

RG: The Green Mountain Boys.

JG: The Green Mountain Boys, yeah.

RG: Well, thanks for inviting Deconstructed out here for this road show, it’s very much appreciated. And it couldn’t be a more appropriate place, because we want to talk about the history of economics, economic thought, particularly as it relates to your criticism of the way that economists had been looking at inflation during the pandemic and in its aftermath.

And they seem to have been, rather humiliatingly, been shown to be wrong in their approach.

JG: Not for the first time, but yes.

RG: Not for the first time. Pretty recently you had people like Larry Summers and Jason Furman saying, we’re going to need years and years and years of high unemployment in order to tame inflation. That did not prove to be the case. So, what did they get wrong from your perspective? What’s the most important thing that they missed?

JG: Well, I’m a contemporary of Larry Summers, and when we were coming through graduate school, the predominant view of inflation was essentially that created and published in 1960 by Larry’s uncle Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow. It was a relationship between inflation and unemployment. It basically said, the problem of inflation is a problem of excessively tight labor markets and excessive demand. And then, that view was modified in the 1970s to become even more rigid to the idea that the economy was an extremely unstable thing and, if the unemployment rate ever got a little bit too low, inflation would tend to take off and accelerate.

So, these views became deeply embedded amongst academic orthodox economists, and in the policy space as well. They tended to override the alternative tradition, which looks at specific effects on costs, and particularly the shocks, the effects of wars, the effects of energy shocks that tend to go through the price system. So you have these two competing views, but the one which was based on, let’s call it, macroeconomics, was the one that my generation of economists absorbed.

And that’s what I think was reflected in the way in which Larry Summers, Jason Furman, Ken Rogoff, and others, attacked this particular problem. So, they saw an increase in prices, which basically originated in 2021 and, preceding that, there had been a substantial transfer of funds from the government to the household sector. And they lined up these two things and said, OK, we now have a problem of accelerating and persistent inflation. And that just turned out to be a description of events based on a false premise.

What was actually happening was a series of, if you want to call them “shocks” to the price structure, in energy, in the supply chain, plus some things which are essentially statistical artifacts. And those things, although they take some time to work through the system, do work through the system, and they don’t produce a sustained inflationary process.

That doesn’t mean that the shocks can’t happen again; that’s possible. But it does mean that the analysis that this was being driven by the Covid income support programs, or by the infrastructure investment programs that were enacted early in the Biden administration, is not an accurate analysis.

RG: And so, if that’s not an accurate analysis, that raises some interesting questions about what is.

There’s a recent article by a mutual friend of ours, Zach Carter, in The New Yorker about the economist Isabella Weber and her efforts to get people to think about price and price controls. In the middle of all of this analysis — I guess it was 2021 or so — she suggested gently in public that maybe one solution ought to be, let’s think about controlling prices. If we don’t like what prices are doing, let’s control prices. And she was tarred and feathered, academically abused in ways that are just stunning to people, I think, who are outside the profession.

Paul Krugman, I think, has since apologized but, you know, practically wished death on her. Just an extraordinarily bizarre and over-the-top response. What was your reaction at that time, and what point is she making?

JG: Well, first of all, let me say a word about it: Isabella Weber is quite an extraordinary young economist. She’s German, originally. Her expertise, the field in which she made her breakthrough contribution is actually the policy debates in China in the 1980s, essentially. She did a great deal of field work, which is very unusual in economics, to develop a deep understanding of why China had succeeded by avoiding the mistakes that were made, for example, in the Russian Federation with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the other post-Soviet states.

Part of her analysis drew on the fact, first of all, that, in the long history of China, the stabilization of basic prices has been a major source of stability for the state, going back to classical imperial times, thousands of years. And further, in the modern period, and particularly in the early years after Mao, they maintained a system of price discipline, some of which was drawn by their study of the American experience in World War II, something which I also became familiar with in my time, working in China in the 1990s. This, in fact, was a period that Chinese policymakers or policy implementers were very familiar with.

RG: I just want to underline that. So, Chinese reformers, post-Mao, studied U.S. policy during World War II, as they were thinking about…

JG: I think they were familiar with it all the way through. One has to remember that many people who guided Chinese economic development, even in the revolutionary period, came back from the United States. This was something that they had paid especially close attention to.

So all of this suggests that, in a large, very important part of the world, let’s just say the approach to price stabilization was very different from what it was in the United States, and the results were not bad. One might argue, in fact, that the Chinese were too strict on prices, and there’s some interesting stories in Isabella’s book on this. But they, nevertheless, had deployed, let’s just say, strategic oversight over core prices as a continuing part of their policy.

So, it was not a stretch for Isabella to write in The Guardian that the experience of the United States in the Second World War was relevant to what we were going through. This was something she had a very professional, and thorough grasp, of that history, she had studied it very carefully. And so she was, in a sense, an authority, and that’s, again, very rare, because there are very few professional economists in the United States who know anything about this.

So, that, then, to her enormous surprise, generated this extremely vicious reaction. Certainly, Paul Krugman’s attack was really a blow, but there were also many others who joined in the great pile-on, and it showed that she had touched a very raw nerve.

What did I do? I stepped up to try and give her such assistance as I could, both publicly and privately. And, you know, she was able to withstand what was a brutal assault on an untenured professor who’s — she was up for promotion. She has since been promoted, so that issue has resolved. But, certainly, her career was, at least briefly, under a substantial threat.

RG: And her journey from being piled on to the top of the pile is a fascinating one, because she’s now in a position where she’s helping to make policy. But, before we get to that: nobody’s in a better position, really, to talk about that World War II experience than you. Your dad was the leader of implementing this policy.

So, what is it that Weber is looking back to, when she says that we ought to look at American policy in World War II?

JG: Well, at the start of the Second World War, there was an agency called the Office of Price Administration, originally “Price Administration and Civilian Supply,” which my father became the deputy director [of] prices. And that gave him authority, essentially, over every price and wage in the United States.

From May of 1942, this was under something called the General Maximum Price Regulation, and the basic way it worked was that there was a base of price set in March of ’42 and, to go above that price, you had to have the approval of the OPA, which then meant that people had to bring a case to the agency, which rapidly expanded to be about, I think, about 17,000 people. And then they quickly started moving to create schedules, so that they didn’t have to review every case on an ad hoc basis.

And that method for keeping prices under control was reasonably successful. It was replaced in May of 1943 with what was called the “hold-the-line order” that basically froze all prices until the end of the war, and that held up until price controls were abolished in 1946.

So, this was a period in which, given the extraordinary pressure that the wartime demand placed on the economy — total spending, GDP doubled, GNP doubled in the four years, and most of that increase was for things that could not be consumed because it’s military needs. So there was a lot of income that people had that they could not spend and, in order to prevent them from, or discourage them from, hoarding and buying commodities, they had to have confidence that prices were not going to rise, and that’s what OPA provided.

So, it worked in two ways. One was to physically restrain the increase of prices of core commodities, and the other was to give people confidence that, if they bought Series E bonds, Victory bonds at a two percent interest rate, that the purchasing power of those bonds would hold up, so that they would then have something, a financial asset that would serve them into the 1950s and 1960s.

And that was, between those two aspects of the policy, a very successful approach to the most dangerous kind of inflation, which is wartime inflation. [It] tends to be very demoralizing and very destabilizing, particularly if you have some national purpose that needs to be achieved, which is the case in a war.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: At a recent talk, I think it was at the FDR Library?

JG: Yes, I gave a talk on this at the FDR Library.

RG: You mentioned there that another effect that it had — and maybe this wasn’t the intended effect, but it was, to me, a feature of it — that if you are a business owner or an investor and you’re looking to maximize your profits, one way you can do that is by driving up your price and just charging more for your product. If you’re prevented from doing that, then your two options are to increase your productivity and increase your volume, which then produces actual genuine economic activity and a benefit for the society, rather than simply marking up your prices and taking an extra profit margin.

And so, it feels like that has a lot of relevance today, because we’ve heard so much talk about greedflation and its role in driving up prices, but it’s not as if greedflation’s gone away. I would imagine the margins that these businesses are able to capture now, they’re going to try to seize those as long as they possibly can.

And so, what types of price controls are possible now, and can you move through the system, that have a similar function to what happened during the OPA? What parts of it couldn’t be replicated?

You mentioned in your talk that there were these civilian boards, like it was the most democratic kind of economy that you could imagine. That if a business owner wanted to raise their prices, they had to go to the local version of a town council, make their case, and then people would decide.

JG: Actually, the civilian boards, which were in effect from ’43 to ’46, were essentially to enforce the hold-the-line order. So, they were effectively to provide an oversight to prevent, they didn’t have authority, so far as I understand, to authorize price increases. They simply were there to supervise…

RG: To make sure that they weren’t going up.

JG: In the first year, the year my father was responsible, there was some leeway you could come to the OPA, so there’s a difference in these two periods.

But, to get back to your question, yes. This effect of price control on incentives-facing business was very well understood at OPA in the 1940s, no question about that. They had worked out…

RG: It’s fairly straightforward.

JG: It’s an artifact of what we call the “economics of imperfect competition.” Once you understand the way businesses actually function, this was both obvious and clear from the way in which businesses did react. They may have pressed, tried to press for price increases, but when they were denied, they knew that they could make money by increasing their volume on relatively small margins.

Now, the situation in the modern time and, particularly, in the last 30 years, when there has been essentially very little to no price pressure, is that most businesses and big distributors, they tend to behave pretty well with respect to prices. They like to have stable prices; they recognize that’s good customer relations. And, so long as they’re making a decent margin, they don’t, most of them do not, most of the time, constantly press to get the highest price. And they recognize that, if they do, they’re going to lose goodwill, and they may, if they have a competitor, they may lose market share. So, that’s the normal situation, most businesses behave that way most of the time.

But, when you get a shock to the system, and particularly a shock to costs — which is what happened in 2021, with the supply chain disruptions and with the energy price jumps — then things become uncertain for businesses. And, of course, they react to that, if they can, by raising margins. My margin is your cost, so that has effects through the system. And it becomes, then, a situation in which they, if you like, the basic psychology changes, and businesses say — and, you know, I’m not actually faulting them — they say, we really need to take the largest margin, because the other guy’s doing the same thing. And if we don’t, then we are going to be caught out, and we’re going to lose market valuation, we’re going to lose investors and profitability.

And so, what was a generally stable psychology becomes an unstable one.

RG: Which answers the question that people have of, well, greed is constant, so why would it be different now?

JG: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the one piece of this puzzle which has an element of persistence to it, and the one piece that the mainstream economists don’t want to talk about. But if you look into the sources of the recent inflation, you can see a very large share of it is, in fact, increased profit margins, and increased corporate profits.

So, a control mechanism which damps that behavior gets people back onto a more stable track, and that’s the virtue of that idea in the present circumstances.

RG: And what would that look like? I know Weber is now working with Germany and some other places. What does a control mechanism look like beyond the most obvious blunt measure of, you know, Kamala Harris telling us what the prices of milk are.

JG: And that’s, of course, a good question, for which I don’t have a comprehensive answer worked out. But you do look at, you might focus on profit margins, you might focus on core costs. What you want to do, though, is, essentially, try to move people back toward a base period and hold them there, making adjustments as you move along. It requires having an autonomous authority in the government which is not under the control of the lobbies and, therefore, not under control of, let’s say, members of Congress, who are controlled by lobbies.

RG: Like a federal reserve, but for prices?

JG: Well, yeah. Except, I think the Federal Reserve is, in fact, essentially a servant of a particular sector of the economy. This was the feature of the Office of Price Administration, was that it was strongly autonomous. It was run by people who were public servants to the core. My father certainly fit that category, but his boss Leon Henderson was, these were people who were not in the business of catering to lobbyists or self-enrichment.

RG: Now, I think when a lot of people think of price controls, the image that comes to their mind is of a farmer out in the Midwest somewhere, dumping a bunch of milk out, and complaining to the local news that milk prices are so low that it costs him more to just ship the milk. And so, he is just going to dump it, or they’re going to let the crops just go fallow, otherwise.

What’s the response to that kind of fear that people have?

JG: Well, that’s an image that, actually, I associate with the early years of the Great Depression, when agricultural prices fell so low that the orange growers of southern California were turning over their harvests, and dumping kerosene on them, and burning them. And, again, yes, you say, milk poured out on the ground.

The object of a successful program of price control is to keep people in business, to make sure that they can, in fact, sell their product, but that they sell it at a modest but sustainable margin. And so, you can, in fact, set up agricultural purchasing boards, which will ensure that there is a market for agricultural commodities, and avoid that problem.

Sure, anything can be maladministered, anything can be screwed up, but the point is that the situation that we have now has a certain instability to it, and a program of strategic intervention could be a useful way of reducing that instability.

RG: Can you talk a little bit about the way that price has come to be understood by the mainstream economics profession? And the idea that price could be under democratic control really was, as far as I understand it, the real battle that was fought in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, but has vanished as a battle? It is now just kind of assumed that that is off the board, that these are matters of physics, rather than matters of laws.

JG: No, it’s not an unreasonable interpretation of that course of economic thinking, to say that the experience of price control and of wage price guidepost — which continued up until, well, really up until the first days of Reagan’s administration in 1981, when the last vestige was abolished, the Council on Wage and Price Stability in the White House — that the idea that the price mechanism, freely adjusting prices, is the core of a well-functioning and efficient economy was, in a sense, aimed at demolishing those structures and removing them from the sphere of legitimate discussion, and were very successful in doing that.

But the reality is, first of all, that no modern economy, certainly, and I doubt that any economy, actually, even going back to classical times, any real-world economy has ever actually functioned that way. And the assumptions required, even in theory, to make a freely price-adjusting economy into an efficient system are assumptions which basically violate it. They’re completely unconnected to the world in which we actually live. They rest on the notion of so-called “perfect competition,” in which every business is a very small operation competing with many other identically situated very small businesses, to supply equally disorganized, vast numbers of independent households, and that’s not the way the world is organized. In fact, practically every major line of activity is organized through structures in which a relatively small number of major enterprises are involved.

The realization in the 20th century that you could, in fact, control prices, was based on the fact that there were large organizations that were already controlling them, so you simply shifted some of the authority to an institution that was serving public purpose, rather than relying on the good behavior of individual enterprises.

RG: And, despite what feels like the complete victory of the kind of Milton Friedman view of prices, it does actually feel like there are still assumptions embedded in us as people that price controls are important. And what I’m thinking of is Biden’s use of the strategic petroleum reserve. That that was, very directly, a White House effort to control prices.

JG: Absolutely, absolutely. And it was a successful effort. They were faced with a major spike in oil prices, which followed a major slump in oil prices. And what happened in the slump in 2020, among other things, was that the price of oil properties — for example, in the Permian Basin — fell to very low levels, which meant that they were a very good bargain for private equity and others to move in and take control.

Those entities, their behavioral pattern, their focus, is on shareholder return. They’re not out to maximize production, they’re out there to increase the return to their investors; you could read about this in the press in Texas, in the oil country.

When demand recovered, they had a plan for increasing production, but it was not to increase production to meet the demand, but something below that, and allow the price to rise dramatically, which is what it did. And the effect of that was that on the barrels that you were producing, you enjoyed a very healthy windfall. The White House, obviously aware of this process, stepped in, with releasing from the strategic reserve, and that then caused a peak and a decline in the price of oil.

The price of gasoline, which is what ends up in the Consumer Price Index, follows that process with a lag. That’s the price which, of course, is politically sensitive. That’s what people see at the pump.

RG: Are there other examples of that, that an administration could handle? Because it feels like an a-ha moment for a White House to say, oh wait, it is politically popular to control prices. We can control prices. We’re going to be punished. Because in a lot of the political debate you hear Republicans attacking Biden for the price of eggs, or the price of this, that, or the other thing. But you never hear them suggest what they’re going to do. Like, if they get into power.

JG: Well, there were a range of things in the supply chain that were affected by the pandemic, obviously. The delays in the buildup and congestion at Long Beach and Los Angeles for a certain period of time were a factor driving up shipping costs and delivery costs. And, again, the administration did have people working on that problem, which eventually gets smoothed out. So, yes. I think that over a spectrum of specific interventions, you can have an effect.

Another area was with the —which I think was simply resolved over time — was the shortage of semiconductors, as a result of the decision by semiconductor producers that forecast in the pandemic that people would be buying a lot more household appliances and fewer automobiles. And when they then didn’t produce the semiconductors for new cars, new car production got jammed up, and the effect of that was to drive up used car prices. Used car prices you can’t control. That’s an asset, which is, basically, anything the dealer can get you to pay, you will pay. So, they rose by 50 percent or so, and that shows up in the Consumer Price Index.

So, again, these are supply issues, which can, in fact, be addressed and resolved, and may take some time, but they’re not related to some notion that households had too much money to spend.

RG: The fact that Weber is now an in-demand policy advisor around the world, with countries asking her, “What can we do about prices? How can you help us, or show us that there’s some purchase there in government spaces?”

But I’m curious. In the economics field, is there any more openness to this way of thinking about the economy? Or is there going to have to be an entire new generation that comes around?

JG: I think it’s very hard to get serious openness on this question. There were some measures taken in Germany, and Isabella Weber was involved with the commission, and I think it was basically her idea for a price cap on natural gas for households that was implemented. But the reality is that, in order to do this, you have to have governments that are seriously capable of implementing that policy, and that means they have to be somewhat independent of the mainstream economists. And the economics profession has become so hidebound in its views on these matters, and so committed to a particular ideology, that one cannot be optimistic that sensible ideas will prevail anytime soon.

RG: And you also mentioned that there was one day where Keynes himself walked in for a meeting with your father. What do you know about that meeting? And, also, if your father and Keynes were around today, what would they be telling people to do?

JG: Well, my father went to Cambridge in 1937 for a year, but Keynes was not there. He had suffered a heart attack and did not come to campus, so they didn’t meet. In 1942, my father was in the position of being, as I said, Director for Prices at the OPA. This was in an office building which is now, I believe, the Ford House office building down on D Street, southwest.

In any event, one day he came back after lunch, and I think he came up a back staircase, and his secretary came in saying there was an Englishman waiting to see him. And he said, well, I’m busy, but the secretary said, well, he seemed to think you would want to see him. And she handed him a note on which he had written the name as she had heard it: K-E-E-N-S, “Keens.” So, yes, dad did want to see him, Keynes came in.

This was not on a macro issue. Keynes had been raising pigs at his farm in the south of England, at Tilton. And he had written a paper on what became known in economics as the corn hog cycle, the effect of prices of corn on the supply of hogs, “pigs and maize,” as Keynes called them. And he wanted to talk about this with my father. So, that was the subject of their meeting.

My father, in his memoirs, he said this was as though St. Peter had dropped in on the parish priest.

RG: Yeah. So, what do you think your father would say now, about how to think about prices in a global economy, to the extent that it is global?

JG: That’s an interesting question. My father’s perspective on price control was very much in the context of the national economy. That was what we had, the problem you faced in the 1940s, and the U.S. had full control over its core commodities and over its manufactured goods, and that’s not the case now.

Now, what then happened, and the reason why we didn’t have an inflation problem for 40 years after 1980, was effectively globalization, and there were two elements of that. One was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which lowered commodity prices, essentially, around the world. And the other was the rise of China, which gave us a very elastic supply of consumer goods.

And so, I think —just to put myself in my father’s shoes, or to maybe project what I would say —

RG: We’re in his house, so that seems fair.

JG: Exactly. You know, I think what he would say is that, if you want to have a situation in which the world economy is developing on a stable basis, first of all, you need to have peace. You cannot do this in a conflict environment because, in a conflict environment, you’re going to lose control of the flows of commodities, and you are not going to have an assured supply of manufactured goods. You have a global division of labor, everybody has to be working together, and that means you need to have some respect for the other guy. You need to understand that you are not the only player here, and we cannot impose our will on everybody else.

And that is, I think, a serious problem, which the United States has lost a degree of perspective, really, in the last 25 years, where we believed with the way — I mean, really, since the end of the Cold War, but especially since the 1990s — the belief that the world economy was our oyster, to be treated as such. Well, the fact is, as time goes on, that becomes less and less true. And you have to develop a way of living with other great powers.

RG: Jamie Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair and Professor of Public Affairs and Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

JG: Thank you very much.

[Deconstructed end-show theme music.]

RG: That was Jamie Galbraith, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show. Go ahead and rate any episode that you want, even if you rated one already.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or at Ryan.Grim@theintercept.com. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Price Controls: An Inflation Solution That Doesn’t Screw Workers 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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Right-Wing Appeals Court Blocks Arkansas Ban on Trans Health Care

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.