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One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.

In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.

When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”

Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.

By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.

Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.

In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.

Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”

In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.

But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.

Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”

That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.

The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”

When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)

D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.

It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.

That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.

The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”

But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”

During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.

Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”

Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.

In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.

In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”

The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”

After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.

Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”

He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”

When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”

Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”

According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.

“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.

In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.

“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.

Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.

The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.

With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.

The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”

Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.

In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”

Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.

Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.

“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.

Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”

Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.

Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.

Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

Sam Feder is the director of Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary that follows transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he argues before the Supreme Court against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The film explores the crucial role centrist media played in driving legislation like Tennessee’s, and the broader cultural backlash against trans rights. FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar, who appears in the film, interviewed Feder for FAIR.

Civil rights Lawyer Chase Strangio in Heightened Scrutiny: “It’s a playbook that will effectively take a misunderstood, maligned, small minority of people and place a larger population’s anxiety of a changing world onto them.”

Julie Hollar: You previously made a documentary, Disclosure (2020), about trans representation in film and television. You’ve said Heightened Scrutiny is something like a sequel to Disclosure. What drove you to make this film?

Sam Feder: Disclosure ends with a warning about the risks of increased visibility. I first met Chase when I interviewed him for Disclosure. He explained that while representation was important, it was crucial for trans people to be pushing for actual material redistribution, and to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people, impacting their ability to survive. Without the deep, structural change Chase suggested, I worried that we were about to face a significant backlash to the media visibility we were witnessing at the time.

The backlash was even more drastic than I could have imagined. A year after Disclosure came out, hundreds of anti trans bills were being introduced. In just three years, from 2021–2024, we went from zero states banning gender-affirming care to 24 states. Now it’s up to 27 states.

I realized very quickly that anti-trans talking points that had once been confined to right-wing news outlets were now front-page stories in the mainstream media. My colleagues, who had always been strong allies, were parroting the mainstream media, questioning the legitimacy of trans healthcare. And they felt empowered by the coverage they were reading to speak with authority when debating trans rights, because the Paper of Record was saying it, and the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic, and on and on and on.

So I wanted to understand this shift, and I wanted to understand why reporters did not uphold the standards of journalism in coverage of trans people. Heightened Scrutiny examines the relationship between the media’s coverage of trans rights and the anti-trans legislation we have seen balloon in the backlash since 2021.

JH: Tell me more about the role of the media that you uncovered, and your focus on the New York Times.

Atlantic (7-8/18): “”Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.” (He’s 22, actually.)

SF: In the film we show that there was a clear shift starting in 2018, with the cover story in the Atlantic by Jesse Singal headlined “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.”

We interviewed the cover model—he was 22 years old at the time of that article! Likewise, the rest of the story is full of misinformation and fearmongering. Fast forward to 2021, and misinformation about trans people is all over the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Washington Post.

And people started to speak up and tell these outlets that they were publishing a lot of misinformation that was dangerous and harmful. And most outlets were willing to hear that criticism, and at least tried to do somewhat better—except the New York Times. They kind of dug in their heels and took it up a notch.

In a matter of six months or so, there were seven front-page stories questioning trans people’s right to healthcare in the New York Times. In early 2023, a group of Times contributors published an open letter about the anti-trans bias that had been steadily increasing. But the Times refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, calling it legitimate and important journalism, and still to this day they promote the voices and ideas of well-known anti-trans thinkers, and perpetuate this anti-trans narrative.

And as Chase explains in the film, in the legal realm, this unprecedented thing was happening, which is that legal briefs were citing these articles. And that is incredibly uncommon with legal briefs about medical care; you usually see citations from scientists and medical experts, you don’t see them quoting articles from newspapers. And they were doing it because that was the only place they could draw on to support their anti-trans legislation.

And it was working; they were able to pass these bills because of the anti-trans media bias that was popping up everywhere. And the New York Times was central in that. There is a scene in the film where Fox News says look, even the New York Times is questioning this medical care, so it must be really bad for adolescents.

Julie Hollar in Heightened Scrutiny: “The news media really set the political agenda in many ways…. They establish what the national discourse is.”

JH: In the film, I talk briefly about FAIR’s 2023 study of New York Times trans coverage, which showed that over the course of a year, the paper devoted more front-page articles to framing trans people as some sort of threat to others’ rights—such as cisgender women and parents—than to the coordinated assault on trans people’s rights. FAIR just published an update to that study, which shows that the Times has gotten even worse in some ways than they were before, including fewer trans sources in front-page stories about trans issues, for instance, and including just as many sources peddling unchallenged anti-trans misinformation as trans sources. How are you as a filmmaker trying to hold the Times accountable? What do you hope audiences might do in response?

SF: When people watch the film, so many are surprised to learn about the trajectory from coverage to law, and how culpable the Times has been in spreading misinformation. This link between the articles and anti-trans bills is devastating; the film shows the direct connection from article to harm.

Just like Disclosure was a field study in representation that could be applied to any marginalized community, Heightened Scrutiny is a field study that can be applied to the ways in which the media has skewed the public’s perception of all marginalized people. At the end of the day, when anyone’s right to bodily autonomy is chipped away at, everyone’s rights are.

I think this is a way to show people an example of the harm. I also hope this film is a tool for supporting those who are on the ground fighting back against the harm—medical providers, lawyers, legislators, etc.

JH: The Times is getting worse, the Supreme Court isn’t saving us. In making the film, did you come across anything that gave you hope or inspiration?

SF: I learned from people I spoke with, in particular Lewis Wallace, who talks about how hope is a practice. Hope is something we have to work for relentlessly and rigorously.

I’m inspired by Mila, the 13-year-old trans girl in the film. She’s this brilliant person, empowered and unflappable in the face of immense struggle. Watching her fight gives me hope. And watching her family showing up to support her every step of the way teaches all of us what love can look like.

There’s still so much to protect. The Skrmetti decision is devastating, but queer and trans people know that we cannot rely on the law. Our ability to survive and thrive does not begin or end with the law. We know how to take care of each other. That also gives me hope.

You know, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral primary, I also felt real hope, witnessing New Yorkers come together and do something that seemed so impossible. I hope people will rally around trans civil rights the same way.

JH: And media did their best to push misinformation in that case, too.

SF: Yes, the Times included. And seeing people be skeptical of the media, ignore the misinformation, take action together, and do what the media try to tell us is impossible or scary or “too woke”—we need to keep doing that, and giving each other hope.

Filmmaker Sam Feder: “So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about…whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media.”

JH: What do you want people to walk away from your film with?

SF: I want people to see that the SCOTUS case is grounded in popular culture, in mainstream media and social media discourse. So many people were misled into thinking there is a legitimate debate about whether the risks of gender-affirming care outweighed the need for it, and whether trans people’s basic rights should be upheld, and it’s because of what they read or see in mainstream media. The legislation directly responds to the media climate.

Our existence is not a debate. As Jude [Ellison S. Doyle] says in the film: “Trans people are presented as one side of a debate on our lives. I hold the opinion that I exist, and you hold the opinion that I don’t.”

The outcome of this case is going to impact the constitutional rights of all people living in America. That’s lost on many people, but this is going to affect everyone’s access to privacy with their doctors.

JH: And that’s something that just wasn’t highlighted in most of the media coverage of the case, so that most people are not aware of it, based on the news reports.

SF: I absolutely think you’re right about that. There is still a lot we can protect. The fight is not over.

Heightened Scrutiny is screening in New York City at DCTV, July 18–24; in Los Angeles at Laemmle Theatres, July 26–27 and 29; and in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater, July 31 and August 2.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has worked with Indigenous communities near the mine to study cultural artifacts and is offering to build projects worth millions of dollars for the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, such as a community center and greenhouse.

But individuals and the community groups opposed to the mine don’t want money. They worry mining will pollute local sources of water in the nation’s driest state and harm culturally significant sites, including that of an 1865 massacre of Indigenous people.

“We understand how the land is sacred and how much culture and how much history is within the McDermitt Caldera,” Callao said of the basin where Thacker Pass is located. “We know how much it means to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations.”

Indigenous groups are increasingly at odds with mining companies as climate change brings economies around the globe to an inflection point. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to increasingly intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. The solution — powering the electrical grid, vehicles and factories with cleaner energy sources — brings tradeoffs.

Massive amounts of metals are required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure. Demand for lithium will skyrocket 350% by 2040, largely to be used in electric vehicles’ rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. produces very little lithium — and China controls a majority of refining capacity worldwide — so development of Thacker Pass enjoys bipartisan support, receiving a key permit in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a $2.26 billion loan from President Joe Biden’s administration. (Development ran into issues in June, when a Nevada agency notified the company that it was using groundwater without the proper permit. Company representatives have said they are confident that they will resolve the matter.)

Many minerals needed to produce cleaner energy are found on Indigenous lands. For example, 85% of known global lithium reserves are on or near Indigenous people’s lands, according to a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of the Free State in South Africa and elsewhere. The situation has put Indigenous communities at odds with mining industries as tribes are asked to sacrifice land and sovereignty to combat climate change.

Luke Danielson is a mining consultant and lawyer who for decades has researched how mining affects Indigenous lands. “What I fear would be we set loose a land rush where we’re trampling over all the Indigenous people and we’re taking all the public land and essentially privatizing it to mining companies,” he said.

If companies or governments attempt to force mining on such communities, it can slow development, noted Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, a professor emeritus of Australia’s Griffith University and author of “Indigenous Peoples and Mining.”

“If there are bulldozers coming down the road and they are going to destroy an area that is central to people’s identity and their existence, they are going to fight,” he said. “The solution is you actually put First Peoples in a position of equal power so that they can negotiate outcomes that allow for timely, and indeed speedy, development.”

Most of the documents tracing law enforcement’s involvement at Thacker Pass were obtained via public records requests by two advocacy groups focused on climate change and law enforcement, Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. They shared the records with ProPublica, which obtained additional documents through separate public records requests to law enforcement agencies.

Given the monitoring of mining’s opponents highlighted in the records, experts raised questions about authorities’ role: Is the government there to support industrial development, protect civil liberties or act as an unbiased arbiter? At Thacker Pass, the documents show, law enforcement has helped defend the mine.

Protests have at times escalated.

A small group of more radical environmentalists led by non-Indigenous activists propelled the early movement, setting up a campsite on public land near the proposed mine site in January 2021. In June 2022, a protester from France wrote on social media, “We’ll need all the AR15s We can get on the frontlines!” Tensions peaked in June 2023, when several protesters entered the worksite and blocked bulldozers, leading to one arrest.

That group — which calls itself Protect Thacker Pass — argued that its actions were justified. Will Falk, one of the group’s organizers, said that, in any confrontation, scrutiny unfairly falls on protesters instead of companies or the government. “As a culture, we’ve become so used to militarized police that we don’t understand that, out of the group of people gathered, the people who are actually violent are the ones with the guns,” he said.

Falk and another organizer were, as a result of their participation in protests, barred by court order from returning to Thacker Pass and disrupting construction, and the Bureau of Land Management fined them for alleged trespass on public lands during the protest. The agency charged them $49,877.71 for officers’ time and mileage to monitor them, according to agency records Falk shared with ProPublica. Falk said his group tried to work with the agency to obtain permits and is disputing the fine to a federal board of appeals.

“None of us are armed. We’re not there for an uprising,” said Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, which parted ways with Falk’s group before the incident that led to an arrest.

McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, leads annual prayer rides, journeying hundreds of miles across northern Nevada on horseback with other Native American activists to Thacker Pass. He described the rides, intended to raise awareness of mining’s impact on tribes and the environment, as a way to exercise rights under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects tribes’ ability to practice traditional spirituality. Still, the group feels watched. A trail camera once mysteriously appeared near their campsite along the path of the prayer ride. They also crossed paths with security personnel.

Beyond the trail rides, the FBI tracks McKinney’s activity, the records show. The agency informed other law enforcement when he promoted a Fourth of July powwow and rodeo on his reservation, and it flagged a speech he delivered at a conference for mining-affected communities.

“We’re being watched, we’re being followed, we’re under the microscope,” McKinney said.

The records show security personnel hired by Lithium Americas speaking as if an uprising could be imminent. “To date, there has been no violence or serious property destruction, however, the activities of these protest groups could change to a more aggressive actions and violent demeanor at any time,” Raymond Mey, who joined Lithium Americas’ security team for a time after a career with the FBI, wrote to law enforcement agencies in July 2022.

Mey also researched protesters’ activities, sharing his findings with law enforcement. In an April 2021 update, for example, he provided an aerial photograph of the protesters’ campsite. Law enforcement agencies worked with Mey, and he pushed to make that relationship closer, seeking “an integrated and coordinated law enforcement strategy to deal with the protestors at Thacker Pass.” The records indicate that the FBI was open to him attending its joint terrorism task force.

Mey is not licensed with the Nevada Private Investigators Licensing Board, which is required to perform such work in the state, according to agency records.

Mey said that he didn’t believe he needed a license because he wasn’t pursuing investigations. He said that his advice to the company was to avoid direct conflict with protesters and only call the police when necessary.

The battle over Thacker Pass reflects renewed strife between mining and drilling industries and Indigenous people. Two recent fights at the heart of this clash have intersected with Thacker Pass — one concerning an oil pipeline in the Great Plains and the other over a copper mine in the Southwest.

Beginning in 2016 and continuing for nearly a year, a large protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation sought to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Members of the Indigenous-led movement contended that it threatened the region’s water. The protest turned violent, leading to hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement eventually cleared the camp and the pipeline was completed.

Law enforcement agencies feared similar opposition at Thacker Pass, the records show.

In April 2021, Allen, then the local sheriff, and his staff met with Mark Pfeifle, president and CEO of the communications firm Off the Record Strategies, to discuss “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pfeifle, who helped the Bush administration build support for the second Gulf War, had more recently led a public relations blitz to discredit the Standing Rock protesters. This involved suggesting using a fake news crew and mocking up wanted posters for activists, according to emails obtained by news organizations. Pfeifle sent Allen presentations about the law enforcement response at Standing Rock, including one on “Examples of ‘Fake News’ and disinformation” from the protesters. “As always, we stand ready to help your office and your citizens,” he wrote to the sheriff.

The department appears not to have hired Pfeifle, although Allen directed his staff to also meet with Pfeifle’s colleague who worked on the Standing Rock response.

Around July 2021, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office held a meeting “to plan for the reality of a large-scale incident at Thacker Pass” similar to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Police referred to the ongoing protests on public land at Thacker Pass as an “occupation.”

Allen said he didn’t remember meeting with Pfeifle but said he wanted to be prepared for anything. “We didn’t know what to expect, but from what we understand, there were professional protestors up there and more were coming in,” he said.

Pfeifle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Members of People of Red Mountain have also traveled to Arizona to object to the development of a controversial copper mine that’s planned in a national forest east of Phoenix. There, some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe oppose the development because it would destroy an area they use for ceremonies. (In May, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing a land transfer, removing the final key obstacle to the mine.)

On these trips, Callao and others have frequently found a “notice of baggage inspection” from the Transportation Security Administration in their checked luggage. She provided ProPublica with photos of five such notices.

An agency spokesperson said that screening equipment does not know to whom the bag belongs when it triggers an alarm, and officers must search it.

To Callao, the surveillance, whether by luggage inspection, security camera or counterterrorism task force, adds to the weight placed on Indigenous communities amid the energy transition.

“We shouldn’t have to accept the burden of the climate crisis,” Callao said, “We should be able to protect our ancestral homelands.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Mark Olalde.

A FAIR study found that CNN’s primetime coverage of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests in early June rarely included the voices of the protesters themselves. Instead, the network’s sources were overwhelmingly current and former government and law enforcement officials. The resulting coverage rarely took issue with Trump’s desire to silence the people who were defending their undocumented neighbors—but mainly debated his decision to deploy the California National Guard to do so.

FAIR recorded the sources that appeared in the 5–10 pm timeslot during two key days, June 9 and 10, of CNN’s television coverage of the Los Angeles protests; the shows included were the Lead with Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360 and the Source With Kaitlan Collins.

The sources were categorized by current or former occupation, and on whether they were a featured guest—who typically field multiple interview-style questions from an anchor—or simply a soundbite. Sources that made multiple appearances were counted once for each segment they appeared in. (CNN’s in-house “analysts” or “commentators” were counted as featured guests to reflect their significant impact on the perspectives shared on the shows.)

Out of 85 total sources across the eight broadcasts, only five were protesters, appearing on just three shows. None of the 47 featured guests were protesters or community or immigrant advocates.

By far the most frequent sources were current or former US government officials, with 55 appearances—a whopping 65% of total sources. Thirteen additional sources were law enforcement, and five were current or former military. Together, these official sources accounted for 86% of all appearances. (There were also three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists.)

Of featured guest and analyst interviews, current or former government officials dominated at 49% (23 out of 47). These sources were given the most time to present their perspectives, shaping the narrative around the protests and the government responses. Another 11 featured guests were law enforcement and two were military, so official sources accounted for 77% of all such interviews. The three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists made up the remaining featured guests.

‘Verbally at least hostile’

CNN‘s Kyung Lah (6/9/25) covers protests at LA’s Federal Building—while giving no sign of talking to any protesters.

CNN’s made-for-TV, on-the-ground style of protest coverage in the days following the Ambiance Apparel and Home Depot ICE raids felt little different from when Anderson Cooper stands around in a raincoat during a hurricane. Only this time, CNN reporters were braving an uncontrollable storm of Angelenos.

Much like Cooper’s coat, CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah (Erin Burnett OutFront, 6/9/25) donned protective goggles—useful should she have encountered tear gas, but also undoubtedly a dramatic flourish perfect for one of CNN’s 30-second TV spots.

That CNN was primarily interested in drama rather than helping viewers understand the protests became abundantly clear as—even with her protective goggles—Lah made no apparent effort to interview any protesters as she and CNN anchor Erin Burnett stood in front of LA’s federal detention center, where federal agents, LAPD and the California National Guard were in a standoff with demonstrators. Instead, they kept a close eye on every thrown water bottle, expressing concern about the crowd’s increasingly “young” demographic as the day went on. “This is a much younger crowd, certainly, verbally at least, Erin, hostile,” Lah reported.

The only protest voices that CNN’s audience heard from throughout both days of primetime coverage came in the form of two brief soundbites captured by correspondent Jason Carroll (Lead, 6/9/25) at a protest for the release of arrested SEIU leader David Huerta the morning of June 9.

Araceli Martinez, the only named protester in the study period with a soundbite on CNN ( 6/9/25).

Araceli Martinez, the only protester identified by name, offered a call to action for all Americans, arguing that the Trump administration’s immigration raids are a threat to “the rights of all people, not just the immigrants, but all of us.” That soundbite reaired on Erin Burnett Outfront and Anderson Cooper 360, both on June 9.

Another protester at the demonstration demanding Huerta’s release had this to say, with the soundbite reairing on Anderson Cooper 360, also on June 9:

We are part of that immigrant community that has made L.A. great, that has made the state of California the fourth largest economy in the world today. So, we have a message for President Donald Trump. Get the National Guardsmen out of here.

Multiple times during the first day studied, Lah held up that union-led protest as a standard of message discipline and nonviolent tactics that those outside the federal building, later in the day, weren’t measuring up to. The folks at the earlier protest were “a very different slice of Los Angeles than what I am seeing” at the federal building, Lah said. The key word there is “seeing,” as she did not interview a single protester on camera.

‘We do very good here with unrest’

CNN‘s Jake Tapper (6/10/25) interviews Rep. Adam Smith, who agrees that “you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, CNN brought on multiple featured guests who framed protesters as violent and law enforcement as the ones pushing for accountability—despite the fact that reported injuries of civilians by law enforcement far outnumbered those of law enforcement by protesters (FAIR.org, 6/13/25). LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman (OutFront, 6/10/25), for example, stated that he would work to “punish” all protesters who engage in “illegal conduct.”

Similarly, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (Source, 6/10/25) warned “anyone who goes out and is protesting in a way that is not peaceful…state and local and regional law enforcement will hold people accountable.”

Rep. Adam Smith told Jake Tapper (Lead, 6/10/25): “I don’t disagree that you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement, but there’s no evidence in this case that the LAPD wasn’t doing that.” Once you parse the double negatives, it’s clear that Smith, like the rest of CNN‘s official sources, accepted the characterization of protesters as violent and argued that the response of California law enforcement was perfectly appropriate.

Most of these state and local government sources were responding to questions about Trump calling in the National Guard and Marines; they were defending the local law enforcement response and challenging Trump’s decision.

CNN‘s Erin Burnett (6/9/25) interviews LA County Sheriff Robert Luna, who assures her his forces were “very good here with unrest.”

One of Burnett’s featured guests, for instance, was LA County Sheriff Robert Luna (OutFront, 6/9/25)—the leader of a police force that community activists say routinely collaborates with federal immigration raids (Democracy Now!, 6/9/25), and had just sparred with demonstrators in the Home Depot parking lot in Compton following the failed ICE raid there (New York Times, 6/14/25).

The primary focus of Burnett’s line of questioning was geared at exposing the political nature of Trump’s calling in the national guard:

Just a very simple question. Do you need the Marines? Do you need the National Guard right now? Or if you were looking at this situation and assessing it as sheriff of LA County, would you say you do not need them?

That’s certainly a critical line of questioning to get at the issue of federal overreach. But Burnett failed to similarly question (or even acknowledge) the violence by local law enforcement—which, by the time of Burnett’s broadcast, included 24 attacks on journalists with weapons like pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, according to Reporters Without Borders (FAIR.org, 6/13/25).

Instead, she left unchallenged Luna’s claims that “if they’re peacefully protesting, they’ll be allowed to do that,” that his utmost priority was “keeping our community safe,” and that his police force does “very good here with unrest.”

In doing so, Burnett framed the story as a question of whether putting down protests against sweeping raids of undocumented workers was the responsibility of federal troops or local law enforcement—rather than questioning why such protests were being met with force, and why local officials weren’t doing more to protect their immigrant communities.

Redefining safety

Democracy Now! (6/9/25) broadened the conversation by allowing protesters like Ron Gochez to take part in it.

Meanwhile, the protesters that received such little consideration from Burnett and CNN could have contributed to a very different definition of safety for CNN’s viewers. Ron Gochez, a community organizer and social studies teacher, who was one of the protesters at the ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, described on Democracy Now! (6/9/25) how the protests have managed to protect people despite the efforts of local and federal officials:

When we have these protests, they have been peaceful. But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the LAPD or, on Saturday, for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence….

But what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist and would fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours, the people combatted in the streets against the Border Patrol…. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home that night.

The Trump administration is intent on testing just how far it can go to crush political dissent, and it’s clear most Democratic politicians and local law enforcement are not going to bat for the most vulnerable communities in its crosshairs. Angelenos know they are fighting for the rights of all of us who reside in the US. But CNN’s refusal to have them on air to discuss their struggle and explain their tactics makes it all the more difficult to raise public awareness. Pretending to challenge the deployment of federal troops, CNN normalizes police violence and silences those truly protecting their communities.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

X user Deepak Sharma, who regularly shares disinformation and promotes communal propaganda, shared the video tagging the Deoria Police and wrote, “Do you hear what I am hearing? This crowd raising slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ is not in Pakistan but in India, that too in India’s Uttar Pradesh. Betrayal is in their blood.”

पाकिस्तान जिंदाबाद

जी हाँ ये पाकिस्तान जिंदाबाद क़े नारे लगाती ये भीड़ पाकिस्तान में नहीं भारत में है और भारत क़े
भी उत्तर प्रदेश में है

खून में ही गद्दारी इन BSD वाले लोगों क़े…

Hello @DeoriaPolice
क्या आप वो सुन पा रहे हैं जो मैं सुन रहा हूँ ?

इन्हे ऐसा सबक सिखाएं कि… pic.twitter.com/IDKdnM7jW3

— Deepak Sharma (@SonOfBharat7) July 7, 2025

Right-wing X user Sandeep Mishra and several others on other platforms like Instagram and Facebook shared the same footage with claims that ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans had been raised during a Muharram procession.

Fact Check

Alt News found that the official X handle of the Deoria Police had tweeted about this and refuted the claim about ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans being raised. According to police, in the video recorded during a Muharram procession by the Five Star Club, slogans of ‘Five Star Zindabad’, and not ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ could be heard. 

The police also mentioned that the procession was carried out peacefully in police presence.

मोहर्रम त्यौहार के दिनांक 06/07.07.2025 के जुलूस के दौरान सोशल मीडिया पर एक भ्रामक तरीके से प्रसारित किए जा रहे वीडियो के सम्बन्ध में देवरिया पुलिस का खण्डन।#UPPolice @diggorakhpur @AdgGkr @dgpup @UPPViralCheck pic.twitter.com/7uo0AajvLe

— DEORIA POLICE (@DeoriaPolice) July 7, 2025

Alt News examined the video by playing it in slow motion. On listening carefully to the slogans being raised in the procession, it became clear that the chants were not that of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, but ‘Five Star Zindabad’. However, due to the background noise, the slogans are not that clear.

Apart from this, we noticed that many people participating in the procession wore green T-shirts with ‘5 STAR CLUB’ and ‘5 star’ printed on them.

Upon further investigation, we also came across the Instagram page of 5 star club. Many videos taken during Muharram can be found on this page. Apart from these, in a post by Instagram user Israfil Ansari, too, members of the 5 Star Club can be seen participating in Muharram observation wearing the same green T-shirts in the presence of police personnel.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Smart Israfil Ansari (@smart_israfil_2000)

To sum it up, slogans of “Five Star Zindabad” were raised in the video in question. However, some users falsely claimed that Muslims were raising ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans during Muharram.

The post No, Pakistan Zindabad slogans were not raised at Muharram rally in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

But while Republican governors in states that rely on those programs have largely remained silent about the bill’s effects, tribal leaders across the country are not mincing words about the upcoming fallout for their communities.

“These bills are an affront to our sovereignty, our lands, and our way of life. They would gut essential health and food security programs, roll back climate resilience funding, and allow the exploitation of our sacred homelands without even basic tribal consultation,” said Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida in Alaska, in a statement. “This is not just bad policy — it is a betrayal of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations.”

Tribes across the country are particularly worried about the megabill’s hit to clean energy, complicating the development of critical wind and solar projects. According to the Department of Energy, tribal households face 6.5 times more electrical outages per year and a 28 percent higher energy burden compared to the average U.S. household. An estimated 54,000 people living on tribal lands have no electricity.

Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Biden administration opened up new federal funding opportunities, increased the loan authority of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and created new tax credits for wind energy, battery storage, large-scale solar farms, and programs to repurpose lands harmed by environmental degradation for related energy projects. When signed into law, Trump’s new bill will largely dismantle these programs.

Historically, tribes have had limited access to capital to fund clean energy projects. Through the IRA, new projects were driven by tribes to address community and infrastructure needs on their terms. According to tribes and energy advocacy groups, these projects not only help build energy infrastructure for each tribal nation but also create jobs, boost local economies, and affirm sovereignty.

Crystal Miller, a member of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, heads government affairs and policy at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, underlined the existential outcomes for tribal communities. “It is extremely life or death if you’re talking about clean energy projects, in particular solar, which provide energy to homes, provide heat to homes that wouldn’t have it without because they don’t have lines run to their community,” she said.

Prior to the House vote, the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy was part of a broader group that sent letters to Congress warning of the bill’s consequences for tribes, treaties, and domestic energy priorities. These “are not only economic but also environmental and humanitarian,” they wrote after the Senate narrowly approved the bill 51-50 earlier this week, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. 

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Miller pointed out that tribes weren’t consulted on the terms of the bill headed to Trump’s desk, yet they will be forced to live with the consequences. Tribal leaders across the United States warned the legislation could jeopardize projects critical to their communities’ energy needs: A tribal village in Alaska’s attempt to curb high electricity costs by establishing a tribal utility; the Cheyenne River Sioux’s efforts to navigate long, harsh winters in South Dakota; and California tribes’ development of microgrids to offset power outages due to wildfires. The Hopi Tribe in Arizona said the sovereign nation’s microgrid would fail after a historic transition from coal.  

Tribal leaders also warned there could be widespread job losses across the 574 federally recognized tribal nations, an outcome at odds with Trump’s economic promises. “When we talk about bringing jobs back to America and keeping them here domestically, that also includes tribal nations,” Miller said. 

Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné professor at the University of British Columbia whose previous research focused on tribal clean energy development, called the legislation a big setback — though not entirely unexpected. “Tribes have been presented with challenges in the past hundred years and this is a challenge we’ll have to face,” she said. “It will come down to the tribal, entity, and individual level, and how they want to best move forward.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Clean energy projects on tribal lands were booming. Then came Trump’s tax bill. on Jul 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Miacel Spotted Elk.

It’s been 55 years since the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University who were protesting the US war in Vietnam. Four students were murdered at the Kent State Massacre: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Mike Alewitz, who was a student at Kent State in 1970, about what it was like to witness the massacre firsthand, and about how the true history of this critical moment in US history has been whitewashed ever since.

Guest:

• Mike Alewitz is an internationally renowned muralist and Professor Emeritus of censorship, art, and politics at Central Connecticut State University. Alewitz was the founder and chairman of the Kent Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam and an eyewitness to the May 4, 1970, Kent State massacre.

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

The Fordow site was of particular interest, located some eighty to a hundred metres underground and cocooned by protective concrete. For its purported destruction, B-2 Spirit stealth bombers were used to drop GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator “bunker buster” bombs. All in all, approximately 75 precision-guided weapons were used in the operation, along with 125 aircraft and a guided missile submarine.

Trump was never going to be anything other than optimistic about the result. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” he blustered. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”

At the Pentagon press conference following the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bubbled with enthusiasm. “The order we received from our commander in chief was focused, it was powerful, and it was clear. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.” The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, was confident that the facilities had been subjected to severe punishment. “Initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.” Adding to Caine’s remarks, Hegseth stated that, “The battle damage assessment is ongoing, but our initial assessment, as the Chairman said, is that all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect.”

Resort to satellite imagery was always going to take place, and Maxar Technologies willingly supplied the material. “A layer of grey-blue ash caused by the airstrikes [on Fordow] is seen across a large swathe of the area,” the company noted in a statement. “Additionally, several of the tunnel entrances that lead into the underground facility are blocked with dirt following the airstrikes.”

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, also added his voice to the merry chorus that the damage had been significant. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted airstrikes.” The assessment included “new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

Israeli sources were also quick to stroke Trump’s already outsized ego. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission opined that the strikes, combined with Israel’s own efforts, had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir’s view was that the damage to the nuclear program was sufficient to have “set it back by years, I repeat, years.”

The chief of the increasingly discredited International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, flirted with some initial speculation, but was mindful of necessary caveats. In a statement to an emergency meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, he warned that, “At this time, no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow.” Cue the speculation: “Given the explosive payload utilised and extreme(ly) vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.”

This was a parade begging to be rained on. CNN and The New York Times supplied it. Referring to preliminary classified findings in a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment running for five pages, the paper reported that the bombing of the three sites had “set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months”. The strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but they were not successful in precipitating a collapse of the underground buildings. Sceptical expertise murmured through the report: to destroy the facility at Fordow would require “waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.”

Then came the issue of the nuclear material in question, which Iran still retained control over. The fate of over 400 kg of uranium, which had been enriched to 60% purity, is unclear, as is the number of surviving or hidden centrifuges. Iran had already informed the IAEA on June 13 that “special measures” would be taken to protect nuclear materials and equipment under IAEA safeguards, a feature provided under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any transfer of nuclear material from a safeguarded facility to another location, however, would have to be declared to the agency, something bound to be increasingly unlikely given the proposed suspension of cooperation with the IAEA by Iran’s parliament.

After mulling over the attacks for a week, Grossi revisited the matter. The attacks on the facilities had caused severe, though “not total” damage. “Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.” Tehran could, “in a matter of months,” have “a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.” Iran still had the “industrial and technological” means to recommence the process.

Efforts to question the thoroughness of Operation Midnight Hammer did not sit well with the Trump administration. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt worked herself into a state on any cautionary reporting, treating it as a libellous blemish. “The leaking of this alleged report is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she fumed in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets.”

Hegseth similarly raged against the importance placed on the DIA report. In a press conference on June 26, he bemoaned the tendency of the press corps to “cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood”. The scribblers had to “cheer against the efficacy of these strikes” with “half-truths, spun information, leaked information”. Trump, for his part, returned to familiar ground, attacking any questioning narrative as “Fake News”. CNN, he seethed, had some of the dumbest anchors in the business. With malicious glee, he claimed knowledge of rumours that reporters from both CNN and The New York Times were going to be sacked for making up those “FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong.”

A postmodern nonsense has descended on the damage assessments regarding Iran’s nuclear program, leaving the way clear for overremunerated soothsayers. But there was nothing postmodern in the incalculable damage done to the law of nations, a body of acknowledged rules rendered brittle and breakable before the rapacious legislators of the jungle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The world-destabilizing horrors we see on the news today (and the many forms of resistance we don’t see) can easily make us feel overwhelmed and hopeless about the state of the world. But as Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back have seen firsthand organizing with poor and working-class communities around the US, “there’s amazing grassroots organizing led by poor and dispossessed people that’s happening right now… there’s kind of an awakening happening, but I think instead of looking to our political leaders or looking to some of the more established folks out there.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back about their new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty.
Guests:

• The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is an anti-poverty activist, pastor, theologian, and author. She is the executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for the past thirty-plus years.
• Noam Sandweiss-Back is an organizer and a writer born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey. He has spent a decade organizing among the poor and dispossessed, including with the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign.

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Doctors Sarah Lalonde, Rizwan Minhas, and Yipeng Ge have all recently returned to Canada from volunteer medical delegations in Gaza with a harrowing message for the rest of the world. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with all three doctors about what they saw and experienced attempting to provide medical care for patients in the midst of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.

Content Warning: This episode contains vivid descriptions of wartime conditions, genocide, violent physical injuries, and death.

Guest(s):

• Dr. Sarah LaLonde is an emergency and family physician specializing in community, rural, and remote emergency medicine, with a particular focus on Indigenous communities
• Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician specializing in sports and regenerative pain medicine, with extensive experience in emergency medicine.
• Dr. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in Ottawa, Canada.

Additional resources:

• CityNews, “Canadian doctors returning from Gaza detail eyewitness accounts: ‘We are telling the truth’”
• Global March to Gaza website

Credits:

• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Today we’re going to talk with three physicians who’ve just returned from Gaza as we speak. The Israel’s war in Gaza is killed. At least 55,000. Palestinians wounded over 125,000 more. This war began when 1,130 Israelis were killed, who were held hostage. But now this war is out of control. Every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being decimated, and as we begin this conversation, 36 more people, non-combatants were killed in Gaza. Our guests today have vast experience in war zones and in disasters. Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician. He specializes in sports and regenerative pain medicine, but his extensive experience across the globe and is deeply committed to global humanitarian medical efforts. Dr. Sarah LaLonde as an emergency and family physician who specializes in community, rural and remote emergency medicine, especially in indigenous communities. She’s worked in Albania, Togo, Chad, and fights against human trafficking in Quebec in Canada, and of course most recently came back from Gaza. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based in Ottawa, Canada. He currently works and lives on the traditional Unseeded and Unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin on shop bag. He practices family medicine and refugee health and community health centers there and across the country.

So just once again, it’s a pleasure to have you all with us here. It’s also an honor for me to talk to the three of you who sacrificed so much to be on the front lines in Gaza to save lives. I mean, as we begin to record today, I was just getting texts from another friend in Gaza who just said another 50 people, mostly women and children have been killed as we were beginning this conversation right now. That’s just so important people to realize that. I’d like to just kind of step back for a minute, all three of you, and just, I’m really personally curious how and why you all ended up doing what you do, because it’s not as if you’re going into Gaza to come home and make thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a physician and you’re going into a war zone, you’re going into a place where you may not come back from. So I’m very curious about all of you, what motivated you, what happened to put you into gaze, into those front lines? And we can start with you, Sarah, please.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah, so my journey started in medical school. I had a lot of friends who were Jewish and I became quite interested in the country of Israel because they were talking about their experiences living there, and many had been or were going, and that got me thinking about Israel. At the end of my medical training, I decided to go to Israel. So I was there for about two weeks, and as the two weeks was finishing up, I had a really strong gut feeling that I should go on this tour that takes place in Hebron. So for those of us who are religious, that’s a place where Abraham, who’s the father of Islam, Christianity and Judaism buried his wife Sarah. And that town is in the West Bank and has a very specific history. And basically in Hebron at that time when I visited, there was I think a few hundred or a few thousand settlers.

There was I think about 3000 soldiers to guard the settlers. And there was about 200,000 Palestinians. And the settlers and the Palestinians are living quite closely, some even literally on top of each other in apartment buildings, et cetera. And while I was there, I was leaving the mosque, which is called the Ibrahim Mosque, and I saw that the border police was angry, so I decided to hide. And while I was hiding the Israeli border police killed a girl, a girl who was 17. She’s actually the same age as my brother, and that in Canada we’re not very accustomed to gun violence. So that really shook me up to be so close to a shooting. And then afterwards, because they closed the checkpoint, we were kind of stuck on the Palestinian side of Hebron and we went into a woman’s house and she was supposed to be feeding us lunch, but she was very shook up because there had just been a person killed outside her house.

And she was trying to manage her children who were behaving like normal children, playing with their bikes inside the house. And she was trying to feed us lunch, our guide saw the girl get shot, and he was also very shaken up. So when I had that experience, it helped me understand the type of fear that someone might have when they live under occupation. And that got me interested in thinking about what it might be like to live or to experience occupation living in the West Bank. And then that got me thinking about how I could contribute in the future as a physician. And one of those ways was by going to Gaza. So I was thinking of going to Gaza from 2016 until this year when I was honored to be able to go

Marc Steiner:

Yipeng?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

Similar to Sarah, actually, I visited that mosque in Hebron, Abraham Mosque. I visited it back in March, 2023. I was with many other Harvard graduate and undergraduate students who were visiting Palestine to understand the context of historical and political context of Palestine. It was during that master’s that I was studying colonialism as a structural determinant of health. That’s actually been my own entry point into medicine and public health, learning about settler colonialism as it affects indigenous first nations, Inuit, Metis peoples in Canada or so-called Canada as a settler colonial state that has committed genocide of indigenous peoples on this land. And I didn’t choose to grow up in Canada. I came to Canada when I was four years old and learning about the history of indigenous peoples and the genocide of indigenous peoples on this land, I felt very compelled to do what I can to understand that more and to think about what does it look like to decolonize and to dismantle these systems of oppression here.

And that really led me to the field of study and learning about colonialism in other contexts and how it is so interconnected in how people experience health or poor health. And to understand that was actually just part of my public health studies. And during my own public health and preventive medicine training, I finished my family medicine training just two years ago, and it was during my public health and preventative medicine training that this increased violence in Gaza took place about 20 months ago. And my university that I was training at actually suspended me for social media posts related to Palestine. And it was actually just also photos from my own travels in Palestine just a few months before in that very year. And they later rescinded that suspension and then didn’t offer an apology. And I’ve been continuously thinking about ways to put my energy and put my time to places and spaces that deserve it, including going to Gaza and offering what I could to be a witness to genocide as a family doctor.

Marc Steiner:

That was ama.

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

So you know what? I wish I studied this beforehand, but I’m talking about the conflict beforehand. Before I knew there was a conflict, I wasn’t aware how the conflict was, what phase it was taking, but the reason I went there was because from the fellow physicians that went there before me, they came back and they informed me of the stories that they were seeing, what they were seeing on the ground, that they were handing children with bullet wounds, they were handing children who needed amputations. There was no medical supply. But when I’m hearing these stories and when I was looking at the news, I was hearing something completely different. So then as a fellow colleague to these physicians who did go there prior to my travel in April of 2024, I said, this is true. I want to go see for myself and I want to be able to provide at least some aid because there’s no independent journalism there.

So I was trusting my fellow physicians. And when I got there, and I was shocked to see they were absolutely correct. So I went there just specifically to bring in some aid because at that time no aid was being allowed. And while traveling, I took a flight from here to Egypt, Cairo, and then I took a bus from Egypt, Rafa, and we crossed to the Palestinian side, to the Rafa Palestinian side. And when I was crossing, I saw exactly what they said was true. There were thousands of trucks lined up and not one was being allowed through. So then we and my fellow colleagues, we had about close to I think about a hundred thousand dollars of medications that we took along. So I went there just to provide some relief in regards to medical supplies and to provide relief to the doctors who are working tirelessly 24 7 and to give them a break. That was my main motivation for going there.

Marc Steiner:

I really want to give people a sense of what you all experienced, the things that I’ve watched you talk about and read about that you did. I mean, it has to be one of the most profoundly difficult things to do to be a physician, do the work you’re doing and working in a place that is just being slaughtered and destroyed. And you’re in the middle of all this trying to heal it and save as many lives as you can. And as I was reading about what you all did, it was almost difficult for me to comprehend in terms of what you experienced. I just would like you to all give a message to this world to make them really understand and hear and see how horrendous it is, what Godin’s lived through and what people are experiencing every day and the slaughter that is taking place. It’s almost unfathomable for me. I mean, it’s like a war beyond most wars that I’ve ever read about or experienced. And I know that it was all very emotional for all of you as well, despite the work you do. And I just like, let’s just rattle forth wan, you want to just begin?

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Absolutely. It is tough talking about it, especially when you see it. You can’t unsee it. I want the world to know that. Trust me when I say this, we want independent journalism to be there because now it’s our word against what the Israeli media or the army is trying to tell you. And trust me, the two opposite statements can’t be correct. I want them to know that all the doctors who’ve been there are seeing and are on the same page. This is a genocide happening, live streamed. And yes, you can see it online, you can see dead babies online, but we actually are holding those dead babies with our hands. We’re actually treating those babies with bullet wounds. We’re actually treating older folks who are dying because of a lack of medication that could easily be treated. I want them to know that this is not a battle of two religious sides or anything.

This is just a battle of humanity. I had a fellow physician, Dr. Mark Palmiter, who is, I believe he’s of Jewish faith, and he was working alongside with me over there, and our main focus was to save as many lives as you can. The thing is with doctors, we can’t stop a genocide. The political leaders around the world can. And I want the world to understand that yes, we may be able to provide aid, but you have to step up yourself and put pressure on your government and stand together with humanity and help stop this genocide. This is happening during our lifetime,

Marc Steiner:

What you just said, you can jump in here. It is our job at this moment, your job to tell your stories. Our job is to get your stories told so that we shine light into this darkness so we can do something to stop it. I mean, that’s part of what has to happen here.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah, there’s so much that we can say that people should know about it. I think that it’s important to know for people to understand the kind of visceral feeling that you have when you go into Gaza. Gaza is a post apocalyptic world. When you go into Gaza, you feel like you’re in some type of a post apocalyptic film. And I think that when we think about Gaza, we need to think about would we accept any of the things that we’re asking people in Gaza to accept. Like last week for example, we went to the Canadian parliament and there was a journalist there who asked us about tunnels being under the hospital.

Now, this is a question that’s been repeated to many physicians. You can watch many, many, many interviews on YouTube where they asked physicians if they saw tunnels underneath the hospital and we did not see tunnels. However, even if there were tunnels, does that justify the bombing of hospitals? Would we accept, let’s say my nephew was in the hospital and I find out my nephew was killed while he was in the hospital by a bomb, and someone said, oh, there was a tunnel underneath the hospital, so that’s why we bombed the hospital. Would we accept that? Would we accept that for our own children? Would we accept that for our indigenous people that we would bomb? I work up north in Cree nation and with the Inuit that we would accept that we would bomb the Cree Regional Hospital. And ironically, after we had that conversation, we discovered that there were tunnels underneath the building where we did the press conference.

We walked through them as we were going to another building. But do you think that as Canadians, we would accept that someone would bomb our parliament because there were tunnels underneath it? So I think that a lot of what we’re asking, what the world is asking Gaza to accept is not something we would accept for ourselves or our children. We have access to direct news because we’ve been to Gaza, we know people there, and a few times a week I receive videos of people being burnt alive more than once a week. Would we accept that our children in Canada would be burnt alive on a regular basis? I don’t think we would accept that. And I think when it comes to the land piece of it, after the world decided to create Israel, it was created after the Arab Israeli war, there was 22% of the land that was given to the Palestinian people.

And that’s the land where these crimes are being committed. And when we talk about forcible displacement, they’re asking those people to move off of their land. That would be like if Canada said to the Inuit people, oh, we don’t like having you here in Northern Quebec, so we’re going to put you on a train and we’re going to send you to America. Well, I don’t think there’s very many Canadians that would find that to be acceptable. So we have to think about, I mean, first of all, there’s international law and we can talk about what is okay and what is not okay according to law. But on a more visceral and gut and human feeling, we have to think about whether we would accept any of that for someone that we love.

Marc Steiner:

Yipeng?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

I mean, reflecting on Sarah’s words, I think it’s really important that I think about the context and framework of settler colonialism because I agree with Sarah in all of these really important questions. And how has this happened to this extent? And to be able to see settler colonialism in its brutal, vicious, overt form of genocide is only possible because of this really pervasive dehumanization, not only through politic and rhetoric, but through very real actions on the Palestinian indigenous land and body. And we’ve seen that too in the context of Canada, right? That indigenous children have been starved in Canada by policies set by the first prime minister of this country, sir John A. McDonald, to be able to displace indigenous peoples off of their land into reservations. But I think it’s, at least for me, it’s different because I’ve learned about settler colonialism in almost this sterile academic environment.

And the ways in which it feels and acts in Canada and the US is still very pervasive, but is not this overt violence and brutality on a body. And we see it in resource grabs in decimating the land here, but to see it also for firsthand in Palestine, I’ve also seen it in the West Bank, the demolitions of homes and the displacement of people from their villages that they’ve lived for generations. But to see it in Gaza, it helps a sliver to understand that this is settler colonialism. But it does something I think to my soul, to our souls of seeing this, that this is what humans are capable of. And unfortunately, it’s a reminder of what humans have been capable of since time existed, perhaps because these atrocities in the form of holocaust and genocides have happened in the past and are actually happening in other parts of the world.

But I think the tagline for me is to know that Canada is so heavily complicit in what’s happening, and that’s what we tried to highlight last week. And it’s also something that a lot of parliamentarians and policymakers they don’t even think is true because they are being fed inaccurate information from the Minister of Foreign Affairs or minister of Industry now about how Canada is still heavily complicit. They canceled 30 permits for military technology that goes to Israel last year, but there’s still around 88% of existing permits of these technologies that go to Israel, including technology that goes from Canada to the us, such as engine sensors built in Ottawa, built in Ottawa, the only engine sensors that fit the F 35 fighter jets that are built in the US by Lockheed Martin. Those engine sensors are made by a company called Gas Stops in Ottawa. And those F 30 fives are the same fighter jets drop 2000 pound bombs on Palestinian children, women, men, and families, and they’re the ones that come into the hospitals sometimes dead on arrival. So to understand that complicity, I think it’s really compelling for us to know what is our responsibility, for example, as a Canadian, to push for ending this kind of complicity.

Marc Steiner:

I think that the work you’ve done, what you’ve written, what you have been interviewed about, what you’ve told people you’ve seen should be opening doors to just that idea at this moment. And all of you having grown up in a medical world, I know what you see every day is seeing people in deep pain lives in trouble, and you do your best to put your knowledge to work, to save lives. But I don’t think people really understand or get what the three of you saw, what the three of you experienced in Gaza, no matter what you’ve done before. I mean, when I interview people in Gaza, there’s one interviewee I’ve been desperately trying to get back to. I don’t know what happened to him, but we tried to follow his life. And to people that don’t really understand the depth of destruction and depravity that’s taking in places that you all just came back from, how do we begin to relate that to people in terms of your experiences?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

I mean, I think it’s just so indescribable. I think we can sit here all day to kind of go through all the ways in which life has been completely and utterly decimated. If we think about all the conditions of life that are needed to sustain life in Gaza being targeted and destroyed, it becomes really, really hard for someone living on this side of the world to fully grasp that and understand that. I don’t think I can even grasp it in this moment because I go to work here and then I go home and I have food on the table. I can go buy stuff from the grocery store. All of those things have been fully broken and the ways in which people live their lives have been fully broken. I just want to share the things that I learned in medical school. I was hoping to use even a little bit in the clinics that I worked at in Rafah, but it was really incomparable to what was absolutely needed. What was needed was food. What was needed was water. What was needed was medicines. These were things that were not even available. And to be faced with starving children on the brink of death, severe malnutrition, we didn’t even learn about things in a comprehensive way in medical school about severe malnutrition or something like rickets disease where your bones don’t even develop properly because you have vitamin D deficiency. But these were the things that we were already seeing. And that was like a year ago in Gaza.

Marc Steiner:

Rizwan, you’re about to jump in. Please do.

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Yeah. You know what Dr. Yipeng said, it’s hard to put into words what you see that you can’t unsee, and it’s hard to even to put into words, but just for example, so I went to the European Gaza Hospital, and this is only one side of the story because then you have the rest of the population. There is some population that’s even more north. There’s some population that was in Rafah, and there’s some population that was around the European Gaza Hospital. Once you enter the hospital, people are trying to crowd themselves around the hospital just for safety because they think that they’ll be safe around the hospital setting, which has now found to be not true because they can target hospitals anytime they want to. When I was entering, actually what happened was there was the World Central Aid Kitchen trucks that were with us at the border, and they were a few minutes ahead of us while we were entering, and they were the first to be targeted.

And one of our fellow Canadian, Jacob Flickinger was in that van working with World Central Aid Kitchen. And when we found out about it, then we’re like, okay, so we’re entering now. Could be this could be us as well. So right from the start, you realize that your life is in their hands with the press of a button. When you enter the hospital setting, you realize this is a population with a 90% literacy rate, and now they’re out looking for food for their children. Every person that I saw, every third person I saw had yellow eyes that showed that they had jaundice, likely from a in contaminated hepatitis water. There’s no water, there’s no food, and there’s no aid. There’s nothing getting through to the borders. In regards to the medical side of things, there is a lack of supplies. We had to choose who we would give oxygen to, who we would give the last few IV antibiotics to.

We had two people, I wasn’t working in the ICU, but I would go to the ICU transfer patients to the ICU. There was a girl, there was a girl, which we did a newspaper on over there, and she was in the ICU and she was intubated, but because of the lack of pain medication, she was always in pain. She was just hurling around in bed all day for 24 hours and we had no IV set of antibodies, but we just didn’t want to lose hope. And then every day we used to go and check up on her, and she was always in pain, and you could tell she was in pain because she would try to extubate herself at the same time. She would be screaming in pain all night, and we had to make a decision, should we give her a chance? Should we wait?

Maybe some supplies might enter, maybe there’s the news that Israel is allowing aid to get through medical supplies, at least to get through. But that news never came. And the day I was leaving, it was also the last day that she actually, they could not survive without the pain medication or medical lack of medical supplies. And it hurts because in a situation like in Canada, that 4-year-old girl’s life could have been easily saved. And listen, there’s so many kids over there with no surviving family. So the only people that have is the nurses and the medical people around, and maybe they might be lucky to find a family friend that’s around them as well. So it’s a tough situation, hard to describe, and it’s not like it’s not known, and now it’s everywhere on the internet. But the problem, the thing with us is we’ve seen it firsthand.

Marc Steiner:

So I want you to jump in here, please. I just might just give a thought. It was hard to listen to that. People have to hear it. I think that the three of you are physicians who have seen some horrendous things in your lives working with patients, but they experienced the horror of that little girl you were just talking about, and that’s expanded 10, 20,000 times inside Gaza. I think people need to hear and understand the depth of that pain and what we’re allowing to happen. I didn’t mean to sit there and preach, just it grabbed me very deeply what you said, Sarah. I’ve seen doctors work on people who come out of accidents that happened in communities like ours where we all live, but what you all experienced and have seen is something way beyond that. And so it’s just your own kind of personal journey through that and what you came away with and how you survived it, how you survived it.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah. Well, of course, I could talk about many things. I was working at European Gaza Hospital when we received the Palestinian prisoners that were given in exchange during the month of February during the so-called ceasefire. And I could talk about the state of the prisoners. I could talk about all the patients that we saw who were affected by quadcopters or snipers or unexploded ordinances or missiles. I could also talk about the colleagues. But part of the conversation that I think is often missing is our experiences as international doctors in the hospital. And I think what really changed me when I went to Gaza was my experience of the kindness and the welcoming by the national staff. I remember that I was sad one day I went outside and I was standing, it was raining and I had eaten with most of the people in the department.

They all knew me. So the security guards or the people who do the welcoming of the patients and triaged, they saw me. They looked out the window and they saw me and they said, Dr. Sarah, are you okay? Are you okay? Let us pass you a chair. So they passed me a chair through the window. So then I sat on the chair. So then they said, are you okay? Are you okay? Can we give you some tea? So I said, okay, thanks for the tea. So they gave me tea. So then after that they said, well, if you’re having tea, you need to have some kind of chocolate with your tea. Can we give you a chocolate? So then they gave me a chocolate through the window. And I think that the profound kindness and welcoming and the treatment of guests was something that I was so touched by.

And as I think about what we’re often taught as children, I guess teaching in every family is different, but in my family, it was like that love is about putting the other person before yourself or that thinking about the good of the other or being attentive to what they might want or need in that moment. And that’s something that I experienced all the time there I was so touched at the end of my time there, I offered to extend, and I spoke with my boss about that. And you have to keep in mind that my boss was the only physician there during the mass casualty events last year. He was there with a bunch of medical students. He lived in the hospital and he sought every mass casualty event. So I asked him, do you need some help? Do you want me to stay longer? And he answered my question in a very polite but roundabout way. He said that he had experienced romantic love in his life, but that the romantic love that he experienced will never ever compare to the love that he has for his daughter. And then he said to me, your dad’s worried about you. You should go home.

So to think that my boss was caring about the feelings of another man that he’s never met while undergoing a genocide and being afraid for his children’s lives, having lost everything, displaced multiple times, huge financial loss, huge personal loss. The healthcare workers in Gaza, they’re experiencing the genocide on two levels. They go to work, they try to manage the mass casualty events. They try to save as many people. Some of my male colleagues admitted to me that they felt so hopeless after the mass casualty events that they were crying. And after all that, they go home and they experience the genocide in their own lives. They’re living, most of them are living in tents. They don’t have electricity, they don’t have access to water. They’ve experienced, they’ve lost friends, they’ve lost family members. And despite all of that, they’re coming to work and they’re taking great care of patients, and they’re treating us like guests, even though our country is directly involved in killing their friends. And I think that that’s something that really changed me.

Marc Steiner:

Before we become around this up a bit, I want closing thought from each one of you, but Yipeng, let me just ask, I understand you’re going back to Gaza soon, is that right?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

The intention is not to go into Gaza. I’ll be with a global march to Gaza. So we have, I believe, over 50 country delegations now, and we are expecting thousands of people arriving in Egypt to go from Cairo to Alish, which is a few kilometers away from the Rafa border between Egypt and Gaza Palestine. And the goal will be to march and to protest at the Rafa border crossing to demand that the thousands of trucks that are still waiting at that border to be let in with food, water, fuel, medical aid, and supplies, that that needs to enter to end the genocide, to end the famine and the starvation. And I think we are at this pivotal moment where hundreds of thousands, if not the majority of the population facing extermination because of this months long blockade on top of an existing 18 year blockade of essential foods and supplies and medicines.

So people are on a razor thin thread of survival at this moment. And I think citizens and people of conscience around the world are really unsure what else there is to do, right? We have organized as best as we could in different parts of the world, especially the countries that are most complicit, like the uk, France, Canada, Australia, the us, and we’ve done our press conferences, we’ve done our letters, we’ve done our petitions, we’ve done it, and we’ve done direct actions, we’ve done it all. And I think this feels like a very pivotal moment where people are descending on the rough of border to say, enough is enough. We haven’t seen meaningful action from these most complicit parties to prevent and end this genocide and end this famine. And as people, we are going to try to do this on our own in the same way that the freedom Flotilla has tried multiple times, and now they are, I think, very close to reaching the beaches of Gaza. So I think it’s a reflection of nothing in this world, whether it be civil rights or equal human rights, if we can even call it that on this side of the world, nothing has been just granted to people. It has always been fought for by the people. And this is another example of that,

Marc Steiner:

Just when is that taking place?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

The goal is to march the Rafah border crossing June 15th.

Marc Steiner:

So as we conclude this and let you all go back to your day, I know you’re busy. One of the things you said, Sarah, I was curious about, we hear about the resilience of the Palestinian people, and I wonder when you are there and reflect on it now, where you see the hope, where you see the possibility of this ending and how we end it and how we build something new and how not to give up hope.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Well, first I’ll talk about resilience, then I’ll talk about hope. So I don’t think that we should be talking about resilience. While there are ongoing atrocities, I don’t think that resilience, I have a lot of resistance to the use of the word resilience when we’re talking about something that’s manmade

Because it takes the responsibility off of the perpetrator and puts it onto the victim. And this is not what the insurance companies call an act of God, right? This is a choice. We saw all the trucks outside of Gaza as we went in. It’s very easy to get water and food into Gaza. It’s easy. Like many of these problems could be solved within a few hours if there was the political will to do that. So I don’t want to focus on the Palestinian resilience. I want to focus on what we can do to come alongside people in need and to do that in a way that respects their sovereignty to say, how can we come along you? What do you want us to do for you or with you? And how can we help? And I think that that’s how we need to be responding.

When it comes to hope, I think that hope is a choice. So love is a choice, and hope is a choice. So as I come alongside my Palestinian colleagues, my patients, the nurses, and all the people of Palestine and of Gaza, I’ve taken a decision to clinging to hope, even at the darkest moments when I am receiving those videos of people being burnt alive. This week, I found out that one of my colleagues had his leg blown off at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution that happened. I found out that another friend of a friend was killed by missile when he went to go pick up his food at the Gaza, at the GHF distribution. And that type of grieving is hard for me, and I’m only experiencing 1000000th of what my Palestinian friends, colleagues, patients are experiencing. So to summarize, I am willing to choose hope. Even at times when hope is not saying that there is a probability that everything is going to go amazing, but for me, hope is a choice.

Marc Steiner:

There’s one you want to,

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Yeah, you know what? Yes. I would like to comment on two things Sarah mentioned about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation known as the GHF, and understand that this was backed by US and Israel only to distribute aid in to Gaza. It was a failed operation, which was marred by violence and mismanagement. And not many other humanitarian organizations even want to deal with them or collaborate with them because they knew it would fail. And it did fail. Not only did it fail, it actually led into violence and killing of more Palestinians who were just there to grab aid for their families. So it’s just tough to talk about this. Anyways, it was a failed operation. In regards to blockade. I know we kept talking about blockade of supplies, but there’s a blockade of medical personnel getting in. There’s a blockade of journalism getting in and the medical, we had three rejections by the head of Galia just informed us, who was Dr.

Dort. She had three rejections. And before that, there was another organization that had nine out of 10 people rejected from doctors coming into Gaza to provide medical relief in regards to hope. I don’t want to talk about the Palestine home like Sarah said, because they are a resilient group. That’s their faith. Their faith tells them that despair is a sign of disbelief and that hope is a hallmark of faith. So they’re never going to give up hope. And so for such people, you can never defeat them. In regards to from our standpoint, there’s always hope. Because if you don’t have hope, then you let injustice win. And what you see, what we’ve seen, you can never let that happen. There’s hope whenever they pull a child out of the rubble and he smiles back at you. Those images are tough to look at, but they’re there. And without hope, we let injustice one. So there will be hope until we succeed in having a free Palestinian state.

Marc Steiner:

I want to thank the three of you deeply for what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and for joining us today, and the stories and wisdom that you all have shared in this conversation. I hope we can all just stay in touch. I’m serious about that because this is something that we have to be unified together to stop. And I just really do want to thank you for the sacrifices you’ve made, putting your lives a line in danger and bringing back the stories that we need to hear and healing the people in the process. So thank you all very much for being here.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

It was an honor. Thank you for having us.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you once again. Let me thank our guests, doctors Sarah LaLonde, Yipeng Ge, and Rizwan Minhas for joining us and for all the work they do, putting their lives on the line, literally putting their lives on the line in Gaza to save people’s lives. And here in Baltimore, let’s say thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner show, and putting up with me and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to the three physicians that work for joining us here today on the Marc Steiner Show. So the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

The man in the video ridicules Pakistanis for celebrating an apparent ‘victory’ in the flare-up which saw intense cross-border missile strikes. He states that Pakistan has attained victory, not with regard to technological advances, but with their capacity to tell lies. He further lampoons Pakistan by calling out news agencies and their propensity to spread misinformation. The video is embedded with a caption which reads: “Pakistani influencer exposes Pakistani army and media with brutal satire, reveals ground reality.’

Verified X user Chota Don (@choga_don) posted the viral video, claiming that the man speaking on camera was from Pakistan. This tweet has gathered 10 Lakh views and more than 3,500 re-shares. (Archive)

Dheere dheere Pakistanio ko realise ho rha h, kya hua tha unke sath pic.twitter.com/5riyw82TcL

— Chota Don (@choga_don) May 25, 2025

The same claim was amplified by several other X users. (Archived links: 1, 2, 3, 4)

The official Instagram handle of the Rajasthan unit of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) also posted the viral video.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by RSS Rajasthan (@rssrajasthanorg)

Fact Check

We ran a reverse image search on one of the key-frames from the viral video, which led us to this Instagram reel, uploaded by comedian and model, Anil Singh, on May 19. This is the same video that went viral.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by ANIL SINGH (@anil_singh_0009)

By going through his profile, we could discern that the original reel, which featured Singh performing a comic monologue in character, was part of a series of sketches that lampoon political rhetoric in the subcontinent. In this particular video, he plays the character of a Pakistani man.

A link provided in his Instagram bio led us to his YouTube channel, where it is mentioned that Anil Singh is from India.

So, to sum up, an Instagram reel uploaded by an Indian model and content creator by the name of Anil Singh, has gone viral, with users on social media claiming that he is a Pakistani civilian admitting to the deplorable state of affairs in Pakistan.

There is more, and this is where it gets interesting.

Republic TV Ran The Video as Confession of a Pakistani Man

In a blatant case of reporting without any verification, Republic Bharat aired this satirical reel, falsely presenting it as a real confession by a Pakistani civilian.

The clip, originally intended as a comedic skit, was stripped of its context, and repurposed as a confession during a prime-time broadcast, named ‘Yeh Bharat ki Baat Hai’, on May 23.

The comedian, Anil Singh, posted another Instagram reel on May 24, which showed footage of the Republic Bharat broadcast of May 23, which had been aired at 8:56 PM. The anchor, Syed Suhail, says: “Toh Pakistan yeh jashn isliye mana raha hai ki unke awaam ko bata sake – hum haare nahi hai, jeete hai. Lekin awaam unki sab janti hai. Suniye uni ke zubaani kya keh rahi hai – Pakistan jeeta hai ya haara.” (Translation: “Pakistan is celebrating in order to show its people that they didn’t lose, but won. However, their people know the truth. Listen to what they themselves are saying – did Pakistan win or lose?”)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by ANIL SINGH (@anil_singh_0009)

Alt News was able to locate the timestamp of the episode where the satirical reel was broadcast, but the section has since been edited out (starting at the 3:40 timestamp).

Anil Singh uploaded another Instagram reel on May 26 which called attention to a corrigendum issued by Republic Bharat, on the May 24 broadcast of the same show. The anchor, Syed Suhail, clarifies that the man shown on the Instagram reel was no Pakistani, and asserts that the show had made no insinuation towards the testimony being that of a Pakistani’s. This is, however, a false claim. The anchor clearly said what he was going to show was a statement from “पाकिस्तान की अवाम” (the common people of Pakistan).

He then ends by issuing an apology, considering that audiences might have leapt to false ideas about that person’s nationality.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by ANIL SINGH (@anil_singh_0009)

The post Republic used Indian creator’s satiric reel on prime time; claimed Pakistani civilians were slamming their country appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

Once temples of learning where new generations of students sought to advance their futures, Gaza’s universities have all been destroyed by Israel’s genocidal annihilation of the Gaza Strip, and many students and faculty have been killed. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN speaks with displaced Palestinian students and parents about the systematic destruction of life and all institutions of learning in Gaza, and about their reactions to Palestine solidarity protests on campuses in the West and around the world.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

CHANTINGS: 

Free free Palestine! 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I saw the protests at Columbia University. There were protests in solidarity with Gaza. The police arrested more than 100 students. They were in solidarity with the students of Gaza. They arrested many teachers and students. There was also a university in Atlanta where the head of the philosophy department was arrested. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets to suppress these protests and demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

Of course, when we see all this, we feel a sense of pride and gratitude. We want to thank them for standing with us. We thank the free people of the world—professors and students—for standing with us. Who stood with the students of Gaza, despite the repression, despite the arrests they stood with us, and this has helped us a lot. 

I am Haya Adil Agha, 21 years old, a fourth-year student at the Islamic University in Gaza. The Department of Science and Technology, specializing in smart technologies. The technology club was like a second home to us. There was a club president, we had club members, My classmates and I used to spend most of our time at the university. We had different groups and organized events. We would come up with innovations and new ideas for students. I used to spend most of my time at university with friends. We would discuss projects, questions and assignments and study together. If the professors were available you could go and ask them questions. So I used to spend all my time at University and they were the best years of my life —the last two years before the war. Exactly three days before the war—two weeks into the first semester. My professor requested that I present on a subject. So I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and handed out a summary to the students. I got up and began presenting. I had no idea that this would be my last presentation at university. Three days later, the war began. It destroyed our dreams, destroyed our future, destroyed our aspirations. All our memories now have no meaning. The place is gone and nothing is left. 

UM MOHAMED AWADH: 

Our dreams and everything else we ever wanted was destroyed with our homes. Even our dreams were destroyed. Everything in our life was destroyed. It used to be a really good area. It used to be a place for the youth to study and pursue their dreams. Look at the extent of the destruction. I mean it’s just rubble. Even learning has been banned here. We’ve started to dream about the simplest of things. Just to eat. The dreams of our children have become as basic as filling a bottle of water. They dream of reaching a soup kitchen. These are simple things. They have been robbed of their right to education. Their right to healthcare. They have been robbed of a lot.

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I lost contact with some of my friends because they were killed at the beginning of the war. Of course, this impacts me because every day, you hear that a classmate was killed, that a professor at your university was killed. This has a profound impact on us as students. Many professors were killed, too. I can’t list them all. And I lost contact with many others because it was the university that used to bring us together. The war has driven us apart, so I couldn’t stay in touch with them. We were constantly displaced, moving from place to place. There was no internet and no electricity. I was forced to take my laptop outside to charge it. This was a big risk because, as an IT student, my most important tool is my laptop. As well as this, there was no internet. I had to travel far to get to the closest spot with internet. to be able to download lectures and slides to be able to study. I came back to the university after seeing it from afar. I had planned to visit briefly and then leave. When I saw it, I got depressed. I had seen it in pictures, but I wasn’t expecting this level of destruction. When I first arrived, I was so upset and angry. Everywhere I looked, I remembered things: This is the building where I used to sit; this is the corner where my friends and I used to hang. This is the building where a certain professor used to be. We would always go to ask him questions, and he would respond. All of the memories came back—so it affected me really deeply. My university—the place where I used to dream, where I spent two years of my life, the best two years of my life—was gone. I had been counting down the years until graduation. And just like that, it disappeared in the blink of an eye. In one day, the university was gone without a trace. 

HANI ABDURAHIM MOHAMED AWADH: 

The suffering in our lives—lack of water, food, and drink—is unbearable. You can see, the children, they have been robbed of everything. In the whole of the Gaza strip, from one end to the other, there is no safe place. Here used to be students and a university, all the people of Gaza used to study here. Now: it’s become ruins. All of it is just ruins. There’s nothing to be happy about. No reason to be happy. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

People have been forced to burn books. Firstly, there’s no gas—the occupation has stopped gas from entering Gaza. But people still have to fulfill their daily needs. There’s no gas, but people still need to cook and heat water. And on top of that, people have lost their source of income. So people can’t afford to buy wood or paper. so in the end they have been forced to burn the university library books. Of course they have been forced to do this. You have to understand people’s circumstances. 

ALAA FARES AL BIS: 

I have been displaced about 18 times. We left under fire, under air strikes. I mean, we couldn’t take anything with us—we left running for our lives. With ourselves and our children. There’s no food, no drink, no water, no proper sleep, no proper shelter. We are living amidst rubble. We ask the whole world to have mercy on us and to bring a ceasefire in Gaza. 

CHANTINGS:

Free free Palestine!

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

Anyone who witnessed or was affected by Baltimore’s failed experiment with zero-tolerance policing during the aughts remembers the unrelenting chaos it created. As reporters working for a newspaper, we witnessed the onslaught of so-called quality of life arrests as a fast-moving crisis that seemed to accelerate with each illegal charge.

The policy was driven by the idea that even the most minor infraction, like drinking a beer on a stoop, was worthy of detainment in the pursuit of stopping more violent crimes. However, it soon spiraled out of control to roughly 100,000 arrests per year between 2000 and 2006. It led to bizarre examples of over-policing, like Gerard Mungo, the seven-year-old boy arrested for sitting on an electric dirt bike, or the incarceration of attendees of an entire cookout over a noise complaint. 

But aside from the individual horror stories of people who ended up in jail without committing a crime, there was something else just as shocking: all of the suffering occurred in a blue city, with little if any political opposition or pushback from the Democratic establishment.  

If you’re skeptical, don’t be. Post 9-11 Democrats wanted to look tough. And they were looking for a political superstar to replace former President Bill Clinton. 

Then-Mayor Martin O’Malley fit the bill. He was a rising political star who the local Democratic establishment believed would eventually ascend to the presidency. Throughout his tenure, he oversaw this policy of mass arrests, hoping the ensuing drop in crime would bolster his future candidacy. Predictably, his presidential aspirations fizzled under the weight of the 2015 uprisings after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, and crime didn’t go down. 

But the results were undeniably horrific: tens of thousands of people placed in cuffs without committing a crime. An authoritarian policy embraced by a Democratic establishment that seemed to have few qualms with allowing police to create untenable conditions within predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

During the zero tolerance heyday, prosecutors were so overwhelmed by the onslaught of detentions that they invented a previously unheard-of legal terminology to address it: ‘abated by arrest.’ It was a legal classification intended to reckon with the fact that there was no legal basis for charging thousands of people police were putting into handcuffs. In other words, the arrest was illegal; prosecutors just invented a way to make it seem less so.  

The city’s Central Booking facility, constructed in the ’90s with the expectation it would process around 40,000 arrests annually, was so overwhelmed that many detainees would be given what was known as a ‘walk through,’ which entailed simply walking in and out of the facility in a long serpentine line guided by corrections personnel. This overcrowding was exacerbated by the jump-out boys, who would arrive in predominantly Black neighborhoods to lead people, whose only crime was living in an area police deemed suitable for mass illegal incarceration, into the back of vans.

The point was, and is, that zero tolerance was, in some sections of Baltimore, worse than authoritarianism—it led to a reconfiguration of the Constitution. People would be illegally detained and then disappear into the Central Booking facility for months without due process. Many victims weI interviewed were often released without charging documents, unable to describe or otherwise recount the crime that had landed them in jail. Baltimore was essentially non-constitutional—a bastion of notably unlawful law enforcement.  

All of this backstory is a prelude to the astonishing and terrifying argument made recently by prominent Johns Hopkins professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Lester Spence. 

Spence is one of a handful of innovative political scientists who examine national politics through the prism of urban governance. He is the author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. In it he argues that cities, once bastions of progressive policymaking, have become laboratories for neoliberalism.  

But Spence has taken this idea one step further by making an argument that makes the Trump administration’s current unconstitutional actions even more terrifying. 

During an interview for the TRNN documentary ‘Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle,’  Spence linked the wildly unconstitutional policing that precipitated the uprising to the anti-democratic impulses from the Trump administration that are infiltrating the country’s institutions. 

“To the extent that if you looked at a map of the country and you looked and you layered density and then voted on that map, what you’d see is the most Democratic places are the densest places, and all the rest is red,” Spence explained. 

“Now, if you layer onto those values about democracy, should everybody be able to get a right to vote? Should people accept the results of elections? But then, should people have a right to healthcare? Should people have a right to solid education? Should people have a right to a living wage? All those attitudes are concentrated in metropolitan areas. If you constrain the ability of those spaces to articulate those values and policy, then you constrain the ability to state on one hand… and then the nation-state on the other to actually fight for those values,” he said. 

“So the sort of authoritarianism comes out of the policing and the lack of opportunity and the dysfunction of democracy.”

There are obvious connections that Spence is making here. Illegal arrests have been proven to diminish political participation. Specious criminal charges literally erode the type of citizenship that a democracy depends on.

It estranges, isolates, and otherwise marginalizes entire swathes of a community. Affected residents subsequently cannot access public housing, student loans, or even admission to higher education. All of these factors conclusively diminish the strength and vibrancy of our citizenry, and, as Spence suggests, mute the constituency most likely to advocate for progressive policies. 

But Spence’s idea has even more profound implications if you delve deeper into the history of policing in blue cities like Baltimore. To understand its true significance, just consider a less direct force undermining democracy which is precipitated by Democrats’ commitment to aggressive law enforcement. 

It starts with the conservative narrative of the failed city. 

The so-called failed “Dem-run city” is shorthand for broader attacks on Democratic competence. It boils broader ideas of liberal excesses into simple narratives: The chaotic blue communities are beset by criminals and immigrants. The lawlessness and moral bankruptcy of cities that have run amok. All of it espoused by Republican candidates and right-leaning news media outlets as probable cause to run Democrats out of Washington.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post published daily stories on crime and dysfunction in San Francisco. Similarly, in our own hometown, right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting has touted a ‘City in Crisis’ series that again equates crime to failed Democratic policies and the mayhem they supposedly engender. All of this, manufactured or true, creates a perception that Democrats are wildly incompetent.

That perception gains traction, according to Spence’s idea, because—in some cases—it’s accurate.

That’s because cities under Democratic administrations have invested billions in the ostensibly flawed idea that policing was a key to reducing crime. Just like with zero tolerance in Baltimore, many Democratic mayors and elected officials not just allowed but touted aggressive and illegal policing as a proficient means to an end.

That commitment to a flawed policy has not only led to failure, but has given Republicans plenty of fodder to justify the Trump administration’s authoritarian rule. The easy-to-construct narrative that Democrats can’t and will not impose order and don’t know how to do so has simply made right-wing talking points more salient and appealing.

The irony is, as Spence points out, that blue cities like Baltimore invested massive sums in policing for decades with meager results. Defunding the police has hardly been the problem. Here in Baltimore, for example, public safety spending has outpaced education spending for decades. 

Nevertheless, Baltimore’s recent drop in homicides suggests that all this spending overlooked what appears to be the most effective solution: investment in community-based programs. 

Dayvon Love, public policy director for the Baltimore-based think tank Leaders of Beautiful Struggle, made this point in the same documentary. The Baltimore Police Department, he noted, has been grappling with a historic number of vacancies, fluctuating somewhere between 500 and 1,000 officers. However, even with fewer officers to patrol the streets, violent crime and homicides have dropped significantly. In 2024 homicides dropped to 201, a 20% decrease from the year prior. This year, nonfatal shootings and homicides have continued to fall another 20% to a record low. 

Some have attributed this to a broader national trend towards lower homicide rates. But, as Mayor Brandon Scott recently pointed out, Baltimore has always bucked fluctuations in homicides and violent crime.  

Instead, Scott attributes the drop to the city’s commitment to community-based programs like the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy, which uses a coordinated community-based approach to persuade high-risk residents to get a job rather than commit a crime. The city, with the help of the state of Maryland, has also made historic investments in Safe Streets, a violence interruption program in which former felons mediate disputes before they turn violent. 

All of this points to the fact that Democrats’ past use of aggressive policing has been a boon for Republicans because it was not just the wrong solution, but a prescription for electoral failure as well. Whether or not the Republican depiction of this policy has been fair, the fact remains that Democrats across the country have invested countless billions into authoritarian policing with little impact on crime, and as a result have paved the way for an authoritarian national movement.

If these two trends continue, as Spence suggested is possible, then we are in big trouble. 

Just consider the findings of the Justice Department report that was released after its 2016 investigation into the Baltimore Police Department in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. It found that, among other abuses, police arrested one man 44 times. It also revealed that several extremely poor and mostly African-American neighborhoods were targeted with mass arrests to the point that a person could be detained for simply walking in an area where they did not live.

If that sounds scary, consider the fact that the editor of the paper I worked for was arrested after we published the overtime earnings of all the officers on the force during the zero-tolerance era. Police contrived a crime to effectuate the arrest, accusing him of pointing a shotgun at his neighbors. The case fell apart after his lawyers pointed out that all of this occurred in the privacy of his home and that the aggrieved neighbor had only witnessed the infraction through a shut window. However, that did not stop a cadre of heavily armed officers from dragging him into the same Central Booking facility as the other victims of the city’s mass arrest movement. 

Even more troubling were the sheer numbers of arrests effectuated by a relatively small number of officers. At its peak, BPD had roughly 3,000 sworn cops—and the number of people they managed to arrest was thousands of times greater. Imagine if the vast federal bureaucracy embarked on a similar program of nationwide detentions.

That program is, actually, already happening. The Trump administration has enlisted the FBI and IRS to help arrest immigrants, a task usually outtside their respective purviews. 

The point is, we have witnessed how over-policing changes the contours of government, and if this same mentality pervades the federal institutions and agencies, it will be more terrifying than it’s already been. 

Spence’s insight should be heeded as not just a cautionary tale, but a call to action. Baltimore has made positive changes to commit resources towards a community based approach to crime intervention. The question is, will it be enough?

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Stephen Janis and Taya Graham.

A new Auckland-based kava business has found itself at the heart of a cultural debate, with critics raising concerns about appropriation, authenticity, and the future of kava as a deeply rooted Pacific tradition.

Vibes Kava, co-founded by Charles Byram and Derek Hillen, operates out of New Leaf Kombucha taproom in Grey Lynn.

The pair launched the business earlier this year, promoting it as a space for connection and community.

• READ MORE: PHOTOESSAY: Visual peregrinations in the realm of kava — Pacific Journalism Review
• Other kava reports

Byram, a Kiwi-American of Samoan descent, returned to Aotearoa after growing up in the United States. Hillen, originally from Canada, moved to New Zealand 10 years ago.

Both say they discovered kava during the covid-19 pandemic and credit it with helping them shift away from alcohol.

“We wanted to create something that brings people together in a healthier way,” the pair said.

However, their vision has been met with growing criticism, with people saying the business lacks cultural depth, misrepresents tradition, and risks commodifying a sacred practice.

Context and different perspectives
Tensions escalated after Vibes Kava posted a promotional video on Instagram, describing their offering as “a modern take on a 3000-year-old tradition” and “a lifestyle shift, one shell at a time”.

On their website, Hillen is referred to as a “kava evangelist,” while videos feature Byram hosting casual kava circles and promoting fortnightly “kava socials.”

The kava they sell is bottled, with tag names referencing the effects of each different kava bottle — for example, “buzzy kava” and “chill kava”.

Their promotional content was later reposted on TikTok by a prominent Pacific influencer, prompting an influx of online input about the legitimacy of their business and the diversity of their kava circles.

The reposted video has since received more than 95,000 views, 1600 shares, and 11,000 interactions.

In the TikTok caption, the influencer questioned the ethical foundations of the business.

“I would like to know what type of ethics was put into the creation of this . . . who was consulted, and said it was okay to make a brand out of a tradition?”

Criticised the brand’s aesthetic
Speaking to RNZ Pacific anonymously, the influencer criticised the brand’s aesthetic and messaging, describing it as “exploitative”.

“Their website and Instagram portray trendy, wellness-style branding rather than a proud celebration of authentic Pacific customs or values,” they said.

“I feel like co-owner Charles appears to use his Samoan heritage as a buffer against the backlash he’s received.

“Not to discredit his identity in any way; he is Samoan, and seems like a proud Samoan too.

“However, that should be reflected consistently in their branding. What’s currently shown on their website and Instagram is a mix of Fijian kava practice served in a Samoan tanoa. That to me is confusing and dilutes cultural authenticity.”

Fiji academic Dr Apo Aporosa said much of the misunderstanding stems from a narrow perception of kava as simply being a beverage.

“Most people who think they are using kava are not,” Aporosa said.

‘Detached from culture’
“What they’re consuming may contain Piper methysticum, but it’s detached from the cultural framework that defines what kava actually is.”

Aporosa said it is important to recognise kava as both a substance and a practice — one that involves ceremony, structure, and values.

“It is used to nurture vā, the relational space between people, and is traditionally accompanied by specific customs: woven mats, the tanoa bowl, coconut shell cups (bilo or ipu), and a shared sense of respect and order.”

He said that the commodification of kava, through flavoured drink extracts and Western “wellness” branding, is concerning, and that it distorts the plant’s original purpose.

“When people repackage kava without understanding or respecting the culture it comes from, it becomes cultural appropriation,” he said.

He added that it is not about restricting access to kava — it is about protecting its cultural integrity and honouring the knowledge Pacific communities have preserved for upwards of 2000 years.

‘We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide’
Dr Edmond Fehoko, is a renowned Tongan academic and senior lecturer at Otago University, garnered international attention for his research on the experiences and perceptions of New Zealand-born Tongan men who participate in faikava.

He said these situations are layered.

“I see the cultural appreciation side of things, and I see the cultural appropriation side of things,” Fehoko said.

“It is one of the few practices we hold dearly to our heart, and that is somewhat indigenous to our Pacific people — it can’t be found anywhere else.

“Hence, it holds a sacred place in our society. But, we as a peoples, have actually not done a good enough job to raise awareness of the practice to other societies, and now it’s a race issue, that only Pacific people have the rights to this — and I don’t think that is the case anymore.”

He explained that it is part of a broader dynamic around kava’s globalisation — and that for many people, both Pacific and non-Pacific, kava is an “interesting and exciting space, where all types of people, and all genders, come in and feel safe”.

“Yes, that is moving away from the cultural, customary way of things. But, we need to find new ways, and create new opportunities, to further disseminate our knowledge.

‘Not the same today’
“Our kava practice is not the same today as it was 10, 20 years ago. Kava practices have evolved significantly across generations.

“There are over 200 kava bars in the United States . . . kava is one of the few traditions that is uniquely Pacific. But our understanding of it has to evolve too. We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide,” he said.

He added that the issue of kava being commercialised by non-Pacific people cannot necessarily be criticised.

“It’s two-fold, and quite contradictory,” he said, adding that the criticism against these ventures often overlooks the parallel ways in which Pacific communities are also reshaping and profiting from the tradition.

“We argue that non-Pacific people are profiting off our culture, but the truth is, many of us are too,” he said.

“A minority have extensive knowledge of kava . . . and if others want to appreciate our culture, let them take it further with us, instead of the backlash.

“If these lads are enjoying a good time and have the same vibe . . . the only difference is the colour of their skin, and the language they are using, which has become the norm in our kava practices as well.

“But here, we have an opportunity to educate people on the importance of our practice. Let’s raise awareness. Kava is a practice we can use as a vehicle, or medium, to navigate these spaces.”

‘Getting judged for the colour of my skin’
“I completely understand the points that have been brought up,” Byram said in response to the criticism.

Tearing up, he said that was one of the most difficult things to swallow was backlash fixated on his cultural identity.

“I felt like I was getting judged for the colour of my skin, and for not understanding who I was or what I was trying to accomplish. If my skin was a bit darker, I might have been given some more grace.

“I was raised in a Samoan household. My grandfather is Samoan . . . my mum is Samoan. It’s tough to be this person and then get hurt online, without having a conversation with me. Nobody took the time to ask those questions,” he said.

The pair also pushed back on claims they are focused on profit.

“We went there to learn, to dive into the culture. We went to a lot of kava bars, interviewed farmers, just to understand the origin of kava, how it works within a community, and then how best to engage with, and showcase it,” Byram said.

“People have criticised that we are profiting — we’re making no money at this point. All the money we make from this kava has gone back to the farmers in Vanuatu.”

Representing a minority
Hillen thinks those criticising them represent a minority.

“We have a lot of Pasifika customers that come here [and] they support us.

“They are ecstatic their culture is being promoted this way, and love what we are doing. The negative response from a minority part of the population was surprising to us.”

Critics had argued that the business showcased confusing blends of different cultural approaches.

Byram and Hillen said that it is up to other people to investigate and learn about the cultures, and that they are simply trying to acknowledge all of them.

Byram, however, added that the critics brought up some good points — and that this will be a catalyst for change within their business.

“Yesterday, we joined the Pacific Business Hub. We are [taking] steps to integrate more about the culture, community, and what we are trying to accomplish here.”

They also addressed their initial silence and comment moderation.

‘Cycle so self-perpetuating’
“I think the cycle was so self-perpetuating, so I was like . . . I need to make sure I respond with candor, concern, and active communication.

“So I deleted comments and put a pause on things, so we could have some space before the comments get out of hand.

“At the end of the day . . . this is about my connection with my culture and people more than anything, and I’m excited to grow from it. I’m learning, and I’m utilising this as a growth point. We’re just doing our best,” Byram said.

Hillen added: “You have to understand, this business is super new, so we’re still figuring out how best to do things, how to market and grow along with not only the community.

“What we really want to represent as people who care about, and believe in this.”

Byram said they want to acknowledge as many peoples as possible.

“We don’t want to create ceremony or steal anything from the culture. We really just want to celebrate it, and so again, we acknowledge the concern,” he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The regime forced tens of thousands of men and women, as strangers, to marry as an effort to populate Democratic Kampuchea.

The documentary “The Stories We Share” looks at this untold legacy of Pol Pot’s rule that left many lasting scars. The filmmakers meet with survivors Oung Phhun and Soeng Chantorn and travel with Khmer Rouge Tribunal educators as they help the younger generation understand their country’s past.

While forced marriage was intended to boost the population, during less than four years under the Khmer Rouge, the population shriveled. An estimated two million people died from starvation, disease and execution.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Investigative.

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches, to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In Phnom Penh’s hot season, when the Cambodian capital’s sweltering, subtropical air routinely soars to 100 degrees, more workers than usual visited the infirmaries inside a factory that made baby clothes for Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel brand.

As many as 15 people a month typically became too weak to work in May and June, according to a medical worker employed by the factory. Even at other times of year, she said, eight to 10 workers wound up in the clinic monthly because they felt weak, including one or two a month who fell unconscious and needed to go to the hospital.

Other former employees told ProPublica they sometimes saw two or three people a day taken to an on-site clinic. One described how he carried workers too weak to walk. Another said she saw thin workers being taken to the clinic, their faces pale and eyes closed.

Y&W Garment’s employees — at one time numbering around 4,500 — operated sewing machines and packaged clothing in cavernous buildings with fans but no air conditioning. The fans sometimes broke and weren’t fixed, one worker said. Another said the inside of the factory could get hotter than it was outdoors. “It’s so hot,” said Phan Oem, 53, who started working there shortly after the factory opened in 2012. “I’m sweaty. It’s too hot.”

Workers have fainted for years inside Cambodia’s garment factories, where more than 57,000 people now produce Nike goods. People at Nike’s suppliers fainted en masse in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to news reports at the time, part of a string of events in which thousands of Cambodians got sick, vomited or collapsed on the job. (The term “fainting” in Cambodia is used for conditions that range from losing consciousness to becoming too dizzy or weak to work.)

Nike had moved into Cambodia in 2000, just two years after co-founder Phil Knight promised to end labor abuses that accompanied its push into Southeast Asia.

Nike took action after faintings made headlines. It sent executives on a fact-finding mission in 2012. It asked for international labor officials to investigate. Nike in 2017 told The Guardian, “We take the issue of fainting seriously, as it can be both a social response and an indication of issues within a factory that may require corrective action.”

Yet for all the measures Nike says it relies on to keep workers safe, which include heat standards in factories, internal and external audits, announced and unannounced visits, Y&W workers said fainting persisted during the two years Nike products were made there.

Jill Tucker, who led the U.N.-backed oversight group Better Factories Cambodia from 2011 to 2014, said she was not surprised to hear that workers regularly fainted at Y&W Garment.

The problem is “a consequence of low wages and poor working conditions that continue, even after decades of work on this issue,” Tucker said. “People work very hard for very little pay.”

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its parent company, Hong Kong-based Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to emails, text messages or calls.

It’s unclear what Nike knew about working conditions at the Phnom Penh factory. Better Factories Cambodia, whose audits Nike has said in the past it relied on to monitor suppliers, told ProPublica it did not know workers were fainting at Y&W. ProPublica previously reported on low wages at Y&W, where just 1% of workers made what Nike says is typical of workers in its supply chain.

Nike didn’t answer ProPublica’s questions, including about whether it stopped working with the Y&W factory because of any violations of its code of conduct. Y&W Garment stopped making Nike apparel in late 2023, shortly before going bankrupt, workers told ProPublica. Nike said in a statement that it is “committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing” and sets clear expectations for its suppliers through its code of conduct.

Workers said Nike garments at Y&W were produced under the auspices of Haddad Brands, a private New York company whose website says it produces Nike children’s clothing and enforces Nike’s code of conduct. Haddad did not respond to repeated emails; someone who answered its phone hung up on a reporter who called, and no one responded to a subsequent voicemail.

On its website, Haddad says it works directly with its factories “to ensure that each of our suppliers has the ability to not only manufacture our product, but to do so responsibly — for the workers, for the environment, and for our customers.”

At Y&W Garment, a set of corrugated metal buildings along both sides of a busy road in rapidly developed southern Phnom Penh, two workers said faintings were so frequent that they were no longer surprising. The medical employee interviewed by ProPublica blamed overtime hours and workers not sleeping much or eating enough.

If employees fell unconscious, they went to the hospital, the medical worker said. Otherwise, they were given calcium pills and allowed to rest on a thin mat spread on a metal cot.

Then, she said, they typically went back to work.

Y&W is not an isolated case. The Cambodian government reported more than 4,500 faintings in factories between 2017 and 2019, according to news reports, a problem it has attributed to pesticide spraying, chemicals used in manufacturing, heat, poor nutrition and inadequate ventilation. Media reports also quoted the government citing psychological factors, such as workers’ beliefs in supernatural forces.

Bill Clinton set out to alleviate harsh working conditions in Cambodia’s factories in 1999, when as president he signed a trade deal that greatly expanded Cambodian garment exports to the United States.

Cambodia’s emerging industry at the time was helping to shore up the country’s economy as it recovered from war and the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide. A few months after the trade deal was signed, an incident illustrated why labor issues were a concern. More than two dozen exhausted workers fainted at a Phnom Penh garment factory. A union representative told a local newspaper they’d been working 14-hour days, fearful they’d be fired.

The Clinton trade agreement called for creating a labor monitor to bring Cambodia’s factories up to international standards. If the manufacturers improved their working conditions, the United States would expand its import quotas. Better Factories Cambodia, which is part of the United Nations’ International Labor Organization and has been funded by the U.S. Labor Department, began operating in 2001.

The group would ensure “American companies like Gap or Nike feel safe placing orders in Cambodia, knowing that factories comply with human rights, labor laws and good working conditions,” Van Sou Ieng, then-president of the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, told Vogue in 2002.

Nike, which had withdrawn from the country when a BBC investigation in 2000 found children as young as 12 working for a Nike supplier, returned after Better Factories Cambodia launched. The company has repeatedly pointed to Better Factories Cambodia as an essential part of its factory oversight over the years. In 2012, Nike said that it relied on the group’s factory audits, rather than conducting its own, to ensure adequate working conditions in the country. (Nike did not respond when asked about Better Factories Cambodia’s current role in auditing.)

Unlike workplace safety regulators in the United States, Better Factories Cambodia was not given enforcement power to fine or shut down problem factories. In addition, industry and government made up two-thirds of the organization’s advisory committee. That gave them much more influence than workers, according to Tucker.

In 2012, Better Factories Cambodia took on mass faintings with something called the One Change Campaign. It followed a string of media reports that prompted a frantic search for solutions, Tucker said. The idea was to get each factory owner to do one thing to reduce fainting that the law didn’t already require. It might be free lunches, snacks or twice-daily paid exercise programs to combat fatigue and monotony — aerobics for workers who were at risk of being malnourished.

“It was just lame,” said Tucker, who was the organization’s leader at the time. She said she came to realize that the agency was taking the wrong approach, focusing on short-term initiatives instead of tackling the root causes of problems.

Better Factories Cambodia has had a mixed record since then.

It has called attention to the failure of Cambodian factories to obey labor standards. The organization in February reported that almost half of the more than 350 factories it inspected in 2023 made employees work excessive overtime hours, while two-thirds of factories were hotter than the organization’s recommended 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The report didn’t identify the factories.

Daramongkol Keo, a Better Factories Cambodia spokesperson, said the organization has seen meaningful improvements in wage compliance, gender equality, working hours and workplace safety while it has been operating. He said the group has consistently monitored and reported fainting incidents in Cambodia.

For all the issues it’s uncovered, though, labor advocates say its inspectors miss many more.

A 2024 report from the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, a Cambodian legal aid group, found that Better Factories gave perfect marks for labor union compliance even at factories where employees said union busting was pervasive.

If Better Factories’ findings don’t reflect actual working conditions, the report said, “then everyone is participating — whether willingly or not — in a large-scale whitewashing scheme.”

When asked for a response to the criticism, the leader of Better Factories Cambodia, Froukje Boele, told ProPublica, “we appreciate the report’s focus and emphasis on working conditions, freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

Cambodia’s garment industry praises Better Factories Cambodia’s work. Ken Loo, the current head of the industry’s trade group, said the program complements government and industry efforts “to ensure high levels of social and labor compliance.”

Better Factories Cambodia was unaware of the incidents at Y&W Garment that former workers described to ProPublica, according to Keo, the spokesperson. That’s despite conducting four inspections from March 2020 through July 2023.

The organization acknowledged some shortcomings of its two-day, unannounced audits in a report this year. It said problems like sexual harassment and efforts to interfere with union organizing are hard to verify.

“If fainting incidents were known but not adequately addressed at the factory level,” Keo told ProPublica, “it underscores the broader challenges of enforcement and accountability within the industry.”

Had the issue of faintings been confined to Cambodia, the shortcomings of Better Factories Cambodia might explain Nike’s failure to rid its supply chain of the problem. That wasn’t the case, according to findings of a labor monitoring group in Vietnam in 2016.

That year, the Worker Rights Consortium described numerous faintings at a Vietnamese supplier of Nike and other Western brands. Workers at Hansae Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City told the group that pressure to meet production targets in the un-air-conditioned factory was so high that they didn’t drink water to save time visiting the toilet. Hundreds of workers went on strike, twice.

The consortium called in a certified industrial hygienist, Garrett Brown, to conduct an independent investigation.

It was months before Brown was allowed to enter the 12-building factory complex that employed roughly 10,000 people. Inside, he and another colleague recorded temperatures as high as 95 degrees, he said.

“It was goddamn hot inside those plants, for sure,” Brown told ProPublica. By the end of the day, he said, he was exhausted.

“You’re sweating profusely, walking between the buildings and in the buildings as well,” he said. “And we were just doing it for eight hours — and a lot of workers were going for 10, 12, 14 hours.”

Hansae, which didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica, developed a remediation plan to fix the problems Brown and others had identified. It included installing cooling systems and shutting off the electricity in production areas to ensure that workers took lunch breaks. Nike no longer produces at the factory.

Temperatures came down far faster in 2021 when Nike was confronted with an employee complaint about dizziness and dehydration at Nike’s retail store in downtown Portland, which sits not far from the company’s suburban corporate headquarters.

Unlike in Vietnam, the complaint was about temperatures in the low 80s — “super hot,” one worker told an inspector from the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division — not the mid-90s that Brown measured in Ho Chi Minh City. And unlike in Vietnam, it took days, not months, for workplace safety inspectors to get inside.

According to a state report, the inspectors quickly discovered that the problem was already being addressed, at least temporarily. Nike had brought in five portable air conditioners, spending what a company official would later estimate was $40,000 to get the summer heat under control.

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation. Kirsten Berg of ProPublica and Matthew Kish of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Rob Davis.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell’s announcement began:

“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”

There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.

• READ MORE: Pope Francis dies one day after first post-hospital public appearance and with final plea for Gaza
• How the next pope will be elected — what goes on at the conclave
• Pope Francis updates: Leader of Roman Catholic Church dies at 88

He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.

From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.

Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.

“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”

Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.

The Pope’s Easter Blessing    Video: AP

The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.

Between a rock and a hard place
Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.

His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.

He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.

The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.

Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.

At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.

Pope Francis is seen as “one of the most vocal leaders on #Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and asking for a ceasefire and … end of this conflict.” #AsiaPacificReport #PopeFrancis #GazaGenocide @palestine @OnlinePalEng @PalestineAusNZ https://t.co/vtuTpIVYmv pic.twitter.com/6EF1wdhgYL

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) April 21, 2025

Impact on the Catholic Church
In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.

He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.

He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.

Love for our common home
The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.

Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.

He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.

Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.

Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).

Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens
Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.

Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.

With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.

Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.

Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.

Here’s what you need to know about the process:https://t.co/osfOYKagk9

— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025

Catholicism in the modern age
Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.

He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.

Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.

Dr Joel Hodge is senior lecturer, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University and Dr Antonia Pizzey is postdoctoral researcher, Research Centre for Studies of the Second Vatican Council, Australian Catholic University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell’s announcement began:

“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”

There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.

• READ MORE: Pope Francis dies one day after first post-hospital public appearance and with final plea for Gaza
• How the next pope will be elected — what goes on at the conclave
• Pope Francis updates: Leader of Roman Catholic Church dies at 88

He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.

From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.

Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.

“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”

Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.

The Pope’s Easter Blessing    Video: AP

The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.

Between a rock and a hard place
Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.

His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.

He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.

The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.

Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.

At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.

Pope Francis is seen as “one of the most vocal leaders on #Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and asking for a ceasefire and … end of this conflict.” #AsiaPacificReport #PopeFrancis #GazaGenocide @palestine @OnlinePalEng @PalestineAusNZ https://t.co/vtuTpIVYmv pic.twitter.com/6EF1wdhgYL

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) April 21, 2025

Impact on the Catholic Church
In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.

He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.

He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.

Love for our common home
The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.

Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.

He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.

Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.

Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).

Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens
Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.

Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.

With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.

Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.

Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.

Here’s what you need to know about the process:https://t.co/osfOYKagk9

— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025

Catholicism in the modern age
Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.

He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.

Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.

Dr Joel Hodge is senior lecturer, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University and Dr Antonia Pizzey is postdoctoral researcher, Research Centre for Studies of the Second Vatican Council, Australian Catholic University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”

A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.

Before examining the opposition media’s error-strewn reports, this article first explains the background: how the tariff was set, whether it is legitimate and how US-Nicaragua trade is changing. Then it turns to the opposition’s mistakes and explains how they are using Trump’s actions to bolster their attacks on Nicaragua’s government and people.

How the tariffs were set

Trump’s chart of tariffs has two sets of figures for each country: the “tariffs charged to the USA” and the “reciprocal tariffs” to be imposed this month. Bizarrely, the “tariffs charged to the USA” do not relate to actual tariffs charged on US imports. Instead, they are the product of a calculation based on each country’s trade gap with the US. For most countries, the value of these “tariffs charged” has been set at 10 per cent, on the basis that the US has no trade deficit with them, or only a small one. All of these countries (including Nicaragua’s neighbors) are hit with a “reciprocal tariff” of 10 per cent on their exports to the US, from this month onwards, even if they buy more from the US than they sell to it.

However, a higher “tariff charged” is calculated for countries with which the US is judged to have a bigger trade deficit. For each country, the White House looked up the deficit for its trade with the US in goods for 2024, then divided that by the total value of the country’s exports to the US. Trump, to be “kind”, said he would offer a discount, so halved that figure. The calculation was distilled into a formula.

For example, these are the figures for China:

1) Goods trade deficit (exports from the US minus imports): – $291.9 billion

2) Total goods imported to the US from China: $438.9 billion

3) A ÷ B = – 0.67, or 67 per cent

4) Half of this is 34 per cent, the new tariff being applied to China.

Based on this formula, the small African country of Lesotho was saddled with the highest “reciprocal tariff” of 50 per cent, while several major SE Asian countries were also hit with very high tariffs.

How Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated

Nicaragua’s “reciprocal tariff” was calculated in the same way. According to US trade figures, in 2024 US goods exports to Nicaragua were $2.9 billion, while US goods imports from Nicaragua totaled $4.6 billion. The US goods trade deficit with Nicaragua was therefore – $1.7 billion in 2024.

The calculation was therefore: trade deficit (- $1.7 billion) ÷ imports ($4.6 billion) = – 0.37, or 37 per cent, halved to produce a “reciprocal tariff” of 18 per cent.

This means that from April 9, there will be a new tax of 18 per cent on Nicaraguan goods sent to the US, payable as a customs duty on their arrival by the company or agency importing the goods.

How Nicaragua might contest the tariff

It seems unlikely that Trump will bend to pressure on the tariffs. However, at least in theory, there are three ways in which Nicaragua might argue that the tariff is wrongly imposed:

1) Nicaragua’s Central Bank shows a smaller trade gap with the US. According to the Central Bank’s figures for 2024, Nicaragua’s exports to the US totaled $3.7 billion, not $4.6 billion, while its imports from the US totaled $2.7 billion, giving a trade gap of $1 billion, not $1.7 billion. On the basis of Trump’s tariff formula, the result should have been a 14 per cent tariff, not 18 per cent, if Nicaragua’s trade figures are correct. (A possible explanation for the difference may be the way that goods, originating in Nicaragua, are processed in other Central American countries before arrival in the US.)

2) Although most Central American countries import more from the US than they export to it, Costa Rica also has a trade surplus with the US, amounting to $2 billion, bigger than Nicaragua’s, yet it is only being penalized by the standard “reciprocal tariff” (10 per cent).

3) Most importantly, as the Guatemalan government pointed out, under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty new tariffs are illegal (under both US federal and international law). The treaty prohibits new tariffs or customs duties between the seven member countries. Therefore, all six of the other countries that are parties to CAFTA-DR are entitled to challenge the US for breaching it.

Action by CAFTA-DR members is complicated by the fact that Nicaragua is not only worst hit by the tariffs but is also a country that the US would like to exclude from the treaty completely, a point picked up below.

Changing significance of Nicaraguan exports to the US

Nicaragua’s Central Bank divides its trade figures between “merchandise” and products from free trade zones (principally, apparel). This, as we will see, confused the opposition media. This is the breakdown:

+ Exports of merchandise (e.g. gold, coffee, meat, etc.) totaled $4.2 billion in 2024, with the US accounting for 38.7 per cent of these, or $1.62 billion.

+ Exports from free trade zones were lower ($3.5 billion) but the proportion going to the US was much higher (59 per cent, or £2.08 billion).

+ Of Nicaragua’s total exports, at $7.7 billion, $3.7 billion went to the US (48 per cent).

+ Exports provide 39 per cent of Nicaragua’s annual income or GDP.

+ Exports to the US therefore account for a significant 18 per cent of GDP.

These figures exclude services, such as tourism and transport, where trade between Nicaragua and the US is roughly in balance (unlike Guatemala and Honduras, with whom the US has a strong trade surplus in services).

Exports to the US have fallen slowly from over 50 per cent of the total two years ago, as the government looks for other markets. Exports to the Republic of China, for example, were four times higher in 2024 than in 2022, but (at $68 million) are still a small proportion. There are other growing export markets, of which the most notable is Canada (now the second biggest buyer of Nicaraguan merchandise).

The Nicaraguan government’s response to the tariffs is likely to involve continued efforts to diversify trade and keeping a watchful eye on the effects on different sectors of the economy. Producers of products like coffee and gold may be less affected as they already have diverse markets. On the other hand the apparel sector, which until this month enjoyed zero tariffs on its $2 billion exports to the US, is geared to the US market and might find greater difficulty in mitigating the tariff’s effects.

Celebration and misinformation in opposition media

Nicaragua’s opposition media, long financed by the US government, admit that they have been hit by Elon Musk’s cuts. How they are now funded is unclear. However, prominent opposition activists enjoy salaried employment in US universities and think tanks, where they call for sanctions that would hit poor Nicaraguans. Naturally, they welcomed Trump’s announcement.

Errors in reporting on the tariffs showed opposition journalists’ unfamiliarity with Nicaragua’s economy. Confidencial, in a piece translated and reproduced in the Havana Times, claimed that the tariff imposed on Nicaragua ignored a trade surplus “of $484 million in favor of the US” which “has been growing in recent years.” This completely ignored exports to the US from the free trade zones. The same error was made a day later by Despacho 505.

According to Confidencial, the reason for the higher tariff on Nicaragua (and on Venezuela, hit with a 15 per cent tariff) was to punish their authoritarian governments. In reality, the higher tariffs on both countries resulted from the application of Trump’s formula, but this deliberate misrepresentation was to be repeated.

In an “analysis” for Confidencial on April 4, Manuel Orozco painted the 18 per cent tariff as specifically aimed at the Nicaraguan “dictatorship” (again, linking it with Venezuela). Orozco is a former Nicaraguan now living in Washington, working for the Inter-American Dialogue, an NGO funded by the US government and its arms industry. It is most unlikely that he was unaware of how the tariff was calculated; misleading his readers strengthened his argument that the higher tariff was a purely political move.

Further articles in Despacho 505 and Articulo 66 also blamed political factors without explaining the arithmetic behind the tariff. In La Prensa, activist Felix Maradiaga wrongly remarked that the US accounts for over 60 per cent of Nicaragua’s exports. According to him, the supposed weakness of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government means the country will struggle to cope (he disregards its remarkable resilience in dealing with the much heavier economic consequences of the 2018 coup attempt and the 2020 pandemic).

Then, also in Confidencial, opposition activist Juan Sebastián Chamorro made the claim that the new tariffs, which of course he welcomes, are entirely compatible with the CAFTA-DR trade treaty. He argued that Washington’s action is justified on grounds of “national security.” This echoes the absurd classification of Nicaragua (during the first Trump administration, continued by Biden) as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Opposition media are trying to present the new tariff as the first round of the stronger sanctions on Nicaragua that they have been urging Washington to adopt. They do this regardless of their illegality under the CAFTA-DR trade treaty or wider international law. The possibility of going further – excluding Nicaragua from the treaty – was trailed by Trump’s Latin America envoy, Mauricio Claver-Carone, in January, although he was careful to note the difficulties. But if this were to happen it would delight the opposition even further.

Obsessed with promoting regime change in Managua, these anti-Sandinista activists disregard the effects of tariffs and trade sanctions on ordinary Nicaraguans. On “Liberation Day” Trump showed his indifference to the millions of people in low-income countries whose livelihoods depend on producing food and other products for export to the US. The likes of Orozco, Maradiaga and Chamorro behave in just the same way.

The post Nicaragua’s Opposition Media Welcome Trump’s New Tariffs – and Ignore How They Were Calculated appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Perry.

In one, a cell phone video taken by two teenage girls, ages 13 and 16, shows them trapped with their 75-year-old grandmother in the cramped darkness of a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay, a city near the epicenter of Friday’s quake.

“We’re trapped in here! We’re trapped in here!” one of them calls out desperately. One girl taps with something metallic on a concrete slab to signal to rescuers where they are.

Only the light of a mobile phone illuminates the claustrophobic scene. Briefly, we get a glimpse of the grandmother’s bloodied face.

Their cell phone signals reached residents, who worked feverishly to dig them out. Separate video footage shows a cluster of men lifting chunks of cement with their bare hands. “We’re ready to uncover them!” one shouts.

The final seconds of the footage shows the three being carried out of the rubble on stretchers on Sunday -- a happy ending amid the gloom of the worst earthquake to hit Myanmar in decades.

The military-run country is ill-equipped to respond to the disaster. It is mired in a four-year civil war that has already displaced 3 million people.

So far, the quake has killed more than 3,000 people in Myanmar, according to the military junta that took power in a 2021 coup.

In another video, a 13-year-old girl named Pan Aye Chon is unearthed from the rubble of a collapsed monastery in Mandalay after three hours of digging by rescue workers.

While she survived the quake, family members say she’s heartbroken that many of her friends who were with her died.

When the shaking started midday Friday, the girl ran out of the monastery, but then turned around to go back to try to rescue her friends. Then part of the structure fell and trapped her, family members said.

In the capital, Naypyidaw, a 63-year-old woman was rescued from the rubble after being trapped for 91 hours, or nearly four days, Reuters reported.

Video showed orange uniform-clad rescuers in white helmets searching the partially collapsed remains of a building before the woman was carried out on a stretcher.

Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video as Naypyitaw from the buildings, the road layout and the entrance to the hospital, which matched satellite imagery of the area.

The date when the video was recorded could not be verified independently, Reuters said. However, a Myanmar Fire Services Department statement said the rescue took place on the morning of April 1.

Edited by Mat Pennington and Malcolm Foster

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Shiva Gounden in Majuro

Family isn’t just about blood—it’s about standing together through the toughest of times.

This is the relationship between Greenpeace and the Marshall Islands — a vast ocean nation, stretching across nearly two million square kilometers of the Pacific. Beneath the waves, coral reefs are bustling with life, while coconut trees stand tall.

For centuries, the Marshallese people have thrived here, mastering the waves, reading the winds, and navigating the open sea with their canoe-building knowledge passed down through generations. Life here is shaped by the rhythm of the tides, the taste of fresh coconut and roasted breadfruit, and an unbreakable bond between people and the sea.

• READ MORE: Marshall Islands: How the Greenpeace Rongelap evacuation changed the course of history
• Eyes of Fire — the Rongelap evacuation story microsite — David Robie
• Other Rongelap reports

From the bustling heart of its capital, Majuro to the quiet, far-reaching atolls, their islands are not just land; they are home, history, and identity.

Still, Marshallese communities were forced into one of the most devastating chapters of modern history — turned into a nuclear testing ground by the United States without consent, and their lives and lands poisoned by radiation.

Operation Exodus: A legacy of solidarity
Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands — its total yield roughly equal to one Hiroshima-sized bomb every day for 12 years.

During this Cold War period, the US government planned to conduct its largest nuclear test ever. On the island of Bikini, United States Commodore Ben H. Wyatt manipulated the 167 Marshallese people who called Bikini home asking them to leave so that the US could carry out atomic bomb testing, stating that it was for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”.

Exploiting their deep faith, he misled Bikinians into believing they were acting in God’s will, and trusting this, they agreed to move—never knowing the true cost of their decision

On March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo test was launched — its yield 1000 times stronger than Hiroshima. Radioactive fallout spread across Rongelap Island about 150 kilometers away, due to what the US government claimed was a “shift in wind direction”.

In reality, the US ignored weather reports that indicated the wind would carry the fallout eastward towards Rongelap and Utirik Atolls, exposing the islands to radioactive contamination. Children played in what they thought was snow, and almost immediately the impacts of radiation began — skin burning, hair fallout, vomiting.

The Rongelap people were immediately relocated, and just three years later were told by the US government their island was deemed safe and asked to return.

For the next 28 years, the Rongelap people lived through a period of intense “gaslighting” by the US government. *

Forced to live on contaminated land, with women enduring miscarriages and cancer rates increasing, in 1985, the people of Rongelap made the difficult decision to leave their homeland. Despite repeated requests to the US government to help evacuate, an SOS was sent, and Greenpeace responded: the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Rongelap, helping to move communities to Mejatto Island.

This was the last journey of the first Rainbow Warrior. The powerful images of their evacuation were captured by photographer Fernando Pereira, who, just months later, was killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior as it sailed to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific.

From nuclear to climate: The injustice repeats
The fight for justice did not end with the nuclear tests—the same forces that perpetuated nuclear colonialism continue to endanger the Marshall Islands today with new threats: climate change and deep-sea mining.

The Marshall Islands, a nation of over 1,000 islands, is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. Entire communities could disappear within a generation due to rising sea levels. Additionally, greedy international corporations are pushing to mine the deep sea of the Pacific Ocean for profit. Deep sea mining threatens fragile marine ecosystems and could destroy Pacific ways of life, livelihoods and fish populations. The ocean connects us all, and a threat anywhere in the Pacific is a threat to the world.

But if there could be one symbol to encapsulate past nuclear injustices and current climate harms it would be the Runit Dome. This concrete structure was built by the US to contain radioactive waste from years of nuclear tests, but climate change now poses a direct threat.

Rising sea levels and increasing storm surges are eroding the dome’s integrity, raising fears of radioactive material leaking into the ocean, potentially causing a nuclear disaster.

Science, storytelling, and resistance: The Rainbow Warrior’s epic mission and 40 year celebration

At the invitation of the Marshallese community and government, the Rainbow Warrior is in the Pacific nation to celebrate 40 years since 1985’s Operation Exodus, and stand in support of their ongoing fight for nuclear justice, climate action, and self-determination.

This journey brings together science, storytelling, and activism to support the Marshallese movement for justice and recognition. Independent radiation experts and Greenpeace scientists will conduct crucial research across the atolls, providing much-needed data on remaining nuclear contamination.

For decades, research on radiation levels has been controlled by the same government that conducted the nuclear tests, leaving many unanswered questions. This independent study will help support the Marshallese people in their ongoing legal battles for recognition, reparations, and justice.

The path of the ship tour: A journey led by the Marshallese
From March to April, the Rainbow Warrior is sailing across the Marshall Islands, stopping in Majuro, Mejatto, Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap, and Wotje. Like visiting old family, each of these locations carries a story — of nuclear fallout, forced displacement, resistance, and hope for a just future.

But just like old family, there’s something new to learn. At every stop, local leaders, activists, and a younger generation are shaping the narrative.

Their testimonies are the foundation of this journey, ensuring the world cannot turn away. Their stories of displacement, resilience, and hope will be shared far beyond the Pacific, calling for justice on a global scale.

A defining moment for climate justice
The Marshallese are not just survivors of past injustices; they are champions of a just future. Their leadership reminds us that those most affected by climate change are not only calling for action — they are showing the way forward. They are leaders of finding solutions to avert these crises.

Since they have joined the global fight for climate justice, their leadership in the climate battle has been evident.

In 2011, they established a shark sanctuary to protect vital marine life.

In 2024, they created their first ocean sanctuary, expanding efforts to conserve critical ecosystems. The Marshall Islands is also on the verge of signing the High Seas Treaty, showing their commitment to global marine conservation, and has taken a firm stance against deep-sea mining.

They are not only protecting their lands but are also at the forefront of the global fight for climate justice, pushing for reparations, recognition, and climate action.

This voyage is a message: the world must listen, and it must act. The Marshallese people are standing their ground, and we stand in solidarity with them — just like family.

Learn their story. Support their call for justice. Amplify their voices. Because when those on the frontlines lead, justice is within reach.

Shiva Gounden is the head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific. This article series is republished with the permission of Greenpeace.

* This refers to the period from 1957 — when the US Atomic Energy Commission declared Rongelap Atoll safe for habitation despite known contamination — to 1985, when Greenpeace assisted the Rongelap community in relocating due to ongoing radiation concerns. The Compact of Free Association, signed in 1986, finally started acknowledging damages caused by nuclear testing to the populations of Rongelap.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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The findings were stark. In one investigation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that a Texas state agency had steered $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and nearby communities of color after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region in 2017. In another investigation, HUD found that a homeowners association outside of Dallas had created rules to kick poor Black people out of their neighborhood.

The episodes amounted to egregious violations of civil rights laws, officials at the housing agency believed — enough to warrant litigation against the alleged culprits. That, at least, was the view during the presidency of Joe Biden. After the Trump administration took over, HUD quietly took steps that will likely kill both cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

Those steps were extremely unusual. Current and former HUD officials said they could not recall the housing agency ever pulling back cases of this magnitude in which the agency had found evidence of discrimination. That leaves the yearslong, high-profile investigations in a state of limbo, with no likely path for the government to advance them, current and former officials said. As a result, the alleged perpetrators of the discrimination could face no government penalties, and the alleged victims could receive no compensation.

“I just think that’s a doggone shame,” said Doris Brown, a Houston resident and a co-founder of a community group that, together with a housing nonprofit, filed the Harvey complaint. Brown saw 3 feet of water flood her home in a predominantly Black neighborhood that still shows damage from the storm. “We might’ve been able to get some more money to help the people that are still suffering,” she said.

On Jan. 15, HUD referred the Houston case to the Department of Justice, a necessary step to a federal lawsuit after the housing agency finds evidence of discrimination. Less than a month later, on Feb. 13, the agency rescinded its referral without public explanation. HUD did the same with the Dallas case not long after.

The development has alarmed some about a rollback of civil rights enforcement at the agency under President Donald Trump and HUD Secretary Scott Turner, who is from Texas. “The new administration is systematically dismantling the fair housing enforcement and education system,” said Sara Pratt, a former HUD official and an attorney for complainants in both Texas cases. “The message is: The federal government no longer takes housing discrimination seriously.”

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett disagreed, saying there was precedent for the rescinded referrals, which were done to gather more facts and scrutinize the investigations. “We’re taking a fresh look at Biden Administration policies, regulations, and cases. These cases are no exception,” Lovett said in a statement. “HUD will uphold the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act as the department is strongly and wholeheartedly opposed to housing discrimination.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Harvey case concerns a portion of a $4.3 billion grant that HUD gave to Texas after the hurricane inundated low-lying coastal areas, killing at least 89 people and causing more than $100 billion in damage. The money was meant to fund better drainage, flood control systems and other storm mitigation measures.

HUD sent the money to a state agency called the Texas General Land Office, which awarded the first $1 billion in funding to communities affected by Harvey through a grant competition. But the state agency excluded Houston and many of the most exposed coastal areas from eligibility for half of that money, according to HUD’s investigation. And, for the other half, it created award criteria that benefited rural areas at the expense of more populous applicants like Houston.

The result: Of that initial $1 billion, Houston — where nearly half of all homes were damaged by the hurricane — received nothing. Neither did Harris County, where Houston is located, or other coastal areas with large minority populations. Instead, the Texas agency, according to HUD, awarded a disproportionate amount of the aid to more rural, white areas that had suffered less damage in the hurricane. After an outcry, GLO asked HUD a few days later to send $750 million to Harris County, but HUD found that allocation still fell far short of the county’s mitigation needs. And none of that money went directly to Houston.

HUD launched an investigation into the competition in 2021, ultimately finding that GLO had discriminated on the basis of race and national origin, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and possibly the Fair Housing Act as well.

“GLO knowingly developed and operated a competition for the purpose of allocating funds to mitigate storm and flood risk that steered money away from urban Black and Hispanic communities that had the highest storm and flood risk into Whiter, more rural areas with less risk,” the agency wrote. “Despite awareness that its course of action would result in disparate harm for Black and Hispanic individuals, GLO still knowingly and disparately denied these communities critical mitigation funding.”

GLO has consistently disputed the allegations. It contends that many people of color benefited from its allocations. The Texas agency has also argued that the evidence in the case was weak, citing the fact that, in 2023, the Justice Department returned the case to HUD. At the time, the DOJ said it wanted HUD to investigate further. The housing agency then spent more than a year digging deeper into the facts and assembling more evidence before making its short-lived referral in January.

Asked about the rescinded referral, GLO spokesperson Brittany Eck told ProPublica: “Liberal political appointees and advocates spent years spinning false narratives without the facts to build a case. Four years of sensationalized, clickbait rhetoric without evidence is long enough.”

The other HUD case involved Providence Village, a largely white community north of Dallas of around 9,000 people. Purported concerns about crime and property values led the Providence Homeowners Association to adopt a rule in 2022 prohibiting property owners from renting to holders of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, through which HUD subsidizes the housing costs of poor, elderly and disabled people. There were at least 157 households in Providence Village supported by vouchers, nearly all of them Black families. After the HOA action, some of them began leaving.

The rule attracted national attention, leading the Texas Legislature to prohibit HOAs from banning Section 8 tenants. Undeterred, the Providence HOA adopted amended rules in 2024 that placed restrictions on rental properties, which HUD found would have a similar effect as the previous ban.

Throughout the HOA’s efforts, people peppered community social media groups with racist vitriol about voucher holders, describing them as “wild animals,” “ghetto poverty crime ridden mentality people” and “lazy entitled leeching TR@SH.” One person wrote that “they might just leave in a coroner’s wagon.”

The discord attracted a white nationalist group, which twice protested just outside Providence Village. “The federal government views safe White communities as a problem,” flyers distributed by the group read. “The Section 8 Housing Voucher is a tool used to bring diversity to these neighborhoods.”

In January, HUD formally accused the HOA, its board president, a property management company and one of its property managers of violating the Fair Housing Act. The respondents have disputed the allegation. The HOA has argued its rules were meant to protect property values, support well-maintained homes and address crime concerns. The property management company, FirstService Residential Texas, said it was not responsible for the actions of the HOA.

The HOA and FirstService did not respond to requests for comment. The property manager declined to comment. Mitch Little, a lawyer for the HOA board president, said: “HUD didn’t pursue this case because there’s nothing to pursue. The claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”

The Providence Village and Houston cases stretched on for years. All it took was two terse emails to undo them. “HUD’s Office of General Counsel withdrew the referral of the above-captioned case to the Department of Justice,” HUD wrote to Pratt this month regarding one of the cases. “We have no further information at this time.” That was the entirety of the message; neither email explained the reasoning behind the decisions.

The cases may have fallen victim to a broader roll-back of civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department, where memos circulated in January ordering a freeze of civil rights cases and investigations.

The development is the latest sign that the Trump administration may dramatically curtail HUD’s housing discrimination work. The agency canceled 78 grants to local fair housing groups last month, sparking a lawsuit by some of them. HUD justified the cancellations by saying each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” (Pratt’s firm, Relman Colfax, is representing the plaintiffs in that suit.) And projections circulating within HUD last month indicated the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity could see its staff cut by 76% under the new administration.

If HUD does not pursue the cases, the complainants could file their own lawsuits. But they may not soon forget the government’s about-face on the issue. “If there is a major flood in Houston, which there almost certainly will be, and people die, and homes get destroyed, the people who made this decision are in large part responsible,” said Ben Hirsch, a member of one of the groups that brought the Harvey complaint. “People will die because of this.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jesse Coburn.

Sympathy for Israeli former captive Eli Sharabi must not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to Israel’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.

Eli Sharabi has every reason to feel aggrieved. After all, he not only spent 490 days in captivity in terrifying conditions before his release last month, but emerged to find his family had been killed during Hamas’ break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.

Nonetheless, sympathy for his plight should not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

He has echoed Israeli politicians in claiming that Palestinians in Gaza – all 2.3 million of them, apparently – are “involved” in the mistreatment of the Israeli captives. In other words, he has given succour to the Israeli government’s efforts to justify the extermination of Gaza’s entire population, half of whom are children.

He has also claimed that Hamas stole aid that entered Gaza to eat “like kings”, while he and the captives starved. In other words, he is bolstering the argument of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is justified in blocking food and water to Gaza – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.

But perhaps most ludicrously of all, Sharabi asks of the two largest bodies involved in humanitarian operations on behalf of the destitute, decimated people of Gaza: “Where was the Red Cross when we [the Israeli captives] needed them? Where was the UN?”

Sharabi, more than anyone, ought to know the answer to his own question.

Local staff of the UN and Red Cross – or Red Crescent as it is known in Gaza – have spent the past year and a half living under constant and ferocious air strikes, like everyone else in the enclave. Large numbers have been killed and maimed by the US-supplied bombs Israel has been dropping continuously.

They have certainly not been idle, as Sharabi suggests. When they have not been killed themselves, they have been dealing with the many tens of thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of wounded.

And all the while, they have been desperately struggling to help feed a population that Israel has spent the past 18 months actively starving through its strict blockade of food and water into the tiny territory.

The job of the UN and Red Cross has been to save life. That is what they have been doing. Their job is not to go on a wild goose chase, trying to find Israeli captives that Israel itself, with all its technological know-how and military might, has been unable to locate.

Where was the UN?

Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers – led by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN – forget to explain to him that Israel has formally banned the UN from Gaza? Israel both bars the UN from the enclave, specifically targeting local staff with its weapons, and yet also expects those same staff to track down the Israeli captives held there. How can one even begin to take Israel’s position – or Sharabi’s – seriously?

Where was the Red Cross?

Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers forget to mention that, also, the Red Cross has not been able to visit a single one of the thousands of Palestinians who have been abducted by Israel from Gaza, including doctors, women and children?

Unlike the Israeli captives, the location of the Palestinian captives is known. They are being held in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “torture camps” inside Israel, where sexual assaults and rapes are commonplace.

Israel has refused the Red Cross access for a simple reason: because it doesn’t want the world to know what it is doing to Palestinians inside those torture camps. And the western media is complying, barely reporting the horrors unearthed by human rights groups and UN investigators.

Yes, the Israeli captives have gone through a horrific experience. And their greatest trauma – though Sharabi, unlike his fellow Israeli captives, fails to mention it – was living under Israel’s constant bombs: the equivalent so far of six Hiroshimas. None knew from one day to the next whether they would be vaporised by one of the 2,000lb bombs supplied by the US and dropped all over the enclave.

It is important to hear Sharabi’s account of his captivity on a stage as visible as the UN’s. But it is equally important for the UN to hear from the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel and held in even more horrifying conditions, as repeatedly documented by human rights groups.

Yet those Palestinian victims, victims of Israeli barbarism, have not been provided with the platform offered to Sharabi. Why? Because Israel gets to decide who speaks at the UN, for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Unlike Hamas, Israel holds its captives permanently prisoner, even after they have been released from its torture camps. It holds them in a giant open-air concentration camp called Gaza. And they won’t find themselves on a stage at the UN – not unless Israel allows it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say,  in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays. 

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year. 

But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it. 

For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line. 

“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife. 

A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois. 

“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau. 

That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said. 

He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills. 

Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal. 

“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came. 

“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy. 

“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store. 

Lively helped promote REAP during his time at an environmental nonprofit, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused. 

The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.” 

The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds  “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.” 

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

Read Next

Trump is freezing climate funds. Can he do that?

Jake Bittle

Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits. 

“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story. ​​

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers and small business owners were promised financial help for energy upgrades. They’re still waiting for the money. on Mar 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The best way to get published in an elite media outlet is to say that the people were right in thinking things were bad in 2024, and the Democrats were wrong in trying to tell people things were good. Both parts of that line are wrong, but hey, when did outlets like the New York Times ever care about accuracy?

The latest item that really ticked me off on this was a NYT column which included the line:

“After a prolonged period of inflation, with a Biden administration that told Americans not to believe their lying wallets, voters clearly wanted the next president to stabilize the economy and make their cost of living more manageable.”

There have been many others along this line, which I won’t bother list, except to mention one particularly pernicious column: a widely circulated Politico piece by “Eugene Ludwig,” headlined “the voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong.” In fact, just about everything in Ludwig’s piece was wrong, but let’s get back to the NYT.

I would challenge Kristen Soltis Anderson to find any occasion where Biden, or any Democrat, went around saying that things were good. To my mind, they made a big mistake in not emphasizing the unambiguously positive aspects of the Biden-Harris record.

For example, we saw the most rapid real wage growth (wage growth in excess of inflation) for lower paid workers in half a century. We saw much of the wage gap between higher paid and lower paid workers that developed over the prior four decades, disappear in the years since the pandemic. We also saw the smallestBlack-white wage gap ever recorded.

The Biden-Harris recovery also saw the longest period of low unemployment (below 4.0 percent) since the 1960s. We also saw the lowest Black unemployment rate ever recorded and tied for the lowest ever Hispanic unemployment rate.

There also were record rates of new business start-ups, an especially impressive fact given that Trump and the Republicans insisted that Biden and Harris were Marxists, socialists, and/or communists. We also saw an increase of 20 million (one eighth of the workforce) in the number of people who could work from home since the pandemic. This is a benefit that is equivalent to a 10-15 percent increase in pay, as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell told us in a piece that ran afterthe election.

But Ms. Anderson apparently believes that she has been in direct contact with people’s wallets and knows that all the data pointing to relatively good times are wrong and that people were in fact really hurting. (To be clear, many people are hurting, and we should be doing tons to reverse the upward redistribution of the last forty years, but my comparison is to 2019 when people like Ms. Anderson all said things were good.)

Anderson undoubtedly can point to any number of surveys showing that people felt the economy was bad. Usually, the surveys found that most people thought everyone else was doing awful, but they personally were doing okay. But we can get beyond what people say about the economy, which we know is heavily influenced by partisanship, as well as media reporting, and look at what they do. If we want to hear from people’s pocketbooks that would be the obvious place to look.

The pocketbooks don’t seem to agree with Anderson’s assessment. First, real consumption, that is consumption adjusted for higher prices, was 15.1 percent higher in 2024 than 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. This means that people were on average buying more stuff.

To see what they were spending their money on I looked at real spending on a number of items that most of us would not call necessities. Spending on games, toys, and hobbies increased 59.0 percent over this five-year period. I guess people needed the games to distract themselves from how much they were hurting.

Spending on newspapers and magazines increased by 58.0 percent. That’s great news for those of us who like to write or like to read. Spending on air travel rose 36.4 percent, again not an expense we usually think of as a necessity.

Spending on restaurants rose by 12.7 percent, while spending on fast-food restaurants rose slightly less at 12.5 percent. And spending on hotels and motels increased by 11.6 percent.

Spending can be skewed by more money going to the rich, but did the rich need more money to increase their spending on games and hobbies or newspapers and magazines? That doesn’t seem very plausible. Perhaps putting more money in their pockets got the rich to spend more on restaurants but does that also explain the increase in real spending on fast-food restaurants. Is Elon Musk eating more Big Macs because the value of his Tesla stock has increased?

We do actually have data on consumption by income. There was a recent paperfrom the Fed which found that real consumption rose somewhat faster for high income people, but still found substantial growth in real consumption both for households with incomes below $60,000 a year and for people without college degrees.

Would be wallet whisperer Kristen Soltis Anderson is telling us that the wallets are really hurting, but the wallets don’t act like they were hurting, or at least they didn’t until Donald Trump started yelling about tariffs, and Elon Musk began taking a chainsaw to people’s jobs and benefits. It would be good if news outlets showed a little more skepticism towards people who claim to know about people’s well-being, but have no data to support their claims.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post The Masses Were Saying Things Were Good, Not the Democrats appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

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On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance.

Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned administration officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was “a false statement” that amounted to “fraud” if the agency kept the language in the letter.

The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter, a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels.

Joseph Rillotta, a senior IRS lawyer, wrote that “no one” at the IRS had taken into account the performance of the probationary workers set to be fired. Rillotta urged that the language be struck from the draft termination letter.

If the falsehood wasn’t removed, Rillotta said he would file a report with the inspector general for the IRS.

No one appeared to respond to Rillotta’s first email. In a follow-up email, he said he was “pleading with you to remove the clause,” adding: “It is not an immaterial false statement, because it is designed to improve the government’s posture in litigation (to the detriment of the employees that we are terminating today).”

Because it was not true, he wrote, “That renders it, as I see it, an anticipatory fraud on tribunals of jurisdiction over these employment actions.”

Rillotta was again ignored. The IRS sent out the Feb. 20 termination notice with the disputed language in it, according to copies received by fired workers who shared them with ProPublica. The notice said the decision to fire the workers had taken “into account your performance” as well as administration guidance and “current mission needs.”

In fact, many of the employees had received laudatory reviews with no hint of any concerns.

Soon afterward, the inspector general for the IRS took preliminary steps to look into the matter, according to a person familiar with the effort who wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters. This person said they told the investigator that they agreed with Rillotta that the performance rationale was false.

Michelle Bercovici, a lawyer who represents federal workers, told ProPublica that Rillotta’s ignored warnings should make it easier for plaintiffs to show that the mass firings were “arbitrary and capricious,” the legal standard needed to invalidate a federal agency’s action. She added that the emails could also help plaintiffs recover attorneys’ fees from the government.

“When an agency acts based on false information, not only does it set the action up for being overturned,” she said. “It also means the agency is not going to have many defenses to its actions and could be liable for fees.”

Spokespeople for the Treasury Department and IRS did not respond to requests for comment. An Office of Personnel Management spokesperson referred ProPublica to a revised memorandum stating that OPM “is not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees.”

The terminations at the tax agency were among the deep cuts to federal agencies by the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk.

Multiple federal lawsuits are now challenging the Trump administration’s mass firings. Last week, two federal judges temporarily blocked the IRS and other firings, but the lawsuits continue.

The issue of whether the performance rationale was legitimate has been central to the suits. One suit, brought by a group of labor unions, advocacy groups and other parties in California federal court, alleges that OPM directed the probationary firings and so “perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not.”

In response, administration lawyers deniedthat OPM directed agencies to fire probationary workers based on performance or misconduct. Instead, the filing says, “OPM reminded agencies of the importance of the probationary period in evaluating applicants’ continued employment and directed agencies to identify all employees on probationary periods and promptly determine whether those employees should be retained at the agency.”

The plaintiffs later expanded that suit to include the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, as one of the defendants. In mid-March, Judge William Alsup issued a preliminary injunction in the case, saying the administration’s probationary firings were based on “a lie.” Alsup ordered several federal agencies, including the Treasury, to reinstate thousands of fired employees. The Trump administration has appealed Alsup’s ruling.

Another suit, filed in Maryland federal court by nearly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general, also claims that the IRS mass firings were unlawful and should be reversed. (In that case, administration lawyers asserted that the mass firings were lawful.)

Court filings in both cases have partially revealed how the administration chose to make the legally questionable decision to fire probationary workers en masse on performance grounds..

At the IRS, the plan to fire probationary employees began in early February, according to an affidavit filed in the Maryland case.

A high-ranking Treasury Department official instructed a senior IRS personnel employee named Traci DiMartini to identify all probationary IRS employees and fire them “based on performance,” according to an affidavit DiMartini later filed in court.

DiMartini had “never heard of mass probationary employee firings,” she stated in her affidavit.

When DiMartini asked the Treasury Department official why they were firing so many probationary employees, she was told that the order came from OPM, which was staffed by Trump appointees and members of DOGE.

In her affidavit, DiMartini confirmed what Rillotta wrote in his emails — that it was false to say probationary employees were fired for performance. DiMartini’s office “did not review or consider” any probationary employees’ job performance or conduct. Nor did the Treasury Department. “I know this because this fact was discussed openly in meetings,” DiMartini stated in her affidavit.

According to DiMartini’s affidavit, OPM drafted the IRS mass-termination letter. While Treasury officials made several changes to it, the IRS’s personnel office where DiMartini worked “was not permitted to make any changes to the letter,” DiMartini’s affidavit said.

DiMartini refused to sign the mass-termination letter, according to her affidavit. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS, Douglas O’Donnell, also refused to sign the letter.

When thousands of affected IRS employees finally received the letter, it arrived from a generic email account. No agency official’s name appeared anywhere in the document.

Do you have any information we should know about the IRS, DOGE or the Trump administration’s mass firings? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Andy Kroll.

Image by Asael Peña.

California is among the top three states with the largest veteran population in the US. In 2023, the state was home to over 1.48 million veterans and the most military installations in the country, with the Navy having a strong presence in the coastal state. Considering the Military’s decades-long extensive use of toxic asbestos, it is not surprising that California had 27,080 asbestos-caused deaths between 1999 and 2017, which is the most in the country. Many of these people, whose lives were taken by malignant asbestos-related illnesses such as mesothelioma or lung cancer, were veterans.

Asbestos is a heat-resistant and durable mineral fiber. All military branches have applied asbestos-containing materials, especially between the 1930s and the early 1980s. However, those working in the Navy’s shipyards and warship personnel are the most likely to have encountered this hazardous material. Consequently, many of California’s veterans were exposed to asbestos during their service and now suffer from diseases stemming from it.

Veterans should go for regular health check-ups

Asbestos crumbles over time, releasing microscopic fibers into the air, and veterans stationed in shipyards, military bases, and naval vessels come into contact with airborne asbestos dust. Inhaled asbestos particles cause permanent scarring in organs and may lead to the development of mesothelioma, a malignant disease caused exclusively by asbestos. This cancer develops in the membrane around the lungs, abdomen, heart, or reproductive organs. Its symptoms may take 20 to 50 years before they show, and usually, by then, the cancer is already at an advanced stage. Unfortunately, the long latency period is also a characteristic of other asbestos-related diseases, and advanced stages by the time of diagnosis are a common occurrence. Asbestos exposure increases the chance of lung cancer, the second most common cancer in the US. Similar to mesothelioma, its symptoms first show when the cancer is at a stage with metastases.

It is why veterans with known and unknown asbestos exposure should attend regular health check-ups and specialized screenings, such as chest X-rays or CT scans and breathing tests, even if they do not experience symptoms. Timely discovery is the only option for veterans exposed to asbestos dust, as no treatment is available for illnesses stemming from it. Today’s medical procedures can only alleviate symptoms and slow progression in hopes of prolonging veterans’ life expectancy.

The VA compensates for the harm caused by asbestos

Manufacturers were aware of the hazards posed by asbestos years before its use started to be regulated, and they exposed millions of service members to its danger by hiding the truth from the military. California used to mine and produce large amounts of asbestos applied at its military bases, including in the San Francisco Bay Area. The state is home to former Naval Air Station Moffett Field, located near San Jose, which served as an important base during WWII and became the West Coast’s largest naval air transport installation; the airfield was closed in 1994 under the Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC). Mare Island Naval Shipyard, located northeast of San Francisco, was similarly closed under the BRAC. The shipyard was the first Navy base on the West Coast, and during WWII, it was one of the busiest naval shipyards in the world: over 500 naval vessels were constructed, and thousands were overhauled at the Mare Island yard while it operated.

Veterans who have been diagnosed with an asbestos-linked malignant condition are eligible to file claims with asbestos trust funds or apply for disability compensation and possibly free health care from the VA.  Moreover, policymakers are trying to compensate now for the harm caused by asbestos exposure. Since the passage in 2022 of the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (PACT Act), the application process has become easier, as asbestos and asbestos illnesses have been added to the list of presumptive conditions. More than 1.4 million veterans have been approved for benefits nationwide thanks to the Act.

Having a disability, especially at an older age, is an enormous burden—not only mentally and physically, but financially, too. Veterans should apply for their well-deserved compensation offered by the VA’s disability compensation program, the asbestos trust funds, and the PACT Act. More information is available at https://www.va.gov/resources/the-pact-act-and-your-va-benefits/.

The post California Vets Were Exponentially Affected by Asbestos appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cristina Johnson.

Owned (Hachette, 2025), by Eoin Higgins, traces the relationship between tech industry barons and two former left-wing journalists.

Matt Taibbi, once a populist writer who criticized big banks (Rolling Stone, 4/5/10; NPR, 11/6/10), has aligned himself with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the kind of slimy protector of the ruling economic order Taibbi once despised. Putting his Occupy Wall Street days behind him, Taibbi has fallen into the embrace of the reactionary Young America’s Foundation. He recently shared a bill with other right-wing pundits like Jordan Peterson, Eric Bolling and Lara Logan. Channeling the spirit of Richard Nixon, he frets about “bullying campus Marxism” (Substack, 6/12/20).

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, who helped expose National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13; New York Times, 10/23/14), has buddied up with extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, notorious for falsely claiming that the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook Elementary were crisis actors. That’s in addition to Greenwald’s closeness to Tucker Carlson, the ex–Fox News host who has platformed the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust revisionism. 

This is just a taste of what has caused many former friends, colleagues and admirers to ask what happened to make these one-time heroes of left media sink into the online cultural crusade against the trans rights movement (Substack, 6/8/22), social media content moderation (C-SPAN, 3/9/23) and legal accountability for Donald Trump (Twitter, 4/5/23).

Both writers gave up coveted posts at established media outlets for a new and evolving mediasphere that allows individual writers to promote their work independently. Both have had columns at the self-publishing platform Substack, which relies on investment from conservative tech magnate Marc Andreessen (Reuters, 3/30/21; CJR, 4/1/21). Greenwald hosts System Update on Rumble, a conservative-friendly version of YouTube underwritten by Peter Thiel (Wall Street Journal, 5/19/21; New York Times, 12/13/24), the anti-woke crusader known for taking down Gawker. 

High-tech platforms

Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been  a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.)

The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24). 

In Higgins’ narrative, these billionaires originally saw Greenwald as a dangerous member of the fourth estate, largely because their tech companies depended greatly on a relationship with the US security state. But as both Greenwald and Taibbi drifted rightward in their politics, these new media capitalists were able to entice them over to their side on their new platforms.

Capitalists buying and creating media outfits to influence policy is not new—think of Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of the Washington Post (8/5/13; Extra!, 3/14). But Higgins sees a marriage of convenience between these two former stars of the left and a set of reactionary bosses who cultivated their hatred for establishment media for the industry’s political ends. 

Less ideological than material

Matt Taibbi (X, 2/15/24) learned the hard way that cozying up to Musk and “repeatedly declining to criticize” him was not enough not avoid Musk’s censorship on X.

Higgins is not suggesting that Thiel and Andreesen are handing Taibbi and Greenwald a check along with a set of right-wing talking points. Instead, Higgins has applied Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model, which they used to explain US corporate media in Manufacturing Consent, to the new media ecosystem of the alt-right. 

Higgins even shows us that the alliance between these journalists and the lords of tech is shaky, and the relationship can be damaged when these tech lords are competing with each other. For example, right-wing multibillionaire Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X. Taibbi, who boosted Musk’s takeover and the ouster of the old Twitter regime, chose to overlook the fact that Musk’s new regime, despite a promise of ushering in an era of free speech, censored a significant amount of Twitter content. Taibbi finally spoke up when Musk instituted a “blanket search ban” of Substack links, thus hurting Taibbi’s bottom line. In other words, Taibbi’s allegiance to Musk was less ideological as it was material. 

Greenwald and Taibbi have created a world where they are angry at “Big Tech,” except not the tech lords on whom their careers depend.

Lured to the tech lords

Owned addresses the record of these two enigmatic journalists, and their relationship to tech bosses, in splendid detail. In what is perhaps the most interesting part, Higgins explains how these Big Tech tycoons originally distrusted Greenwald, because of his work on the Snowden case. Over time, though, their political aims began to align, forging a new quasi-partnership.

As the writer Alex Gendler (Point, 2/3/25) explained, these capitalists are “libertarians who soured on the idea of democracy after realizing that voters might use their rights to restrict the power of oligarchs like themselves.” Taibbi and Greenwald, meanwhile, became disaffected with liberalism’s social justice politics. And thus a common ground was found.

In summarizing these men’s careers, Higgins finds that early on, both exhibited anger management problems and an inflated sense of self-importance. What we learn along the way is that there has always been conflict between their commitment to journalism and their own self-obsession. We see the latter win, and lure our protagonists closer to the tech lords.  

Higgins charts Greenwald’s career, from a lawyer who ducked away from his duties to argue with conservatives on Town Hall forums, to his blogging years, to his break from the Intercept, the outlet he helped create. 

We see a man who has always had idiosyncratic politics, with leftism less a description of his career and more an outside branding by fans during the Snowden story. Higgins shows how Greenwald, like so many, fell into a trap at an early age of finding the soul of his journalism in online fighting, rather than working the street, a flaw that has forever warped his worldview. 

Right-wing spirals

As the lawyer for a white supremacist accused by the Center for Constitutional Rights of conspiring in a shooting spree that left two dead and nine wounded, Glenn Greenwald said, “I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me” (Orcinus, 5/20/19).

The book is welcome, as it comes after many left-wing journalists offered each other explanations for Taibbi and Greenwald’s right-wing spirals. Some have wondered if Greenwald simply reverted to his early days of being an attorney and errand boy for white supremacist Matt Hale (New York Times, 3/9/05; Orcinus, 5/20/19), when he used to rant against undocumented immigration because “unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate” makes “impossible the preservation of any national identity” (Unclaimed Territory, 12/3/05). 

Higgins gives us both sides of Greenwald. In one heartbreaking passage, he reports that Greenwald’s late husband had even tried to hide Greenwald’s phone to wean him off social media for his own well-being. 

In a less sympathetic passage, we see that of all the corporate journalists in the world, it is tech writer Taylor Lorenz who has become the object of his obsessive, explosive Twitter ire. Her first offense was running afoul of Andreessen, one of Substack’s primary financers. Her second was investigating the woman behind the anti-trans Twitter account, Libs of TikTok (Washington Post, 4/19/22).

In Taibbi, we find a hungry and aggressive writer with little ideological grounding—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that it leaves one vulnerable to manipulative forces. Higgins shows us a son of a journalist who had a lot of advantages in life, and yet still feels aggrieved, largely because details of his libidinous proclivities in post-Soviet Russia made him vulnerable to the MeToo campaign (Washington Post, 12/15/17). It’s not hard to see how the sting of organized feminist retribution would inspire the surly enfant terrible to abandon a mission to afflict the comfortable and become the Joker.

Right-wing for other reasons

Naturally, Owned doesn’t tell the whole story. While Musk’s Twitter has become a right-wing vehicle (Atlantic, 5/23/23; Al Jazeera, 8/13/24; PBS, 8/13/24), a great many left and liberal writers and new outlets still find audiences on Substack. At the same time, many of the platform’s users threatened to boycott Substack (Fast Company, 12/14/23) after it was revealed how much Nazi content it promoted (Atlantic, 11/28/23). And while Substack and Rumble certainly harnessed Taibbi and Greenwald’s realignment, many other left journalists have gone right for other reasons.

Big Tech doesn’t explain why Max Blumenthal, the son of Clinton family consigliere Sidney Blumenthal, gave up his investigations of the extreme right (Democracy Now!, 9/4/09) for Covid denialism (World Socialist Web Site, 4/13/22) and a brief stint as an Assadist version of Jerry Seinfeld (Twitter, 4/16/23). Christian Parenti, a former Nation correspondent covering conflict and climate change (Grist, 7/29/11) and the son of Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, has made a similar transition (Grayzone, 3/31/22; Compact, 12/31/24), and he is notoriously offline.

Higgins’ book, nevertheless, is a cautionary tale of how reactionary tech lords are exploiting a dying media sector, where readers are hungry for content, and laid off writers are even hungrier for paid work. They are working tirelessly to remake a new media world under their auspices.

To remake the media environment

Taibbi, who once upon a time spoke at Occupy Wall Street, has lazily morphed into a puppet for oligarchic state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) to literally repost Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich.

Thiel, Andreessen and Musk have the upper hand. While X is performing poorly (Washington Post, 9/1/24) and Tesla is battered by Musk’s plummeting public reputation, Musk’s political capital has skyrocketed, to the point that media outlets are calling him a shadow president in the new Trump administration  (MSNBC, 12/20/24; Al Jazeera, 12/22/24). Substack is boasting growth (Axios, 2/22/24), as is Rumble (Motley Fool, 8/13/24).

Meanwhile, 2024 was a brutal year for journalism layoffs (Politico, 2/1/24). It saw an increase in newspaper closings that “has left more than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties—or 55 million people—with just one or no local news sources where they live” (Axios, 10/24/24). A year before that, Gallup (10/19/23) found that

the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016. 

The future of the Intercept, which Greenwald helped birth, remains in doubt (Daily Beast, 4/15/24), as several of its star journalists have left to start Drop Site News (Democracy Now!, 7/9/24), which is hosted on—you guessed it—Substack.

Rather than provide an opening for more democratic media, this space is red meat for predatory capital. The lesson we should draw from Higgins’ book is that unless we build up an alternative, democratic media to fill this void, an ideologically driven cohort of rich industrialists want to monopolize the communication space, manufacturing consent for an economic order that, surprise, puts them at the top. And if Taibbi and Greenwald can find fame and fortune pumping alt-right vitriol on these platforms, many others will line up to be like them.

What Higgins implies is that Andreessen and Thiel’s quest to remake the media environment as mainstream sources flounder isn’t necessarily turning self-publishing journalists into right-wingers, but that the system rewards commentary—the more incendiary the better—rather than local journalists doing on-the-ground, public-service reporting in Anytown USA, where it’s needed the most.

Greenwald and Taibbi’s stature in the world of journalism, on the other hand, is waning as they further dig themselves into the right-wing holes, and the years pass on from their days as scoop-seeking investigative reporters. Both ended their reputations as members of the Fourth Estate in favor of endearing themselves to MAGA government. 

Taibbi has lazily morphed into a puppet for state power, using his Substack (2/16/25) space to literally rerun Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in support of the European far right in, of all cities on earth, Munich. Greenwald cheered Trump and Musk’s destructive first month in power, saying the president should be “celebrated” (System Update, 2/22/25). Neither so-called “free speech” warrior seems much concerned about the enthusiastic censorship of the current administration (GLAAD, 1/21/25; Gizmodo, 2/5/25; American Library Association, 2/14/25; ABC News, 2/14/25, Poynter, 2/18/25; FIRE, 3/4/25; EFF, 3/5/25).

Past their sell-by date

And there’s a quality to Greenwald and Taibbi that limits their shelf life, a quality that even critics like Higgins have overlooked. As opposed to other left-to-right flipping contrarians of yore, the contemporary prose of Taibbi, Greenwald and their band of wannabes is simply too pedestrian to last beyond the authors’ lifetimes.

They value quantity over quality. There is no humor, narrative, love of language or worldly curiosity in their work. And they have few interests beyond this niche political genre. 

Christopher Hitchens, who broke with the left to support the “War on Terror” (The Nation, 9/26/02), could write engagingly about literature, travel and religion. Village Voice civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose politics flew all over the spectrum, had a whole other career covering jazz. This made them not only digestible writers for readers who might disagree with them, but also extended their relevance in the literary profession. 

By contrast, Taibbi’s attempts to write about the greatness of Thanksgiving (Substack, 11/25/21) and how much he liked the new Top Gun movie (Substack, 8/3/22) feel like perfunctory exercises in convincing readers that he’s a warm-blooded mammal. A Greenwaldian inquiry into art or music sounds as useful as sex advice from the pope. This tunnel vision increased their usefulness to the moguls of the right-wing media evolution–for a while.

Taibbi and Greenwald are not the true enemy of Owned; they are fun for journalists to criticize, but have slid off into the margins, as neither has published a meaningful investigation in years. The good news is that for every Greenwald or Taibbi, there’s a Tana Ganeva, Maximillian Alvarez, Talia Jane, George Joseph, Michelle Chen or A.C. Thompson in the trenches, doing real, necessary reporting.

What is truly more urgent is the fact that a dangerous media class is taking advantage of this media vacuum, at the expense of regular people.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Nearly five years after a pipeline spewed poison gas across a Mississippi town, federal regulators appeared ready in recent weeks to institute new safety rules aimed at preventing similar accidents across the U.S.’s fast-growing network of carbon dioxide pipelines. 

But the proposed rules, unveiled five days before the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, were quietly derailed during the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term. 

A federal pipeline safety official not authorized to speak publicly said the proposed rules were “withdrawn” in accordance with a January 20 executive order that freezes all pending regulations and initiates a review process by Trump’s newly appointed agency leaders. Putting the pipeline rules in further doubt is a February 19 executive order aimed at rooting out all regulations that are costly to “private parties” and impede economic development. 

Trump’s choice to lead the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which proposed the rules, is Paul Roberti, an attorney strongly backed by pipeline and energy industry groups. Roberti, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, oversaw PHMSA’s safety enforcement during Trump’s first term, a time marked by fewer citations and smaller fines than the Obama and Biden administrations. 

Pipeline safety advocates still hope to push the Trump administration to approve the rules, which they say are critically important for reducing the risks of potentially deadly accidents across a growing number of states. 

“It’s not dead yet,” said Paul Blackburn, an energy policy advisor for the Bold Alliance, an environmental group that tracks pipeline development. “It can be brought back by Trump, and I think the Trump administration should be pressured to do that.”

The more than 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S. are primarily used for enhanced oil recovery, a process that injects carbon dioxide into old oil reserves to squeeze out leftover deposits. Much of the current and predicted growth of the CO2 pipeline network is linked to the recent boom in carbon capture technologies, which allow industrial plants to store CO2 underground instead of releasing it into the air. 

The CO2 pipeline network could top 66,000 miles — a thirteenfold increase — by 2050, according to a Princeton University-led study. 

The Trump administration isn’t as supportive of carbon capture, but industry experts say growth will continue as companies try to meet state-level climate benchmarks. 

While proponents say carbon capture will help address climate change, transporting pressurized CO2 comes with dangers, especially for rural stretches of the Midwest and Gulf Coast, where the network is concentrated. 

CO2 can cause drowsiness, suffocation and sometimes death. Colorless, odorless, and heavier than air, carbon dioxide can travel undetected and at lethal concentrations over large distances. 

The proposed rules would establish the first design, installation, and maintenance requirements for CO2 pipelines. Companies operating pipelines would need to provide training to local police and fire departments on how to respond to CO2 leaks, and emergency communication with the public would need to be improved. 

Operators would be required to plan for gas releases that could harm people within 2 miles of a pipeline. The proposed rules show that PHMSA finally recognizes that the threats from CO2 pipelines are different from oil and natural gas pipelines, which can spill, burn, or explode but don’t usually imperil people miles away, said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group.

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“These are relatively strong proposals,” he said. “Would these rules make CO2 pipelines completely safe? No. But it would modernize the pipelines.”

PHMSA currently has no specific standards for transporting CO2. Rules governing the CO2 pipeline network haven’t undergone significant review since 1991, according to the trust. 

The proposed rules apply “lessons learned” from a 2020 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, PHMSA officials said in an announcement on January 15. 

The rupture in the small community 30 miles northwest of Jackson forced about 200 Satartia residents to evacuate. Emergency responders found people passed out, disoriented, and struggling to breathe. At least 45 people were treated at nearby hospitals. 

“I have learned firsthand from affected communities in Mississippi and across America why we need stronger CO2 pipeline safety standards,” then-PHMSA Deputy Administrator Tristan Brown, a Biden appointee, said in a statement on January 15. “These new requirements will be the strongest, most comprehensive standards for carbon dioxide transportation in the world and will set our nation on a safer path as we continue to address climate challenges.”

Accidental releases have occurred from CO2 pipelines 76 times since 2010, according to PHMSA data reviewed by Verite News. Of the more than 67,000 barrels of CO2 released over the past 15 years, the vast majority — about 54,000 barrels — came from pipelines owned by Exxon Mobil subsidiary Denbury Inc. 

Denbury operates the 925-mile pipeline network that failed in Satartia and more recently in southwest Louisiana. Last April, a pipeline at a Denbury pump station near the Calcasieu Parish town of Sulphur ruptured, triggering road closures and a shelter-in-place advisory. Some residents reported feeling tired and light-headed, but local authorities reported no serious illnesses. 

The pump station and pipeline weren’t equipped with alarms or other methods of alerting nearby residents when accidents occur. 

Several Sulphur-area residents said they received no notice of the leak or became aware of it via Facebook posts more than an hour after the gas began to spread. 

“There should have been alarms, and the whole community should have been notified,” Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer who lives near the station, told Verite in April. “I don’t trust the system we have at all.”

Unless the proposed rules are enacted, similar or worse accidents are likely, said Kenneth Clarkson, the trust’s communications director. 

“In the absence of a rule, blatant regulatory shortfalls will remain, leaving the public fully exposed to the risks of CO2 pipelines,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Efforts were underway to prevent CO2 pipeline leaks. The Trump administration quietly derailed them. on Mar 10, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Baurick.

And if you watched their program, part of France 2’s “Cash Investigation” series, you might be convinced that they found astonishing and scandalous evidence.

The fact of the matter, though, is that the show’s creators used blatant lies to come to that conclusion, and I have all the evidence on today’s show.

What is even more delicious is that the show also featured seasoned anti-China “academic” Adrian Zenz, who has ended up being exposed by this show at the same time. Two birds with one stone!

Grab a cuppa and come with me as I explain all of the tricks the two female reporters used, and highlight clearly why they are lies.

This is Reports on China, I’m Andy Boreham in Shanghai. Let’s get reporting!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Report on China.

“We’re really losing our history here; we’re losing our environmental history,” Santarsiero told the Bulletin last week.

To some extent, government watchdogs, scientists, and climate and environmental activists were expecting this. During the first Trump administration, the use of terms like “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” across federal environmental websites fell by 26 percent. In some cases, those terms were replaced by more ambiguous phrases like “energy independence” and “resilience”; other pages referencing climate change simply vanished.

But what Santarsiero and others are witnessing now goes far beyond that. Thousands of datasets have been removed from federal websites. Information on climate and the environment — from agencies like the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, NOAA, NASA, the State Department, and the Defense Department — has been deleted or become virtually impossible to find.

The administration’s wrecking-ball approach has raised profound questions about the integrity and future of vast amounts of information, public or not.

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Under the first Trump administration, Santarsiero said, there were at least placeholder websites for federal groups like the Council on Environmental Quality. Now, the homepage (whitehouse.gov/ceq) redirects to whitehouse.gov, emblazoned with a photo of Donald Trump captioned “AMERICA IS BACK.”

The website for USAID, the agency responsible for administering U.S. foreign civilian aid, now consists entirely of a letter to employees instructing them on how to retrieve personal belongings from their former office spaces. The Trump administration has fired or placed on leave all but 294 USAID staffers, out of more than 10,000.

“What we’re really concerned about is what happens to those records now that this agency has just been gutted,” said Santarsiero. “Typically, what happens when an agency is shuttered, or closed, [is that] whatever agency comes to replace it takes ownership of those records.” It seems like the State Department should now be responsible for USAID records, but their disposition is not clear.

In February, the Trump administration ended roughly 10,000 foreign aid projects, or 90 percent of the USAID’s humanitarian operations and half of the State Department’s, including at least 130 climate- and clean energy-related contracts. Senior USAID officials and other experts say cuts to foreign aid will increase global instability and result in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from malnutrition and disease. Finding information about those programs is now extraordinarily difficult — the first six Google results for “USAID gov climate” all return an error message for “page not found.”

“We don’t really know what’s happening. There’s been absolutely no updates,” Santarsiero said. “I’ve sent a couple FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests to the State Department for USAID, [about] specific climate programs that were happening during the Biden administration. I’ve received no acknowledgment letter. It’s not surprising, but that just sets a precedent that is very worrisome for us about USAID records from past administrations. Where are those living? How do we get access to them? I think that is a very ominous bellwether.”

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Librarians and archivists have sprung into action to download, save, and make available as much of this information as possible, but things may still fall through the cracks.

“The piece that worries me is that it is such a massive undertaking,” Santarsiero said. “It’s almost like, we don’t know what it is that we don’t know, we don’t know what it is that we’re missing.”

Climate in the crosshairs 

Most of the climate and environmental data that’s disappeared since Trump took office has been equity-related, said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist and cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, where she leads the Website Monitoring Program.

The day after the inauguration, the administration took down the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool — a map that had layers of information from multiple agencies about climate and economic vulnerabilities. The tool was made to facilitate funding decisions for Justice40, a Biden administration initiative in which 40 percent of certain federal investments in climate and clean energy were supposed to go to economically disadvantaged communities. But, Gehrke said, it was widely used by environmental justice advocacy groups outside of government as well.

Fortunately, Public Environmental Data Partners, the coalition of groups working to preserve and make available federal environmental data, had downloaded the data before the inauguration, and because the map code was open source, they were able to recreate the tool and get it back online by January 24.

Gehrke said the Scope 3 Federal Emissions Inventory, which tracked emissions by the federal government, was also taken down. Bizarrely, Gehrke said, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has been down for maintenance for more than three weeks, an unusually long time.

“It’s very possible that it’s down for maintenance,” Gehrke said. “I have never heard of a tool being down for maintenance for several weeks before.”

Gehrke also said that members of the coalition based in Canada have noticed that they can no longer access some pages, like the FEMA National Risk Index, a mapping tool that illustrates the risks from 18 natural hazards across the United States. The pages are still available in the United States, but it seems like the administration is cutting off access in foreign countries, which could undermine cross-border scientific collaboration and research.

Some pages had their server certificate removed, so visiting the URL doesn’t even return a 404 error (page not found). Without an error message, the crawler Gehrke’s group uses to monitor federal websites doesn’t flag a status change, making it harder to know when pages have been removed.

A frantic pace 

Lynda Kellam, a digital archivist and librarian, said that her work as a volunteer for the Data Rescue Project has focused more on the social sciences, because groups like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative have climate and environmental data covered.

Kellam said data and information are disappearing under the second Trump administration much faster than they did during his first term. “In 2017, we were doing data rescues until June, whereas if we waited that long to put together a data rescue event this year — you know, all the data is going away,” she said.

“They were very speedy right out the gate,” Gehrke agreed. “They have also done much more widespread and intensive information suppression than they did the first time around. They didn’t actually take down data last time. We feared that they would, and we did all these data rescue events in case they did, but they really didn’t touch data. This time is obviously very different.”

Kellam and Gehrke said the second Trump administration is also going so far as to change or edit data, including removing categories for people who identify as trans or nonbinary.

Archiving datasets is much more complicated than saving a single web page. “If you have the Excel file, that’s great, but you also need the documentation, you need the metadata, you need provenance information,” Kellam said. Automated crawls can miss pieces of that bigger picture, so it requires more human, hands-on involvement.

The Data Rescue Project maintains a spreadsheet of at-risk data to track what’s been saved, where it lives, and what still needs to be archived, and trains volunteers to do the actual archival work.

Gehrke is also focused on identifying and prioritizing the datasets to save and tools to replicate.

“Tons of people have said, ‘archive all of NOAA.’ That’s not happening,” Gehrke said. “Just as a brain teaser, we mapped out how much it would cost us, if we even could download ‘all of NOAA.’ It would cost us $500,000 in storage per month — just to host, cold storage, not even have access to it.”

Instead, the groups are relying on nominations by researchers and advocacy organizations to tell them what datasets are most important, and then sharing the burden of archiving and publishing the information. “We don’t need 16 copies of EJ [environmental justice] screen,” she said. “We can do one copy of EJ screen and apply our efforts more effectively together elsewhere.”

Quite a lot of federal data collection is mandated by Congress. What is not mandated are the tools that the public can use to access that data. “NOAA’s climate data is congressionally mandated,” Gehrke said. “Whether or not we are able to access it is a different question.”

For tools that were not built on open-source platforms, Gehrke said she plans to submit FOIA requests to relevant agencies to ask for the code and all the documentation necessary to recreate them.

A snapshot in time 

Much of the ongoing archival work would have happened regardless of who won the 2024 presidential election. Since 2008, the End of Term Web Archive has crawled the federal web domains every four years at the end of each presidential term, capturing and saving government websites on the Wayback Machine. Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, said they crawl before the election, after the election but before the inauguration, and then after the inauguration.

“This isn’t a political project,” said James Jacobs, a U.S. government information librarian at Stanford who also works on the End of Term Web Archive (a collaborative effort among multiple institutions). “It’s a library and archives project.”

Jacobs’ work isn’t just about saving information but about giving the public the tools to find and access information — like extracting text from PDFs to make them searchable. His hope is to use the archive to create special collections organized by topic, like climate, the environment, and health.

Researchers can take data from the archive and analyze it, to see what’s been changed — or use the archives to find information that has since disappeared from federal websites.

“For example, this weekend, I said to myself, ‘I wonder how many web pages existed on U.S. government websites that had the word monkeypox in them,’” Graham said. “Monkeypox being one word, pretty unique. I found 5,600. Then I said, ‘How many of those 5,600 are no longer available from those websites?’ And it’s 403. So, for some reason, it appears on the face of it, without going in and checking each one, that more than 400 pages related to monkeypox were taken offline by our government.”

Graham plans to regularly do that kind of rough analysis for the top 20, “to riff on George Carlin, naughty words.”

The Trump administration has made that project somewhat easier by providing lists of words and phrases that will, for example, get research flagged for review.

Suing for access 

As with so much that the Trump administration is attempting, some of the fights over data access could be decided by the courts. Already, Earthjustice has sued the Department of Agriculture on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Working Group, to try to force the agency to restore some of the “climate-related policies, guides, datasets, and resources” that have been removed from the web.

Last month, a federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services; the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC to restore websites and datasets essential for public health, after Doctors for America and Public Citizen sued the agencies. The Justice Department had tried to argue that the defendants hadn’t suffered “actual” injury because the information was available on the Wayback Machine, but the judge rejected that assertion on the grounds that the information was much harder to find. “These are injuries in fact,” U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote. “These doctors’ time and effort are valuable, scarce resources, and being forced to spend them elsewhere makes their jobs harder and their treatment less effective.”

Other lawsuits targeting different agencies and datasets are likely to follow. But lawsuits are costly in both human resources and actual funds.

“We were asked to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit, but they wanted a super quick turnaround, and we just couldn’t make a decision that fast,” Gehrke said. “We’re a tiny organization, and so we definitely don’t have the funds to litigate.” But, she said, they could use their extensive expertise and evidence to support others pursuing litigation.

Gutted and privatized 

Archiving can save a good amount of the information created before the Trump administration, but it’s possible that some long-running research and monitoring programs will grind to a halt. It’s also possible that more data collection and distribution will move outside of government.

This is disturbing to experts on both personal and professional levels. Kellam is concerned that the privatization of data and information will exacerbate inequalities in data access. Many institutions and individual researchers can’t afford the subscription costs to private data repositories.

Jacobs said that, as an avid sea kayaker, he relies on NOAA data to access the great outdoors safely. Right now, he still has access to information about tides, currents, and weather forecasts, but he’s not so sure that will still be the case going forward. And of course, Jacobs points out, it’s not just pleasure-seekers who depend on this information: So does the entire shipping industry.

Of course, most all Americans rely on access to NOAA data, just to know whether they need to take an umbrella when leaving the house or when to prepare for extreme weather events. Information from the CDC, FDA, and FEMA is vitally important to protecting citizens from a wide array of dangers.

Government data, on climate and the environment and so much else, is a vast and expansive resource that everyone relies on, whether they know it or not. And experts are worried about the future of this resource.

“Civil society does not have the capacity, the infrastructure necessary, the rights necessary, to collect a lot of the data that the government collects and disseminates,” said Gehrke. “Little nonprofits are not going to be sending up a satellite and collecting climate data. We are at the mercy of our government to collect this data for the public good, and if they choose not to, I don’t think there’s a lot that we can do about it.”

For now, Gehrke and others are focused on what they can do. “I am grateful for a place to throw my energy and to be doing a form of resistance that I can do,” she said. “I think that all of us need to be resisting in whatever way we can.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘We’re losing our environmental history’: The future of government information under Trump on Mar 9, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jessica McKenzie.

The Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land won an Oscar for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.

The film — recently screened in New Zealand at the Rialto and other cinemas — follows the struggles of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta to stay on their land amid home demolitions by the Israeli military and violent attacks by Jewish settlers aimed at expelling them.

The film was made by a team of Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers, including the Palestinian journalist Basel Adra, who lives in Masafer Yatta, and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, both of whom are prominently featured in the film.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Oscars were held Sunday evening. History was made in the best documentary category.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON: And the Oscar goes to ‘No Other Land’.

AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land won for best documentary. The film follows the struggles of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta to stay on their land amidst violent attacks by Israeli settlers aimed at expelling them. The film was made by a team of Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers, including the Palestinian journalist Basel Adra, who lives in Masafer Yatta, and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. 

Both filmmakers — Palestinian activist and journalist Basel Adra, who lives in Masafer Yatta, and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham — spoke at the ceremony. Adra became the first Palestinian filmmaker to win an Oscar.

BASEL ADRA: Thank you to the Academy for the award. It’s such a big honor for the four of us and everybody who supported us for this documentary.

About two months ago, I became a father. And my hope to my daughter, that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing — always — always fearing settlers’ violence, home demolitions and forceful displacements that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day under the Israeli occupation.

‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: We made this — we made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger.

We see each other — the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end; the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7th, which must be freed.

When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.

There is a different path: a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here: The foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.

And, you know, why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined, that my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way.

It’s not too late for life, for the living. There is no other way. Thank you.

Israeli and Palestinian documentary ‘No Other Land’ wins Oscar. Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript of the February 18 interview with the film makers before their Oscar success:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the occupied West Bank, where Israel is reportedly planning to build nearly a thousand new settler homes in the Efrat settlement near Jerusalem. The Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.

The group Shalom Achshav, Peace Now, condemned the move, saying the Netanyahu government is trying “to establish facts on the ground that will destroy the chance for peace and compromise”.

This comes as Israel’s ongoing military operations in the West Bank have displaced at least 45,000 Palestinians — the most since the ’67 War.

Today, the Oscar-nominated Palestinian director Basel Adra shared video from the occupied West Bank of Israeli forces storming and demolishing four houses in Masafer Yatta.

Earlier this month, Basel Adra himself filmed armed and masked Israeli settlers attacking his community of Masafer Yatta. The settlers threw stones, smashed vehicles, slashed tires, punctured a water tank.

Israeli soldiers on the scene did not intervene to halt the crimes.

Basel Adra’s Oscar-nominated documentary No Other Land is about Israel’s mass expulsion of Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta.

In another post last week, Basel wrote: “Anyone who cared about No Other Land should care about what is actually happening on the ground: Today our water tanks, 9 homes and 3 ancient caves were destroyed. Masafer Yatta is disappearing in front of my eyes.

Only one name for these actions: ethnic cleansing,” he said.

In a minute, Basel Adra will join us for an update. But first, we want to play the trailer from his Oscar-nominated documentary, No Other Land.

No Other Land trailer.   Video: Watermelon Films

BASEL ADRA: [translated] You think they’ll come to our home?

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 1: [translated] Is the army down there?

NEWS ANCHOR: A thousand Palestinians face one of the single biggest expulsion decisions since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] Basel, come here! Come fast!

BASEL ADRA: [translated] This is a story about power.

My name is Basel. I grew up in a small community called Masafer Yatta. I started to film when we started to end.

They have bulldozers?

I’m filming you.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 2: [translated] I need air. Oh my God!

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 3: [translated] Don’t worry.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 2: [translated] I don’t want them to take our home.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] You’re Basel?

BASEL ADRA: [translated] Yes.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 4: [translated] You are Palestinian?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] No, I’m Jewish.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 5: [translated] He’s a journalist.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 4: [translated] You’re Israeli?

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 5: [translated] Seriously?

BASEL ADRA: [translated] We have to raise our voices, not being silent as if — as if no human beings live here.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] What? The army is here?

BASEL ADRA: This is what’s happening in my village now. Soldiers are everywhere.

IDF SOLDIER: [translated] Who do you think you’re filming, you son of a whore?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] It would be so nice with stability one day. Then you’ll come visit me, not always me visiting you. Right?

BASEL ADRA: [translated] Maybe. What do you think? If you were in my place, what would you do?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the Oscar-nominated documentary No Other Land, co-directed by the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and our next guest, Basel Adra, Palestinian activist and journalist who writes for +972 Magazine, his most recent piece headlined “Our film is going to the Oscars. But here in Masafer Yatta, we’re still being erased.”

Basel has spent years documenting Israeli efforts to evict Palestinians living in his community, Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron.

Basel, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about your film and also what’s happening right now? This is not a film about history. It’s on the ground now. You recently were barricaded in your house filming what was going on, what the Israeli settlers were doing.

Palestinian film maker Basel Adra talks to Democracy Now!   Video: Democracy Now!

BASEL ADRA: Thank you for having me.

Yeah, our movie, we worked on it for the last five years. We are four people — two Israelis and two Palestinians, me, myself, Yuval and Rachel and Hamdan, who’s my friend and living in Masafer Yatta. We’re just activists and journalists.

And me and my friend Hamdan spent years in the field, running after bulldozers, soldiers and settlers, and in our communities and communities around us, filming the destruction, the home destructions, the school destructions, the cutting of our water pipes and the bulldozing of our roads and our own schools, and trying to raise awareness from the international community on what’s going on, to get political impact to try to stop this from happening and to protect our community.

And five years ago, Yuval and Rachel joined, as Israeli journalists, to write about what’s happening. And then we decided together that we will start working on No Other Land as a documentary that showed the whole political story through personal, individual stories of people who lost their life and homes and school and properties on this, like in the last years and also in the decades of the occupation.

We released the movie in the Berlinale 2024, last year, at the festival. And so far, we’ve been, like, screening and showing, like, in many festivals around the world.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Basel, your film has received an Oscar nomination, but you haven’t been able to find a distributor in the US What do you know about this refusal of any company to pick up your film to distribute it? And also, can it be seen in the West Bank or in Israel itself?

BASEL ADRA: It’s sad that we haven’t found a US distributor. Our goal from making this documentary, it’s not the award. It’s not the awards itself, but the people and the audience and to get to the people’s hearts, because we want people to see the reality, to see what’s going on in my community, Masafer Yatta, but in all the West Bank, to the Palestinians and how the life, the daily life under this brutal occupation.

People should be aware of this, because they are — somehow, they have a responsibility. In the US, it’s the tax money that the people are paying there. It has something to do with the home destruction that we are facing, the settlers’ violence, the building of the settlements on our land that does not stop every day.

And we, as a collective, made this movie. We faced so many risks in the field, on the ground. Like, my home was invaded, and the cameras were confiscated from my home by Israeli soldiers.

I was physically attacked in the field when I’m going around and filming these crimes, I mean, to show to the people and to let the people know about what’s going on.

But it’s sad that the distributors in the US so far do not want to take a little bit of risk, political risk, and to show this documentary to the audience. I am really sad about it, that there is no big distributors taking No Other Land and showing it to the American people.

It’s very important to reach to the Americans, I believe. And so far, we are doing it independently on the cinemas.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your co-director is Israeli. Have you come under criticism for working with Israelis on the film?

BASEL ADRA: So far, I’m not receiving any criticism for working with Israelis. Like, working together is because we share somehow the same values, that we reject the injustice and the occupation and the apartheid and what’s going on, and we want to work pro-solution and pro-justice and to end these, like, settlements and for a better future.

AMY GOODMAN: Basel, the Oscars are soon, in a few weeks. Can you get a visa to come into the United States? Will you attend the Oscars?

BASEL ADRA: So, I have a visa because I’ve been in the US participating in festivals for our movie. But my family and the other Palestinian co-director doesn’t have one yet, and they will try to apply soon.

And hopefully, they will get it, and they will be able to join us at the Oscars.

AMY GOODMAN: So, since it’s so difficult to see your film here in the United States, I want to go to another clip of No Other Land. Again, this is our guest, Basel Adra, and his co-director, Yuval Abraham, filming the eviction of a Palestinian family.

BASEL ADRA: [translated] A lot of army is here.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] They plan a big demolition?

BASEL ADRA: [translated] We don’t know. They’re driving towards one of my neighbors.

Now the soldiers arrived here.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 1: [translated] Aren’t you ashamed to do this? Aren’t you afraid of God?

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] Go back! Move back now! Get back! I’ll push you all the way back!

YUVAL ABRAHAM: [translated] I speak Hebrew. Don’t shout.

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 2: [translated] I hope that bulldozer falls on your head. Why are you taking our homes?

MASAFER YATTA RESIDENT 3: [translated] Why destroy the bathroom?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Israeli bulldozers destroying a bathroom. This is another clip from No Other Land, in which you, Basel, are attacked by Israeli forces even as you try to show them you have media credentials.

BASEL ADRA: [translated] I’m filming you. I’m filming you! You’re just like criminals.

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] If he gets closer, arrest him.

BASEL ADRA: [translated] You’re expelling us. Arrest me! On what grounds?

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] Grab him.

BASEL ADRA: [translated] On what grounds? I have a journalist card. I have a journalist card!

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] Shut up!

BASEL’S FATHER: [translated] Don’t hit my son! Leave our village! Go away! Leave, you [bleep]! Shoot.

ISRAELI SOLDIER: [translated] Move back.

BASEL’S FATHER: [translated] Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me.

BASEL’S MOTHER: [translated] Get an ambulance!

BASEL’S FATHER: [translated] Run, Basel! Run! Get up, son. Run! Run, Basel!

AMY GOODMAN: Basel, that is you. Your mother is hanging onto you as you’re being dragged, your father. What do you want the world to know about Masafer Yatta, about your community in this film?

BASEL ADRA: I want the world to really act seriously. The international community should take measures and act seriously to end this, like, demolitions and ethnic cleansing that is happening everywhere in Gaza, in the West Bank, through different policies and different, like, reasons that the Israelis try to separate out, which is all lies.

It’s all about land, that they want to steal more and more of our land. That’s very clear on the ground, because every Palestinian community being erased, there is settlements growing in the same place.

This is happening right there, in the South Hebron Hills, everywhere around the West Bank, in Area C. And now they are entering camps, since January until now, by demolishing, like, destroying the camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, and forcing people to leave their homes, to go away.

And the world just keeps watching and not taking serious action. And the opposite, actually.

The Israelis keep receiving all. Like, this amount of violations of the international law, the human rights laws, it’s very clear that it’s violated every day by the Israelis. But nobody cares. The opposite, they keep receiving weapons and money and relationships and —

AMY GOODMAN: Basel —

BASEL ADRA: — and diplomatic cover. Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I thank you so much, look forward to interviewing you and Yuval in the United States. Basel Adra, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary No Other Land.

The original content of this programme is licensed and republished by Asia Pacific Report under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As parents, we’re horrified by the denial of health care to trans children that’s being imposed on families and communities across this country right now.

Through President Trump’s executive orders and harsh anti-trans laws in different states, policy makers are making it a crime to provide for trans kids’ medical needs. That’s sickening. We’re especially outraged that the people leading these attacks are often doing so in the name of “parents’ rights.”

Our children aren’t transgender, but we want to be clear: These attacks don’t speak for us.

Like all parents, we feel deeply what it means to care for our kids’ health. We remember how scary it was the first times they had fevers or broken bones. When our kids are hurting or afraid, we’ve worked to comfort them even when we feel afraid ourselves.

We know the anxiety our kids may have — or that we have as parents — in anticipation of a doctor’s visit. We also know the relief and gratitude of a visit that goes well, especially when we trust that we have competent health professionals to collaborate with.

We’ve never had to consider the possibility that powerful political forces could compel our children’s doctors not to provide the care that they determine to be in our children’s best interest, based on their professional judgment.

Yet that’s exactly what these politicians are doing to families with trans children right now. Age-appropriate gender-affirming care — as determined by kids, their families, and health professionals — is the standard of carethat’s universally endorsed for trans kids by reputable medical organizations.

Access to this care, which lawmakers and the president are targeting so aggressively, can be a matter of life and death. We’re appalled that these officials are demonizing trans kids, their families, and health professionals in their attempts to deny it.

This is bullying in its most repulsive form: powerful men targeting vulnerable children, all with the full weight of the law. And just like we teach our kids, if bullies aren’t challenged, they feel emboldened to target other vulnerable people.

We urge any parents of cis-gender children who think these attacks on trans children don’t impact their own families to consider what this could mean. Your own children could be targeted in the near future, based on some other hateful ideology conjured up by the bullies.

As disgusted as we are by these attacks, we’re also heartened by the rising sensibilities about gender and sexuality that we’re witnessing in our kids’ generation. The world they’re creating together is less judgemental, more inclusive, and more affirming than the one we grew up in.

Like so many things with parenting, sometimes this requires learning and adjustment on our part. But instead of fearing this emerging world, we honor it — and find ourselves being transformed by it. A world where trans kids are safe to be who they are is a world that honors the fullness of everybody.

We’re not the exceptions. Surveys show that significant majorities of parents say they would support their children who come out as trans or nonbinary and encourage others to do the same. And vast majorities agree that kids and their parents, not politicians, should get to decide what medical care is appropriate.

We hope that parents everywhere can raise our voices in defense of this more inclusive world against those who seek to destroy it — especially by targeting children and families. As parents, we have a responsibility to protect kids — not just our own, but all the children of our communities.

We already see glimpses of a world where we treat each other with greater compassion and dignity. That world — and its children — deserve to be nurtured and protected.

The post We’re Parents: Trump’s Attacks on Trans Kids Don’t Speak for Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Khury Petersen-Smith, Basav Sen and Lindsay Koshgarian.

NBC News (2/4/25) put Trump’s unconstitutional attack on USAID in a Cold War frame.

Are the corporate media outlets reporting on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian takeover smarter than a fifth grader? Recent coverage of the president and his henchman’s blatantly unconstitutional dismembering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would suggest some are not.

Reports on the agency’s shuttering (Politico, 1/31/25, 2/14/25; NBC, 2/4/25) have often failed to sufficiently sound the alarm on how Trump’s efforts are upending the most basic—and vitally important—federal checks and balances one learns about in a Schoolhouse Rock episode. Instead, these reports have framed bedrock constitutional principles as if they were up for debate, and neglected to mention that the Trump administration is purposefully attempting to shirk executive restraints.

Meanwhile, much of corporate media’s justified attention on the foreign aid agency’s demise has wasted ink on a narrower, unjustifiable reason for audiences to draw objections: the loss of the “soft power” USAID gives America in its battle over global influence with its adversaries (CNN 2/7/25; New York Times 2/11/25). This sets up the precedent that Musk’s federal bludgeoning should be assessed based on the value of his target, rather than the fact that he is subverting the Constitution.

‘The least popular thing’

Michael Waldman (Brennan Center, 2/19/25): “Trump’s power grab…is the culmination of decades of pressure from conservative organizations and lawyers who have sought a way to dismantle government and curb its power to intervene in markets.”

A lawsuit by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees against the Trump administration lays out the five-alarm constitutional fire the shuttering of USAID has set off. USAID was established as an independent agency outside the State Department’s control by an act of Congress in 1998.

Longstanding judicial precedent holds that only Congress has the ability to create and dissolve federal agencies. Last year, the legislature prohibited even a reorganization of USAID without its consultation in an appropriations law. The Trump administration’s actions—justified solely by an extreme interpretation of executive authority—violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, and are indeed designed to do so.

Together Trump and Musk share interest in reconstituting US governance. The checks and balances that help to constrain executive power, along with civil service workers, are also roadblocks to the billions in federal contracts that have underwritten Musk’s empire. USAID has become the first target in their federal bludgeoning, because its relative unpopularity among voters means they might get away with rewriting the Constitution without too much public outrage. Its “the least popular thing government spends money on,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to a USAID official earlier this month. (Americans tend to vastly overestimate how much the US government spends on foreign aid, and think it should be reduced to a level that is actually far more than USAID’s current budget—Program for Public Consultation, 2/8/25.)  

Trump and Musk’s withdrawal of nearly all foreign aid funded through USAID is another grave challenge to the constitutional order. Since those funds were congressionally appropriated, neither Trump nor Musk has the authority to stop them, especially not on the basis of their political preferences.

The act of a president indefinitely rejecting congressionally approved spending is known as impoundment, which has been effectively outlawed in all forms since 1974. Trump has been explicit about his intent to bring impoundment back, which threatens to render Congress—which is supposed to have the power of the purse—irrelevant.

‘Musk has been clear’

Politico (2/14/25) would have better helped readers’ understanding if it hadn’t taken “Trump’s plans to shrink the federal workforce” at face value.

Such a threat to democracy requires calling it for what it is. Simple but consequential abdications of responsibility abound, though. Politico (2/14/25), for example, saw fit to reprint at face value Trump and Musk’s claims that they just wish to drastically reduce federal spending. An explainer article on Trump and Musk’s efforts made no mention that they might have ulterior motives.

In response to the question, “What is Trump and Musk’s goal?” Politico simply answered: “With Trump’s blessing, Musk has been clear that his goal is to drastically reduce the size of the government.” That Musk, the richest person in the world, whose business empire spans the globe and dominates whole industries, has resolved to dedicate his undivided attention to the cause of reducing federal spending deserves more skepticism. The fact that Musk has prioritized going after federal agencies that have had the temerity to investigate his businesses suggests a more plausible scenario.

Though the article, which is meant to give readers a brief but comprehensive overview of Trump and Musk’s efforts, briefly mentions some of the court-ordered pauses to Trump’s orders, it doesn’t discuss the overarching implications for US democracy.

Another Politico story (1/31/25), breaking the news that Trump intended to subsume USAID into the State Department, gave the move a stamp of approval by pointing out it was the fulfillment of long-held bipartisan aspirations—corporate media’s highest praise—while ignoring the unconstitutional means that brought it about. For years, the article says, “both Democratic and Republican administrations have toyed with the idea of making USAID a part of the State Department.” That’s because, Politico claimed,

there have always been tensions between State and USAID over which agency controls what parts of the multibillion-dollar foreign aid apparatus, regardless of which party is in power.

The article qualifies that USAID “describes itself” as an independent agency, as if this were up for dispute.

‘Keep America safe’

CNN (2/3/25): “Trump’s claim that he can single-handedly shut down USAID is at odds with Congress’ distinct role in forming and closing federal agencies.”

Corporate media’s failure to foreground the authoritarian threat of Trump and Musk’s USAID takedown also includes a narrow focus on its geopolitical ramifications that smooths over the unsavory aspects of the agency’s humanitarian work.

USAID oversees billions in foreign aid that is responsible for lifesaving food, medical care, infrastructure and economic development. The massive disruption in that aid is already causing death, hunger, disease outbreak and economic hardship. But a defense of that lifesaving work, and the democratic norms threatened by its unraveling, need not require a rosy picture of its imperialist motivations.

That’s exactly what the New York Times’ Daily podcast (2/11/25) accomplished, though, in an episode titled “The Demise of USAID and American Soft Power.” As has become all too frequent, nowhere during the episode’s 35-minute run time did the host, Times reporter Michael Barbaro, or his two guests, Times journalists Michael Crowley and Stephanie Nolen, mention the constitutional principles at stake in USAID’s closure (though the following episode was dedicated to the constitutional crises Trump has provoked—Daily, 2/12/25).

Instead, the podcast focused on what Barbaro described as Trump’s overturning of a decades-long bipartisan consensus about the best way to “keep America safe.” That safety, Barbaro learned by way of his guests’ contribution, is a supposedly serendipitous return on investment America receives through its strategic generosity abroad (effective altruism, one might say?). Trump has now abandoned that generosity, leaving a more brutish impression of America’s global role, and ceding ground to geopolitical adversaries, Barbaro and company said.

What threats do they identify that Americans have needed to be kept safe from? At first, Crowley said, it was the Soviet Union’s relative popularity in the developing world. After the Cold War ended, though, USAID’s justification for existence seemed thin, he acknowledged. But that didn’t last long, because it just so happened that after 9/11, “America realized that the Soviet Communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology,” Crowley explained.

For one, it wasn’t just USAID, but the entire military industrial complex, that was inevitably going to identify a new justification for its existence, 9/11 notwithstanding. But the podcast also completely leaves out USAID’s modern role in conditioning aid to developing countries on opening up their economies to the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations, creating the conditions for neo-colonial dispossession and Western dependency.

Dedicating a whole episode to portraying USAID’s work as a mutually beneficial marriage between developing nations’ humanitarian needs and US national security interests, all so that audiences might selfishly conclude that preserving foreign aid is in their own interests, perpetuates imperial propaganda. Pointing out how Trump’s actions harm people, including his own supporters, is well and good. But the loss of imperial soft power is not an example of that. And pointing out the actual harms without discussing the autocratic way they were inflicted risks suggesting that unconstitutional actions are acceptable as long as their results are beneficial.

Some journalists are doing a fine job of exposing the assault on USAID (e.g., New York Times, 1/28/25, 2/5/25; CNN, 2/3/25). But amid this unprecedented blitz on democratic norms, others are showing that they might need to revisit their elementary school textbooks.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Luca GoldMansour.

In September 2015, the U.S. set an ambitious target of reducing its food loss and waste by 50 percent. The idea was to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfills, where it emits greenhouse gases as it decomposes, a major factor contributing to climate change.

Researchers at UC Davis looked at state policies across the country and estimated how much food waste each state was likely reducing in 2022. They found that, without more work being done at the federal level, no state is on track to achieve the national waste reduction goal. 

Researchers calculated that, even when taking reduction measures into account, the U.S. still generates about 328 lbs of food waste per person annually — which is also how much waste was being generated per person in 2016, shortly after the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the waste-cutting goal. 

These figures indicate that even our best strategies for eliminating waste aren’t enough to meet our goals, said Sarah Kakadellis, lead author of the study published in Nature this month.

In order to assess how the U.S. is doing to meet its food waste reduction goals, Kakadellis and her team used both publicly available data (from ReFED, a nonprofit that monitors food waste in the U.S.) and estimates based on the current policy landscape. 

The study’s findings were “not surprising” given the absence of federal policy governing food waste, said Lori Leonard, chair of the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. “People are trying to do what they can at state and municipal levels,” she said. “But we really need national leadership on this issue.”

Kakadellis suggests that a path forward will also necessitate shifting the way consumers think about certain waste management strategies — like composting. 

Composting turns organic material, like food scraps, into a nutrient-rich mixture that can be used to fertilize new plants and crops. It can be considered a form of “recycling” food, although its end product technically cannot be eaten. This important detail means consumers must learn to view composting, despite its potential environmental benefits, as a form of food waste, says Kakadellis. 

“It’s really thinking about the best use of food, which is to eat it,” she said. 

Although it’s been touted as a great alternative to chucking your moldy bananas in the trash, composting is indeed classified as a form of food waste by the United Nations and the European Union. In 2021, the EPA updated its definition of food waste to include composting and anaerobic digestion — both of which can take inputs like uneaten food and turn them into fertilizer or biogas, respectively.

In updating its guidance, the EPA published a food waste hierarchy — which shows the best way to reduce food waste is to prevent it. This includes things like adding accurate date-labels to food products, so consumers aren’t confused about when something they’ve purchased has gone bad or is no longer safe to eat. It’s also preferable to find another use for unsold or uneaten food — like donating it to food banks or integrating into animal feed, where it can be used to raise livestock (assuming that livestock will also eventually feed humans). 

Composting will always have a role to play in diverting food waste from landfills — because those operations can accept spoiled or rotten food, which food banks, for example, cannot. “It’s not an either/or. They have to go hand in hand,” said Kakadellis. “But we’re skipping all these other steps and we’re going straight to the recycling too often.”

Leonard agrees, pointing out the high costs associated with ensuring the nation’s sprawling, complex food system runs smoothly: from the farm where crops are harvested to the trucks and cold storage that handle packaged goods. “There’s a tremendous amount of energy that’s gone into producing that food,” she said. “We don’t do that to create compost. You know, we do that to feed people.”

Composting, of course, serves more than one purpose and has environmental benefits beyond lowering food loss and waste. For example, it replenishes soils. But Leonard notes that if more work were done on the prevention side — like, making sure farms aren’t overproducing food — then soils wouldn’t be so depleted in the first place and wouldn’t need so much remediation.

Both Leonard and Kakadellis emphasize that no one tool for avoiding sending food to landfills should be off the table. Leonard, who previously worked with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, once did research on organics bans in other states. 

“I asked them if they were encouraging businesses or households to move up the EPA hierarchy and find other, better uses for their food scraps? And they said, no, no. What we’re really trying to do is just get people to do anything on the hierarchy.” That includes composting.

Until there are more options for both pre- and post-consumer food waste, composting may be the best, most accessible option for many people. “It is the easiest thing to do,” said Leonard. “And it’s probably the safest thing to do until we have better protocols in place.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US wants to cut food waste in half. We’re not even close. on Jan 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Two families have sued an East Tennessee school district in federal court, arguing that school officials violated students’ rights when they called the police under a Tennessee law that seeks to severely punish threats of mass violence.

One 11-year-old was arrested at a restaurant even though he denied making a threat. A 13-year-old with disabilities was handcuffed for saying his backpack would blow up, even though only a stuffed animal was inside.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about both cases last year as part of a larger investigation into how new state laws result in children being kicked out of school and arrested on felony charges, sometimes because of rumors and misunderstandings. Our reporting in Hamilton County found that police were arresting, handcuffing and detaining kids, even though school officials labeled most of the incidents as “low level” with “no evidence of motive.” The students arrested were disproportionately Black and had disabilities, compared to those groups’ overall share of the district’s population.

The lawsuits against Hamilton County’s school district, filed this month in federal court in Chattanooga, are two of several brought against school officials in Tennessee in response to the threats of mass violence law. Advocates hope to push for changes to the law in the legislative session that begins this month. But the law’s Republican sponsor, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, told ProPublica and WPLN News that he is “not looking to make any changes to the law.”

“The zero-tolerance policy for even uttering the words ‘shoot’ or ‘gun’ is an unconstitutional kneejerk reaction by the legislature, and has led school administrators to make rash decisions concerning student discipline,” states one of the lawsuits, filed Thursday on behalf of the 11-year-old autistic student arrested at the restaurant.

When asked by another student last September if he was going to shoot up the school, the 11-year-old said, “Yeah,” according to the lawsuit. The school reported the comment to the police, who tracked him down and arrested him.

The other federal lawsuit, filed Jan. 3, involves the 13-year-old student with “serious intellectual impairments,” who told his teacher last fall that the school would “blow up” if she looked inside his backpack. The teacher found just a stuffed animal in the backpack, but school officials reported the incident to police anyway.

“Despite the clear absence of any true threat, and in the context of a student with Doe’s intellectual and emotional impairments, Doe was isolated, handcuffed by the [student resource officer], and transported to juvenile detention,” the lawsuit reads. (Both suits refer to the children involved as John Doe to keep them anonymous.) The school later determined that the student’s behavior was a manifestation of his autism, according to documentation included in the lawsuit.

Both lawsuits allege that district officials violated state law by allowing students receiving special education services to be physically restrained and by failing to follow proper procedure before facilitating the students’ arrests. The school district “infringed on Doe’s First Amendment rights and did so with deliberate indifference,” both lawsuits read.

The juvenile court cases against both students have been dismissed.

The Hamilton County Schools superintendent referred a request for comment to the school board’s attorney, citing pending litigation. The attorney did not immediately respond to a subsequent request for comment. The district has not yet filed a response to either lawsuit.

Disability rights advocates fought for a broader exception in the law that would have prevented police from charging kids who might, as a result of their disability, say or do something that could be construed as a threat.

“What we’re seeing coming out with all of these lawsuits, it’s sort of exactly what we were trying to educate about last year,” said Zoe Jamail, the policy coordinator for Disability Rights Tennessee.

Instead, lawmakers only excluded people with “intellectual disabilities,” failing to address students with other disabilities that affect their communication or behavior. The law does not state how police should determine whether a child has an intellectual disability before charging them. In fact, our reporting found that police arrested the 13-year-old in the lawsuit although school records showed he did have an intellectual disability.

Disability Rights Tennessee and other organizations plan to push for an amendment to the law this legislative session to protect more students with disabilities, especially when the threat is not credible. “The question should really be how can we better support those young people in the school environment, and how can we handle these cases with compassion and reason, rather than reacting and interpreting the law in a way that is not really reasonable,” Jamail said.

A federal judge allowed a lawsuit against a suburban Nashville school board to move forward in November. Two parents had sued Williamson County’s school board on behalf of their children, claiming they were wrongfully suspended and arrested after being accused of making threats of mass violence at school.

The families, Judge Aleta Trauger ruled, had a “plausible claim” that the school board violated the students’ due process rights by suspending them.

Part of the lawsuit involved a middle school student referred to as “H.M.” Teased by friends in a group chat about “looking Mexican,” she jokingly texted her friends, “On Thursday we kill all the Mexicos.” The school board argued in a legal filing that state law required officials to suspend the student and call the police, regardless of whether the threat was serious. In response to a request from ProPublica and WPLN, a school board official declined to comment further.

Trauger questioned Williamson County school board’s analysis of the law, which she said “leads to absurdity.”

“The implausibility of an action — here, a middle school student killing all Mexicans — ought to affect the threat analysis,” she wrote. “What if, for example, H.M. had threatened to cast a magical killing spell on a large group of people? What if H.M. had threatened to fly to the moon and shoot at people using a space laser?”

She denied the Williamson County school board’s motion to completely dismiss the lawsuit. The suit is pending.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio.

We speak with a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, Aaja Chemnitz, about incoming U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to make America larger, in part by taking ownership of Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark. Greenland’s prime minister rejected the idea this week, saying, “We are not for sale and will never be for sale.” Trump’s statement on Greenland was made as he announced he was picking PayPal co-founder Ken Howery as his pick for United States ambassador to Denmark. “We’re open for business. We’re not for sale,” says Chemnitz. “The decision on what should happen with the future of Greenland is up to the Greenlandic people.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The 10-day siege of PolyU began on Nov. 18, 2019, after around 1,000 protesters occupied the university as part of an ongoing series of actions to achieve the movement’s key demands: fully democratic elections; the withdrawal of plans to allow extradition to mainland China; greater official and police accountability; and an amnesty for detained protesters.

The protesters were then trapped on campus as riot police encircled the area, prompting nearly 100,000 people to turn out to battle riot police across Tsim Sha Tsui, Jordan, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok and other parts of the Kowloon peninsula.

Four young people who were among the besieged protesters spoke to RFA Cantonese on the fifth anniversary of the siege, which ended Nov. 19, 2019, and proved to be one of the last major standoffs between black-clad protesters and riot police after months of clashes sparked by plans to allow extradition to mainland China.

A former protester now living in democratic Taiwan, who gave only the nickname Kai for fear of reprisals said he had been in the siege of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from Nov. 13-15, 2019 before responding to a call for help defending PolyU against riot police just a few days later.

He never expected the police to prevent the protesters from leaving, or that the siege would last 10 days.

“I never thought the police would adopt a siege approach,” Kai said. “They cut off our supply lines, and even cut off the water, which was inhumane.”

“Any supplies we had were brought in by older helpers from outside,” he said.

When the protesters did try to leave, they were outflanked by police on both sides, he said.

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“Soon after we ran out, we were intercepted by police in front of us, who forced us to run in another direction before we could move forward, but then after we’d run for a bit, we realized we were outflanked on both sides,” he said.

“All the police in front of us had their guns ready, and were waiting for us, so we had to go back to PolyU and plan our next move,” Kai said.

Kai managed to avoid arrest at the time, but left Hong Kong soon after learning he was on a police blacklist.

He said the political crackdown that followed the 2019 protest movement has shown that the protesters were right to fear Beijing’s encroachment on their city’s promised autonomy.

He said many young protesters were motivated by a desire to burn their home city to the ground rather than acquiesce in its transformation into another Chinese city under Communist Party rule.

“Nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer hiding its authoritarian tendencies, and has been sanctioned by the international community, while the Hong Kong economy declines by the day,” Kai said.

“This shows that our idea that we would all burn together was right on the money,” he said.

Around 1,300 people were arrested, with around 300 sent to hospital for injuries related to water cannon blast, tear gas, and rubber bullets, as protesters wielding Molotov cocktails, catapults and other makeshift weapons from behind barricades beat back repeated attempts by riot police to advance into the university campus.

Small groups of protesters continued to make desperate bids for freedom throughout the siege, many of them only to end up being arrested and beaten bloody by police.

Police also deployed tear gas, water cannon, and rubber bullets against a crowd of thousands trying to push through towards Poly U from Jordan district, with hundreds forming human chains to pass bricks, umbrellas, and other supplies to front-line fighters.

“I took part in a lot of protest-related activities from June [of that year] onwards, although I never considered myself a front-line fighter,” a former protester living in the United Kingdom who gave only the pseudonym Kit for fear of reprisals, told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “But I felt that if I wasn’t prepared to take it further, then we really would lose the rule of law in Hong Kong.”

The 2019 protests started out as a wave of mass public resistance to a legal amendment that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to face trial in mainland Chinese courts, a move that was generally seen as undermining the city’s status as a separate legal jurisdiction with an independent judiciary.

The movement later broadened to include the “five demands,” that included fully democratic elections, an amnesty for arrested protesters and greater official accountability.

The young protesters, hundreds of whom were minors, soon found themselves running out of food, and faced with a growing hygiene problem, and many tried to leave, only to be tear gassed, fired on with water cannon, or beaten up and taken away by police.

“We made three attempts to break out, but they all failed, so we went back to PolyU,” Kit said. “Everyone was scared, but we couldn’t come to any conclusion.”

“I later tried to get out by myself ... but I was arrested by the police,” he said, adding that the movement had soon fizzled under the impact of coronavirus measures introduced by the government in early 2020.

“The government used people’s fear of the virus to make the protests disappear,” Kit Jai said. “The outlook is pretty grim right now, but I still hope that the people of Hong Kong ... will keep its culture alive.”

A former protester living in Japan who gave only the nickname Tin for fear of reprisals said he also remembers the three failed attempts at breaking out, and the desperate mood that descended on those inside PolyU after those inside realized they were trapped.

“What impressed me most was that some of the protesters used a homemade catapult to launch Molotov cocktails, which set fire to the police armored vehicle, forcing it to retreat,” he said. “Everyone cheered when that happened.”

“Actually, the situation inside PolyU was total chaos, with a lot of misinformation coming in, and nobody really knew what to do,” he said.

Tin said he had fled Hong Kong and wound up in Japan after traveling to several other countries first.

“I’ve had good and bad experiences over the last five years, but I’ve survived,” he said.

A former protester now living in Germany who gave only the nickname Hei for fear of reprisals said he went to PolyU on Nov. 17 to try to persuade his fellow protesters to leave while they still could.

Before he knew it, he was trapped inside.

“I wanted to persuade them to leave, because the situation was critical, with helicopters flying overhead,” Hei said. “But they refused to leave.”

Hei never thought he’d be stuck there for as long as he was.

“When it became clear at around 9.30 that evening that those of us left inside weren’t going to be able to leave, things got pretty dark,” he said. “One guy told us to make a written statement pledging not to commit suicide.”

So he stayed behind to resist the advance of the riot police.

“The police offensive was really intense,” he said. “I was on the platform of A Core for the entire night.”

“Just below us were the frontline fighters, and the police water cannon truck, which sprayed us on the platform with blue water from time to time,” Hei said. “Then at about 6.00 p.m. on the 18th, the police suddenly launched an offensive and fired large numbers of tear gas rounds and rubber bullets from a high altitude at the Core A platform.”

“I opened my umbrella and squatted down next to a tree, and the bullets kept cracking on the umbrella,” he said. “We lost the position pretty quickly, but I was able to make it back to PolyU luckily.”

Inside, rumors were swirling that the police would burst in to arrest everyone, so Hei managed to escape by following a lawyer who had come in to try to help the young people inside.

He had a lucky escape. Anyone arrested during the siege was eventually charged with “rioting,” with some receiving jail terms of up to 10 years.

“They only took my ID details,” said Hei, who wasn’t arrested, and who later left Hong Kong for Germany.

He said the siege taught him how hard it is to stand up to an authoritarian regime.

“But I have no regrets, because anyone with a conscience or any sense of justice would have chosen to stand up,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Yitong Wu and Kit Sung for RFA Cantonese.

Though the election of Donald Trump has loomed over this month’s United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Biden administration officials and prominent Democrats have given speech after speech pledging that the nation’s transition to renewable energy will continue. White House representatives have touted the economic benefits of the billions of dollars in climate-related subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and officials from California and Washington have pledged that individual states will continue the march to net-zero emissions.

But the U.S. officials with the most power over the country’s energy future did not even arrive in Baku until the end of the first week of the U.N. conference, which is known as COP29. When Trump assumes the presidency in January, these five Republican members of Congress will enjoy unified control of the federal government, giving them wide latitude to write (or repeal) laws that will determine the nation’s climate future.

In a swaggering press conference that took place just a few hundred feet from where international negotiators have spent a week hashing out a transition away from fossil fuels, the GOP delegation delivered an aggressive message in support of oil, gas, and even coal — all while framed by signs that said “United Nations Climate Change.” (The Congressional delegation is officially bipartisan, but the two Democratic Representatives in Baku did not attend the press conference.)

U.S. Representative August Pfluger, who represents Texas’ oil-rich Permian Basin and is leading the GOP’s COP delegation, suggested that the U.S. should once again exit the 2015 Paris climate agreement. As the leader of the House of Representatives’ energy committee, Pfluger also emphasized the incoming Congress’ power to repeal key pieces of Biden’s climate policies (policies that were passed, in part, to get the U.S. within reach of the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius). The press conference came off as a direct rebuke to the message delivered by the official U.S. delegation.

“Last week, people in the United States overwhelmingly supported President Donald Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion,” he said. 

The four other Republicans joining Pfluger on stage echoed this message with a grab bag of pro-fossil-fuel stances. Troy Balderson, who represents a part of Ohio with plentiful shale gas, mounted a defense of fracking. Morgan Griffith, a veteran representative who hails from a coal-rich area of western Virginia, expressed support for so-called clean coal power outfitted with carbon capture technology, as well as natural gas mined from coal beds.

“An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world,” said Griffith. This message echoed Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s statement to world leaders at the start of COP29, in which he called his country’s oil resources as a “gift from God” and chastised the American media for referring to Azerbaijan as a “petrostate,” given that the U.S. itself is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels.

The Biden administration and elected Democrats have argued, at COP and elsewhere, that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is in a sense too big to fail — in part because the hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing projects and tax breaks that it unleashed flow to Republicans and Democrats alike (and, in the case of the new manufacturing plants, are flowing disproportionately to GOP congressional districts). Indeed, more than a dozen House Republicans have already asked the chamber’s leader, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, not to gut the law.

But none of those representatives were present in Baku, and the tone adopted by Pfluger and his colleagues was distinctly more hostile to the core components of Biden’s landmark law. Though the bill was passed after U.S. inflation had already peaked, Pfluger suggested that the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable-energy provisions contributed to the soaring prices that angered American voters. 

“The United States of America, like many other countries around the world, has seen this crazy inflation,” he said. “Lowering those costs, we believe, has a very strong tie to energy — unleashing affordable, reliable baseload capacity. If there are pieces and parts of the IRA that are not compatible with that, that’s going to be looked at.”

Nevertheless, the delegation stopped short of advocating for a wholesale repeal of Biden energy policies.

“If there are pieces of the IRA that will support lower energy costs, helping Americans, helping our partners and allies have access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet that those will stay in place,” Pfluger said. 

The primary goal of this year’s COP is to develop an agreement on international climate aid, whereby rich countries will agree to transfer hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to poorer parts of the world to speed their energy transitions and make them resilient to climate-fueled disasters. During his first term as president, Trump proposed zeroing out these sorts of commitments. When Grist asked Pfluger if he would support a renewed call from Trump to cut off this foreign aid, Pfluger did not rule it out. He also appeared to suggest that future climate aid might go to support Republican energy priorities.

“On climate finance, if something is not congruent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, then you can bet that this Congress is going to look at that,” he said.
After the press conference ended, Pfluger and his colleagues were mobbed by reporters from several countries before leaving for an event where they touted their support for nuclear energy. The U.S. State Department, which is coordinating the country’s delegation in Baku, did not respond to a request for comment about the congressmen’s statements before publication.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s GOP at UN climate talks: We’re in charge now on Nov 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

In November 2024, we see similar tremors of doubt and consternation, though the official stance, as expressed by President Joe Biden, is to “accept the choice the country made.”  In the vast, noisy hinterland of social media speculation lie unproven claims that some 20 million votes have gone missing, necessitating a recount.  Ditto problems with failing voting machines.  In a statement of cool dismissive confidence, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is adamant: “we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security and integrity of our election infrastructure.”

2016 might have given the Democrats meditative pause as to why Trump was elected.  Even more significantly, why Trump’s election was more apotheosis rather than gnarly distortion.  Instead of vanishing as aberrant over the Biden years, Trumpism has come home to roost in winning, not only the Electoral College but the majority vote by convincing margins.

Much is made of Trump’s pathological campaign against the legitimacy of his loss in 2020, as well as it might.  Less is made, certainly from the centre left and Democratic quarters, of the conspiratorial webbing that served to excuse an appalling electoral performance on behalf of the donkey party and their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton.  Doing so shifted any coherent analysis about loss and misjudgement to plot and the sorcery of disruption – the very sorts of things that Trump would use to such effect after 2020.  Indeed, the seeds of election denialism were already sown in 2016 by the Democrats.  Trump would draw on this shoddy model with vengeful enthusiasm in 2020.

In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes make the point that the Clinton team took a matter of hours to concoct “the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up… Already, Russian hacking was the centrepiece of the argument.”

In declassified notes provided in September 2020 by the then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the picture of pre-emptive delegitimization becomes vivid.  Clinton, in late July 2016, “had approved a campaign plan to stir a scandal against US Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”  Then Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan “subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”

Since her loss, Clinton has been impervious to the notion that she lacked sufficient appeal in the electoral race.  Trump was, she has continued to insist, never a legitimate president to begin with.

Other Democrat worthies never deviated from the narrative.  The late Californian Senator Dianne Feinstein was certain in January 2017 that the change in fortunes in the Clinton camp had much to do with the announcement the previous October that the FBI would be investigating Clinton’s private email server.  Typically, the issue of what was exposed was less relevant than the fact of exposure.  The former was irrelevant; the latter, Russian, unpardonable, causal and fundamental.

In June 2019, former President Jimmy Carter went even further, showing that the Democrats would remain indifferent to Trump as a serious electoral phenomenon.  “I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” he stated on a panel hosted by the Carter Center at Leesburg, Virginia.  “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”  This execrable nonsense was fanned, fed and nurtured by media servitors, to such a degree as to prompt Gerard Baker, currently editor-at-large for the Wall Street Journal, to remark that it was mostly “among the most disturbing, dishonest, and tendentious I’ve ever seen.”

An odd analysis in Politico by David Faris about the latest election suggests that Democrats “have the advantage of introspection” while the Republicans, after losing in 2020, “chose not to look inward and instead descended into a conspiratorial morass of denial and rage that prevented them, at least publicly, from addressing the sources of their defeat.”

Faris misses the mark in one fundamental respect.  The Democrats were, fascinatingly enough, the proto-election denialists.  They did not storm the Capitol in patriotic, costumed moodiness, but they did try to eliminate Trump as an electoral force.  In doing so, they failed to see Trumpland take root under their noses.  His stunning and conclusive return to office demands something far more substantive in response than the amateurish, foamy undergraduate rage that has become the hallmark of a distinct monomania.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools.

Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%.

Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.

But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.

Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.

Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)

Yet voucher efforts have been more successful when they aren’t put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen states have enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, which provide taxpayer money even to affluent families who were already able to afford private school.

That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to enact the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been so soundly repudiated by voters just a few years before.

Another way that Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying anti-voucher members of their own party and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in primary elections. This way, they can build legislative majorities to enact voucher laws no matter what conservative voters want.

In Iowa, several Republicans were standing in the way of a major new voucher program as of 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped push them out of office — despite their being incumbents in her own party — for the purposes of securing a majority to pass the measure.

A similar dynamic has developed in Tennessee and in a dramatic way in Texas, the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. There, pro-voucher candidates for the state Legislature won enough seats this Tuesday to pass a voucher program during the legislative session that starts in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said.

The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, framed the result as a resounding signal that Texans have now shown a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue was conspicuously missing from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans whom he helped win, amid polling numbers that showed Texans hold complicated views on school choice. (A University of Houston poll taken this summer found that two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, but that an equal number also believe that vouchers funnel money away from “already struggling public schools.”)

In the half dozen competitive Texas legislative races targeted in this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not make vouchers a central plank of their platforms. Most left the issue off of their campaign websites, instead listing stances like “Standing with Public Schools” and “Increased Funding for Local Schools.”

Corpus Christi-area Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected she would “​​fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she did not emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one ad paid for by the American Federation for Children’s affiliated PAC attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers but for what it claimed were his “progressive open-border policies that flood our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)

Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said that this strategy reflects a belief among voucher advocates that compared to the border and culture wars, vouchers are not in fact a “slam-dunk winning issue.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s results in the presidential election, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said that Democrats had overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular among working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the concrete results of ballot initiatives around the nation show that it is in fact Trump, DeVos and other voucher proponents who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue.

They continue to advocate for vouchers, though, for multiple reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long-term goal of more religious education in this country.

And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been overridden by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center who recently published a history of billionaire-led voucher efforts nationwide.

The Supreme Court could also aid the voucher movement in coming years, he said.

“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because voters have rejected this.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager and Jeremy Schwartz.

Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of immigrants a centerpiece of his plans for a second term, vowing to forcibly remove as many as 20 million people from the country. Historian Ana Raquel Minian, who studies the history of immigration, says earlier mass deportation programs in the 1930s and '50s led to widespread abuse, tearing many families apart through violent means that also resulted in the expulsion of many U.S. citizens. “These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves,” says Minian. She also says that while Trump's extremist rhetoric encourages hate and violence against vulnerable communities, in terms of policy there is great continuity with the Biden administration, which kept many of the same policies in place.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Rick Roth is a staunch Republican and a conservative member of the Florida Legislature, but he’s quick to point out that he’s first and foremost a farmer. Roth grows vegetables, rice and sugar cane on the thousands of acres passed down to him from his father, in Palm Beach County south of Lake Okeechobee. And because the farm relies on a steady stream of laborers, most of them from Mexico, Roth spent substantial time over the last three decades, before and after he became a politician, trying to stop lawmakers from messing with his workforce.

A big part of that fight was against legislation that would make employers verify their workers’ immigration status. Such laws, Roth once said, would bankrupt farmers like him.

But by 2023, when Florida was once again considering such a bill, Roth’s convictions had grown shaky. In May of that year, he sat and listened as his Democratic colleagues voiced their opposition: “This bill will tank our state’s economy by directly harming Florida's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries,” one of them warned. Had this debate been unfolding even a few years earlier, Roth — who has acknowledged relying heavily on labor by undocumented immigrants in the past — likely would have nodded along.

This time, he didn’t. Several minutes later, Roth, his gray hair cut short and a cross pinned to his lapel, rose from his seat on the House floor, peered through reading glasses and delivered a statement antithetical to what the 70-year-old had long stood for: “I rise in support of SB 1718,” he announced. First among his reasons, he said, was an “invasion” of immigrants at the border. He called it a “ticking time bomb.”

The bill not only required all but the smallest employers to check the legal status of any new hires against a federal database, it also ordered hospitals to ask patients about their status. The measure added new funds to Gov. Ron DeSantis' program to transport newly arrived immigrants out of the state, while making it a felony for individuals to bring undocumented workers in. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-illegal-immigration legislation in the country.”

Roth knew that the legislation might hurt many farmers — not to mention landscapers and contractors and hotels and a slew of other employers in Florida. But it was good politics. Across the country, Republican politicians like himself have almost universally fallen in line with what amounts to a requirement for party membership. Even business-focused Republicans, who for many years had turned a blind eye to undocumented immigrants because they provided cheap, reliable labor, had given in to a mandate from a party whose leader has spent three presidential campaigns portraying immigration as an existential threat to the United States. In Roth’s case, the transformation from a decades-long advocate for expanding legal immigration to a Trump-style hardliner was so swift and so complete that he barely tries to explain it, other than to repeat what sound like Republican talking points about how the border has become a crisis.

The measure passed easily out of the Republican-controlled House the same day Roth stood to support it. Relieved it was over, he left Tallahassee to return to his fields outside the town of Belle Glade, where the motto is “her soil is her fortune.” He drove his Toyota Prius, a Trump 2020 sticker on the bumper, down the dirt lanes that run along his tracts of land. Birds darted around the fallow farmland. Roth felt at ease.

The calm didn’t last. Among Roth’s business owner constituents, there was a rising panic about the fate of their workers. A manager of a vegetable packing house stood by as dozens of his workers left. “We had a mass exodus here,” he later said. Undocumented immigrants and their families were loading up trucks with years of belongings and decamping to Georgia or North Carolina. “Everyone was afraid,” said a resident of a Belle Glade mobile home park. She’d watched as at least five of her neighbors, all undocumented immigrants, sold their trailers and moved. A daycare worker in the next town said several children of immigrants in her classroom were there one week, gone the next.

As workers were scrambling to protect themselves from what they saw as a coming crackdown, phone calls were flooding into Roth’s legislative office. The farmers and contractors and landscapers were complaining that this law Roth had supported was going to wreck their businesses. It was exactly the kind of fallout Roth had long warned of when he’d fought measures like the one he’d just helped to pass.

As one nursery owner who called into Roth’s office asked: “What have you done?”

Around the time of the flurry of calls, 26-year-old Salvador Garcia Espitia and his wife, Nohemí Enriquez Fonseca, were trying to figure out how they’d deal with their own crisis. The couple, who’d grown up near each other in the small ranchos of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, had become parents two years before. Their son, Isaac, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and autism. Garcia’s work in a vegetable packing facility and in the corn fields around their town barely covered his son’s therapy and medication. Enriquez hadn’t worked since the baby was born, since his care took all her time.

The family lived in Cerritos, with Garcia’s parents. It wasn’t much of a town, just a cluster of homes behind a locked gate. The gate went up after a local woman was kidnapped, presumably by gang or cartel members, though no one knows for sure. Each night, after 9:30, residents communicated by group chat if someone needed to leave for an emergency, so that whoever had the key could let them out and back in.

Whenever Garcia worked overtime, which was almost always once Isaac’s medical bills stacked up, his mother would sit and wait for him to come home, even until 2 a.m. She feared for her youngest child, her only son. He was so full of promise, capable of so much with his serious disposition and vast intelligence. She worried not just about his safety, but that she hadn’t done enough for him. The best job she could find was cleaning houses, which she did for many years. Her husband was frequently out of work after a head injury he’d suffered back when Garcia was a toddler.

Since Garcia was a child, he had watched countless relatives and friends make the decision for their own families’ futures to go find work in the north. The men departed, crossing into the United States without papers. To have a home, to afford a car, to provide for a child who would struggle to walk or speak, going north was the only way.

But Garcia was clear: He would not cross the border that way. He could not risk being harmed or killed and leaving his wife and son with nothing.

Not long after the severity of Isaac’s condition came to light, Garcia began to listen more closely to other young men in the towns near his: There was a way to travel back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work, a way to do it that seemed safe.

The solution for Garcia was a visa program that promised to benefit both migrating workers in desperate need of livable wages and U.S. farms in desperate need of affordable labor. But in many ways, the benefits to workers have remained a gamble while for farmers they're guaranteed.

Roth is a special case, a farmer and also a politician. For him, the program has served a dual purpose. It’s ensured the success of his business by providing a steady stream of workers. And it’s made it easier for him to adopt a harsher political stance on immigration at a time when he feels his party demands it.

Roth didn’t mention it on the House floor or broadcast it to his constituents, but the visa program made his farm mostly impervious to the provisions he’d rallied against in the past. As anxiety gripped communities of undocumented people and many of their employers, Roth Farms was going to be just fine.

The visa program turned out to be a lifeline for Roth. When Garcia reached for that same lifeline, it failed him.

Roth Farms dates back four generations to the late 1940s, but Rick Roth didn’t grow up thinking the family business would be his future. When he went off to Emory University in 1970 to study math, he figured he’d find himself working an office job, somewhere far from any fields.

“I thought, ‘Man, I'm too smart to be a farmer.’” But Roth said a mix of marijuana and malaise sent him off track. After he was placed on academic probation, he came home and asked his father to put him to work on the farm. To Roth’s surprise, he liked it. He was assigned easy jobs, like driving truckloads of radishes to the packing house. Though he’d often mess up basic tasks or show up late and hungover, his father’s workers knew that he could be the boss someday, and they treated him accordingly. Roth knew it, too. He also knew that if he went to work at some company, he’d start at the bottom, and there was no guarantee how far up he’d make it. Here, he had a clear path to the top.

Roth returned to Emory, finished his degree, and then came back to Roth Farms. His father gave him more responsibility, and within a few years he was overseeing harvest operations. With his crew leaders’ guidance, he’d earned his father’s respect and sensed that this might be permanent, that the farm could actually be his.

Sooner than he expected, it was. In 1984, his father had a heart attack. Two years later, he died. Roth still tears up, 40 years later, recalling his loss.

For a decade, the farm grew and prospered. Then, Roth faced his first major challenge. Back then, almost all of the farm’s workers were Black. But as the workers began aging out of farm labor, it was becoming harder to find new people to take their place. Though Roth had found reason to continue his father’s lucrative profession, he realized with some consternation that the people he employed in low-wage field jobs didn’t raise their own children to follow them: “No farmworker raises their kids to be farmworkers.”

Other Belle Glade farms were responding to the worker shortage by hiring newly arrived Mexican immigrants. Roth Farms hired a new Latino crew leader to help bring them in. By the end of the 1990s, “half of our employees working in seasonal jobs probably were illegal,” Roth said. “Everybody knew that.”

The immigrant workers Roth hired were young, strong and plentiful, and they were willing, he has said, to work for less money than Americans. That assumption brought trouble. By the late 1990s, nearly all of his workers were Latino, and in 1999, a group of nine of them filed a class action lawsuit against Roth for racial and national origin discrimination. They alleged that they earned up to $1.50 less per hour than the small remaining Black crew of a dozen or so workers. Roth at the time denied that any wage disparities were based on race.

The two sides reached a settlement, with Roth Farms agreeing to pay $124,000 to cover the additional wages the workers alleged they were owed. Roth declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As the farm continued to benefit from a fairly steady stream of workers from Mexico, Roth became convinced that those workers should be entitled to legal status. He felt that farms like his couldn’t just keep on hiring undocumented immigrants forever, or at least they shouldn’t have to. He began making treks to Washington, D.C., to advocate for an easier path for undocumented workers to become legal ones.

The bills that would have done that didn’t pass. But Roth kept up his advocacy efforts, reiterating that U.S. citizens would never return to farm work, even with higher wages, and that without immigrant workers, the U.S. would need to begin importing more food.

In 2011, Florida lawmakers began deliberating a series of bills modeled after a recent Arizona law that would make it a crime to be undocumented in Florida, allow police to check people’s immigration status and crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. The Arizona law, and similar ones in Alabama and Georgia, played out as anticipated. Workers left. Fields of vegetables rotted.

One of the Florida bills also would have required private employers to run all hires through E-Verify, the system for checking legal work status, and imposed fines on companies that employ undocumented immigrants. In response, Roth intensified his public opposition. Those bills failed.

When Congress later that year considered the Legal Workforce Act, including an E-Verify requirement, Roth again spoke against it, telling the Palm Beach Post: “This is a repetitive job for people who don't speak the language. These people pick the crops for other people who have air-conditioned jobs.”

Generations of Garcia’s family members had worked on farms, but he didn’t grow up thinking it was an inevitability. He wanted to go to college, maybe even become a doctor.

He was in high school when he met Enriquez, who was 15 at the time and a guest at his cousin’s wedding. She was struck by how serious he was, and how smart. No matter her question he had an answer.

Enriquez’s parents were strict. She liked to go out, much more than Garcia did, but she could only meet him in public with her parents in tow, at community gatherings or the annual festival celebrating the town’s patron saint. Otherwise, he could come to the family’s house.

By the time Garcia moved in with Enriquez and her parents, when she was 18 and he was 20, he’d had to give up on going to college. There was no money for that. He went to work in a local dairy, then to the fields and the vegetable packing houses.

A year after he moved in, Garcia and Enriquez married. He didn’t want to start a family too soon, though. He wanted to save up for a house of their own. They made it three years. A house was still a distant possibility, but Garcia took the pregnancy as the best news.

The baby was 6 months old when Enriquez became convinced that something wasn’t right. Isaac was not developing the way he should. She started to look for help. Eventually, she brought Isaac to a private doctor, who said the baby needed to see a neurologist.

That one appointment was nearly a week’s salary. The neurologist scheduled a scan of the child’s brain. Enriquez and Garcia cobbled together what they could, figuring that it was just enough to pay for the scan and cover the bus fare to the facility for her, Isaac and his godmother, who wanted to come along. But when they got there, the scan was more than they were expecting, and more than they had. Isaac’s godmother came up with the remainder, but they were left with no money to get home. They found a bus willing to let them pay the fare at the destination. On the way, Enriquez called a friend to meet the bus and lend her the fare.

The more stressed her husband got, the quieter he became. And in the weeks after the scan, he said very little. He was also working constantly. The neurologist had explained that Isaac had cerebral palsy, which meant he would need a speech therapist, physical therapy and a nutritionist. The rehab facility was an hour and a half away by bus. The therapy sessions cost 1,200 pesos, or about $60, every week. The most Garcia could bring home each week, working as much overtime as he could, was 2,000 pesos. Typically it was more like 1,500.

Just as they got help covering the cost of Isaac’s treatment, he was diagnosed with a second condition, autism. The new medication cost more than what they’d been spending to manage his cerebral palsy.

The need for Garcia to go north was no longer merely important. It was urgent. He turned to his wife and said: “I have to find another solution.” And that’s when the H-2A visa came up.

After years of lobbying against various laws, Roth began to wonder if he could do more for farmers by joining the Legislature rather than fighting it. In 2016, he announced his run for a Florida house seat.

Not long after Roth won his race, Donald Trump entered the White House. Roth wholeheartedly supported Trump, but he would soon find that the president’s immigration agenda created a new problem for his farm. “With Donald Trump, there were not a lot of illegals coming to America,” Roth acknowledged, which aligns with the low numbers of immigrants who crossed the border during much of the former president’s first year in office. “We started to have to say, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’”

For a time, he did what he’d always done: He fought actions that would harm undocumented workers and their employers. He voted against a 2019 E-Verify bill pushed by DeSantis. But he was more quiet about his opposition, he said, refraining from the strong language he’d previously used. The bill died in committee.

It was around that time that Roth, along with his son, who’d taken over the day-to-day operations of the farm, found a fix. It was available to only a sliver of the state’s employers: an agricultural visa program called H-2A.

The program, which allows the U.S. farming industry to bring in foreign laborers on a temporary basis, had been around in some form since the 1940s. But until recently Roth had little need for it – his workers, documented and not, came back every year. Plus, he had considered the program’s requirements to pay more than the minimum wage and cover the cost of transportation from Mexico and housing in Belle Glade too expensive. But, like many other farmers who’d struggled with labor shortages, he came around to it. The program could dependably deliver legal workers. H-2A visa certifications have increased fourfold in the last decade, and nowhere are there more of these workers than in Florida.

“H-2A,” Roth said, “was really the only choice.”

When Florida’s anti-immigration SB 1718 came around in 2023, Roth had an almost entirely H-2A workforce — which made it easier for him to support legislation that purported to push out undocumented workers. As for how to explain his change of heart to constituents: “Given the border crossing that’s going on, we did need to send a strong message,” he said. “If you're illegal, don't come to Florida. We're gonna make it tough on you.”

But some of his constituents couldn’t help but get a different message: “We’re going to make it tough on your workers.” They told Roth that the law itself, not the far-away border crossings, posed the immediate threat to their livelihoods.

Eventually, the potential for the law’s harm began to sink in. Weeks after his vote for SB 1718, in the summer of 2023, Roth showed up at meetings across his district on a campaign of damage control. “I apologize to you for this bad bill,” he told a group gathered at a local church, with the help of a Spanish interpreter.

Roth made numerous statements in public and private meetings that the law is predominantly political, intended “to help a governor run for president.” He said it had been laced with “purposeful loopholes” to protect employers from too much harm. For one, it doesn’t apply to small businesses with fewer than 25 workers. But chief among the loopholes, Roth said, is that the E-Verify requirement doesn’t extend to undocumented immigrants who already have jobs. “If you like your job, keep your job,” he’s become fond of saying.

Roth admits that, even today, he may have longtime workers who are undocumented. When workers in his own packing house started asking questions about the law, he said he “instructed all my management what to say, and I just told them very clearly, ‘This new bill that you're hearing all this talk about does not apply to workers that already have a job.’”

The full impact of SB 1718 is still not clear. Its E-Verify provisions did not take full effect until July. For some employers, it’s made life more difficult. “I can’t grow,” said Mark Baker, who owns a 40-year-old landscape and plant nursery in Delray Beach. He lamented that he can’t use the H-2A program, since his workers aren’t temporary. “I want to open another office, but I can’t because I can’t even staff the office I have.”

Despite having voted to crack down on immigrants in Florida, Roth maintains he still supports broader immigration legalization and insists it’s up to Washington to take action. He also admits he thinks such a fix is far off. What he knows for sure is that for farms like his, H-2A is working, that it incentivizes workers to come here the right way — with the assurance that worker and farmer alike will be protected.

That September 2023 morning started like so many others. Enriquez caught the bus to take Isaac to physical therapy. This time her husband came along. They stopped to eat something on the way back home, then Garcia collected the bags he had packed.

If he was nervous or frustrated or scared, he didn’t show it.

Garcia’s parents picked up the three of them to drive Garcia to the bus station. It would be tortuous for him to be away from his family, but the consolation was that the job would only last five months. It was dusk when they got to the bus stop, and they couldn’t linger. It was unsafe to be out in the dark. They hugged him tight. “Take care of our boy,” he said.

Garcia spent the following days sorting out paperwork with a labor subcontractor who specializes in recruiting Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. He knew a little about where he was headed: Belle Glade. His wife’s aunt had immigrated to a nearby town years earlier. Once he arrived, he visited with her before settling into his barracks-style lodging near the sugar cane fields, which happened to be just a few miles from Roth’s fields. Garcia texted his wife that he would try his best to get some rest that night, since he would start work in the morning.

The following afternoon, Sept. 13, 2023, Enriquez was just getting back from taking Isaac to therapy when someone called from Florida. It was a woman from the company that had hired Garcia. Her husband was fine, the woman said. He had fainted in the fields, she explained, which was something that happened from time to time, because of heat nearing 90 degrees. But no, he couldn’t talk to her right then. He was still unconscious. The woman gave Enriquez the name of the hospital where he was recovering.

As soon as they hung up, Enriquez called her aunt, who headed to the hospital. But when she arrived, she was told that Garcia had been transferred, to Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the hours that followed, the calls to Enriquez accelerated. Amid all the ringing and buzzing, someone arranged that night for a video call so she could see her husband. He still hadn’t woken up. She spoke softly to him, trying to hold back her panic over the cables and tubes that crisscrossed his body, including one helping him breathe.

It was very early the next morning when the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez’s permission to resuscitate her husband. The words instinctively came to her — yes, save him — and she sprang into action. She realized she would need to somehow quickly cross the border to get to her husband. It seemed as if one minute, she was handing off Isaac to her mother and the next she was 900 miles away at the border crossing at Matamoros, Garcia’s mother by her side.

The two women had to wait on the Mexican side of the bridge for several hours. As they sat outside in the middle of the night, the hospital called again. They needed Enriquez to agree to resuscitate her husband. Again she said yes.

The nurses ventured one more question. In the event of a third resuscitation, would Enriquez have the same answer? Her husband was no longer well, they said. He was suffering. Enriquez weighed the pain in her soul. No, she said. Not a third time.

The border crossing took all day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had to ask so many questions to approve the two women for the humanitarian permit. Hours passed. Enriquez was aware that authorities kept trying to reach people at the hospital to confirm her husband’s condition.

Finally, the permits were approved. As the two women left the CBP building in Brownsville, Texas, an official saw them out, holding open the door. It would be the first time either woman had crossed into the United States. All the man said was, “I’m very sorry.”

Roth had heard about the death of a worker on a nearby farm. He said it was sad. He also said one of his first thoughts was one of worry, about what state or federal agencies would do in response. “It's a big deal that somebody died,” Roth added. But “the government tends to overreact.”

In late 2023, Roth returned to Tallahassee to serve his final session in the Florida House before he termed out. He has plans to run for state Senate in 2026. Among the last bills he co-sponsored as a member of the House was one that would prevent local governments in Florida from implementing workplace heat protections.

It was introduced in reaction to a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would have required water, breaks and shade for outdoor workers. Roth had joined a chorus of business groups pushing forcefully to ban the local labor ordinance. “I’m a little bit insulted that some government bureaucrat thinks they need to help me take care of my employees,” he told a local Fox affiliate.

Roth had supported a bill four years earlier to require heat protections for student athletes, but he rejected the idea that Florida should impose protections for workers. He told ProPublica that employers don’t need state or local government to require safeguards, since employers already have every incentive to protect their workers. Given the shortage of workers across the state, he said, “do you really think they're not taking care of their employees?”

He also pointed out that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration already regulates workplaces, including fining those that don’t offer heat protections. And ultimately, he said, it’s the responsibility of workers and their crew leaders to make sure they’re not putting themselves at risk. On his own farm, he said, workers know when they need to take breaks.

On March 12, 2024, days after the Florida Legislature passed the anti-heat protection bill, OSHA revealed the findings of its investigation into Garcia’s death. It determined that the Belle Glade company that hired Garcia and other H-2A workers to local farms had failed to adequately protect workers from the heat.

“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure,” the OSHA area director said in a statement. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”

For McNeill Labor Management Inc.’s failures to protect Garcia and to report his death to the government, OSHA issued the company a fine of less than $28,000.

Owner Shannon McNeill told ProPublica that his company, which employs 700 mostly H-2A workers at the height of operations, provides workers with all of the protections that safety advocates call for, including water, shade and breaks. He also said that the company is now easing new hires more slowly into full-day shifts, a practice that OSHA already recommended. But he is contesting OSHA’s determination that the company is responsible for Garcia’s death.

McNeill Labor Management had paid for Garcia’s body to be returned to Mexico and his funeral expenses. On a morning in July, before a heavy rain set in, Nohemí Enriquez left her son with her mother near the church in the town of Pueblo Nuevo and drove out of the town center to visit her husband’s grave in a small, orderly cemetery. The flowers she placed there on her last visit had become dried and shriveled. She took them from the vase and threw them away, angry at herself for not bringing fresh ones. And then she prayed. “For those I love and who loved me,” his gravestone read.

One week earlier, on July 19, Roth was in the audience as Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee about “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” He promised to deliver on a commitment to carry out “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Roth, a party delegate from Florida, had spent the day before dancing and laughing on the floor with other delegates, as well as shedding a few tears. “It was very emotional for me when Trump came out,” he said.

Asked a week later if the mass deportations would do harm to the agricultural industry in Florida, he responded with confidence that Trump would not actually engage in an indiscriminate mass deportation program. But even if that did happen, he said, there will always be a supply of H-2A workers waiting. “We'll figure it out,” he said. “We'll get more.”

Translations by Wendy Pérez, Jesús Jank Curbelo and Greta Díaz González Vázquez.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert  for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.

***

Democracy Now! (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.

In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.

Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that

Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.

Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.

And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.

Defending Rights & Dissent (8/10/23)

The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.

And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.

And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.

Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”

We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.

Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.

And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.

The Nation (8/16/24)

And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.

So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.

We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.

Campus Crisis Alert (10/23/24)

I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alert newsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.

And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”

And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.

And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.

Guardian (9/18/24)

And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”

JJ: Right—what?

CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.

But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.

An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.

Wall Street Journal (5/12/24)

JJ: Castro from the grave.

CG: Castro’s ghost, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Putin, China. Really, all of the evil-doers, maybe, are behind it, apparently.

And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.

So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.

And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.

So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.

Intercept (2/21/24)

And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.

So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.

Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.

You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.

JJ: She understood.

Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.

And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.

CounterSpin (2/26/16)

CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no one against the Iraq War.”

I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?

JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…

CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.

JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?

CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”

Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.

Al Jazeera (1/19/14)

And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”

JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.

And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.

And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?

CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”

JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.

CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”

So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.

Washington Post (10/22/24)

But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.

And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.

JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?

CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.

But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

I think there was always a clear path in my mind. I always wanted to do music. I was talking to my partner recently about how I used to say that as a kid you’re like, “I want to be whatever,” and I would say, “I want to be a singer.” That’s just the cutest thing you can say. And I was telling him that and he was like, “Well, you are a singer.” I think that’s just so cute.

Did you always know that you wanted to pursue music?

In some way or another. When I was younger I was doing classical music and it was a much more restrictive technique. I could have gone to school for that. I could have had a very different path of music, but still be involved in it. So there’s probably different me’s in the universe somewhere doing something else, but I’m sure it’s always in music.

Are you still incorporating your classical training and background into your new work in any way?

I would love to do more. I think there’s so much untapped history and potential with that in terms of just arrangements, or even implementing some sort of operatic saying or classical singing. I haven’t yet. I do try to use the technique that I’ve learned with breath control and stuff, but [it’s different] with the indie singing, singer-songwriter-y vibe.

You’ll probably hear in a lot of my old music that I was so strict with that technique. You hear it really high in my voice. You can hear it being very nasal. I can’t really listen to a lot of my old songs because of the vocal memory of how I sang them. It was probably a lot healthier, but I don’t really sing that way anymore.

It’s more of a relaxed style now?

Yeah. And farther back in my throat. Growing up, I thought that singing from your chest voice was illegal. It was very airy, very high voice, and now I’m big and down deep, and it feels really good to sing the way I’m singing now. But I definitely am losing a lot of that classical technique.

Have you always been comfortable on stage, or what did it take to improve your performance skills?

I have typically been comfortable on stage. Even when I was really small, one of my earliest music memories is being at a family dinner and my mom asking me to sing the national anthem to the table of six people. And I was petrified, and I cried and said no, and then a year later I’m on stage at a recital, happily singing to 100 people in the theater or something. I’ve always been a little bit more comfortable doing that than having such an intimate crowd watching me.

On your own terms.

Yeah, on my own terms, and I do feel I got comfortable from having my YouTube channel in my early twenties, and performing on there, and exercising that side of my brain of talking to viewers.

When you’re on stage, you’re talking, but no one’s really talking back to you. You are just screaming into the void unless people heckle you, which I do love. I love being heckled. But that’s the same as making videos and the vlogs that I would do. I would just talk to an audience that couldn’t really respond back. So it was great exercise and I treat my stage presence as if I’m talking to [anybody or nobody]. I’m sure on the subconscious level, that’s what I’m doing.

Early days you were producing independently. What has the transition been like to now being signed to a major label?

It’s been fun. I produced Wisecrack outside of Arts and Crafts. so I haven’t yet produced an album under the label and their direction. I’ve been having some really great chats in preparation for the next project. A lot of support. It’s cool.

Do you find you’re able to really pause and take in these major milestones?

No. I don’t know. I have a hard time pausing and reflecting on things like [milestones] because the more these milestones occur, the more pressure I put on myself. So this will be a good reminder to reflect today.

Do you find that as an artist, you sometimes feel pushed to fit within a single genre? Or how have you avoided being pigeonholed into one genre of writing?

I change my mind every second in terms of decision making. I am very bad at making decisions. I think I just let things happen and I don’t really like to stay too monotonous.

I am curious about this upcoming project—having a label, and having more of an idea of a well-rounded vision of a musician, and a brand and stuff. They’re doing business just like anybody else. [I wonder if] I’ll feel the constraints of that genre-wise and vibe-wise. But I just like to be a little bit all over the place. I love all sorts of music, so why not make all sorts of music?

It’s refreshing to see you thrive in the freedom of that space. People have so many opinions on what it takes to be a successful artist. You need to be a good performer, you have to be outputting constantly. You have to have this super engaging, consistent online presence. Have you felt those pressures along the way to deliver in all these different areas, or what’s your process like for balancing it all?

Definitely, I do feel like in the last three or four years I’ve been too overwhelmed by that. So I’ve taken a step back and tried to not think too hard about that. The other day I was like, “Maybe I should try again and just see if it works.” So here I am editing a really stupid video, because it’s fun to keep trying to see what works. I’m a bit resentful of the fact that artists have to do this, but anyone with any sort of business does, and it’s good to sometimes have a reality check that this is a livelihood and a business, even though it’s a passion. Especially living in Vancouver and its expensiveness is draining, and when you have to think of your project and your passion as a moneymaker because you need to pay rent, it does get disheartening. I think that’s why I’ve proudly stepped back and been like, “I’m not going to be an influencer, or I’m not going to play the game. I’m not playing their game,” Now I need money. And I’m like, “Oh, sure!”

How do you have healthy boundaries with it?

I don’t know if you can when the internet’s involved. I think that on the surface I have a healthy relationship, and then when I get sad about it, that’s when I unveil how insecure and strange it feels to be in this career in this time of 2024 where [there’s pressures of] the internet, and TikTok, and record labels, and whether or not you do need one, and whether or not you need to be this brand machine. It’s all very overwhelming.

How do you find balancing your creative work with your relationships and your life?

I don’t know. It’s again, one of those things that I don’t know if I actively think about, because maybe it would create some more structure and whatever. My boyfriend and I, we’re both creatives. He’s a writer and a filmmaker, and we both have been having this discussion about how when we’re both in the house, we just want to hang out with each other, and go do something, and go get a coffee, and go get lunch, and go to shops. We never are too inspired together to make art when we’re living together. It’s when he leaves the house, I’m like, “I need to write a song.”

I don’t know if I work amazingly unless I’m secluded. I think that’s what I’m used to and that’s how I work best. In terms of it crossing over with my relationships, I guess it doesn’t really. But it would be great for me to figure that out so I could have the freedom.

And going on tour a lot, it’s nice to miss someone but the distance is hard a lot of the time. I might take a little break this next year and just kind of focus on being at home, and exercising that relationship, versus art, versus cohabitation thing.

How would you say you take care of your creative side when you’re not working?

I love being in nature. I had a sort of life-changing flight. I used to be very scared of flying, and I played a festival in Yellowknife a month ago, and when we were flying back on that flight, I actually looked out the window for the first time and I saw these insane clouds, the craziest thing. And I’m like, “God, this world is truly a gorgeous thing.” So I really think that natural elements and the sky really inspire me. You think, what really matters in life?

Do you have any habits or creative tics that you sometimes have to fight against and how do you do it?

I’m a bad procrastinator and putting off things because it doesn’t feel like the right time. In terms of songwriting and stuff, it’s not a forced thing to me. So if the elements aren’t right, I’ll be like, “Well, not today.” And I think that can be a bad habit and a bit inhibiting.

I’ve seen some of your videos where you talk about your love of scents and the connection to memories. Have you always been more sensitive to smell? And when did you discover there was comfort in it for you?

I think always for both of those. I became more aware of it and used it to my advantage in the last few years. Buying perfume is a really expensive habit, but it really brings me so much peace—finding a new smell, breaking it down, and seeing why I like it. And usually the reason that I like smells is because it’s a memory attributed to them.

What’s your earliest memory of a scent that evoked some emotional response?

I really love white floral scents, like lilacs, or honeysuckle, or Jasmine. It really takes me back to being in my uncle’s backyard. I think the last time I was there I would’ve been four, and I can just see the white flowers. That definitely is the first. That’s a scent memory that I come back to a lot.

Is it safe to say that you often write from memories? What do you think draws you back to the past to write from?

I think I do. I tend to really, really be crushed under the weight of my own nostalgia.

It definitely is me working out a lot of things. As I’m writing it, I’m going through something that I hadn’t yet processed. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it, and why I’ve been in a bit of a creative block this last year in terms of songwriting, just because I think that all my songs were about my past, my childhood, and things that have happened to me. I’m like, “Okay, I’m at peace with that. Now what do I write about?” Now I have to live in the present, Oh great!

Would you say your writing is really intentional then, or do you ever just write something because you like it?

I’m trying to do that. I think it’s a great songwriting technique and frees up a lot of space in my brain to just write whatever. But in the past and up until now my writing is really intentional. I always want it to be super personal and almost too vague for anybody to understand, but so specific to me.

What is your approach to writing typically like? Is it very collaborative?

No, it should be. Again, there’s so many things that it would be great for me to experiment with more, to unlock a new form of songwriting for me. I’d love to do that and I’m open to it, but in the past it’s been very independent and kind of no plan, no structure, no schedule. I never was looking at the clock at 2:00 PM, “Okay, now let’s write for two hours.” It happens in the shower, on a walk, gotta run home something’s sparked.

It’s kind of unrealistic that way because it takes a long time to get songs out.

I really admire people who can just set aside their whole morning, and they’re writing a song A to B, or just trying to figure it out. Got to work on that. I’ve said this for years too, by the way.

Are you someone that’s typically very assertive in the production process, or what have you found works best when you’re working with others in the studio?

I’m typically very open. When I was recording my first album Below the Salt, I was really not familiar with the studio vibe at all, and I didn’t really know what to do. I had the band Tennis come in and do a couple songs for me and Alaina from Tennis said one thing that I always try and bring into every studio session is just “see every idea through, even if you know it’s a bad one, see it through, because you might change your perspective by the end.”

So I try to do that, and be really open. Typically, up until now, I brought full songs into the studio and we just produced them. We don’t write them. So they seem very precious and very, very special to me. So if a producer says, “Well, let’s cut this verse.” In my mind I’m like [husky screaming] but actually the song flows so much better, and I have to sit with it and be like, “Okay, actually that was a better idea,” because you have a completely different view on this song that to me is so special, and to you, it’s just a song right now. So you can have fun with it.

So that’s what I try to do and just be really open. I could definitely be more assertive. I do think it’s hard because if I am out of my comfort zone—I’m not well versed in producing and all the little details that go into it—so I do get a little intimidated, but we’re always learning. I feel like this next time I’ll go into the studio, I’ll be even more confident than I was.

How do you start a project typically?

I typically will look and see if I have enough songs that I’ve written over a course of however long. For Wisecrack, it was a very conceptual album to me, so I had such a vision and when I met Dave Vertesi who produced it, he just understood it. And so it was really easy. I didn’t have to look anywhere else for producers, he was just kind of like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing and this is what I want it to be, and you get it.” And so it’s super easy and really painless.

And with Below the Salt, to me that was more of a compilation album. There was really no through line conceptually. The songs were really different from one another. I worked with a couple of different producers on them. I was very young and I didn’t really know what I was doing.

And so for this next one, I don’t really know how to approach it because I don’t really know what it is yet. I have some ideas, I have some songs. I feel like I want to go in a different direction genre-wise, but I’m not sure what that is. So this one is going to be a mixture of the past two in terms of vision, but I don’t really know how to approach this one. I’m kind of stumped.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

Well, I don’t know if this is surprising, but it’s something that I’ve been realizing is that it’s really hard for me to be a boss. When you’re on tour and you have a big band that you have to take care of, you are technically the boss. And I think it’s a weird balance of having the sense of unity as a band, but then these people are just here for your project. And it is a bit of a weird imposter thing in my brain where I’m like, “That’s a lot of pressure.” And it’s hard to be a boss.

What’s something you wish someone told you when you began to make music?

There are no rules, none at all. You can really do whatever you want if you’re brave enough. There’s no limits. I’ll listen to a song and I’ll still have a moment where I’m like, “You can do that? I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.”

What do you think writing music and being an artist has taught you about yourself?

I think that I really need it and that I can always be better than I am right now. There’s always room to learn more about myself, even if I think I have it figured out. And I think that’s always important to reflect on, that no matter what you put out or write, you can always write something completely different and learn from that the next day.

Always evolving.

Yeah, constantly evolving, and like I said, I have a bad time making decisions, and maybe that favors me in some way.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hannah Harlacher.

As many as 28,000 people incarcerated in central and southern Florida jails and prisons were in mandatory evacuation zones for Hurricane Milton, but many officials reportedly refused to evacuate them. Some who were moved to more secure facilities ahead of the storm report having been left in lockdown with no power, updates or access to prison staff. “The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes. And I think we can all agree, if we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside,” says Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons and the group’s Hurricane and Disaster Response Team. They helped organize pressure campaigns for officials to evacuate incarcerated people during this storm as they have for many others.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On Monday, revered Palestinian poet, teacher and mentor Refaat Alareer - so stubborn that a friend believed "people like him never die" - would have turned 45. Killed in an Israeli air strike, he left behind his wife and six children, and hundreds of Gazans who vow to emulate him - to speak truth, lift up others, "hold their heads high and endure like he did in his lifetime." "If I must die," he wrote, "Let it be a tale." And so it is.

A much-loved professor of comparative literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, with a masters from University College London, Alareer was known for chronicling Gazan experiences and nurturing young Palestinian writers to help them tell their stories. As "a reckless stone-thrower in the first Intifada," he said in an interview years ago, the stories of his mother and grandparents were "our solace, our escort in a blind world controlled by soldiers and guns and death." Those stories, he said, "make us who we are...they are one of the ingredients of Palestinian steadfastness, a creative act of resistance to oppression." A longtime believer that the pen is mightier than the sword, he urged young Palestinians to empower themselves by taking control of their own narratives. "For Palestinians, to tell a story is to remember, and to help others remember," he said. "Telling the story itself becomes an act of life."

After October 7, along with many thousands of Gazans, he and his family struggling with whether to stay in their home in Gaza City and risk death in an air strike, or to flee south with no guarantee of safety. After deciding to stay - they had "nowhere else to go" - he described "an archetypal Palestinian debate: Should we stay in one room, so if we die, we die together, or should we stay in separate rooms, so somebody can live?” (The answer is always to sleep in the living room together: "If we die, we die together.") On December 6, after Israel destroyed their home, he was moving between a school shelter and other people's homes when he was killed by an Israeli strike on a building in Shajaiya, in northern Gaza, where he was staying with his brother, sister and her four children; they were all also killed. His wife Nusayba, and six children aged 7 to 21, were sheltering in another building and survived.

A few hours before his death, he was walking along a road with his friend Asem Alnabih, telling him he was "tired of this war." "If he were alive today, I would not be writing this," notes a grieving Alnabih on Monday. Instead, they would be celebrating his birthday at al-Qalaq, a simple eatery known for having on its menu only crab - or "qalaq," which also translates to "worry" - while Refaat simultaneously worked. "If Refaat were alive right now, he would be taking care of us," writes Alnabih, who says three days before Refaat had came to his house after Alnabih's grandmother died to say, "I am always here for you. I am by your side." "He was (our) guide and mentor, and maybe that’s what frightened them - that he never hesitated to amplify the voices of those who spoke the truth," writes Alnabih. "I am still living and need to try telling his story. Dear Refaat, I miss you so much, my brother."

When he was killed, moving tributes poured in from his students, mentees, colleagues, friends. "Nothing I write could do him justice," one wrote of a scholar and activist so strong he transcends death and "comes back to us as a source of hope, strength, and belief...He was targeted because of his words and his message, and it is our duty (to) amplify it." Alareer's work itself does the same, especially Gaza Writes Back, an anthology of often harrowing short stories by 15 young Palestinian writers that Alareer spent over a year editing. "I started inviting students to write about what they had endured, to bear witness to the anguish," he recalled. "Writing is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with (the)world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope. They just came out. Stories in Palestine just come out."

In 2014, Alareer toured the U.S. for a month with some of the book's writers, meeting with writers and activists, both Palestinian and Jewish. The experience confirmed his belief that art is universal, that "literature breaks barriers, and returns us all to our humanity." The same year, he described how he came to the Writes Back project during Israel's 2008/2009 war against Gaza: As the bombs fell, "I had to find a way to distract my kids, by telling them stories from my childhood." He recalled his then-five-year-old daughter Shymaa asking him, "Dad, who created the Jews?", meaning Israelis. "I could not answer her question," he wrote. "But I realized the war mad her think there is a loving and merciful God, and another cruel God who created these Israeli soldiers, these killing machines (who) turn our lives into a living hell...The children pay the heaviest price, a price of fear and non-stop trauma."

In April, Israel murdered Shymaa, her husband Mohammed, and their two-month-old son Abd al-Rahman, Refaat's first grandchild, who he never had a chance to meet. They died in an airstrike on a building in Gaza City where they'd had been sheltering; it housed the international relief charity Global Communities, and was thought to be safe. Shymaa had posted a heartbreaking message to her martyred father shortly after her son's birth. "I have beautiful news for you, and I wish I could tell you while you were in front of me," she wrote. "Did you know that you have become a grandfather?” Amidst so much death, Gazans still mourning the much-loved Refaat were further devastated by the double tragedy. “I am out of words, tears and ways to comprehend this endless loss, this pain, this criminal annihilation of our people,” one wrote. "Shaymaa has joined her father Refaat after less than 5 months."

In August, The Electronic Intifada published some of Alareer's "Genocide Diaries," which OR Books will soon release in If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, an anthology of his work compiled by Yousef Aljamal. In searing entries, Alareer documents the stages of coping with war in Gaza, his and his wife's loss of over 50 family members to Israeli terror - "We are an average Palestinian family" - and their growing numbness to the ongoing carnage. "My grandmother would tell me to put on a heavy sweater because it would rain. And it would rain! She, like all Palestinian elders, had a unique sense, an understanding of the earth, wind, trees and rain. (They) knew when to pick olives for pickling or oil. Sorry, Grandma. We have instead become attuned to the vagaries of war. 'Is it war again?' asks my youngest child, Amal, 7, previous Israeli assaults still fresh in her mind. In Gaza, Amal is already four wars old."

As a parent, he feels "desperate and helpless." Unable to offer protection, he is focused on rationing food and water: "Instead of telling my kids 'I love you,' I have been repeating...'Kids, eat less, drink less'...I imagine this being the last thing I say to them, and it is devastating." When Israel bombs the building where they're hosting four other families, "We ran and ran," carrying the little ones, grabbing the small bags with cash and documents "Gazans keep at the door," and somehow survive. They walk to a UN shelter "in an inhuman condition," cram into classrooms. They lose their water, their food, "our last sense of safety." "In Gaza, no one is safe," he writes. "Israel could kill all 2.3 million of us, and the world would not bat an eye." Before Israel killed him, a hero and symbol of hope to so many, he wrote “If I Must Die,” urging, "You have to live/To tell my story." Heartrendingly, he wrote it to Shymaa.

If I must die
If I must die, you have to live
To tell my story, to sell my things
To buy a piece of cloth and some strings,
(Make it white with a long tail)
So that a child, somewhere in Gaza
While looking heaven in the eye,
Making it blush under his gaze,
Awaiting his Dad who left in a blaze–
And bid no one farewell
Not even to his flesh, not even to himself—
Sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
And thinks for a moment an angel is there
Bringing back love.
If I must die, let it bring hope.
Let it be a tale.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

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More than three years ago, a small group of government scientists came forward with disturbing allegations.

During President Donald Trump’s administration, they said, their managers at the Environmental Protection Agency began pressuring them to make new chemicals they were vetting seem safer than they really were. They were encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage and neurological problems, from their reports — and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves.

After the scientists pushed back, they received negative performance reviews and three of them were removed from their positions in the EPA’s division of new chemicals and reassigned to jobs elsewhere in the agency.

On Wednesday, the EPA inspector general announced that it had found that some of the treatment experienced by three of those scientists — Martin Phillips, Sarah Gallagher and William Irwin — amounted to retaliation.

Three reports issued by the inspector general confirmed that the scientists’ negative performance reviews as well as a reassignment and the denial of an award that can be used for cash or time off were retaliatory. They also detailed personal attacks by supervisors, who called them “stupid,” “piranhas” and “pot-stirrers.”

The reports called on the EPA to take “appropriate corrective action” in response to the findings. In one case, the inspector general noted that supervisors who violate the Whistleblower Protection Act should be suspended for at least three days.

The reports focus only on the retaliation claims. The inspector general is expected to issue reports in the future about the whistleblowers’ scientific allegations.

In an email sent to the staff of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention after the reports were released, EPA Assistant Administrator Michal Freedhoff wrote that the office plans to hold a “refresher training on both scientific integrity and the Whistleblower Protection Act” for all managers in the office. Freedhoff also wrote that the office is “reviewing the reports to determine whether additional action may be necessary.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the EPA tied the problems laid out in the report to Trump. “The events covered by these reports began during the previous administration when the political leadership placed intense pressure on both career managers and scientists in EPA’s new chemicals program to more quickly review and approve new chemicals,” the agency wrote, going on to add that the “work environment has been transformed under Administrator Michael Regan’s leadership.”

Trump campaign spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A second Trump presidency could see more far-reaching interference with the agency’s scientific work. Project 2025, the radical conservative policy plan to overhaul the government, would make it much easier to fire scientists who raised concerns about industry influence.

“I’m worried about the future because there are groups out there pushing for changes to the civil service that would make it so I could be fired and replaced with a non-scientist,” said Phillips, a chemist. Publicly available versions of the inspector general’s reports redacted the names of all EPA employees, including the scientists, but Phillips, Gallagher and Irwin confirmed that the investigations focused on their complaints.

Phillips said the experience of having his work changed, facing hostility from his supervisors and agonizing about whether and how to alert authorities was traumatic. He began pushing back against the pressure from his bosses in 2019, trying to explain why his calculations were correct and refusing their requests to change his findings, he said.

In one case, someone had deleted a report he had written that noted that a chemical caused miscarriages and birth defects in rats and replaced it with another report that omitted this critical information. After Phillips asked that the original report be restored, he was removed from his position within the EPA’s division of new chemicals and assigned a job elsewhere in the agency.

“I was turned into a pariah,” Phillips told ProPublica about the almost yearlong period when he was sparring with his managers in the new chemical’s division. “I lost sleep. I dreaded going to work. I was worried every time I had to meet with my supervisor or other members of the team. It made me question whether I wanted to continue in my job.”

He and the other scientists said they felt vindicated by the inspector general’s findings.

“It’s gratifying and a relief,” said Irwin, who has worked at the EPA for 15 years.

Irwin, who has a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology and three board certifications in toxicology, was transferred from the new chemicals division into a division of the agency he calls “existing chemicals,” after refusing to change several reports, including one on a chemical that he suspected of causing reproductive, immune and neurological problems. Irwin said his supervisor later cited his refusal to sign off on that assessment as a reason to downgrade his rating in his annual performance review.

The division where Irwin and the other scientists worked plays a critical role within the EPA. Companies that develop new chemicals are required to get permission from the EPA to introduce them to the market. If the agency finds that they could pose an unreasonable risk to health or the environment, it must, by law, regulate them, which can involve limiting or forbidding their production or use.

Irwin feels he is particularly suited to the work on new chemicals. “I have a strong ability to look at a chemical and pick out what its toxicity would be based on the structure.” When he was transferred, he said, “I got put on something I didn’t want to do.”

After they were forced to leave their jobs assessing new chemicals, the scientists filed the first of what would be six complaints with the EPA inspector general in June 2021. Their allegations, which detailed industry pressure that continued under the administration of President Joe Biden and pointed fingers at career officials who still worked for the EPA, were the subject of a 10-part series I published in The Intercept. Three of those career scientists named in the complaints subsequently left the EPA. And the agency ordered changes to address the corruption the whistleblowers had alleged, including the creation of two internal science policy advisory councils aimed at shoring up scientific integrity.

“These whistleblowers have been beaten down, ostracized and punished, when all they were trying to do was to protect us,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization that helped the scientists draft the complaints to the EPA inspector general.

The inspector general’s reports said supervisors defended their actions, claiming that the whistleblowers took an overly conservative approach in their assessments and that, in some cases, criticisms the supervisors had relayed from the companies that submitted the chemicals were valid. One supervisor said scientists “were expected to make compromises to complete the new chemicals assessments.”

The inspector general released two additional reports that did not substantiate allegations of retaliation made by two other scientists.

Bennett said she was particularly concerned about how the outcome of the upcoming presidential election could affect the whistleblowers. “If there is another Trump administration, I will be petrified for them,” she said.

If Trump fulfills even some of the promises made in Project 2025, job security for the whistleblowers — and all EPA scientists — will become much more tenuous. Project 2025 specifically calls for new chemicals to be approved quickly and proposes that all employees whose work touches on policy in federal agencies would become at-will workers, allowing them to be fired more easily.

Although Trump has attempted to distance himself from the effort, saying, “I don’t know what the hell it is,” reporting by ProPublica showed that 29 out of 36 speakers in Project 2025 training videos worked for him in some capacity.

All three scientists who were found to have been the victims of retaliation said they worry that the underlying problems they raised have not been adequately addressed and might worsen.

The scientists said they were still concerned about industry pressure on the EPA’s chemical approval process.

“It’s been four years since we first started raising concerns about what was happening, and we haven’t seen a resolution yet,” Gallagher said. “We haven’t gotten assurance that the concerns we’ve been raising will be fixed.”

Still, Gallagher said she thinks the inspector general’s investigation might begin to lessen the burdens she’s felt since she blew the whistle at the EPA. “I’m hoping that I’ll be able to feel valued in my job again,” she said.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Sharon Lerner.

North Korea has executed two women who had been forcibly repatriated from China for helping other North Koreans in China escape to South Korea, a human rights organization told Radio Free Asia.  

Charged with human trafficking, a 39-year-old woman surnamed Ri and a 43-year-old surnamed Kang were executed Aug. 31 after a public trial in the northeastern port city of Chongjin, according to Jang Se-yul, head of Gyeore’eol Unification Solidarity, based in Seoul.

Nine other women were sentenced to life in prison on the same charges.

All 11 women were among a group of around 500 North Koreans which China forcibly repatriated in October 2023.

“These two women were executed because they had sent North Korean escapees from China to their enemy country, South Korea,” Jang told RFA Korean. 

“When they first escaped, they were sold to a Chinese adult entertainment business,” he said. “When other North Korean women working there said they wanted to go to South Korea, they made arrangements to send them there.”

This is the first report of executions since the resumption of forced repatriation of North Korean escapees in China in October. 

Escapees in South Korea and elsewhere have urged China not to send North Koreans back, saying they would face severe punishments. China says it has an obligation to repatriate them under bilateral agreements it has with Pyongyang.

Women at risk

Women make up the majority of North Korean escapees in China. While there, they are often at the mercy of Chinese handlers who can sell them into servitude, either to work in prostitution, or to be the “wives” of Chinese men. 

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 34,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea. Of these, around 72% were women.  

Jang said that he learned of the trial and execution through Freedom Chosun an online media outlet run by North Korean escapees. 

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‘Some of them will be sent to … camps,’ some ‘may be executed’ 

Residents in North Korea confirmed that the trial and execution occurred.

A resident of the Chinese border city of Hoeryong told RFA that he witnessed the trial while visiting Chongjin, about 44 miles (70 kilometers) away. He said it started at 11 a.m. Aug. 31 and lasted an hour, and hundreds of residents and merchants at the marketplace were in attendance.

The trial concluded when the Social Security Bureau of North Hamgyong Province decided to execute the women on the same day, and put the 11 women in a convoy to send them away, he said.

The family of a North Korean escapee in South Korea, also confirmed (to him/her) that two people were executed in Chongjin. 

Suzanne Scholte, chairwoman of the Virginia-based North Korea Freedom Coalition, confirmed to RFA Sept 11, that the trial and executions were discussed at a recent meeting of the organization.

Helping escapees

Jang said he had spoken with the younger sister of one of the executed women, who told him that she was able to escape to South Korea with her sister’s help.

She said that her sister was caught by a Chinese broker while she was trying to escape to the South herself, Jang explained. She had been helping North Korean women escape by running a business with her Chinese husband in Longjing, Jilin province, China.

“She cried a lot,” said Jang. “It seems like her sister had rescued a lot of North Korean escapees and sent them to South Korea.”

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jamin Anderson for RFA Korean.

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This story is part of a partnership with Scripps News.

Jessica Patterson tensed as she tore open the letter from Exeter Finance. “This notice is being sent to you concerning your default,” the company wrote.

She didn’t need to keep reading to know she was in trouble.

It was January 2018. Seven months earlier, she’d borrowed $14,786.07 to purchase a silver Kia Rio. The interest rate was sky high — 25.17% — and the $402 monthly payment was more than a quarter of her take-home pay. But she needed the car to keep her job and support her three young children. For months she had skimped on groceries, eaten at soup kitchens and even skipped Christmas gifts to pay the car loan. But most of the time it wasn’t enough, and now Exeter was threatening to seize the Kia.

Panicked, she dialed the number in the letter. Can we work something out, Patterson asked.

Exeter’s response came easily, she recalled. It offered to extend her loan.

The company would simply move the December and January payments to the end of her five-year payment schedule, the representative told her, adding two months to the loan’s term. “It was instant relief,” Patterson said.

The extension seemed to be a courtesy from Exeter in a time of need. In fact, the company’s disclosures at the time stated “Extension fee: $0.00.”

The pause in payments, however, was anything but free. What Patterson didn’t know, and what she said Exeter didn’t tell her, was that every penny of her next five payments would go to the interest that built up during the reprieve. That meant she didn’t pay down the original loan balance at all during that time.

While the extension allowed her to keep her car, it added about $2,000 in new interest charges, which the lender did not clearly disclose.

Patterson’s experience with Exeter was not unusual. A ProPublica investigation has found that it’s an integral part of how the company runs its business.

Exeter is one of the largest auto lenders in the nation, specializing in high-interest loans to people with histories of not paying bills or defaulting on debt, a practice known as subprime lending. The company, which has more than 500,000 active loans and a partnership agreement with CarMax, the country’s largest used car retailer, casts itself as a provider of second chances. “We’re here to help,” it says on its website. In reality, Exeter’s practices often do the opposite.

When the company allows a borrower to skip payments, it typically adds thousands of dollars in new interest charges to the customer’s debt. Dozens of customers told ProPublica that Exeter didn’t tell them about the added costs.

When it’s time to make their final payment, many are faced with a huge bill, which they often can’t afford to pay.

Click here to find out how much used car loan extensions could cost with our free calculator tool.

At that point, Exeter often repossesses a car and sends the bill to a debt collector, regulatory records show. In some cases, the company makes more money on loans that default than on ones in which borrowers pay on time, ProPublica found.

Critics, including some former employees, say the company’s practices are predatory. “I really hated extensions once I found out what they did to people,” said Tyhara Ross, who worked at Exeter for nearly nine years. “You think you’re getting something for nothing, and you’re not.”

Exeter’s top executives declined to be interviewed for this story, and the company did not answer detailed written questions. Instead, it issued a statement that said it’s “fully committed to transparency in its lending practices” and “has no reason to mislead customers.”

“Exeter’s mission is to enable Americans who otherwise may not be able to access financing the opportunity to own their own vehicle so they can go to work and take care of their families,” the company said. “We take that mission seriously as well as our commitment to our customers.”

It’s difficult to track just how many extensions Exeter gives out; the company is not required to report detailed numbers. But publicly available data shows they’re fundamental to Exeter’s business model. Lenders often describe extensions in the context of financial emergencies, like when a borrower loses their job, or national crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Exeter hands them out “like candy,” according to three former employees who worked in the company’s collections operation.

To examine Exeter’s practices and their effect on borrowers, ProPublica analyzed data on more than 10 million auto loans included in bonds issued in the past five years.

At first blush, Exeter’s portfolio looks dire: A majority of its loans — more than 200,000 — are at least three payments behind schedule — a degree of delinquency that is roughly twice that of any other subprime lender in the data. Many companies would be preparing to count those loans as losses, send them to a collection agency and repossess the cars.

But Exeter has turned what would otherwise be a financial crisis into a profit center. Each time the company grants an extension, it resets the clock and reclassifies the loan as being on schedule. ProPublica found that Exeter has done this as many as 12 times over the course of a 72-month loan, with borrowers continuing to make payments in hopes of catching up. Regulatory records show many customers paid the equivalent of the full loan or more, only to see their cars repossessed.

Federal law prohibits lenders from engaging in “unfair, deceptive or abusive acts,” and the chief enforcer of that law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, took action against Santander Consumer USA, the nation’s largest subprime lender, in 2018 for practices similar to Exeter’s, such as offering loan extensions without clearly disclosing the financial impacts. CFPB forced Santander to pay nearly $12 million in restitution and penalties. But the agency hasn’t taken enforcement action against Exeter. Meanwhile, annual complaints to the CFPB about the company have grown threefold in the past five years, with nearly 900 in 2023.

Extensions that hide the consequences from borrowers “are taking a loan that is not working and ensuring that it’s just not going to work for a little longer,” said Pamela Foohey, a University of Georgia law professor who has written extensively about subprime lending.

Exeter said it made “voluntary revisions” in 2019 “to the way it communicates about extensions to ensure customers are fully informed on the costs,” notably in the scripts its agents use when talking to borrowers. It also said it created a dedicated team that year to handle extensions “with a focus on transparency to customers.”

“Customers are told clearly that interest will continue to accrue during an extension and are given the true cost of the interest accrual so that customers can make a decision on whether to choose an extension,” the company said.

But none of the customers that ProPublica spoke to said that was what they experienced. In fact, more than 20 borrowers told us they were not provided a dollar amount of what their extensions would cost before they agreed to them. “I just felt like that was so wrong,” said Natosha Smith, a former Exeter borrower living in Georgia.

She received eight extensions over the course of her loan. Each time, Smith said, an Exeter employee explained that it added additional months to the end of her loan term. Smith said she expected to pay a little extra interest, something akin to her $425 monthly payment. Instead, the cost was more than 10 times that.

“You guys have gotten double what this vehicle is worth, and you still want to take another $6,000 from me?” Smith said of Exeter. “I was appalled. I couldn’t believe it.”

When asked why it did not provide Smith and others with the exact cost of their extensions, Exeter amended its statement, saying, “Customers who request an extension are given the option before accepting the extension to immediately speak with an agent who can provide the cost of the interest that will accrue during the extension period. Some customers choose not to be transferred to an agent to receive the explanation.”

Neither Smith nor other borrowers could recall being given this option.

The monthly payment for a 72-month, $15,000 loan with a 25% interest rate is $404. But with two extensions early in the loan, the borrower’s final payment will be more than six times higher.

Exeter has always specialized in the subprime market. But in the late 2010s, the company went after customers with poor credit more aggressively than it had in the past. It accepted borrowers with even lower credit scores, lent them more money — as much as $50,000 per loan — and gave them longer to repay it. Some agreed to schedules stretching longer than six years, making the loans more costly.

“We’re not your father’s Exeter Finance,” the company proclaimed in a 2019 blog post aimed at wooing new business from dealerships.

It also increased its prices.

ProPublica’s analysis shows that Exeter charges the highest interest rates of any lender in the publicly available data. Since 2020, the average interest rate for an Exeter car loan jumped from 19% to nearly 22%, regulatory records show.

Rates for borrowers with the lowest credit scores were nearly 30%.

Exeter’s loan volume exploded, bond data shows. And as borrowers got into trouble, the lender’s collections workers were rewarded with bonuses for getting loans out of delinquency, according to three former employees. Extensions were a common tool to accomplish that. Exeter denied the allegation, saying, “customer service agents are not incentivized or rewarded with compensation related to granting extensions.”

Either way, Exeter financial records show the number of loans with five or more extensions rocketed 80% between 2016 and 2018.

The company attributed part of a more recent uptick in extensions to the COVID-19 relief bill that Congress passed during the pandemic in 2020, saying the legislation “encouraged compassion from lenders.”

That “compassion,” however, led to confusion and anger among borrowers who began filing complaints with state attorneys general. ProPublica examined nearly 200 of them and found the most common problems involved how much of their payments went to interest and why they still owed so much.

The company has drawn the scrutiny of regulators in at least three states. In 2019, the attorneys general of Massachusetts and Delaware settled lawsuits against Exeter alleging it had violated consumer protection laws. The company said the settlements had nothing to do with extensions and contained no admission of illegality. The Georgia attorney general’s office confirmed it is now investigating Exeter, though it declined to provide more detail. Exeter declined to comment on the investigation.

The CFPB declined to answer questions about Exeter’s practices and its oversight of the company. Chris Kukla, a CFPB program manager supervising the auto finance industry, said that in general “it’s important for everybody to understand what’s going on in the transaction.”

“All the information should be shared," he added.

For years, Exeter failed to provide specific information in its written notices. They did not explain that a borrower’s next payments would first be applied to the interest from extensions, which would delay repayment of the original loan balance, known as the principal. These omissions were identical to those that federal regulators had targeted in their case against Santander years earlier, according to three consumer finance experts who reviewed them.

The company said it updated those disclosures in late 2021 but declined to provide copies or details about the changes.

Notices sent to borrowers earlier this year, reviewed by ProPublica, said that an extension would increase the borrowers’ interest charges as well as the amount of their final payment. However, the notices did not include the actual dollar amount. If borrowers wanted to know more, the letter directed them to call a toll-free number.

One employee said that lack of disclosure was intentional.

“The object was for the agent to keep the customer in the car no matter what,” said Ross, the former Exeter employee who worked with borrowers struggling to make their payments. “That’s the end game. Because as long as that customer stays in that car, guess what? They are getting that interest. And the interest brings them more money.”

Jessica Patterson encountered Exeter like tens of thousands of consumers do each year: via CarMax, which uses Exeter to make loans when borrowers don’t qualify for CarMax’s in-house financing.

In the spring of 2017, Patterson sat at a circular table in her local CarMax just outside Kansas City, Kansas, with $200 in her pocket. Around her was an open sales room nearly as deep and wide as a football field.

A salesperson had shown her a Kia Rio with low mileage and zero frills. At $15,000, it was “the best that I could do for what I had,” Patterson recalled.

As a receptionist at a hearing aid sales center, she made $12 an hour, below the federal poverty line. She’d just moved her family out of a domestic violence shelter and into a basement apartment of their own. Their life felt fragile.

Like most subprime customers, her credit history was rife with unpaid bills. The debts were mostly from her ex-husband, she said.

The CarMax employee said she had good news, though: Exeter would lend Patterson the full amount needed to buy the Kia. Then the employee read the loan terms aloud. A six-year loan. A 25.17% interest rate. ​​A monthly payment of $402.63. That would be a quarter of Patterson’s take-home pay, almost twice what consumer finance experts recommend.

She asked whether there were cheaper offers. None of the other companies were willing to give Patterson a loan, said the employee, who turned her computer monitor so Patterson could see. “Exeter was the only one there,” she said. According to rating agency reports, CarMax is the single largest source of Exeter’s business — responsible for some 50,000 loans per year.

Patterson agreed to the terms. To get to work and get her kids to school, she needed a car. Turning down the loan felt like giving up.

Exeter contacted her employer and landlord to confirm the details in her application. It knew how much money Patterson would get in her upcoming paychecks, how much would automatically go out and how little room for error she had.

For its part, CarMax said it is not involved with the loans Exeter and other lenders sell to its customers and declined to answer specific questions about its partnership with Exeter.

“Each of CarMax’s finance sources performs its own underwriting, servicing, and collection activity,” the dealership chain said in a written statement. “CarMax cannot speak to details about how our finance sources manage repossessions or extend financing.”

The top of Patterson’s contract had a box detailing just how much she would pay over six years — a requirement of the federal Truth in Lending Act. It said she’d pay Exeter more than $14,000 in interest, almost as much as she would pay for the Kia itself.

While it would be tight, Patterson thought she could budget for the loan.

Within months, though, she fell behind. In January 2018, Patterson took her first two extensions. She used the time to reorder her finances so she could resume payments.

To save on food, she drove her family to free church dinners every Wednesday and Thursday night. Donations from a nearby food bank allowed them to keep grocery bills at a bare minimum.

Patterson sent payments to Exeter for February and March. But by late spring, she was in trouble again, resorting to sending a few hundred dollars at a time. By the fall, she was on the verge of default.

She called the lender’s collections department and asked for a third extension. The lender granted it over the phone without question, Patterson said.

Exeter agents could see the exact cost of the added interest on their screens during calls like this, but they did not share it with borrowers, said Clair Groves, who worked in Exeter’s collections department in 2019. The company does not include specific price information in the scripts it requires agents to read when giving an extension, Groves said, and urges them to finish calls in less than three minutes, leaving little time to provide more information.

Exeter did not respond to questions about Patterson’s account or Groves’ statements.

Extension practices like Exeter’s, experts say, undermine the utility of the Truth in Lending law, which aimed to eliminate financial surprises for consumers.

“If you can manipulate the payment schedule in such a way that makes the original disclosures meaningless, that’s a huge problem,” said Erin Witte, consumer protection director at the Consumer Federation of America.

For Patterson, the true cost of the extensions would become clear only after she remarried two and a half years later. Her new husband, Andrew Patterson, had found the Exeter loan odd. He had bought a more expensive car from the same dealership, but because he qualified for a loan from CarMax directly, his monthly payments were far lower. He decided to take a closer look.

The numbers on her statements were staggering, he said. Even when she made payments consistently, so much money went to interest that she barely made a dent in the original debt. If they made the 20 remaining payments, there was still no way they’d be able to pay off the car.

Using her loan statements, ProPublica calculated that Patterson had paid Exeter $17,097 over three years. About 80% of that had gone to interest, leaving her with more than $11,000 in debt.

“Just let them repo it,” Andrew told his wife.

The lender seized the Kia in the fall of 2021 and auctioned it off for $13,800. Exeter collected more from Patterson’s failed loan than it would have if she’d paid on schedule.

ProPublica’s analysis found that nearly a quarter of Exeter loans from 2020 and 2021 — more than 65,000 — ended like Patterson’s did, with borrowers stopping repayment early.

For people who take extensions and make it to the end of their loan, a large final payment typically awaits.

That news was crushing for Don Weaver, a disabled veteran living in Louisiana. In 2015, Exeter lent him $15,607.29 to buy a 7-year-old GMC Envoy. Over the next seven years, the company granted him 12 extensions by phone, Weaver said. Each time, the agent assured him he was “current,” he recalled.

The extensions had helped him navigate choppy economic waters, he said. He lived off VA disability payments, and unexpected expenses like a busted lawn mower or worn-down brake pads often made his $393.14 monthly payment difficult.

In September 2022, after Weaver had paid Exeter $29,125 — $819 more than his loan contract outlined — the company told him he still owed more than $9,000.

“I couldn’t get heads or tails about how much of that was actual payments and how much of that was fees,” Weaver said.

When he couldn’t pay, Exeter repossessed the Envoy, and today, a collections company is pursuing him for the $5,800.73 he still owes.

Although their loan outcomes were different, both Weaver and Patterson felt certain that local authorities should know about their experiences. Exeter “has a huge role in allegedly financing unfair, subprime auto loans,” Patterson wrote to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt in November 2021. “They are a predatory company.”

Weaver’s complaint was strikingly similar, citing the settlements Exeter had entered into with Massachusetts and Delaware: “They had to pay millions back to consumers due to predatory practices,” he wrote to Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. “I am wondering if that is happening to me.”

Kansas simply forwarded Patterson’s complaint to Exeter, which responded with a letter claiming that all the contract terms were properly disclosed; five extensions were granted “at Jessica’s request.” Months after it repossessed her Kia, Exeter added, it stopped pursuing her, “as a courtesy,” for the $51.63 she still owed.

Louisiana regulators didn’t press Exeter in Weaver’s case, either. After receiving a similar explanation from the lender, the attorney general’s office ended its inquiry, encouraging Weaver to hire a lawyer if Exeter’s response “does not result in a satisfactory outcome for you.”

The attorney general’s office confirmed that it did not investigate Weaver’s case. Landry, who is now governor of Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment. The Kansas attorney general’s office also declined to comment.

In the fall of 2022, even with the bill collector after him, Weaver still needed a car. So, he headed to a nearby CarMax to start the process over. When the employee ran his information, he was told that Exeter had approved him for another loan.

“You’re telling me you got to charge me this extra interest and all this because I’m a bad risk,” Weaver said, “but you’re willing to risk it again?”

This time, he declined the offer.

Help ProPublica Investigate the World of Subprime Car Loans

Disclosure: The private equity firm Warburg Pincus owns a controlling stake in Exeter. Mark Colodny, one of the firm’s managing directors, is a member of ProPublica’s board.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Mollie Simon of ProPublica and Carrie Cochran and Patrick Terpstra of Scripps News contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Ryan Gabrielson and Byard Duncan.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and CEPR’s Algernon Austin about the Black economy for the September 6, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CEPR (8/26/24)

Janine Jackson: Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called the “US economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me.

A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic indicators, not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go, as a society that has yet to address deep, historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We’ll hear from its co-authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That conversation is coming up on today’s show.

***

JJ: Corporate news media tend to report economic news like the weather. Yes, it affects different people differently, but the source, the economy, is just—stuff that happens.

But there’s really no such thing as “the economy.” There are policies and practices about taxes and lending and wages, and they are as historically embedded, preferentially enforced and as susceptible to intentional change as everything else.

So how should we read reports about the “best Black economy in decades,” particularly as one question news media rarely include in the daily recitation of numbers is: Compared to what?

A new research brief engages these questions; the title’s a bit of a giveaway: “The Best Black Economy in Generations—and Why It Isn’t Enough.”

We’re joined now by the brief’s co-authors. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Algernon Austin.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Thank you.

Algernon Austin:  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

JJ: Economic reporting can seem very dry and divorced from life as lived. We read that the country’s GDP is up, or that inflation is leveling off, and a lot of us just don’t know what that means, in terms of whether we are more likely to get a job, or a wage increase, or a home loan. If you can parse that data, though, it does tell us something, if not enough. So let me ask you first, what particular indicators are telling us or showing us that Black Americans are experiencing the most positive economic conditions in generations? What are you looking at?

Algernon Austin: “If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would…significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.”

AA: One thing that I pay a lot of attention to is the employment-to-population ratio, or the employment rate, and that’s simply what percent of the population is working. And that’s something that’s very concrete, that people can relate to. And the Black population, historically, has had a significantly lower employment rate than the white population.

So why we’re in the greatest economy on record is because, if you look at the prime age employment rate, that’s individuals 25-to-54 years old, the Black prime age employment rate, the annual rate for the first half of this year has been at a record high. So that is certainly quite positive news, and something that we should celebrate.

But as you pointed out, compared to what? Compared to the white prime age employment rate, it’s still below average. And when you do the full calculation of what I call the “Black jobs deficit,” we need about 1.4 million more Black people working to have the same employment rate as white people.

And what does that mean in terms of income for Black America? If you had an additional 1.4 million Black people working, you would have an additional $60 billion, that’s with a B, $60 billion going into Black America, which would significantly reduce Black poverty, and would help Black households start to build wealth.

So that’s the positive: We have a high employment rate. The negative is it’s still lagging, and that lag, that deficit, is still causing a great deal of poverty for Black people.

JJ: So Algernon, you’ve connected employment and poverty and income right there, which are the key indicators that I’m seeing lifted up in this report. Unemployment is one that is a complicated thing to report because, as we know, sometimes unemployment rates don’t include people who’ve stopped looking for work, and all of that. But you’re saying that unemployment and poverty and income are all connected here. What can you tell us about what those other indicators, the poverty rates, and the income and wealth indicators, what do they add to this picture about good news?

AA: We pay a lot of attention to the unemployment rate, which is valid; it’s an important indicator. But for populations that face persistent challenges finding work —and I just said that there are about 1.4 million Black people who should be working but who aren’t—you see the unemployment rate undercounts joblessness. Because if people have been repeatedly rejected by employers—so imagine someone who maybe was formerly incarcerated—that individual is less likely to be actively looking for work. And if you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not counted as being unemployed. Or if you’re in an economically depressed area and you look around and you say, “there’s no jobs,” and you’re not actively looking for work, you’re not being counted as unemployed.

So the unemployment rate is an important indicator, and the Black rate is typically about twice the white rate. Right now, it’s a little bit less than two times, so that’s, again, another positive sign. But it does undercount joblessness.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: Yeah. And in terms of income and wealth, we’ve also seen some positive signs. So I think that’s why we’re saying it’s the strongest Black economy in generations, because we see in many of the major indicators that Blacks are at record high. Also in terms of median household income, Blacks in 2022 were at $53,000 median income for households. And so that is a record high for the African-American community. As well as wealth in 2022, where we have the most recent data, it’s at a record high of $45,000.

Now, just as Algernon had noted, record highs can be great, but relative to what, and what does that mean? The median income for white households is $81,000. So Blacks are still about $30,000 less in terms of median income. And I think most people would understand that $53,000 for a household is not a lot of money.

And we look at wealth. We also argue that $45,000 median wealth is actually a household that is asset poor, that does not have enough wealth to keep them financially secure. There’s been estimates, well, let’s just put forward that white median wealth is $285,000. So you have that $45,000, compared to $285,000, with past estimates of middle-class wealth beginning around $170,000.

So we can see that we’re hitting record highs, but we’re still leaving African Americans in spaces of economic insecurity, and that’s why it isn’t enough and we need to do more.

New York Times (5/30/24)

JJ: There’s been a phenomenon lately where reporters and pundits seem to say, “People are saying they’re not happy with the economy, but they’re wrong, because look at this chart.” It’s sort of like people are maybe too dumb to know how good they have it.

But people aren’t dumb. They know they have two jobs and still struggle. They know they have a fairly good income, but they could not survive one medical emergency. But reporting, and some politicking, seems to suggest that if you aren’t doing well, then maybe that’s a you problem, because, after all, “the economy” is firing on all pistons. But people’s opinion about their economic health and their economic situation, Black people’s opinion, comes from a combination of things, you found?

AA: A lot of the reporting is based on macroeconomic indicators, which are, I’m not disputing them, it’s just that the big picture, national average can mask a lot of variation on the ground, and can be distant from what people are feeling.

So we’ve been through, because of Covid, because of the lockdowns, because of the shutdown and supply chains, because of the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen a massive spike in inflation, I think probably more than we’ve seen in a generation. And that has been quite a shock. And I think that affects people’s views of economic conditions.

We’ve also seen very high interest rates, and that makes it very hard for people to borrow, or increases the cost of trying to get a mortgage, increases credit card debt. We’ve seen, in terms of housing, a real scarcity in housing, and a real spike in housing costs.

So there’s a lot of things for people to be worried about, to be anxious about. And of course there was the Covid recession, which was massive. So there’s been a lot of economic turmoil, and it’s an error to discount what these recent traumatic experiences are, and the fact that they’re not just experiences, there are real economic consequences that people see every day when they go to the grocery store and pay their grocery bills.

JJ: And Dedrick, the report says Black Americans are optimistic, pessimistic, multifaceted and complex in terms of their understanding of their own economic situation, and then when they’re asked about the broader picture; and that makes sense as human beings.

Pew (7/18/23)

DA: Yeah, yeah. I did think that was an interesting thing pulled out of our paper, was looking at some past surveys and seeing 67% of African Americans expressed optimism, feeling good to somewhat good, about their financial future, while at the same time, in a different poll, in a Pew poll, we saw that African Americans, 70% said they did not have enough money for the life they want. And these are different things, right?

Again, if you’re used to ridiculously high unemployment rates in your community, and then it’s getting a little bit better, that might make you feel optimistic that, oh, well, maybe things can get better in my household. But, at the same time, you can still understand that, “but I don’t have enough money to be a homeowner. I’m having a harder and harder time paying grocery bills.”

So both of those feelings can live within one’s life experience and be real. I think it’s only when you’re trying to just have a very simple explanation of how people feel that we act like they’re in contradiction.

JJ: Algernon has referred a couple times to consistent challenges faced by Black Americans. I think that’s part of what’s left out of a lot of news media conversations. So let’s just talk about, when you say big numbers, macro numbers, can be trending in a good direction, but they’re not enough, and they’re not going to be enough without something else, what are you getting at? What would responsive policy look like?

CBPP (6/10/24)

AA: In response to the Covid pandemic, the federal government expanded the child tax credit, and expanded the earned income tax credit, so that more poor people and more poor people with children would get aid from the federal government.

And what did we see? We saw a dramatic decline in poverty, dramatic decline in Black poverty, dramatic decline in Black child poverty, as well as for American Indians, for Latinos, and for the white population. So we know what works, we know that we have the power to do it, but, unfortunately, conservatives in Congress decided that they were not going to extend the expanded child tax credit and the expanded EITC.

So we’ve seen a reversal. So we’ve seen Black poverty rates—and this is using the supplemental poverty measure, that factors in these tax credits—increase again. So it’s unfortunate that policy makers don’t put the policy agenda to fight poverty, and to produce more racial equality, as a higher priority.

DA: Yes, and I’ll just add to that, I think an important takeaway from this is that though we have some record highs, we don’t need to let up on the economy. We need to put our pedal down to the metal, as the saying goes, in order to continue to build and strengthen. Because even with these record highs, in terms of income, we noted a report that was done last year with the Institute for Policy Studies, that noted that even at the current rate, if you look from 1960 to 2020, it would take hundreds of years before Blacks had equal pay with whites, and it would take almost 800 years for Blacks to have equal wealth with whites.

And so over the last five years, we’re having some important advances. And so what we need to do is do policies that build off of that, right? Whether it’s to continue to strengthen the earned income tax credits and other such types of credit, I think increased home ownership, there’s a lot of conversation on that. We have to make sure any type of home-ownership advancement is something that disproportionately affects African Americans in particular, but Latinos as well. African Americans have never had the majority of their population as homeowners, and that’s the No. 1 source of wealth for most Americans. So if we can do something in 2025 to really strengthen homeownership for first-time homeowners, that could be something substantial that could help break away from these historic inequalities that have made racial inequality, not just something that occurs through prejudice, but something that can be seen through socioeconomic status.

AA: We also need targeted job creation. Subsidized employment is the most effective way, so subsidized employment programs targeted to high-unemployment communities. I mentioned that we still need about 1.4 million more Black people working for the Black employment rate to be the same as the white employment rate. So we need to target those high-unemployment communities with effective job creation.

CEPR (2/9/23)

JJ: When I hear “consistent challenges,” I mean, we’re talking about racism, in terms of economic policy in this country, and the harms have been targeted, historically and presently—redlining, loan denial, all of that, the harms have been targeted. But at this moment, supposedly reforms are not allowed to be targeted, because that would be DEI, that would be unfair.

And I know we’ve talked about, for example, the Covid response was not about race. Great Depression, the WPA was not targeted by race. It was actually something that helped Black people, because it helped everyone. But we’re in this present moment that we’re in, where if you say these people are being particularly harmed, and so at least some remedy should be targeted towards them, we know that that’s going to be politically difficult. And I know that’s a weird question, but I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

DA: Clearly, racial equality has always been politically difficult, as the history of this country has shown. So it will continue to be politically difficult. I think we have seen, like the War on Poverty, that sometimes in its name might not appear as something particularly focused on African Americans, but it was coming out of the strong Black civil rights movement of that time period, when we saw a substantial decline of Black poverty in particular, all poverty. But many of the policies I did think had a disproportionate impact on African Americans.

The most effective and efficient way to address disproportionate negative harm is to then put in positive economic impact, particularly on those communities. So we should look at ways of doing that. Sometimes race would be the factor named, but sometimes you can also get it just by focusing on first-time homeowners of certain income and wealth level that would disproportionately have a good amount of African Americans, Latinos, and would have some whites, but would have a disproportionate impact on the community.

So I think if policymakers are willing—and I think our job as the electorate is to make policymakers willing—and we can get forward these policies, whether we call them DEI policies, or whether we call them trying to ensure that America is majority homeowner, or America is fully employed throughout the nation, there are ways of putting this forward.

Vox (7/9/23)

AA: This is a long struggle. So if you look at the history of the Black civil rights movement, or Black liberation struggle, however you want to characterize it, there have been moments when we’ve moved forward, there have been moments when we’ve moved backwards. So this is just one phase. So it’s important for people to recognize: OK, what’s next? How do we move forward from this particular point? So I think it’s important to regroup and think about how we move forward.

I’m focused on affirmative action policies, and particularly affirmative action in employment, which still exists, which needs to be protected and fought for, because it will be under attack. The second point that Dedrick was making is that there are ways that may be less efficient for racial justice, but there are ways to make impacts that reduce racial inequality.

And we saw it, going back to poverty, the expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit had a disproportionate positive impact on reducing Black poverty. It also reduced white poverty, and poverty for all other groups, but because more Black people were poor and in hardship, it had a disproportionate benefit. So although that was a race-neutral program, it did have a disproportionate racial benefit.

And similarly, I’ve called for targeted subsidized employment, and notice I said targeted to high-unemployment communities. You can go to Appalachia and find majority white communities that are high unemployment, and we should be concerned about those high-unemployment white communities. But if you target job creation to high-unemployment communities, you will disproportionately benefit Black communities, because that’s where the high unemployment is disproportionately concentrated.

So I think it’s important that we continue on both fronts. Let’s exploit all the race-neutral policies that we can, but also let’s not give up on a race-conscious economic justice fight in addition.

JJ: I just want to ask you, finally, about news media, about reporting. When, Dedrick, we spoke in 2017, I was talking about a Washington Post piece that said that a rise in middle-class incomes was “unequivocally good news,” even as the same report had some sort of notes in between, one of which was, oh yeah, “yawning racial disparities remain.” And that’s kind of par for the course in news, the idea that racial gaps in economic circumstances and options are lamentable but normal, and kind of a footnote to the real story, which holds an implication that a rising economic tide will eventually lift all boats.

And that framing and that absence of complexity, while it’s kind of par for the course in corporate journalism, it reflects a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of the way economic developments affect different groups, which is what we’ve been talking about. And I wonder, from both of you, if you have any thoughts about the role that journalism currently plays in illuminating this set of issues, and about the role that journalism maybe could play?

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad: “The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America.”

DA: Things have changed a lot over the last 30 years, even this idea of racial inequality, minority groups. I mean, now you look at Blacks and Latinos, and Latinos oftentimes, as well, have lower income levels, have lower home ownership levels, and you put these populations together, Blacks and Latino, and they’re about a third of the population. And if you talk about youth and children, you see that the majority of kids in many school districts throughout the country are students of color.

So no longer can it be kind of, well, there’s an issue with a small part of the population, but the rest of the economy is going strong. The future of the economy is based on how well minorities do in America—Latinos being the largest group now, African Americans being the second-largest group. So it will be essential, if we’re looking at how the economy can grow, making sure these communities are getting their share of the growth that would get them at a level of true middle class.

I think that’s one thing I particularly look at in terms of wealth, is that Black America’s never had a strong Black middle class in terms of wealth. You’ve always had a very small population that have had a middle-class economic wealth stability. And, again, the future of reporting on the future of the country really requires understanding those differences, and highlighting that, so we can push the country in the right direction, and how do we move the country forward in a way that is equitable in a manner that it never has been.

AA: I don’t want to appear to be too self-centered or self-serving, but we need the information presented in this report covered, because I feel both parts of the story have not gotten sufficient media attention. One is that we’re at historic highs on so many different measures that I don’t think has been talked about enough, and two, we still have significant inequality that we haven’t addressed. There’s some positive signs, but we obviously need to do a lot more. And like Dedrick said, we need to keep pressing the gas. We can’t take our foot off the pedal.

So that’s one thing. The other thing—I try to stress this when I speak to people—is that we’re talking about the United States, and Black people are part of the United States. Latinos are part of the United States. The American Indian or the Indigenous population are sort of part of the United States; some are independent nations, but they’re also interacting with the US economy.

If you improve the economic conditions of the Black population, you’re improving the economic standing of the United States. If you improve the economic condition of Latinos, you’re improving the economic strengths and health of the United States.

And it’s important that people understand that, because, unfortunately, people tend to go into a zero sum mode, and not recognize that helping Black people, in terms of public policy, is a way to help the entire country, help the United States. So that’s something that I think reporters can also work on communicating.

DA: The one thing I’ll add, in terms of what can reporters do, I think reporters need to focus in on expertise, Black expertise, expertise around racial inequality. I’ll just put forward, as recently new president of Joint Center for Political Economic Study, it’s important that Black institutions are utilized and are put at the forefront of conversations around the economy and these issues.

It’s great that there’s been more conversations around racial wealth divide, and race and economics; there’s been a lot of conversation around DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—movement, and attacks on it. But I don’t feel that they have enough centered on those who have been at the forefront of highlighting these issues, putting forth policy solutions to address them.

There are a cadre of reporters who have been focused on these issues for the last 20 years, and these reporters need to be at the forefront of the conversation. Too often times, if I do get a call, I’m getting a call from someone who’s reporting this for the first time, and doesn’t even quite understand the reality that there is deep economic inequality, it has been ongoing, and it would take radical change to really get us to a place where we could have some equality. So, again, I think we need to value those who have been focused on this area, and those institutions from these communities, if we really want to report correctly on these challenges.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and with Algernon Austin, director of the Race and Economic Justice Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The brief we’ve been discussing can be found at both JointCenter.org and CEPR.net. Thank you both so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DA: Thanks for having us.

AA: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

But on a rainy night in September, Castro and a friend, while ending their day advocating for the rights of fishing communities, were allegedly abducted by the Philippine military for their work. 

“They covered our mouths and brought us to a secret detention facility,” she said. The military interrogators asked them questions about their work in environmental justice, and accused them of being communists. “It’s actually the situation of many activists and environmental defenders here in the Philippines.”

Castro and her friend were eventually released two weeks later, but in December of 2023, the Philippine Department of Justice filed charges against them both for “embarrassing” and casting the Philippine military in a “bad light.” The military has denied Castro’s accusations. 

A new study from Global Witness, an international organization that focuses on human rights and documenting infractions, finds that tactics like what Castro experienced are happening to land defenders across the planet, often with deadly results. In 2023, almost 200 environmental activists were killed for “exercising their right to protect their lands and environment from harm.” These killings are often carried out alongside acts of intimidation, smear campaigns, and criminalization by governments and often in concert with companies. The report says violence often accompanies land acquisition strategies linked to the developmental interests of agricultural, fossil fuel, and green energy companies.

“Governments around the world, not only in the Philippines, have the obligation to protect any of their citizens,” said Laura Furones, lead author of the report. “Some governments are failing spectacularly at doing that, and even becoming complicit with some of those attacks or providing an operating environment for companies.”

Indigenous peoples are the most vulnerable to these tactics. Last year, around half of those killed for their environmental activism were Indigenous or Afrodescendents. Between 2012 and 2023, almost 800 Indigenous people have been killed protecting their lands or resources, representing more than a third of all environmental defenders killed around the world in that same time frame. 

Colombia has the highest death toll of environmental land defenders, and the number has gone up in 2023. There are 79 documented cases representing the highest annual total that Global Witness has accounted for since 2012. Of those cases, 31 people were Indigenous. Other Latin American countries like Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico have consistently had the most documented cases of murders of environmental defenders.

Furones said with the rise of green energy projects, mining will continue to grow, and with it, the potential for violence against land defenders. Mining operations have resulted in the most loss of life according to Global Witness, and while most of these deaths occurred in Latin American countries last year, between 2012 and 2023, many occurred in Asia. Around 40 percent of killings related to mining have happened in Asia since 2012 and the report indicates there are many mineral resources in Asia that are important for green energy technologies.  

“The region has significant natural reserves of key critical minerals vital for clean energy technologies, including nickel, tin, rare-earth elements, and bauxite,” the report said. “This might be good news for the energy transition, but without drastic changes to mining practices it could also increase pressure on defenders.”

This year, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues also looked into the rise of criminalization that land defenders face, while reporting from the forum showed that there has been very little done to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights over the last decade. A recent report from Climate Rights International, also on the criminalization of climate activism with a focus on Western democracies, like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, found that governments are violating basic tenets of freedom of expression and assembly in order to crack down on climate activists. In the United Kingdom, for example, five people associated with the group Just Stop Oil were given four- and five-year prison sentences for “conspiring to cause a public nuisance” by blocking a major roadway in London in order to bring attention to the abundant use of fossil fuels. They are the longest sentences ever given for non-violent protests in Britain. Taken together, the reports highlight how criminalization has become a strategy to discredit climate activists. 

In the Philippines, Jonila Castro said she would continue to protect the people and places of Manila, but she does not go anywhere alone and said she feels like she’s always looking over her shoulder. She is currently facing six months of prison for her activities.

“I think the government is thinking that we will be silenced because we’re facing charges,” she said. “But I can’t think of a reason not to continue, and that’s the same with many of the environmental defenders and activists here.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nearly 200 people were killed last year protecting the environment on Sep 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.