A reporter asked Trump what he would do about the Tesla protests, noting that some commentators had suggested that protesters “should be labeled domestic terrorists.” 

Trump leapt at the opening. “I will do that. I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them. We catch anybody doing it because they’re harming a great American company,” he said. “We’re going to catch them. And let me tell you, you do it to Tesla and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you and you’re going to — you’re going to go through hell.” 

The remarks came in the form of an unprecedented display of salesmanship with the White House as a backdrop, part press conference, part advertisement to improve stock performance for the president’s billionaire righthand man amid controversy and tumbling markets.

On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., urged the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Tesla protests. Forbes reported that in doing so, Taylor-Greene — who owns Tesla stock — may have violated House ethics rules.

Trump cannot summarily declare a class of people exercising their First Amendment rights as domestic terrorists. He can try to encourage domestic terror charges, which can be terror crimes or sentencing enhancements on other felonies, but the efforts would be unlikely to stand up in court.

“It’s absurd,” said organizer Alice Hu, executive director at the youth-led climate justice group Planet Over Profit. “It’s obvious, both legally and from a common sense perspective, that First Amendment-protected peaceful protest is not domestic terrorism.”

The response from Trump and Musk, Hu said, is a sign that the protests are working. Tesla’s stock prices tanked. And Musk, who is spearheading Trump’s controversial effort to gut the federal government, is using his social media platform Twitter to target individual organizers and grassroots groups, Hu said. 

“They’re trying to label this peaceful movement an illegal, violent, whatever, domestic terrorist movement,” she said “The reality is that it’s DOGE’s illegal rampage destroying the government, taking over the government. That’s the real problem here.” 

The president is immune from federal ethics regulations prohibiting the use of public office for private gain. However, it’s clear that after campaigning on being a champion of the working class, Trump is using the White House to advertise the company of his largest single donor and de facto appointee amid tanking Tesla stocks. 

“There aren’t laws that apply to Trump here, and with Musk, it’s still not 100 percent clear how he fits in with the government,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president of communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But beyond that, there’s a huge optics problem, where it looks like the president of the United States is trying to stop the stock slide of his election’s biggest individual funder.”

Police have showed up in force to barricade Tesla dealerships around the country since, amid Musk’s de facto takeover of the government, the grassroots #TeslaTakedown movement began demonstrating against the electric car maker last month. An image from Chicago showed more than 20 officers standing in a line blocking the entrance to a Tesla storefront last week. 

Chicago police department out in force protecting a Tesla dealership. pic.twitter.com/LF7X0B9qTw

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) March 9, 2025

Some 350 people attended protests at the Tesla showroom in Manhattan on Saturday. New York Police Department officers arrested six people; one was charged with resisting arrest, and the other five were released. 

Hu said the police showed up with several massive vans from the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a counterterror unit that deals with civil unrest. In 2021, The Intercept reported that NYPD officer trainings — and manuals for the SRG in particular — included few directives about protecting demonstrators’ First Amendment rights. 

“In response to this outpouring of turnout, the police had at least five or six Strategic Response Group vans. Those are the vans that are ready to transport prisoners from some kind of location to the precinct. Each of those vans fits at least 10 people or so in there,” Hu said. “They were totally preparing for some kind of event where they might have needed to arrest dozens of people.”

An NYPD spokesperson confirmed that five people arrested on Saturday were released but did not respond to questions about how many officers were dispatched to the scene. 

At least nine people have been arrested at protests at Tesla dealerships and showrooms in New York. It’s not clear how many more arrests have been made around the country. 

Undeterred by the draconian response of the Trump administration, an organizer in California said she and her colleagues decided to start their own Tesla protests after seeing others pop up around the country. Lara Starr is part of a small group called Solidarity Sundays that writes postcards as a form of protest. “But after the election, postcards didn’t seem like enough,” Starr told The Intercept.

Organizers with the group anticipated that fewer than 10 people would show up to their first action, but after Indivisible, the protest group that sprung up during Trump’s first term, publicized the plan, 200 people showed up. 

“So many people thanked us for giving them something to do,” Starr said. The group plans to keep protesting at Tesla every Sunday.

“Tesla cannot be disentangled from Musk, and Musk cannot be disentangled from Trump and the chaos he is causing, the lives he is ruining, and the dismantling of our democracy and decent society,” she said. “Taking down Tesla’s sales, stock price, and potentially the entire brand is the people speaking up, stepping up, and not letting our voices and values be silenced and ignored.”

The strategy behind the Tesla protests is to take a moment when so many people feel helpless and turn it into an opportunity to exert the power of the masses, Hu said. 

“Ordinary people around the country knew that they needed to take matters in their own hands and start organizing,” Hu said. “We are seeing relative inaction from the Democrats and from people with that kind of platform and power.”

Trump and Musk have no grounds to speak about what’s lawful or unlawful, Hu said. 

“It’s more than clear to anybody paying attention that this is a wannabe dictator, a wannabe authoritarian administration,” she said, raising the arrest and attempt to deport Palestinian protester and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. “They’re undermining the rule of law to try to disappear a permanent resident.”

The post If Protesting Tesla Is Domestic Terrorism, Then What Demonstration Against Musk Isn’t appeared first on The Intercept.

Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit. From military pay of $204,000 a year, Milley is sure to skyrocket to compensation in the millions, especially because he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton, who faced criticism in 2016 for her paid speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Called “cashing in” by military officers, transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner. 

Milley’s speaker’s agency, Harry Walker Agency is touting the retired general, who crossed swords with former President Donald Trump and continues to be a polarizing figure, for his insights on leadership and international conflicts. “His perspective is invaluable for audiences looking to understand the impact of current conflicts and managing risks on boards of directors and leadership teams who are responsible for making strategic decisions and identifying vulnerabilities,” the website says.

According to the speaker’s agency, Milley recently participated in a Q&A at a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by investment bank Moelis & Company, where he provided his “insider’s perspective on world affairs.”

The engagement has not been previously reported.

“He was terrific — we loved him!” said Moelis & Company, a global investment bank, in a review featured on the agency website. “It was fantastic!”

According to the agency website, Milley “provided crucial perspective to business leaders,” but provided little more detail.

On March 4, Milley also spoke at the American Council on Education’s 2024 Presidents and Chancellors Summit at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., according to an event page. A portrait of Milley appears on the list of major speakers and links to his Harry Walker Agency page. 

His speech at the summit was sponsored by Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting and accounting firms, an event page notes. The page describes his speech as exploring “the convergence of democracy, higher education, and moral leadership during times of crisis”; as well as “emphasizing the responsibilities of leaders to uphold democratic principles and inspire resilience in challenging times.” 

“The Summit was exclusively for presidents and chancellors, and there is no transcript,” Jonathan Riskind, vice president of public affairs and strategic communications for the American Council on Education, told The Intercept in response to a query.

Asked for transcripts of this and other speaking engagements, and for Milley’s compensation, Moelis & Company, the Harry Walker Agency, and Milley himself did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.

Milley has emerged as an ardent critic of Trump — unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, in a swipe at Trump, Milley said that “we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

Trump replied with a statement on his social media platform Truth Social: “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week.”

Clinton’s speeches reportedly earned her around $200,000 a pop — about the same as Milley’s annual salary when he was in uniform.

The post Gen. Mark Milley’s Second Act: Multimillionaire appeared first on The Intercept.

Now that the party nominees for president have all but been decided, America’s entire election infrastructure is under assault, from foreign governments, hackers, and extremists. Or at least that’s the frenzied message being conveyed from on high these days. Russian warning lights are flashing. Think tanks are working overtime to grind out panicked reports about cybersecurity and disinformation. Fearmongering proliferates on both sides of the political aisle. 

But it is the federal government that is most active in this effort, and in its zeal to “protect” the elections, Washington is building a narrative that achieves exactly what it blames foreign adversaries for. By arguing that the elections can and will be manipulated, federal agencies are delegitimizing the highly effective and secure electoral system, and affirming the view of too many Americans that the vote can’t be trusted.

Polling shows that conservative voters continue to be distrustful of America’s electoral system. The opinion of the electorate at large is murkier to assess, but some Democrats have also waded into the election denialism.

Last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that election interference is a major priority in the coming months. As evidence of the Bureau’s work on the issue, Wray cited an FBI investigation into two Iranian hackers who had used voter rolls to disseminate misinformation about illegal ballots being cast overseas. 

In his testimony, Wray conflates the threat posed by cyber attacks with targeted disinformation campaigns. There is abundant evidence that foreign governments like Russia engaged in efforts to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections. But there are no examples of successful cyber attacks on the election system itself.

More recently, the FBI, Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security reported in late December that despite incessant hand-wringing over election security, foreign adversaries had no impact on the 2022 midterm elections. This week, they reported that there were no credible threats against Super Tuesday’s primary election. 

“While the government detected some foreign government-affiliated and criminal cyber activity targeting election infrastructure, including activity by suspected People’s Republic of China cyber actors and activity claimed by pro-Russian hacktivists, there is no evidence that this activity prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner; altered any technical aspect of the voting process; or otherwise compromised the integrity of voter registration information or any ballots cast during the 2022 federal elections,” the report states. 

“Additional identified activity involved Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government-affiliated cyber actors scanning and, in some instances, accessing political campaign infrastructure, that is, information and communications technology and systems used by, on behalf of, or closely associated with a political organization, campaign, or candidate. However, there is no evidence that any information obtained through such activity was used in any foreign influence operation or was otherwise deployed, modified, or destroyed.”

None of these conclusions have deterred the now vibrant election protection apparatus of the federal government from accelerating their work. After the 2016 Democratic National Committee cyber attack, the Department of Homeland Security took much of the lead, designating election systems as critical infrastructure and pushing cyber security. DHS not only gained greater power over the U.S. voting system, but it also stoked fears that the decentralized and highly eclectic state and voting system was weak. 

Earlier this month, former DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told ABC News that America is “heading into a highly dangerous, perfect storm” as the 2024 election approaches. Former DHS assistant secretary Elizabeth Neumann added that “there are barrages of threats coming from multiple vectors – and multiple components of election infrastructure. It’s not just the voting machine.” 

According to a DHS bulletin obtained by ABC, Homeland Security today is sounding the alarm regarding foreign influence operations, which they say are “designed to undermine” the democratic “processes and institutions, steer policy, sway public opinion or sow division.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, housed within DHS, is also distributing information to voters in an effort to combat what it labels as “disinformation,” which it claims is an unprecedented threat to democracy. Earlier this month, CISA announced the creation of a new election interference program: #Protect2024, suggesting it is the duty of American civilians to fight a domestic war for election security. 

In addition to dozens of materials warning of potential threats and urging state and local teams to practice “emergency response plans,” CISA has also extended its offer to conduct physical and cyber security assessments, alluding to the notion that elections cannot be safe without the federal government’s helping hand. An FBI report detailing federal agency responsibilities for election security further describes CISA’s role as providing “election infrastructure partners with no cost physical security assessments to identify vulnerabilities and provide recommended mitigation measures.”

Outside the FBI and the DHS, the director of national intelligence is also overseeing a governmentwide push to raise the specter of foreign election interference. In a Q&A with DNI’s Election Threats Executive Shelby Pierson — a position created in 2019 — the top elections intelligence chief outlined her desire to see the federal government further penetrate into local election infrastructure. 

“We are focused on how the IC” — intelligence community — “can best support the FBI and DHS. … I want to see us evolve and continue to cultivate this whole-of-government approach to securing our elections and encourage our mission partners to reach beyond their limits and look beyond 2020,” Pierson said in the interview soon after being appointed, adding an allusion to the intelligence community’s efforts to police social media. “Through our FBI and DHS partners, the IC shares appropriate intelligence to state and local election officials, and private sector partners to include social and digital media platforms.”

Pierson was later criticized for repeating her own disinformation before Congress in a classified briefing. Contrary to Pierson’s testimony that Russia was working to tilt the 2020 election for Donald Trump, multiple national security officials contradicted this statement, clarifying that there was no intelligence to that effect, and offering solely that Russia was intending to sow discord in America. 

The federal government seems intent on conveying the message that the electoral system is vulnerable, despite the fact that the highly distributed state and local electoral system — protected in part by its decentralization and diversity — inherently makes it resilient and overall invulnerable. Michael Cornfield, an associate professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management told CBC: “The chances that the actual ballot tabulation could be hacked are next to nothing. … It’s almost impossible.”

Because the federal government knows this, it has shifted its emphasis to a far more ambiguous and unprovable threat, that “foreign malign influence” is the problem. That Russia or China are trying to influence American public opinion isn’t new and shouldn’t ring alarms. Martin Libicki, a cyber warfare expert at the Rand Corporation, points out that all countries regularly attempt to influence foreign elections, highlighting Barack Obama’s visit to the U.K. to advocate against the Brexit referendum. 

The federal government’s argument is that Russia and China (and even Iran) — through “malign influence” — are clandestinely seeking to undermine American’s faith in elections and even damage American democracy. Acceptance of this proposition, and the belief that “they” are succeeding, is central to the federal government’s larger effort to combat disinformation, which plays out in new efforts to police social media and even regulate free speech. For local election officials, the only solution on tap from Washington is offering to supply secret “intelligence.”

To deal with protecting the vote itself against interference or manipulation, the federal government has been offering cybersecurity “hygiene” audits of state and local systems, while employing the National Security Agency and the military’s Cyber Command to thwart any incoming electronic attacks. While “election security” makes sense on the surface, the overall effect, particularly as the bureaucrats push greater centralization and standardized machines and procedures, is that it might actually increase the vulnerability of a system that is already secure because of its very decentralization and variety.

None of this directly addresses “malign influence” or the vitality of American democracy, neither of which are solvable by government efforts to restrict information. And by increasingly doling out security clearances to state and local officials so that they can get “intelligence” on foreign influence efforts, the federal government enlists election officials into a bifurcated public and secret world, one that undermines transparency and consequently lessens public confidence.

The post How Homeland Security Is Undermining Faith in U.S. Elections appeared first on The Intercept.

In 82 percent of the 719 January 6-related cases that have been resolved, and in which the defendants have either pleaded guilty or been convicted, judges have issued lighter sentences than federal prosecutors requested, the analysis of Justice Department data through December 4, 2023, shows. They imposed the same sentences sought by prosecutors in just 95 cases and harsher sentences in only 37.

Nearly every one of the 24 federal judges handling the massive docket of January 6 cases has shown leniency toward the defendants, regardless of whether the judges were appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents, the data shows. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the judges appointed by President Joe Biden have been slightly more lenient than those appointed by former President Donald Trump. Biden appointees issued lighter sentences than prosecutors sought for January 6 defendants in 24 of the 26 cases they handled, or 92 percent, effectively tying with George W. Bush appointees as the most lenient. Judges appointed by Trump, meanwhile, have issued more lenient sentences in 90 percent of their cases.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the federal judicial system has been unnecessarily punitive in its treatment of January 6 defendants, complaining that they are “political prisoners” who have been unfairly persecuted for trying to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election. One leading January 6 defendant compared himself to a Jew living in Nazi Germany and said that his “only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

The Intercept’s analysis sharply contradicts that right-wing narrative. In many cases, judges have rejected prosecutors’ requests for prison time, often reducing defendants’ sentences to home detention or probation. Defendants have been sentenced to standard prison terms in only 429 out of 719 cases, or 60 percent. Another 31 defendants were sentenced to intermittent incarceration, meaning they only had to serve time on nights or weekends. Home detention was given instead of prison in 101 cases, while defendants in 135 cases got probation.

“There is no evidence that the judges in these cases are handing out sentences that are excessive,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration. “I think this shows that the system is working.”

The Intercept’s analysis is the most comprehensive examination so far of how federal judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents ruled in January 6 cases that have reached a final resolution in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which is handling all the criminal cases stemming from the insurrection. Hundreds more cases are still in progress and will likely be assigned to the same group of judges. A total of 1,233 individuals have so far been charged in connection with the January 6 mob, according to a running tally compiled by the Associated Press.

The January 6 defendants have been charged with a wide range of crimes, including low-level violations like disorderly conduct and unlawful entry that would be forgettable if they were not committed with the aim of derailing the peaceful transfer of power. But the charges also include far more serious offenses, such as assaulting law enforcement officers and members of the media; theft; entering restricted areas with deadly weapons; disrupting Congress; and seditious conspiracy. About 140 police officers were assaulted as they tried to protect the Capitol and members of Congress, according to the Justice Department.

Judges have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors recommended across the board. The Justice Department is now appealing some of them.

“This dispels the idea that [the January 6 defendants] are victims,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University, when The Intercept told him about the analysis.

Lisa Klem, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the statistics.

The pro-Trump revisionist history surrounding the January 6 defendants is part of a larger effort to downplay the significance of the insurrection while perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The campaign to anoint the January 6 defendants as martyrs began soon after the uprising at the Capitol and quickly gained momentum. The following year, a former defendant sat in a phony jail cell in what amounted to a performance art installation created for attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and last spring, a group of January 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a prison phone line became a hit on iTunes. Many January 6 defendants have sought to cash in on their fame and have raised millions of dollars from right-wing supporters, particularly through the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. Prosecutors have asked judges to impose fines to counter the flood of donations.

The right-wing support for January 6 defendants has continued even as many have apologized in court for their actions and blamed Trump for lying about the election results and inciting them to storm the Capitol. One recent study by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that 174 January 6 defendants have said they believed they were doing Trump’s bidding.

Lawyers for Peter Schwartz, who threw a chair at police officers and attacked them with pepper spray, told the court that he was only following Trump’s directions. “There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being the most prominent,” they wrote in an April 2023 court filing. “Mr. Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong.”

Trump and the MAGA right have ignored these statements of remorse and continue to treat the defendants as heroic figures. At a campaign event in Texas in November, the Republican front-runner described incarcerated January 6 offenders as “hostages, not prisoners.” Last June, Trump attended a fundraiser for January 6 defendants, calling them “great people” who have “been made to pay a price.” 

J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, said that the pro-Trump attacks on the judicial process in the January 6 cases are deeply damaging to the nation. “The American people, as well as the courts, must understand that the former president will continue these disgraceful, condemnable attacks on our institutions of law and democracy until he has succeeded in delegitimizing them in the eyes of a sufficient number of Americans that not only will they not accept the justice system’s verdicts against him, but they will return him to The White House in 2024 precisely because of those verdicts.”

Federal sentencing guidelines establish a range for each crime, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory. Federal judges must consider the guidelines, but they are not required to follow them. Prosecutors usually make recommendations in criminal cases, often reflecting the guidelines, while defense attorneys tend to propose lower sentences. But judges can ignore both recommendations.

The judges handling the January 6 cases have taken advantage of the leeway they are granted under the law to largely ignore prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations. Luttig, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, said he always had confidence that judges handling the January 6 cases were not persecuting the defendants as Trump and his supporters had alleged, and were instead following normal and consistent sentencing patterns. He said he was not surprised “by the fact that the judges appear to have sentenced this group of defendants to lesser terms of imprisonment than was generally recommended by the prosecutors,” nor that “the party affiliation of the president appointing the judges” was not “a variable” in their sentencing patterns.

“This is as it should be,” Luttig said.

Obama appointees have handled the most January 6 cases, and they, too, have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in the vast majority. They have presided over 337 cases that have been resolved and have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in 281 of them, or just over 83 percent.

Judge Tanya Chutkan — who is presiding over Trump’s own federal trial on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and who Trump and his supporters have accused of being out to get the former president — has actually been lenient in many of the other January 6 cases she has handled. She has issued sentences lighter than prosecutors sought in almost exactly half — 19 out of 39 — of her January 6 cases. Those statistics contradict a media narrative promoted by the MAGA right that Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has meted out unusually harsh sentences in cases related to the Capitol riot and that she may be exceptionally tough on Trump as well.

Judges appointed by Trump have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors wanted at only a slightly higher rate than Obama appointees. Out of 173 cases, Trump appointees gave lighter sentences than the government requested in 156. Trump appointees agreed to the sentences recommended by prosecutors in 16 cases, while issuing a harsher sentence in one.

By contrast, judges appointed by President Bill Clinton have meted out the harshest sentences, yet they have still been more lenient than prosecutors recommended slightly more than half the time. George W. Bush appointed judges have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors sought in 50 out of 54 cases, or 92 percent, while judges appointed by Ronald Reagan issued more lenient sentences in 42 out of 68 cases, or 61 percent. 

Judges handling the January 6 cases have been relatively lenient even when sentencing the most prominent defendants charged with the most serious crimes. Some leaders of militant groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy — plotting to use force to keep Trump in power — and received long sentences, but those penalties were still significantly lighter than what prosecutors had recommended.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison by Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee. That struck many as a long sentence for the 58-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, but it was seven years less than prosecutors recommended for a man the government says was one of the insurrection’s key leaders. Mehta imposed the lesser sentence despite finding that Rhodes’s actions constituted terrorism, which calls for longer sentences under federal guidelines. The Justice Department has appealed the sentence, along with those of other Oath Keepers who received much lighter sentences than prosecutors recommended.

When it came time to mete out punishment for Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keepers Florida chapter who joined other members of the group to march up the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a “stack” formation to storm the building, Mehta issued a sentence of 188 months in prison; prosecutors had sought a 252-month sentence. Prosecutors asked that Oath Keepers member Roberto Minuta — a tattoo shop owner in Newburgh, New York, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy — serve 204 months in prison, but Mehta sentenced him to just 54 months. On his way to Washington, Minuta filmed a video of himself warning that “millions will die” in a looming civil war; just before the Capitol riot began, he and Meggs were part of a security detail for Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. Tarrio’s is the longest sentence given to any January 6 defendant so far, but it was still much shorter than the 33 years that prosecutors had recommended. The Justice Department has indicated that it plans to appeal the sentences of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys.

Jacob Chansley stormed the U.S. Capitol shirtless, covered in face paint, and wearing a horned headdress. He became known as the “QAnon Shaman” and got all the way up to the Senate rostrum, where he wrote a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence, who was due to preside over the congressional certification of the presidential vote. “It’s only a matter of time,” the note read. “Justice is coming!”

Prosecutors described Chansley as “the public face of the Capitol riot” and asked that he be sentenced to 51 months in prison after he was convicted in 2021 of obstructing an official proceeding. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, sentenced him to 41 months, but Chansley was released after just 27 months. In July, Lamberth dismissed an effort by Chansley to get his conviction overturned, noting that new information obtained by prosecutors showed that Chansley may have been aware that a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol when he wrote his threatening note to Pence — evidence that Lamberth said might have convinced him to issue a longer sentence.

Chansley is now gearing up to run for Congress, the institution he helped invade on January 6. As he launches his bid for a House seat in Arizona’s 8^th District, the 36-year-old says he may rebrand himself as “America’s shaman.” Just before Christmas, Chansley attended a conference of Turning Point USA, a major conservative group, in Phoenix and had his photo taken with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing House member from Georgia. Chansley wore the same costume he’d had on at the Capitol; Greene said she was honored to meet him.

The most lenient individual judge handling January 6 cases was not appointed by Trump or Biden, but by George W. Bush. Judge John Bates, now on “senior” or semi-retired status, issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in all 28 of the January 6 cases he handled, often turning down requests for prison time and letting defendants walk free. 

Take the case of Abram Markofski, an active member of the Wisconsin National Guard when he stormed the Capitol. After Markofski agreed to plead guilty to one of four charges against him — parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building — prosecutors asked for him to spend 14 days in jail; Bates gave him two years’ probation instead. Prosecutors sought a sentence of 30 days in jail for Thomas Fee, a retired New York firefighter who pleaded guilty to a parading charge that carried a sentence of up to six months in prison, but again Bates sentenced him to probation. Prosecutors sought seven months in jail for right-wing Florida pastor James Cusick; nine months for his son Casey Cusick; and seven months for David Lesperance, a member of Cusick’s congregation. Bates reduced their sentences to just 10 days each.

Bates has shown leniency toward even the most violent January 6 defendants on his docket. He sentenced Joseph Padilla, a former corrections officer from Tennessee who threw a flagpole that hit a police officer in the head, to 78 months in prison, less than half the 171-month sentence sought by prosecutors. Bates gave Padilla the lower sentence even after describing him as “one of the most aggressive rioters” on January 6.

“The judge was fair, I have to admit,” Padilla’s wife wrote in September on GiveSendGo, the Christian fundraising website.

Bates was also lenient in the wild case of Nathan Pelham. The same day Pelham agreed to surrender on charges related to the Capitol riot, the Texas man was arrested for shooting a gun in the direction of law enforcement officers. The shooting happened in April, after an FBI agent called Pelham to inform him of the January 6 charges. Later that day, when a local sheriff’s deputy was sent to his home for a welfare check, Pelham fired in the deputy’s direction. Prosecutors wanted Pelham to spend six months in prison for his role in the insurrection, but Bates sentenced Pelham to just a $500 fine in the January 6 case. Separately, Pelham pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal possession of a firearm in connection with the shooting and was sentenced to two years in prison.

One Obama appointee has been nearly as lenient as Bates. Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., has issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in 34 of the 37 cases he has handled.

William Cotton of Rhode Island was a low-level member of the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol, and he quickly cut a plea deal with the government. But prosecutors contended that he should still spend some time in jail because they said he showed no remorse for his actions. “Cotton does not view this case or his participation in the Jan. 6 riot as serious,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “Put differently, Cotton does not take this case seriously because he does not expect this Court to take it seriously.” It appears that Cotton was right; while prosecutors sought a 21-day prison sentence, Boasberg gave him probation instead.

Boasberg also issued a lighter sentence than prosecutors sought in the case of a defendant involved in one of the riot’s most violent incidents. On January 6, Jonathan Munafo of Albany, New York, stole a police officer’s shield and repeatedly punched him, causing “the officer’s head to snap back,” prosecutors wrote in a statement. The government sought 37 months in prison, but Boasberg reduced the sentence to 33 months, despite the fact that Munafo had been arrested in another election-related case for making death threats to a Michigan 911 dispatcher in a series of deranged calls on January 5, 2021. Munafo, who reportedly spent much of 2020 following Trump around to campaign events, was separately sentenced to 24 months in prison on charges related to the death threats.

Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, has also been extraordinarily lenient, issuing lighter sentences than prosecutors sought in 48 of the 50 January 6 cases he has handled, including cases involving some of the day’s most infamous incidents. Kevin Seefried of Delaware was photographed carrying a Confederate flag through the Capitol building, an image that went viral and captured the extremist, racist aspect of January 6. Seefried also confronted U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, a Black man, and threatened him with the flagpole. Seefried, the first rioter to encounter Goodman, cursed at the officer and chased him up a flight of stairs in a scene famously captured on video. Goodman testified that Seefried told him, “You can shoot me, man, but we’re coming in.” The flagpole with a Confederate flag on it, prosecutors noted, “was brandished by a man standing at the front of a volatile, growing mob towards a solitary, Black police officer.”

Goodman said that Seefried jabbed the flagpole in his direction several times while demanding to know “where are the members at, where are they counting votes?” Prosecutors recommended 70 months in prison for Seefried, but McFadden sentenced him to 36 months.

In the case of Geoffrey Sills, a Virginia man who stole a baton from a police officer and beat him with it, prosecutors sought 108 months in prison, but McFadden determined that he should only serve 52 months.

Chutkan, the judge handling Trump’s federal trial, has also issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in cases involving January 6 defendants convicted of violent crimes. Matthew Capsel of Ottawa, Illinois, fought National Guard soldiers protecting the Capitol, charging a line of troops and ramming into their shields. Capsel — who filmed himself fighting the soldiers on TikTok and whose Facebook profile name was “Mateo Q Capsel,” suggesting he was an adherent of QAnon conspiracy theories — only stopped fighting after he was pepper-sprayed, prosecutors wrote in a statement. Capsel kept posting about January 6 afterward, writing that “on the 6^th good men had to do a bad thing.”

Capsel was charged with civil disorder and reached a plea deal with prosecutors, who recommended that he be sentenced to 31 months in prison. But Chutkan reduced that to 18 months, well below the 27 to 33-month sentencing guideline range for his offense, according to prosecutors, and not much more than the sentence proposed by Capsel’s defense lawyers.

Perhaps the toughest January 6 judge has only presided over a small handful of cases and thus has not had much impact on the overall figures. Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee now on senior status, has handled nine cases and issued sentences harsher than prosecutors sought in five, the same as prosecutors sought in two others, and more lenient sentences in only two. 

During the sentencing hearing in the cases of John Getsinger Jr. and Stacie Hargis-Getsinger, a married couple from South Carolina who joined the mob storming the Capitol, John sought to influence Sullivan by expressing regret and acknowledging that “we brought this on ourselves.”

Sullivan wasn’t buying it. Although prosecutors recommended just 45 days in jail for each, Sullivan gave them 60 days apiece.

Some January 6 defendants may soon find their sentences reduced or completely thrown out thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court agreed in December to consider an appeal of one of the charges brought by the government in a large number of January 6 cases: obstruction of an official proceeding. A lower court judge ruled that federal prosecutors inappropriately used the law against January 6 defendants. That ruling was overturned by an appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.

Obstruction of an official proceeding is the sole charge in 24 out of the 719 January 6 cases in which defendants have been convicted and sentenced, according to the Intercept’s analysis; in many other cases, it is one of several offenses of which defendants were found guilty. If the Supreme Court determines that the obstruction law was misused, the defendants who have only been convicted of obstruction could presumably have their records cleared.

As the cases of hundreds of January 6 defendants continue to work their way through the legal system, Trump’s own trial on charges stemming from January 6 and his efforts to overturn the election is looming in the same federal courthouse, an imposing white stone building on Constitution Avenue just a few blocks from the Capitol. Trump is facing a charge of obstructing an official proceeding, along with other charges, so a Supreme Court verdict could affect him as well.

But while Trump has repeatedly spoken out in support of the January 6 defendants, he’s trying to block special counsel Jack Smith from even mentioning the Capitol mob during his trial, which is scheduled to begin in March. In a recent court filing, Smith made clear that he plans to highlight the insurrection as the culmination of Trump’s illegal post-election efforts to remain in power. But Trump is now trying to distance himself from it. His lawyer has argued that any mention of the Capitol riot is “not relevant” to Trump’s case and would be “prejudicial and inflammatory.” 

The post Federal Judges Have Shown Leniency in Nearly All Jan. 6 Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

We do not yet know if any of the cases involving former presidents and vice presidents improperly retaining classified documents are as incendiary as some partisan commentators would have us believe. The dominant view projected by the liberal media is that Joe Biden and Mike Pence are benign, accidental document hoarders and that Donald Trump is a criminal who absconded with vital national secrets that could destroy the republic as we know it. Pro-Trump outlets have generally run with the narrative that the former president had every right to take the documents because he had magically declassified them in his mind, but Biden took the documents to engage in acts of corruption, including sharing them with his wayward son Hunter. The broader right-wing position is effectively to downplay or ignore Trump’s document situation unless it is convenient for hammering on Biden, and to portray the Biden document case as a breathtaking scandal that portends dark secrets that must be exposed.

We do not have enough information yet to determine if there were malicious motives at play in any of these cases, nor do we know if any actual harm was done. There is no denying, however, that Trump’s situation is different from the Pence and Biden affairs — because of Trump’s scuttling of the investigation (potentially in a criminal manner), his resistance to returning documents, and the sheer volume of documents he took. There may well be a finding that some or all of these officials violated regulations or laws governing the handling of classified or national defense materials. In the end, what will really matter is the precise nature of the documents they improperly retained. In Trump’s case, his actions after he took the documents may prove more problematic for him and his team legally than the act of improperly retaining the materials.

For good reasons, this story is receiving widespread coverage and will be the focus not only of the special counsel probes, but also congressional investigations. The Republicans, wielding their majority in the House, will certainly zero in on the Biden document case. He is, after all, the sitting president, and lawmakers are right to investigate. However, if the House Republicans elect to ignore Trump’s actions or minimize their importance while simultaneously running an aggressive examination of Biden’s conduct, that will severely undermine the credibility of the process. Unfortunately, that seems to be a likely scenario.

“No one’s been investigated more than Donald Trump. Who hasn’t been investigated? Joe Biden, and that’s why we’re finally launching an investigation of Joe Biden,” said Rep. James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee. “I don’t feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time investigating President Trump because the Democrats have done that for the past six years.” Comer and other Republicans, however, have indicated they intend to question the government on what they allege was a politically motivated raid of Trump’s Florida resort home last August. “My concern is how there’s such a discrepancy in how former President Trump was treated by raiding Mar-a-Lago, by getting the security cameras, by taking pictures of documents on the floor,” he said.

In recent weeks, Comer has fired off a slew of letters demanding information about the documents as well as details about how they were discovered, who had access to them, and the communications between the Justice Department and Biden’s team. He has also asked the White House and the Secret Service for visitor’s logs for Biden’s home in Delaware. “President Biden’s mishandling of classified materials raises the issue of whether he has jeopardized our national security,” Comer wrote in a letter to chief of staff Ron Klain. “Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents.” In another letter to the University of Pennsylvania, Comer also requested a detailed list of everyone, including members of the Biden family, who may have had access to the Penn Biden Center, where the initial batch of documents was discovered.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, has also announced an investigation into Biden’s documents with an initial focus on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint a special counsel and the communications between Biden’s lawyers and the Justice Department about the discoveries of classified materials. “It is unclear when the Department first came to learn about the existence of these documents, and whether it actively concealed this information from the public on the eve of the 2022 elections,” Jordan wrote in a January 13 letter to Garland.

Biden and his lawyers have been emphatic in asserting that they followed proper protocol once they discovered classified papers at the Penn Biden Center. The administration has blasted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for putting “extreme MAGA members,” such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, on oversight committees, charging among other things that they have promoted “dangerous conspiracy theories.”

Some leading Democrats, including Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, have openly criticized Biden over the documents case, while Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would support bipartisan legislation spearheaded by Michigan Democrat Sen. Gary Peters aimed at preserving presidential and other federal records. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, said he will introduce legislation that would require “federal officials, within 30 days of leaving office, to certify under oath that they possess no classified documents.” Most Democrats, when asked about Biden’s actions, defer to the special counsel probes, while pointing to the differences between the Biden and Trump situations. Many of those same people over the past year have shown no hesitation to blast Trump and portray his taking of classified documents as a nondebatable threat to national security despite the limited amount of concrete information made public about the specific nature of the materials in question. After Connecticut Democrat Rep. Jim Himes remarked that Biden “has apparently done what Trump did in retaining classified documents,” the New York Times reported, “His response irked some Democrats on the Hill, who said they want to maintain a consistent message that the special prosecutors should be able to conduct their investigations without being influenced by politics.”

While the investigations in the House of Representatives appear to be narrowly aimed at Biden’s conduct, there are some indications of bipartisan efforts brewing in the Senate. Sen. Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has expressed frustration that lawmakers never received a briefing on the Trump documents case and has called for one dealing with both the Biden and Trump matters. Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said that there was unanimous support among both Democrats and Republicans on the Intelligence Committee in demanding a full briefing on the documents recovered from both Trump and Biden. “We don’t want to get into a question of threats at this point,” Warner said after a closed-door briefing from the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on January 25. Senators said that Haines told the committee that they would not receive a briefing while the special counsel investigations are ongoing. “We have a job to do. It is our job to make sure that the security of our country is protected and that the intelligence that our country depends upon is not compromised,” Warner said. “The notion that we have to wait until a special prosecutor blesses the Intelligence Committee’s oversight will not stand.” Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton has threatened to block Biden’s nominees “for any department or agency and take every step I can on every committee on which I serve, to impose consequences on the administration until they provide these documents for Congress to make our own informed judgment about the risk to national security.”

Jeremy Scahill discusses the mistreatment of whistleblowers and Washington’s culture of secrecy on Democracy Now!, Jan. 24, 2023.

It would be indefensible for the Biden administration to stonewall a bipartisan effort from the Democrat-led Senate Intelligence Committee to conduct a classified investigation of these matters. It is worth remembering that in 1976, then-Sen. Biden was a co-sponsor of the legislation that established the permanent intelligence committees, following the widespread abuses committed during the Nixon administration. Biden was an original member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and criticized various administrations for failing to comply with its oversight mandates.

Even if such briefings on the Biden and Trump documents happen, the public would be kept largely in the dark, save for some inevitable leaks to the media, for the foreseeable future. As the Justice Department investigations unfold, one of the most valuable public responses from Congress would be to convene a thorough, independent, bipartisan investigation of the entire bureaucracy of secrecy that exists throughout the federal government. It should interrogate the pervasive practice of overclassification, the uneven legal treatment — depending on their status or positions of power — of individuals who mishandle classified materials, as well as the abuse of the Espionage Act by both Democratic and Republican administrations to target whistleblowers and journalistic sources.

There is another aspect to these scandals that we should not lose sight of: the general climate of impunity that exists among the powerful when it comes to secrecy and abuse of power. Under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the U.S. was operating a global kidnap and torture regime after 9/11. Senior CIA personnel destroyed videotapes of their torture of detainees. The CIA, under John Brennan, spied on U.S. Senate investigators and hacked into their computer systems. In the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Cheney and other officials abused the system of classified intelligence, cherry-picking unverified data to fabricate a justification for war. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, perjured himself in front of the U.S. Senate when he lied about the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of the communications of Americans. Modern U.S. history is rife with such malignant actions on the part of senior officials. No one has ever faced any real consequences for these abuses of power — and in fact, many people involved, such as Gina Haspel, who served as CIA director under Trump, continued to be promoted in government or received lucrative deals in the private sector.

It is a disservice to the public to exploit the Trump, Biden, and Pence cases for solely partisan purposes. Each case should be investigated on its merits and the public informed of the extent of the misconduct. At the same time, this moment should serve as an opportunity to launch a serious and wide-ranging investigation into the broader culture of secrecy in Washington, D.C., that leads to such cases.

But the investigation shouldn’t stop there. Any meaningful inquiry must include an accounting of a wider range of abuses, including the secret torture program, and must develop a system of meaningful consequences for the perpetrators regardless of their prominence or the powerful positions they hold.

The post Classified Documents Scandals Point to Larger Culture of Impunity appeared first on The Intercept.

But despite Biden’s urging, abortion defenders in Texas’s 28th District may have fallen short Tuesday night. The final vote count is not yet in, but Cuellar is well positioned to win the nomination for a 10th term in a congressional career for which he long enjoyed an A rating from the NRA. Those who associate the Democratic Party with reproductive rights and gun control efforts could be forgiven for being confused: Despite his stances, top Democratic House leaders lined up to protect the incumbent.

“On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday night. “Accountability isn’t partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership.”

TX28 is an extremely close race. If Cuellar wins, leadership’s decision to go to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent will be the reason why. If Cisneros pulls it out, they will have mobilized against a badly needed grassroots for Nov & fought against a historic victory. And for what?

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 25, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., played both sides. While she pledged her continued support for an embattled Cuellar in March after he was forced into a runoff and reportedly recorded a robocall backing him in the district, she also sent a last-minute fundraising plea Tuesday to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email list to help elect pro-choice Democrats. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., however, was firmly in Cuellar’s corner. In a robocall on Tuesday, he described Cuellar as “a staunch advocate for the people’s health care,” the Texas Tribune reported. Two days after the draft Roe v. Wade opinion came out, Clyburn, who says he supports abortion rights, stumped alongside Cuellar at a get-out-the-vote rally event in San Antonio.

Cuellar’s campaign raised more than $3 million to Cisneros’s $4.5 million. He also got a boost from outside groups including the political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent millions so far this cycle against progressive candidates in at least five competitive Democratic primaries.

In Texas, election rules stipulate that in a primary where no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates compete in a runoff. Cisneros came within 1 percentage point of that margin in March. The next month, AIPAC’s PAC, United Democracy Project, poured more than $330,000 into the race to oppose her. The PAC spent another $1.5 million in May, bringing its total expenditure on the race to just under $2 million.

The race could represent the “pro-Israel” lobby’s second major win this cycle, after PACs for AIPAC and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent $1.3 million to reelect Rep. Shontel Brown over Nina Turner in Ohio.

Another group aligned with the pro-Israel lobby and fighting to protect conservative Democrats, Mainstream Democrats PAC, stepped in to support Cuellar. As the National Journal reported, after the draft Roe opinion leaked, Cuellar’s support dipped in several Democratic surveys. But the fledgling Mainstream Democrats PAC made its first independent expenditure in the race to support Cuellar on the day of the leak.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a top adviser to Mainstream Democrats PAC founder Reid Hoffman, recently told The Intercept that the decision to back Cuellar was informed in part by advice from DMFI head Mark Mellman. According to federal campaign disclosure records, Mainstream Democrats PAC and DMFI share an office.

Spending more than $750,000 to back the incumbent, the PAC ran an ad earlier this month claiming that Cuellar was “under attack by extremists” and had “made it clear that he opposes a ban on abortion.” Cuellar has said he supports abortion access in a few extreme cases, like rape and incest but generally opposes it otherwise. He was the only House Democrat to vote against codifying Roe in September.

Voters who lean more to the center still don’t support overturning Roe or imposing widespread restrictions on abortion, and groups canvassing on behalf of Cisneros sought to peel off those voters in Cuellar strongholds like Webb County, where they started knocking on doors of women under the age of 50. Cuellar won Webb County by more than 37 points, while Cisneros carried Bexar County, and Cuellar’s share of the vote there slipped. Primary turnout in Texas has been historically low, and turnout for Tuesday’s was much lower than that for the March primary.

new Cuellar ad funded by Mainstream Democrats PAC in #TX28 — his first ad that mentions women's rights as "under attack by extremists" and that he "opposes a ban on abortion." Cuellar was sole House D to vote against codifying Roe in 2021 (bill failed in Senate). pic.twitter.com/sqCS8CwvsD

— marissa martinez (@mar1ssamart1nez) May 12, 2022

Team Blue PAC, another committee to protect incumbent Democrats launched last June by House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries and Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., listed the TX-28 primary as one of its “races to watch,” along with Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif. Schrader is poised to lose his primary by just under 20 points, with less than 80 percent of precincts reporting from the May 17 primary.

Cisneros’s campaign earlier this month called on party leaders to withdraw their support for Cuellar, and told The Intercept that refusal to do so showed “cognitive dissonance” in the party’s stated values and its actions with respect to the right to abortion. The Working Families Party helped convene progressive groups to coordinate independent expenditures in support of Cisneros. Groups including the PACs for WFP, Justice Democrats, Communications Workers of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and J Street spent just under $2 million in support of Cisneros and against Cuellar, who came within 4 points of losing his seat to Cisneros in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Ads in the final weeks of the race from an anonymous sender falsely claimed that Cuellar had been cleared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a probe that included a January raid of his home in Laredo. Cuellar has not been cleared, and the probe is reportedly related to an investigation into business interests in Azerbaijan, where Cuellar has ties with prominent oil executives. Other billboard ads that called Cisneros a “homewrecker” were bought by a firm called Big River Media, which Cuellar’s campaign has used in the past and is run by a major Cuellar donor. His campaign issued a statement and said it did not condone the billboard. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ultimate winner will face Republican candidate Cassy Garcia in the November 8 general election. In early March, the University of Virginia Center for Politics changed its 28th District’s rating from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up,” and said of the change: “[W]e believe the GOP trend in this region is real; because the Democratic runoff is likely to be nasty; and because the overall political environment looks good for Republicans.”

Historically, the region has been heavily Democratic, and Biden carried it by 7 points over Donald Trump in 2020.

Top Democrats have blamed the party’s left wing for stifling Biden’s agenda while allowing conservative members to usher its demise. Party leadership’s fear of backlash is protecting a member who could very well be the deciding vote on federal abortion legislation.

The post Abortion Opponent Henry Cuellar Was Buoyed by Democratic Leaders to a Narrow Lead in Texas Runoff appeared first on The Intercept.

If the new taxes were intended to cover new amenities or upgrades for the Villagers, perhaps a hike would be worth the sacrifice. But the money was instead destined to subsidize further sprawl south of The Villages, ultimately benefitting the entity known locally either as “the developer” or “the family,” which could then escape paying the fees associated with the impact of their development.

“This place has grown like crazy,” said Oren Miller, who would go on to run for a seat on the county commission. “The developers pay no impact fees for schools, for fire, for EMS, for police, for parks and recreation, for government buildings. The only impact fees they do pay are for roads, and they only pay 40 percent of the recommended amount.”

The developer is a spaghetti bowl of LLCs doing business collectively as The Villages, which is still owned by the Morse family, descendants of Harold Schwartz, who founded what became the community in the 1970s as a trailer park. The family owns the robust local newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun; owns the radio station, which pipes Fox News and right-leaning updates through speakers in common areas and at pools; owns the glossy magazine; and also owns local politics.

But a group of fed-up Villagers decided to fight back through the only remotely democratic chink left in the armor of The Villages, the county commission. The deck was stacked against candidates challenging the family and its allies, but there still had to be elections. Backed by the Property Owners’ Association, three Villagers stepped up to run: Craig Estep, Oren Miller, and Gary Search. They ran as a ticket under the clever moniker EMS, promising to rescue The Villages.

All three had moved south for the same reason as their neighbors: to retire and live the good Florida life. Miller had never been involved in politics before retiring, while Search had been a commissioner in South Whitehall Township in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, as well as a public school guidance counselor. Estep, a longtime Texan, had a successful career in emergency response management. The three ran as Republicans in opposition to the tax increase, arguing that businesses that profit from the development should instead shoulder the burden with an impact fee. They also vowed to reverse an initiative that had made it easier for the family to keep control of local politics and thereby return some power to rural areas outside the community. And Miller, whose wife was a committed opponent of the local high-kill animal shelter, added a promise to bring a no-kill shelter to The Villages, which won the support of the area’s animal rights supporters, concerned about what might happen to lost pets. While the population of The Villages had exploded, the capacity of the shelter system remained the same.

The amount of money at stake was eye-watering, well into the hundreds of millions for the developer. The Villages did more than $2 billion in revenue in 2021 alone, according to a Florida trade publication.

Contractors for the developer, led by the firm T&D, which primarily works for The Villages, swooped in to fund the campaigns of the incumbents who had enacted the tax increase, lavishing close to $200,000 on them, but it wasn’t enough. In November 2020, the EMS slate won in a landslide, giving them a 3-2 majority on the commission.

EMS immediately faced an onslaught from the Daily Sun, which portrayed the new commissioners as borderline communists set to destroy The Villages’ way of life. The paper accused them of “championing a reversal of the county’s longstanding pro-business strategy.”

A top official with The Villages made clear to the commissioners how rough a road they were about to go down, Search later told a meeting of the Property Owners’ Association. The day he was elected, he said, “I had a higher-up here at The Villages put his finger in my face and say, ‘Search, just remember one thing: I’m a big person, you’re a little person. I can squash you anytime I want.’”

“I said, is that a threat? And he said no, it’s a promise.” Search was later asked about his charge in a deposition and reaffirmed under oath that it happened.

The higher-up was Gary Lester, vice president of community relations for The Villages, Search separately told at least four other Villagers. Lester has been appointed to numerous boards by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and served on the commission that vets judicial nominations. (Asked if it was indeed Lester who issued the threat, Search told me, “I’m not going to say it was, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t. People know who it is.”)

Lester told Search that he had the personal phone number for DeSantis, telling him he could get the governor on the horn at any moment, Search later told his fellow commissioner Miller, according to Miller. “He indicated that he has the personal phone number of Ron DeSantis and can reach him at any point in time he deems that necessary,” Search confirmed. Lester did not respond to emails or messages left with his assistant.

Cracks formed early, with Estep, who became chair, drawing fire for going wobbly on the size of the impact fee needed, and the speed with which they could do the property tax rollback. But the trio quickly moved to make their campaign promises reality. By a 3-2 vote in March 2021, they hit businesses with a 75 percent increase in impact fees — less than what Miller and Search wanted, but a substantial amount nonetheless — to cover the cost of future development. There was no good reason, they argued, for residents to subsidize the cost of further development for the Morse family. If the family wanted to expand The Villages, they could fund it themselves. Estep didn’t respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case of democracy in action: Residents had banded together to make their voice heard and changed the direction of their community, rejecting a cozy arrangement between the area’s political and business elites. Next up was the property tax rollback.

None of that, of course, could be allowed.

The first counterpunch came in January 2021, from Tallahassee, with a push for statewide legislation that would block local officials from significantly increasing impact fees. The Villages had an ally in the right place. In 2018, Brett Hage, then the president of T&D, the main contractor, had been elected to the state House, beating his opponent — Oren Miller — by some 40 percentage points in the Republican stronghold. After his election, The Villages hired Hage directly, paying him $141,000 the first year and $350,000 the next, according to his disclosures, as vice president for residential development. (Previous disclosures had not included such income.)

On January 9, 2021, Hage, still on The Villages’ payroll, introduced legislation to block the proposed impact fee hike. On June 4, 2021, DeSantis signed the bill into law. The governor and the Morse family have close ties, with DeSantis frequently visiting for fundraisers, and The Villages and its executives bankrolling DeSantis. Crucially for The Villages, the law was retroactive.

Income shown on Brett Hage’s disclosures from 2019 through 2021. Credit: Public disclosures

The Daily Sun spiked the football. “The Estep-Miller-Search tax increase dismissed the warnings of economists, business owners and community leaders,” its report on the bill’s passage reads. “This law is a big win for new businesses and homeowners in Sumter County, where three newly elected commissioners reneged on a promise to study road impact fees over the summer and instead raised them by 75% last month.”

The article is broken into sections that leave readers no doubt how the Daily Sun feels about the commissioners and their tax hike: “Law stymies freshmen commisssioners,” [sic] followed by “Conservatives lead charge,” “Understanding economic therory,” [sic] and “Locals applaud new law.”

Meanwhile, Hage had gotten a hefty raise. His 2021 disclosure shows his pay had jumped to $925,096 in the year leading up to Hage introducing the legislation. Though his state House pay is only $29,697 a year, his net worth, according to those same disclosures, had climbed from less than $900,000 to $2.2 million — a total of nearly a million and a half dollars since getting elected to office. In April 2022, Hage announced he wouldn’t be running for a third term. His work in Tallahassee was done.

If the pushback from The Villages, aided by DeSantis, had ended there, it would represent a brazen flow of cash from a developer directly to the personal bank account of a state lawmaker, who passed legislation saving the developer hundreds of millions and instead spreading the costs to tens of thousands of Floridians. If that was all it was, it would be an outsized, unusually lucrative version of politics-as-usual that many cynics expect from their lawmakers, even if they shake their head at it while reading the paper.

But it didn’t stop there. In fact, it only escalated.

On January 30, 2023, a gaunt, 72-year-old Oren Miller — by then a former commissioner, ousted from his seat by a DeSantis decree — was brought handcuffed into the Marion County Courthouse. He had lost 20-plus pounds in the 75 days he spent jailed awaiting sentencing on a felony charge for, essentially, nothing. Or, perhaps more accurately, for fighting back against a powerful, well-heeled ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“It’s a very complicated story,” Angie Fox, Miller’s wife, told me when I first reached out to her. But it’s also a simple one. “Bottom line, he is a political prisoner.”

The governing structure of The Villages would be familiar to anybody who has lived under the thumb of an aggressively run American homeowners association, complete with its busybodies, covenants, restrictions, and the type of infighting iconically portrayed in “Seinfeld”’s fictional Del Boca Vista, the retirement community of Jerry’s parents. Del Boca Vista, like The Villages, had its own newspaper, The Boca Breeze.

Oren Miller moved to The Villages about a decade ago, after 40 years at the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois. His grandfather and father had worked at the same plant, and Miller had risen to logistics manager. But by his 60s, he’d had enough. He retired “on a Thursday and left Friday morning,” he later told investigators.

“My goal nine or 10 years ago was to retire, come down here, golf three days a week, watch some TV, read some books, mind my own business,” he said. “Then about five years ago, I decided to get actively involved in what was going on in the county, and I still golf two or three days a week.”

In the summer of 2018, Michael Grunwald, reporting for Politico magazine, traveled to The Villages and happened to interview Miller. Miller was just becoming involved in local politics, deciding to run for state representative. He told Grunwald that he had recently been talking to neighbors at a block party, and he mentioned to them how nice it was that a Black neighbor of theirs had taken it upon herself to pick up litter on her daily walk. It was something to be emulated and admired, he thought. “People responded with pure racism,” Miller told Grunwald. “I thought we were past that in America.”

The magazine noted that he and his wife had founded the group Lost Pets of The Villages that would try to connect lost pets with their owners before the kill shelter found adoptive homes or else euthanized them, as it would do as a matter of policy within days. The magazine also reported that Miller, alongside his state representative campaign, became commander of the Community Emergency Response Team, a group of residents who’d quickly respond in the event of a health emergency for another Villager. “I’m doing a very bad job of minding my own business,” he said at the time.

The developers were largely able to pick the commissioners.

Miller knew going in that, with power vested in a network of corporations acting in coordination with a political party and with control of the media, democratic decision-making potential is extremely limited. Even the area’s county commission had been tweaked to benefit The Villages by a clever bit of election reform. When the community got started, it needed significant upfront investments in infrastructure, something the existing population was uninterested in subsidizing. The wealthier Marion County to the north effectively kept the The Villages out, but the developers were able to make their moves in Sumter County. The company backed a ballot initiative called One Sumter that reorganized the county commission: No longer would each area of the county have a representative on the board. Instead, every commissioner would be elected countywide. With the Daily Sun trumpeting the measure, The Villages muscled through the reform, and in the elections hence, the developers were largely able to pick the commissioners, with the rural areas outside The Villages effectively disenfranchised.

Miller knew he never had a shot against any Republican for state House but ran for the experience. Brett Hage beat him in a blowout in the 2018 election, 70 to 30 percent. But the next year, when The Villages successfully muscled through its property tax increase, Miller decided to run for county commission.

To understand how Miller went from newly elected commissioner to under investigation by a Florida state attorney, a little background about Florida’s sunshine laws is required.

The state prides itself in its government transparency laws: the Government in the Sunshine Act and the Public Records Act. The Sunshine Act contains two relevant principles for Miller’s saga: County commissioners are not permitted to discuss county business privately with other commissioners; they can only do so publicly at official meetings. And the commissioners may not use a “third-party conduit” for those communications either. The commissioners were sworn in on November 2020 and received a series of trainings on sunshine laws over the next several months.

On February 16, 2021, the county board met at The Villages Sumter County Service Center. The main order of business was a recommendation by the county administrator, Bradley Arnold, that the commission not raise impact fees on businesses but instead negotiate a voluntary impact fee from the developer. The idea was voted down 4-1, according to minutes from the meeting.

As a final order of business, Miller turned to a simmering war between local animal rights advocates — of which he and his wife were two — and supporters of the local kill shelter. He proposed a reconciliation group be formed, and suggested Gary Search as the mediator, based on Search’s background in psychology. (Search is from Allentown, Pennsylvania, as am I, and coincidentally was my sister’s guidance counselor before he retired and moved to The Villages, though I never met Search before reporting on this story.)

“This is news to him, I’m blindsiding him with this,” Miller said of his nomination of Search at the hearing.

“Yes, you are,” Search said, sounding exasperated.

“If you don’t wanna do it, I’m OK. I’m saying he’s got a background in mediation and negotiating, and there’s some strong personalities in that group,” Miller said — referring to a group that included his wife, Angie Fox.

After some discussion among the board members, the county administrator, Arnold, interjected. “There’s a conflict that’s associated with sunshine law issues,” Arnold announced. “The problem that we had was, I had a meeting with Commissioner Search, and he relayed his conversation with Angie Fox that was advocating for this very solution to be presented to the board.”

Arnold, in other words, was accusing Miller of having communicated with Search about the proposal via his wife, in alleged violation of the Government in the Sunshine Act — a conspiracy to break the law in order to create a reconciliation committee aimed at cooling tensions around a high-kill shelter.

Arnold unspooled the evidence he had collected about the conspiracy. “I then had a directive email from Commissioner Miller that said go and do this and use Commissioner Search for that specific purpose,” Arnold continued. “That indicates clearly that Angie Fox is a conduit of communication between two commissioners, which is a violation of open records.”

Arnold said the committee idea should be put on hold awaiting a potential investigation. And he all but encouraged somebody in the audience to file a complaint, and two of them did. “My concern is that, where you have something that unfortunately I became a witness to a violation, that becomes an ethics-related issue,” Arnold said. “If that is filed by someone and the investigation occurs, my concern is, is that you may want to wait until that activity has happened and an investigation has been concluded before you’re involved in anything involving Angie Fox, who’s currently acting as a conduit.”

That, at least, was Arnold’s version of events.

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Behind the scenes, however, not only was Arnold already aware that Miller would bring the idea to the board, but Arnold himself — according to an email he sent to the county attorney that was obtained by The Intercept — had also directly encouraged Miller to do so.

On February 11, 2021, Miller had written to Arnold about his idea, according to emails obtained through an open records request by Fox. “I was out golfing today and Angie talked to Commissioner Search,” he wrote. “I don’t know what the conversation was, and I don’t want to know. I just know his background would come in handy to act as a mediator. I don’t know if he would be willing to do this or not, but I think he would.”

From: Miller, Oren
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:38 PM
To: Arnold, Bradley
Subject: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

It is past time for the animosity between these two entities to stop. I am suggesting a meeting with Steve Kennedy, and Monica and Angie Fox, and Karen Taylor and Kim Pruett. I would like Steve to set this up. I would also like Commissioner Search to moderate this meeting. There are things that A/C can do that the advocates can not do. There are things that the advocates can do that A/C can’t. They returned a dog Wednesday morning that had a cchip connected to a bad phone number and only by having Angie do a background check was the real owner found. For Sumter County to be successful these groups must work together. I understand there are strong personalities involved but that is what fires the passion to get the dogs back home. I was out golfing today, and Angie talked to Commissioner Search. I don’t know what the conversation was, and I don’t want to know. I just know his background would come in handy to act as a mediator. I don’t know if would be willing to do this or not, but I think he would. It is time to put the past in the past and have a fresh start for everyone. I think we could put a model team together by having give and take on both sides. — Oren

“That is a good thought, but I will need Board direction,” Arnold responded, suggesting a future date.

From: Arnold, Bradley
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:46 PM
To: Miller, Oren
Subject: RE: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

That is a good thought, but I will need Board direction to do so since the employees of Sumter County are not the only victims of false claims, personal and professional attacks from the three individuals cited – it also includes your fellow Board members. Perhaps a larger group to include Sumter County’s Humane Society (also a victim) since that is one of our largest rescue agency partners.

May 4th is the workshop for animal services — that might be the best time to broach the topic with the Board.

Bradley

Arnold forwarded it to the county attorney, Jennifer Rey. “I am asking that he bring this issue to the Board,” he said.

From: Arnold
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:49 PM
To: ‘countyattornney.sumtercounty.fl’
Subject: [Forwarded fom Intradyn] [Thu Feb 18 14:23:53 2021] FW: Animal Control and Sumter County Animal Advocates

I am asking that he bring this issue to the Board.

Bradley

“It was a setup,” Fox concluded.

Arnold, in an interview with The Intercept, said that his intervention in the meeting kicked off the resulting investigation. “That’s what ultimately led to the complaint with the State Attorney’s Office,” he said.

“It was a setup.”

Arnold had a backup plan if Miller didn’t bring it up. “If that had not been raised by him at the meeting, it was the plan of the county attorney to share how dangerously close the commissioners are coming to a potential open meetings violation,” Arnold told me. “But before [the county attorney] could provide that support, [Miller] had already proceeded. And then that basically met all of the conditions from my concern that I had raised with the county attorney.”

In other words, Arnold was planning to bring up an allegation of open records violation whether Miller brought up his proposal or not.

But when I asked Arnold if he had encouraged Miller to bring the issue to the board, he flatly denied having done so. “No, absolutely not,” he said.

Presented with the email, Arnold said, “That communication preceded my discovery of the open meetings issue which is covered in the meeting minutes.” However, Miller’s own email alerted Arnold to the fact that his wife and Search had spoken, adding that he didn’t know what they spoke about. Arnold later told Search, according to Search’s testimony, that he had tried to discourage Miller from bringing it up, but no evidence supports that claim. Arnold “said he was disappointed that [Miller] brought it up because he felt his conversation with Mr. Miller indicated that he should not bring it up,” Search said.

A third complaint was filed by former Circuit Court Judge George G. Angeliadis, who had put his name forward to DeSantis in August 2020 for a state Supreme Court opening. That complaint was even more absurd than the other two: Angeliadis had filed an open records request for the documents associated with an animal rights Facebook group run by Fox. Fox explained that the group was public, and Angeliadis could view any of it he liked. He demanded printouts of the entire page, and Fox’s attorney told him she would gladly do so but would need to charge a standard per-page and per-hour rate. He declined and filed a Public Records Act complaint instead, leading to a back-and-forth interrogation of Miller by the local prosecutors over the nature of a Facebook page versus a group. It later came up in court as evidence of Miller’s evasiveness.

Oddly, the three complaints bypassed typical ethics procedures and went directly to Republican State Attorney Bill Gladson. (A more appropriate venue would be the state ethics commission, housed in Tallahassee.) At that point, Miller and Search were on extremely unfavorable terrain. Gladson himself had been elected under unusual circumstances. Just before the deadline to file for reelection in 2020, long serving GOP State Attorney Brad King said that he would not be running for reelection. Gladson’s deputy was ready with his paperwork, and voilà, he became the area’s top prosecutor unopposed.

Also unusually, Gladson took personal control of the rather minor complaints, which, again, focused on the question of whether Fox was acting as a conduit between the two commissioners. In August, Gladson and a team of prosecutors interviewed Search. Estep was also invited to answer questions, but he declined, and the prosecutors never followed up. Citing a potential appeal, Gladson declined to comment on the prosecution.

A transcript of Search’s interrogation reveals a room full of Florida men struggling with the peculiar concept of a woman acting independently of her husband. Fox, Search told them, had been warned by Miller multiple times that there were concerns that she was acting as a conduit for him, and that she should be careful in how she talked to commissioners. But Fox insisted that she was a taxpayer and entitled to lobby her commissioners on behalf of the cause she cared about most deeply: ending the high-kill shelter’s slaughter of local animals.

Search told investigators about a call he had after a January board meeting in which he had declined to second a motion from her husband, Miller, about a new pet tethering ordinance he was suggesting. The investigators asked how long they had spoken. “Ms. Fox does not talk for a short period of time. I can’t tell you how long it went,” he said, but added that he told her, “You’re Commissioner Miller’s wife, we should not be talking.”

She told him, “I’m not calling you about Commissioner Miller as a wife, I’m calling you as the president of the Lost Pets of The Villages and I’m calling you as a constituent,” Search recalled. “I said, OK, I’ll listen,” Search said. “She just ranted for a while about tethering and things like that.” During the conversation, Fox had mentioned an idea for a reconciliation group to ease the tensions, and Search passed on word to the county administrator, Bradley Arnold, and the county attorney, Jennifer Rey, about the conversation. About two weeks later, in an email to Arnold, Miller proposed a different version of a group, this one with Search moderating it. That’s when Arnold suggested he bring it up at a board meeting.

That may be too much detail, but it’s worth understanding the context that led to the complaint, which itself led to the interrogation about Fox acting as a conduit between the two. During Search’s interrogation, one prosecutor asked Search if he thought Fox was acting of her own volition. “From your seat and from your perspective, is he asking her/telling her to knock it off, or is he using her as a conduit?”

“In my speculation, and it’s pure speculation of watching this the last, I’ll say, year before the election until now, is that Angie is a tremendously free spirit who no male is going to tell her — including a husband — what to say, how to say it, when to say it, and what to say. And a husband who is not going to go down that path,” Search answered.

“I get it,” said the prosecutor.

“No, you really wouldn’t get it unless you really met her,” Search said.

“I don’t think my wife is a conduit for me. I might be a conduit for her.”

In October, Miller was subpoenaed by the state attorney, despite repeatedly attempting to schedule a meeting in response to an invitation. The subpoena added to the breathless coverage in the Daily Sun.

Under oath, he told Bill Gladson the same thing as Search. His wife was her own woman. “I don’t think my wife is a conduit for me. I might be a conduit for her. She was the big animal rights advocate to begin with and I’m kind of supporting her on those issues. She brought those concerns to me, not me to her,” he tried to explain.

The prosecutors expressed confusion. “For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t see that this was clearly a conduit situation; I mean, you know all about the positions she’s on, you know about the emails she’s sent, you know she’s having communications with other county commissioners because you’ve seen these emails,” said one prosecutor.

“Right,” said Miller, “but she’s a voter, she’s a taxpayer. She’s not telling me how to vote or what to vote or — she’s not controlling me, she’s trying to be a citizen and a voter and a constituent.”

Apparently recognizing the cul-de-sac they’d found themselves in, prosecutors never went forward with the conduit charge.

In mid-October 2021, Ron DeSantis returned to The Villages for his 20th visit since becoming governor. He had even signed the state’s budget at The Villages. He was there this time to award the county a $6 million grant for road improvements.

Search saw Gary Lester, The Villages vice president who had previously promised to squash him like a bug, and reached out to shake his hand. “Get away from me, you liar,” Lester told him, Search recalled. He waited until after the event and asked him why he had said that.

“Why would you even do that as a fellow Christian brother?” Search asked.

“Don’t get religious with me,” Lester replied, according to Search, who asked again what he was trying to say.

“You’re gonna find out soon enough why you’re a liar,” Search said Lester told him. “And I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Lester, but I haven’t lied about anything.’ And he said, ‘You’re gonna find out.’ And I kind of just took that tongue in cheek, like, OK, I’m not gonna get anywhere with this person.” At lunch after the event, he said, he told Bradley Arnold about the exchange, and Arnold told him not to worry about it, that Lester was just unhappy that Search was on the commission. (Arnold didn’t respond to request for comment on that exchange.) Search was disturbed enough by the encounter that he told his friend Gilbert Windsor from New Covenant United Methodist Church about it that evening, Windsor told me.

In December, Search would come to suspect what Lester seemed to be hinting at. Prosecutors had instead decided to charge both Search and Miller with perjury, saying they lied about the nature of their phone calls with each other. “I never put two and two together until two months later when you get the phone call,” he said, describing the moment he learned he was being charged with perjury. “And it’s like, wait a second, how would he — he had to have known? And why in the world would the state attorney be talking to him?” (Gladson declined to comment.)

Search and Miller, phone records showed, spoke somewhat frequently from November 2020 to February 2021. And, they readily admitted, they had occasionally discussed commission business before they were fully trained and understood that doing so ran afoul of sunshine laws.

The transcript of Gladson’s interview with Miller includes the supposed crime he is convicted of committing:

Miller: We got elected in November, the phone calls probably stopped in January or February when we all realized that could be an issue.

Gladson: Got it.

Miller: So I can’t give you the exact date they stopped, but it was somewhere in there.

Another prosecutor added: “Of more concern, sir, is that I asked you — I think a specific question: Do you have phone conversations with Mr. Search?”

Miller: Yes.

Prosecutor: OK.

Miller: I did.

Prosecutor: After January?

Miller: No.

Miller’s “no” to “After January?” would be used as the basis for a perjury charge, despite his having said multiple times elsewhere in the interview that he’s uncertain about when the calls stopped.

Gadson and his deputies showed Miller some phone records, showing calls in January, and also one on February 17, and another in March, and asked what they were about.

“In all honesty, I do not know what it was about, I don’t.”

“But you had phone conversations with him?”

“Yes, I promise you we had phone calls.”

“So it could have been county business?”

“We did not discuss anything the county was working on, anything we voted on or anything we were going to vote on, or anything that was coming up in front of us,” Miller said.

“Well, how do you know? You don’t remember what the phone calls were about.”

“Because we know from the ethics training we couldn’t do that,” Miller explained.

In the moment, Miller said he didn’t remember what most of the calls were about, and prosecutors didn’t show him a calendar or give him any heads up that might have let him cross-check his schedule. But some of the calls, Miller recalled, were about a golf outing. Some were to arrange who was going to bring apple fritters from Dough J’s for the staff at meetings. (The fritters took up an inordinate amount of time in Miller’s interrogation. Dough J’s was way out of the way, so the pickups had to be coordinated.) Some of the calls, he said, were about church functions or Covid relief. But none, after their training, were about active commission business, he said.

Scott Fenstermaker, a retired attorney and former FBI agent who lives in The Villages, knows both Search and Miller, and would talk to them about county business, he told me. “They would both say, don’t tell me what these other guys have said to me because I don’t want people to think you’re a conduit,” Fenstermaker said. “They were being very careful to observe the Sunshine Act.”

Miller’s lawyer later noted in a motion to vacate the conviction that Miller readily admitted to having violated the Sunshine Act, at least until January and February — undermining the idea that he lied to avoid implicating himself in breaking the law. The perjury charge, in other words, concerned when the calls stopped, but that fact is actually irrelevant to the question of whether they violated the law. And, again, prosecutors never charged either Miller or Search with violating any sunshine laws.

DeSantis stepped in and issued executive orders removing them from the commission.

Yet in December 2021, Gladson charged both commissioners with felony perjury, punishable by up to five years in prison. DeSantis stepped in and issued executive orders removing them from the commission.

“Two things are happening here: intimidation and humiliation,” Search said in January 2022, addressing The Villages’ Property Owners’ Association. “The second thing is … to intimidate any other candidate from running against the local government that they’ve controlled for so long.”

Throughout the whole episode, the Daily Sun routinely published Search’s and Miller’s mugshots. And the opposition to The Villages’ political machine was quickly eroding. Cliff Weiner, president of the Property Owners’ Association, spoke after Search. “I had a lot of people who were lined up to run in 2022 for the two seats that were open. Andrew is the only one who’s still standing,” he said, referring to a candidate in the audience Search had pointed out. “And some people that were gonna run in 2024 in other offices, slowly but surely they’re all dropping. They don’t want to go through what Gary and Oren are going through right now. That’s a sad state of affairs that we live in a community that people are afraid to run because if you win, you’re on the wrong side.”

“I’m also very disappointed in our governor,” Search added. “He made a financial move, but I think a very terrible political move. Hopefully when these charges are dropped, because they are all false, I hope the governor and I have a long talk.”

Soon, Search and Miller were drowning in legal bills. Search also had surgery scheduled, plus his medication schedule made a prison term less than ideal. He cut a deal with prosecutors to testify at Miller’s trial in exchange for avoiding prison and ending the legal battle. The deal barred him from for running for office for six months, blocking him from the next election.

But Search’s testimony was not, in the end, damning to Miller. Search confirmed that the two of them had spoken by phone after January or February, but they weren’t discussing commission business. They would, for instance, coordinate on who would bring which snacks to a meeting. Search did admit to bringing up the no-kill kennel plan with Miller sometime in the summer of 2021, cutting against their claims that they stopped discussing county matters privately after January or February. But that conversation didn’t happen by phone, so it isn’t relevant to the perjury charge.

Miller’s jury was empaneled on November 14, 2022, by Judge Anthony Tatti, who had previously put his name forward to DeSantis, hoping for an elevation to the state Supreme Court. The judge did two things. First, he empaneled the jury on a Monday but delayed the trial until Friday. Then he told them that under no circumstances should they go home and read coverage of the case in the local Daily Sun. Doing so might bias them, he said.

Miller’s attorney, Dock Blanchard, was flabbergasted, and later objected, showing the judge the biased coverage that he had elevated to the jury’s attention. “This is a newspaper, not a motion,” the judge told him, overruling his objection.

Not a single prosecution witness presented evidence that Search and Miller had talked about commission business on the phone after the time they said the calls stopped. But the existence of the calls themselves — perhaps coupled with relentless Daily Sun coverage — was sufficient circumstantial evidence to convict, the jury of six found.

Miller was floored. His attorney asked that he be allowed to go free on bond to await sentencing, but the judge rejected it, sending the 72-year-old out of the courtroom in handcuffs on the afternoon of November 18.

Two and a half months later, and some 20 pounds lighter, Miller was back before Tatti for sentencing. The Daily Sun had run a front-page story that morning on the sentencing, calling Miller a “convicted felon.” Dozens of his friends and supporters packed the courtroom as Miller, cuffed again, was escorted in. He was hunched over, now bearded, wearing an orange-and-white striped jumpsuit.

The last 74 days had been an ordeal. There are about 1,800 people in the county’s lockup facility; Miller was in a pod with 80, he said, but there were just 56 seats for meals. On his first day, a jailmate offered to adopt him and get him a seat at meals in exchange for some of his food, a bargain he eagerly accepted. On the second day, he said, he won protection from a gang leader. “Oren Miller, you are protected in here because you’re a senior citizen,” the man said, according to Miller. “‘But understand, don’t cross any lines.’ … And so I minded my p’s and q’s.” Violence broke out regularly, Miller recounted, and he watched two men beaten nearly to death. He moved to try to break up the first fight, but two men held him back, explaining that if he got involved, he’d be called later as a witness, and you don’t want to be a witness against somebody who sleeps in the same open room as you. So he let them fight.

Miller went days without his heart or thyroid medication, and grew weak and dizzy. Complaining of chest pain, he was eventually given an EKG, which the staff told him showed no problems. “My EKG hasn’t been good in 15 years,” he said. “I will never have a good EKG. I’ve got an irregular heartbeat all the time.” He said they gave him medication despite claiming to detect no heart trouble — the same type of heart medication he’d been prescribed but hadn’t been getting.

His logistics training from Caterpillar came in handy, and he devised a system for the headcount process which worked so well that the unit’s numbers were correct more often, meaning they rarely got punished for the wrong count anymore. He could see the guard coming from a neighboring unit, and Miller would yell “Headcount!”: a signal for the men to move to the predesignated places to be counted. He taught his jailmates how to document abuse and negligence when it occurred, so that if they later filed a complaint, they’d have something to stand it up. When he left the unit for what he hoped would be the last time, he turned around and yelled to the men: “Headcount!”

They all shouted back: “Headcount!”

Tatti began by acknowledging Miller’s motion for a new trial and quickly dismissing it. The judge reprimanded Miller’s attorney, Blanchard, for Facebook posts from Miller’s supporters saying that he had been “railroaded,” and asked if that was the argument Miller was planning to make at sentencing. It was not, Blanchard said, and asked to call three character witnesses.

Fox, ahead of the sentencing, had put out a request for testimonials. What came back shocked even her. If Miller saw somebody eating alone in a restaurant, friends said, he’d pay for their meal. If service was particularly good, he’d insist on speaking to the manager to compliment the staff. If he saw a veteran in a grocery store, he’d pay for their groceries. (“Oren doesn’t have much money,” Fox told me afterward, her pride mixed with a little financial concern.)

A 19-year-old young man from southern Sumter County, outside The Villages, took the stand to call him “the greatest man I’ve ever met,” saying Miller had mentored him since he was 14, including sitting with him as a loved one passed. The last time he saw him for lunch, Miller brought him a stack of used iPads he had collected, and instructed him to take them to a local repairman (at Miller’s expense) and donate them to local high school students in need.

When a family lost their home to a fire, Miller organized the effort to rebuild their lives. When Hurricane Irma hit, Miller didn’t wait for the winds to have fully died down before organizing recovery efforts. There didn’t seem to be a church charity program he wasn’t involved in or leading. Another man described the emergency response team Miller had set up. The first time he got a call, he said, he rushed to the distressed home in two minutes max, but when he got there, he found Miller already in the bathroom, doing chest compressions on a man in cardiac arrest. If somebody lost a pet, said another friend, Miller and Fox would drop everything and go searching immediately. “If it was 2 a.m., they wouldn’t say, we’ll be there at 7. They’d be there right away,” said one woman.

There was no victim, no violence, and Miller had no record. The pre-sentencing report called for time served and 30 months probation. The prosecution, in a subtle nod to the absurdity of the penalty, asked for less: time served and 24 months of probation. But Assistant State Attorney Sasha Kidney still laid into him. “The defendant has shown zero remorse,” said Kidney.

In the hallway, I asked her if she felt like justice was served in the case. “I think the jury listened to the evidence that was presented and returned a verdict based on that, and it was up to them and they made their decision,” she said.

The Daily Sun, also in the hallway, wanted more blood, and asked if the original investigation into sunshine law violations was still open. “Not to my knowledge at this point,” she said. The Daily Sun reporter pressed the question again. “I can’t really answer that question. It may still be open. I don’t know,” she said.

The next morning’s coverage of the sentencing, above the fold on the front page, would headline “Convicted Felon Miller Released from Jail: Legal Woes Not Over.” The article used the assistant state attorney’s answer to hang a new sword over Miller’s neck, reporting: “Prosecutors have not yet said they have closed the investigation into Miller’s potential Sunshine Law violations, and he remains under investigation by the state’s Commission on Ethics over an online fundraiser he created for the public to bankroll his lawyers.” (His GoFundMe to cover legal fees for his appeal remains open and is accepting contributions.)

Back in the courtroom, Tatti decided to add 200 hours of community service to Miller’s sentence, too, but he had a problem: How to punish a man with forced service who gives the bulk of his time in service to the community already? The judge’s solution: On top of going above the sentencing recommendation to give him 36 months of probation, Tatti ordered him to perform his community service at the local landfill.

Update: February 6, 2023

An earlier version of this story reported that The Villages was founded in the 1980s by Gary Morse. Morse’s father, Harold Schwartz, built a trailer park on the spot called Orange Blossom Gardens in the 1970s, which Schwartz and Morse transformed into The Villages.

The post How a Grassroots Revolt in the Iconic Retirement Community Ended With a 72-Year-Old Political Prisoner appeared first on The Intercept.

But on Wednesday, Clyburn hosted a get-out-the-vote rally with the party’s last remaining House member to oppose abortion rights, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. On May 24, Cuellar will face a runoff in his second primary challenge from progressive candidate Jessica Cisneros, who supports reproductive rights and lost to Cuellar by less than 4 percentage points in the 2020 primary for Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cisneros came within 2 points of Cuellar’s votes in the March Democratic primary, forcing the runoff.

“We’re watching the erosion of our fundamental freedoms in this country. This isn’t a drill,” Cisneros told The Intercept. “Urgency is important, and Democrats need to pull out all the stops to fight for us.”

“I do not agree with Henry Cuellar on everything,” Clyburn said at Wednesday’s rally, according to Texas Monthly’s Jack Herrera. “We need to sit down with people who we do not agree with and try to find common ground, to do what is necessary to move this country forward.”

“When people tell you you need to agree on everything, I do not agree with Henry Cuellar on everything…we need to sit down with people who we do not agree with and try to find common ground, to do what is necessary to move this country forward,” say @WhipClyburn pic.twitter.com/E0e8nzg0dT

— Jack Herrera (@jherrerx) May 4, 2022

Clyburn is not alone among party leadership in endorsing the anti-abortion incumbent. Pelosi; Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.; and Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. — all of whom profess support for abortion access — are backing Cuellar. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and New York Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, for their part, back Cisneros.

Party leadership’s support for Cuellar “points out the cognitive dissonance that’s going on right now,” Cisneros said. “Democratic leadership is saying one thing, the actions are showing another by supporting the last anti-choice Democrat in Congress, which is Henry Cuellar.” Cuellar did not provide comment by the time of publication.

In September, Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would strengthen access to abortion and prohibit states from singling out or impeding access to abortion services. Despite his opposition, it passed the House by seven votes before failing by two in the Senate. Sens. Warren; Sanders; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; and Ed Markey, D-Mass., called Tuesday to abolish the filibuster in order to pass the bill or another measure to codify the right to abortion in federal law.

“With the House majority on the line,” Cisneros said, “Henry Cuellar could be the deciding vote on the future of our reproductive rights and so many other fundamental freedoms in this country. And we just can’t afford to take that risk.”

While Cisneros had outraised Cuellar by half a million dollars as of the end of March — with $3.2 million in contributions to Cuellar’s $2.7 million — Cuellar’s campaign has also gotten a major boost from two political action committees for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. The group’s affiliated PAC United Democracy Project spent more than $330,000 last month on ads attacking Cisneros. And the fledgling AIPAC PAC, which endorsed Cuellar in March, has spent more than $165,000 in support of his campaign since January. Along with the group Democratic Majority for Israel, AIPAC has been behind millions more in spending to attack several progressive candidates.

The progressive Israel foreign policy group J Street, which is backing Cisneros, has spent $100,000 on the race so far. Justice Democrats, Emily’s List, NARAL, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and Working Families Party all endorsed Cisneros. Groups including WFP, Justice Democrats, NARAL, the Communication Workers of America, Texas Organizing Project, and Service Employees International Union have spent at least $2 million in support of Cisneros and opposing Cuellar. At the end of last quarter, Cuellar’s campaign had $1.4 million cash on hand to Cisneros’s $1 million.

Cisneros said her team was used to outside spending and was focused on continuing to build grassroots power. “He doesn’t have people where we do. We’ve been up against this fight before and we’ve shown that we can go toe-to-toe with any outside spending.”

Cisneros’s campaign called on Democratic Party leaders Wednesday to withdraw support for Cuellar in light of their denunciation of the draft opinion and his opposition to abortion rights. “At every turn, my Congressman has stood in opposition to the Democratic Party agenda from being anti-union to being anti-choice,” Cisneros said in a press release. Pelosi and Clyburn did not respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which backs incumbent members, has not made an endorsement in the race. On Tuesday, the DCCC released statements calling the draft opinion “a devastating blow” to safe and legal abortion and denouncing Republicans in Virginia, Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, Michigan, and North Carolina as “complicit in this all out assault on women’s freedoms.” None of the statements mentioned Cuellar.

While DCCC hasn’t explicitly weighed in, several of its approved vendors are working to reelect Cuellar, The American Prospect reported Wednesday. Last month, as Cuellar faced scrutiny after an FBI raid reportedly connected to his Azerbaijani business interests, DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney told The Hill that Democrats would maintain control of the district. He did not specify which candidate would hold it.

In 2020, former DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos supported Cuellar’s 2020 primary campaign. That cycle, he also became the first-ever Democrat to receive the Koch network’s endorsement in a federal race.

“Losing the right to choose is imminent,” Cisneros wrote in a tweet on Monday about the draft option. “Yet, Cuellar voted with Republicans against codifying #Roe.” She called for contributions to Texas abortion funds and wrote, “We have the last word on May 24.”

“I’m more than ready to start working with them to deliver on the Democratic agenda,” Cisneros told The Intercept. “I hope that Democratic Party leadership won’t stand in the way of delivering for the people here.”

The post House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn Stumps for Anti-Abortion Rep. Henry Cuellar appeared first on The Intercept.

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday of this week, I interviewed Naomi Klein about her new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which begins with Naomi following her doppelganger, other Naomi — that’s the feminist-turned-Steve-Bannon-ally, Naomi Wolf — down a series of rabbit holes.

Describing her journey to these shadowlands, she also looks into the mirror, and asks all of us to look in the mirror as well, and ask what role we’ve played in ceding turf to the right, or abandoning principles — like skepticism of corporate greed and big pharma, opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and so on — that have long been the domain of the left. By abandoning that territory, did we play a part in clearing the ground for the mirror world? And how can we reclaim our confidence and our voices in such disorienting times?

We spoke at George Washington University at an event hosted by Politics and Prose. That independent bookstore, by the way, will also be hosting a reading for my own forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” I’ll be in conversation there with my Breaking Points colleague Krystal Ball on November 27th.

Now, here’s Naomi Klein with a brief reading from her new book, followed by our conversation.

[Deconstructed intro theme, continued.]

Presenter: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm and enthusiastic welcome to Naomi Klein and Ryan Grim.

Naomi Klein (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. I did not have time, no one asked me to, and several people cautioned against it. Not now, not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet, and certainly not about this.

“Other Naomi,” that is how I refer to her now; this person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me, or thank me, or express their pity for me. The very fact that I referred to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.

For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations. I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes. I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.

And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, a time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space, everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event, dubbed a “heat dome,” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family.

The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly. An estimated 10 billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores. An entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.

“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.

“Can I ask what?”

“You cannot.”

There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk like a great white shark. I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what? Check her serially suspended Twitter account? Study her appearances on Steve Bannon’s live streams for insights into their electric chemistry? Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, to sow mass death on such a scale, it could only be the work of the devil himself?

My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back. A master’s degree worth of hours. I told myself it was research. That, if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows, with names like “Q Anon Anonymous” and “Conspirituality,” that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories. wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID 19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.

This, on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest. “I feel closer to the hosts of Conspirituality than to you,” I whimpered one night into my best friend’s voicemail.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time, or of the compressed writing time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises — and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers of people to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated tyranny — is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that we humans might at some point decide to do together.

Thank you.

[Audience clapping.]

RG: So, Naomi, you talked about all of the podcasts that you mainlined, and I’m curious what … And so, for background, I think you know this, for the last two years I’ve been doing a show where the co-host is a right-winger, which means I’ve been mainlining this stuff, also.

NK: Yeah.

RG: Forced to engage with it on a regular basis. And so, I’m curious, from your perspective, how did your understanding of the right change from before you started mainlining it? And the right itself has obviously been changing enormously.

NK: Yeah. I think it definitely did change. You know, I thought I knew who Steve Bannon was, because I would see the Media Matters clips, or I would see him being dragged away in handcuffs, you know? And what you realize as a longitudinal Bannon listener, he does put out 17 hours a week, around.

RG: It’s an enormous output.

NK: And I did listen to hundreds of hours. There is this, really, there’s a real other side to him. I’m interested in the things he does well, because I think he is a dangerous figure. I take him seriously as somebody who takes internationalism, in some ways, more seriously than a lot of the left. You know, he is building an international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance.

When Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister of Italy in April 2022. I mean, he was like a proud papa. That’s part of his project. He’s been weaving together the farthest-right political parties across Europe, South America. I think it’s a deeply nefarious project.

So, I wasn’t surprised by the nefarious things he was saying. The points where I felt real vertigo… And, you know, this book is not about my doppelganger, it’s really about this vertiginous moment, and it is very unsettling to lose control over oneself in the ether. And so, that kind of became a metaphor for this, I think, collective unsettling, where so many of us have had this feeling of, like, what is this world, you know? How people are behaving so strangely. I thought I knew who this person was, they’re now acting really, really differently. I can’t talk to my grandma anymore, my uncle, you know… I hear this from my students a lot.

So, it’s really just a literary device, to use that sort of identity-unsettling to get into that world, and my most vertiginous moments listening to Bannon were, honestly, when he sounded a little like me. When he would do these — I’m sure you’ve heard this — but these audio montages of the big cable news shows on MSNBC and CNN brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Moderna. And it sounds like the media education 101 that we did in the alter globalization movement in the late nineties, where we were like, okay, there’s just a few companies that own the whole thing.

What worried me about it was not that he was doing it; it was that we weren’t doing it anymore. Or when he talks about transhumanism — that’s a big hobby horse, right? — and he talks a lot about how tech is replacing the human. I wonder if we are, right? I wonder if we’re speaking to those fears.

One of the things I write in the book is, conspiracy culture — and I call it conspiracy culture, not conspiracy theories, because it really is conspiracy without a theory, it’s throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks — it gets the facts wrong a lot of the time, but gets the feelings right a lot of the time. So, a feeling of being surveilled, a feeling of being left behind. I take that really seriously, and a lot of it I see as a failure of our side. You can’t blame a strategist for being strategic, and it’s very strategic to pick up the issues your opponents have carelessly left unattended.

RG: Yeah, and he’ll say Elizabeth Warren had a terrific framing of this particular gripe. He’ll talk about Ro Khanna as somebody that he thinks is, like, as a Democrat, framing things the way … If Democrats would do that more, that he’d be nervous.

NK: Right. Or he would say, I would have been nervous if Trump was running against Bernie. He’s been open about that,

RG: Yeah, he said that. And you’ll hear his riffs, and 90 percent of them, you’re like, actually, okay. All of that’s right. And then he veers off into —

NK: Not 90. No, not 90, Ryan. Not 90.

RG: Okay, 90 within a riff of the show. So, within a show, let’s say it’s a two hour show. Like, an hour and a half of that is complete nonsense. But then you’ll get a 20-second riff, and in that 20-second riff, he’ll go for 15 seconds. You’re like, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. And then at the end…

NK: Military industrial complex, endless wars. Yeah.

RG: And then at the very end, it just crashes into a wall of xenophobia, or…

NK: Well, because it’s a bait and switch. I mean, it’s not like there’s an actual plan to do anything. Take the military spending. He is rabidly anti-China. The theme song — which got stuck in my head for a while — is this incredibly weird song.

RG: Not the CCP …

NK: About the CCP, let’s take down the CCP. It’s sung by the billionaire, Guo, with a lot of autotune, the billionaire whose yacht he was on when he was arrested … Anyway, it’s a deep Bannon cut. But I was like, what is this song? And I looked into it, and Guo wrote the song, and he got this whole vanity project. He’s like, a rapper on his yacht singing it. Oh man.

Yeah. So, if you’re against the military industrial complex, why are you trying to start a war with China? Like, that’s World War 3. So, he’s not to be taken seriously, except as a strategist, I think. I don’t think that it is really about ending the wars, and I don’t think it was ever really about bringing the jobs home. I don’t buy it. I think he, I think he saw issues that a lot of people who had voted for Democrats multiple times, promising to do something about free trade, and he saw a fertile issue. He’s a market researcher more than anything else, I think.

RG: Yes. Today, for instance, he’s going off about spending, so it all comes back to Paul Ryan-style old-school Republican stuff, worried about the deficit and spending.

NK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And transphobia and white supremacy. And he’s most passionate about the border war. So, he capitalizes on these issues like anger at big tech, anger at big pharma, anger at the endless wars, the military spending, but it doesn’t actually ever reach those targets. That’s what I’m struck by. It pivots very, very quickly. And the project is — he says it very plainly — it’s to gain power for a hundred years. Take him seriously.

RG: And you talk about the legal concept of abandonment in the book, which goes to your point that you were just making, about Democrats kind of ceding all of this turf.

NK: I mean, the legal concept of brand. Like, copyright. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Under copyright law, you lose control over your trademark if you’re not using it. That’s just a joke about branding, because I have a branding crisis, which is ironic, if you know anything about the things I’ve written over the years.

RG: How hard was it for you to write about that? To just go directly at your own brand and say, you know what? Okay, fine. You know what? I do have a brand, and the brand is in crisis.

NK: I had so much fun writing this book.

RG: It comes through.

NK: It was not hard. In fact, it was really joyful. I remembered why I wanted to be a writer. I used to be a lot funnier when I first started writing and no one knew who I was. I had this weird thing happen where … You know, my first book “No Logo” was much more playful and self-deprecating. It’s a book about the colonization of so many aspects of our lives by the logic of corporate branding. Little did I know what was ahead — you know, I wrote it in the 90s — but I talked a lot about how I was drawn to the shiny world of logos, and it was a critique written from inside of what I was critiquing, not from the outside wagging my fingers. I get the appeal. I’m drawn to it. I also wanted to climb inside my television set and live there.

I think what happened, because that book sort of put me in this position of being a face of a certain kind of left, at a certain moment when a new movement was emerging, I sort of felt the weight of that, and my writing got a lot more serious and straight up. And I’m proud of the work I did in “The Shock Doctrine” and “This Changes Everything,” and I still do more conventional academic research on climate justice, as you heard in the intro.  But I felt a little speechless during the pandemic, that’s the truth. I felt like I lost faith in the ability to move the needle just by making that same argument again around the climate crisis.

And so, I actually went back to school… You know, we’re here at a school. I never studied creative writing. As an undergrad, I studied English literature and philosophy, and then I started just working in journalism. I got hired before I graduated, and just kept doing journalism, kept writing. And so, I thought, when I was kind of grounded because of the pandemic, maybe I would take a writing course, and that’s what I did.

I worked with a writing teacher and just went back to school and started playing. And then I had this weird concept of using my own doppelganger to look at the doppelganger world that we’re living in, and that felt really fun.

RG: That shows, too. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I was reading it, and thinking, I didn’t know Naomi was so funny, and such a good writer. I mean, the other books are well written, but that’s not what you’re there for. This book, it really sings. And you’re laughing halfway through it.

NK: Laugh-crying. The laugh-cry emoji. Frozen.

RG: And while, in some ways, it’s a departure from your earlier books, I think — and I’m curious for your take on this — I think it also fits in with them as well, in the sense that a lot of your previous books were at once kind of an intervention in a particular moment, but also building a new framework for how to then think about that moment going forward. And I think this is both of those.

So, if that’s right, what kind of intervention did you want this to be, and what are you hoping comes out of it?

NK: Yeah. Thanks for that, Ryan. It’s definitely a weirder book, but it’s definitely a weirder time. I mean, this was a very different writing process in the sense that [in] all my other books, I had a full outline of what I was going to write before I wrote it, I had a book publishing deal. It was like, lay out the thesis, say what you’re going to do, do it. Say you did it. You know, that’s the structure of the books.

With this book, I really found it through writing it. I knew that the device of the narrow aperture of the double, of the doppelganger, was going to help me get back into branding, was going to help me get into AI, was going to help me get into data mining, but was also going to help me get into the way the right, and the sort of liberal center, and, to a degree, also, the left, were kind of in this mirror war with each other, where whatever they said, we can’t say. So, if they’re now talking about big pharma, we are cheering big pharma. Get your… You know, that’s our whole thing.

And so, I was really interested in that reactivity, but also, the final third of the book is about, what are we not looking at, when we’re looking at ourselves as brands, as perfected beings, or when we’re just reacting with one another? And the final third of the book is called “The Shadowlands.” And that’s, I think, as James Baldwin said: what are we not looking at? We’re not willing to look at death, we’re not willing to look at trouble, we’re not willing to look at history. And I think this is such a moment of wild distraction, and it makes sense.

Like, this is a hard moment to hold. COVID was this reckoning, this unveiling of so many preexisting injustices and inequalities that became unignorable, because the people who were in the shadows holding the world up, highly racialized, were the COVID hotspots. I mean, it was the meatpacking plants, it was the Amazon warehouses. And here’s an airborne virus that forces us to think about who else breathes this air, you know? Did could they call in sick? Did they have any rights? It is an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you’re on your own. You are an island. All of your successes are yours alone, and people who don’t have them, it’s their fault. And, suddenly, no. We are enmeshed. And that was a very hard reckoning to hold when you’ve been told your whole life that you make yourself, you know? And your only duty is to yourself and your family and, if you are successful, then you’ve won the prize, right?

And now, suddenly, you have to think about vulnerable people, you have to think about workers, you have to think about racialized workers? That was not the bargain that a lot of people signed up for, and I don’t think it should be a surprise that a lot of people rebelled against that and said, no way, you know? I’m going to shout freedom in the freezing cold, and that’s what happened in my country. Honk your air horn.

I think it’s equally interesting that a lot of people who grew up in that same individualistic culture welcomed the emergence of a social state that put an eviction moratorium, paid people to stay home, set up mutual aid networks, and said, yeah, we want to show up for each other. And then there’s a racial justice reckoning in the middle of that, and it deepens, and there’s a vision for another kind of society with radically different spending priorities.

So, I think we’re in this moment where you’ve got a reckoning with our present incredibly unjust economic order, which you can no longer unsee on some level, especially if you’re part of the lockdown class, because you know that you are being supported by all these other people who bore so much more risk unequally. You’ve got a reckoning with the very creation of settler colonial states, and then you’ve got a reckoning with the future, right? Which is, the climate crisis is here, and we are all implicated in it.

I think there’s all kinds of distractions being thrown up right now, and that’s what this book is trying to do, is map the weirdness of now. Arundhati Roy said to us early on in this pandemic that it was going to be a portal, that we were going to go somewhere new, and it could have been better, and it could be worse, but it was not going to be the same.

This was too cataclysmic to not bring us somewhere, and I don’t think we know where that somewhere is yet.

RG: Yeah. We’re still figuring that out. And you write that the mirror world has to be understood through the prism of the doppelganger, and through the framework of the doppelganger, and so, therefore, can’t be understood without reference to ourselves as well. And you go into a number of different areas where you changed your own mind, and you’re self-critical. For people who haven’t read the book, there’s a lot of self-criticism of things that you wish you had given more thought to early on in the pandemic. Some of them — COVID origin, you write about the vaccine and complications around pregnancy, and some other warnings that could have been given.

Let’s go through some of those. Which ones do you want to start with that were the ones that you…

NK: I just want to point out that I’m in a particularly awkward situation here, because there is this thing where I did write a book called “The Shock Doctrine.” It is about how large-scale emergencies are exploited by elites to push through a preexisting wish list. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s all proven, it’s real, it’s still happening. It’s happening in Hawaii right now, happening under cover of COVID. It’s not a conspiracy, but it is true that, for instance, the U.K. government has used the fact that hospitals were over capacity to attack the NHS, to attack their much-loved National Health Service. Different right-wing-run Canadian provinces have done the same thing.

I think a lot of the attacks on schools around COVID policies were actually just attacks on public schools, and part of that preexisting pattern of, whatever the disaster, let’s use it to have vouchers and charters. The same thing that happened after Katrina and Maria, and again, and again, and again.

But this was awkward for me, and I did write a lot about that in the early stage of the pandemic. But then, all of a sudden, there was this kind of doppelganger version of “The Shock Doctrine,” which was this Great Reset conspiracy theory that was coursing through the world, which was like “The Shock Doctrine” with all the facts and evidence removed in order to expose a conspiracy that actually had a website and a marketing firm. Which was that the world economic forum said, yes, we want a great reset. It wasn’t hidden, but somehow it got recast as if it was some great feat of investigative journalism to find this website where…

RG: And watch a couple of YouTube videos that they made.

NK: Right. Which included people like King Charles, right? So, it’s like, if you were trying to hide something, you wouldn’t get him involved, you know? That left me speechless. Like, I didn’t know what to do.

RG: You wrote one very helpful piece for us, I remember, about The Conspiracy Smoothie. Then I could send the link to all my friends who would be asking about The Great Reset.

NK: I want to tell you an interesting story related to that before we go down the list. because there are real things, there were true things, and things that were abandoned. But some of this is just about clout chasing, and the reason I know that is because… So, Russell Brand read that article on his show. He would often just read articles of mine on, anyone who’s listened to his podcast knows that a lot of what he does is just sort of read articles written by other people with feeling.

RG: Yeah. And an accent.

NK: Yeah. And so, he does this show where he says, Naomi Klein’s written this really interesting article, I know a lot of people are talking about the Great Reset. It explains what it is, it’s nothing to get excited about, and he reads the article and says, you know, this is all true.

And he puts “Great Reset” as one of the tags — you know about all this — and then all of a sudden he gets a lot more views than he had been getting before. Because, of course, all the people who believe in The Great Reset find it, and they watch it. And, suddenly, Russell Brand has a whole bunch of new followers. And then he goes back to The Great Reset about 20 times, except for, now, it’s audience capture, and he’s giving them what they want, which is a much more conspiratorial take on it.

So I just sort of watched that happening with great fascination. Just interesting. It’s a clout mine.

RG: Yes. But YouTube does that to a lot of its content creators, it will pull them into conspiracy land further and further by funneling more and more traffic to them And then they’ll cross an arbitrary line, and they’ll nuke their channel. It’s a bizarre thing where they’re feeding the very thing that they then nuke.

Let me ask you about… you hinted at censorship a couple times, and the whole big tech… It used to be a thing of the left, that you don’t want big tech telling people what they can and can’t say. That’s become a right-wing thing.

NK: Right.

RG: And, looking back with Facebook, for instance, [it] wouldn’t let you post anything that’s speculated about the Wuhan lab being the origin of COVID. Like, you would lose your account. I think Twitter had some penalties, but it wasn’t as draconian as Facebook.

NK: That’s terrifying.

RG: That’s a real, terrifying thing that actually happened.

NK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s also not the first time. I think that this idea that this is a right-wing concern is a very specifically American phenomenon. If you ask folks in Turkey or India, they will most certainly say that it is their extreme right-wing governments that are working with these same tech companies to deplatform dissidents and toe the government line.

RG: Right. Because the right is doing that here as well, including buying the platform, and directing it their way.

So, the book also feels like it’s trying to give people permission to kind of look back at where they were the last couple years, and allow for more uncertainty, while also not wallowing in complete nihilism or pretending that nothing is true.

If you could go back and talk to yourself in, like, 2020, what would you say to help you think your way through the next couple years?

NK: Yeah. I would say that just be… There were certain points where, I think, in the early stages of the pandemic, there was a lot of really great political organizing on the left that was not just supporting the… Like, yes, supporting masks and, eventually, vaccination programs, but being much more ambitious than that. For instance, we knew from the Scandinavian countries that you keep schools open if you had small enough classrooms, right? And so, that’s a pretty good argument for something that we need anyway. We need smaller classrooms for our kids. More outdoor education is also a great way to keep your kids safe from an airborne virus. The right to good indoor air is another one.

And I think what started to happen is, there was a lot of this more ambitious — I mean, you know this, Ryan — there were a lot of groups here that were collaborating across different kind of issue silos to envision what rebuilding from the pandemic could be, learning from the lessons of who had been most impacted, taking in the lessons of the racial justice uprisings of 2020. And there was the [Red, Black & Green New Deal], , there were all these sort of platform experiments happening.

And I think, then, for a variety of reasons, a lot of them got derailed. And, for me, that was what made me most speechless, was watching us go from these really, really high highs. You know, I was part of the Bernie campaign, I was still living in the states when the racial justice uprisings happened. I remember being in New Jersey, and just that kind of amazing moment where you realize that all of your neighbors are out. And it was, like, the opposite of every zombie movie plot right, where there’s an apocalypse and people come out to eat each other’s brains, except there’s an apocalypse, and people come out and they just are expressing solidarity. That was an amazing turn of events.

And then things… You wrote the piece, The Elephant in the Zoom. But I do think Zoom organizing around this was very hard. I think it was hard to sustain solidarity virtually. I think it was one of the issues, losing those sort of interstitial moments that, I think, nourish folks in movements, and just having the hard meetings is really, really difficult. A lot of things got confused when Democrats were in power as well, right? Where I was just like, okay, well, how against things can we be, when we don’t have Trump to clearly all be against? Things got a little mixed up.

But what would I say to myself? I would say, we were on the right track! I think we were on the right track. There was a good piece on that [that] David Wallace Wells did recently, about COVID revisionism, and the COVID revisionism I’m most interested in is the revisionism that kind of erases all that early solidarity, is almost kind of embarrassed by it. And I think we need more stamina, frankly, to see things through, and I think we need that horizon of where we’re moving towards, precisely because these kinds of unveilings and reckonings are really difficult. And if there isn’t a vision of a world where nobody is sacrificial, where everyone has a place, which is somewhere where we all might want to go, I think that the hard work of actually seeing where we are becomes almost impossible, right?

Yeah. So, I would say: keep at it. You were on the right track, don’t get derailed. What would you say?

RG: Uh … Oh God, I don’t know.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: Which direction do you think things are going, the last year or so? You write about the difficulty that, in 2021/2022, on the progressive left, people were just having open debate. That everybody was nervous, everybody was … And you talk about the distrust that was producing just people who were out for themselves, and collapsing organizations, which goes to the thing that you were mentioning that I wrote about later.

NK: Yeah.

RG: Do you feel like it’s still headed in that direction? Or do you think it’s swinging back a little bit, and there’s more trust and more willingness to disagree?

NK: I’ve been struck with this book, that I think there are peaks and valleys in social movements, and I think we’re in a valley. And I think, because of that, there’s less defensiveness. I’m finding less defensiveness where, I think with … Maybe when things are going a little better, people are more inclined to be like, no, don’t criticize us, we know what we’re doing. But I don’t know a single person who’s happy with the trajectory of how social movements have gone.

You know, we’ve had these high-high highs, right? I mean, the climate strikes, that wasn’t so long ago. Millions and millions of people around the world. Or the energy around the Green New Deal in 2019. So, given that in our recent memories we’ve experienced these kind of effervescent political moments when a lot seemed possible … I was in Nevada when Bernie swept the strip. You know, I’ve never seen so many happy leftists. It was just, hugging total strangers, right?

And so, yeah. I think that I’m noticing a non-defensiveness. It’s never easy to do this work, but I think it’s incredibly important for social movements to be able to do self-criticism. And most, frankly, non-North-American countries are better at it than we are. They do the autocritica in Latin America, it’s just like, part of organizing. What did we do wrong, how do we learn from that?

I quote in the book Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who is one of the amazing Egyptian revolutionaries who led the 2011 revolution [and] has been in prison now for 12 years. And he’s sitting there writing essays about what they did wrong, you know? And he knows they did it wrong, because he’s in jail, and so are tens of thousands of other political prisoners in Egypt. And he’s not saying it’s all their fault; it’s obviously a murderous military dictatorship’s fault. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t still have a responsibility to try to metabolize. How do we do it better, right? Because everything’s on the line here.

So, yeah. So far so good, Ryan. I mean, everything could go south really quickly, but …

RG: What do you think that we could acknowledge that we did wrong in the last couple of years in general? Particularly when it comes to COVID.

NK: Who’s the “we?”

RG: Who’s the “we…” The “we” would be the kind of broad, progressive left.

NK: I think we should have got all-in for lifting the patents on the vaccines. I think there should have been just really militant internationalism. Like, I won’t get my third shot until everybody on this planet gets their first one. That was one of the moments where we had this big trucker convoy in Canada that shut down Ottawa for three weeks. And it was weird, because I was like, well, what if we’d shut down Ottawa for three weeks, actually, with some real demands for justice?

So, you know, I think that’s one. I think that it has to be a … If you’re going to ask individuals to do hard things, it has to be fair. This is the lesson of the mobilizations during the Second World War, where people did a lot of hard things for the war effort, but it was incredibly important that it be perceived by the public to apply to everyone. So I think that we should have gone after COVID profiteering hammer and tongs. Like, nobody should have been allowed to get rich, let alone have these billionaires double their already obscene wealth. It’s so demoralizing.

And when you have systems that are allowing that to happen, and then are saying, close down your small business, close down your small job. Come on, that is not going to work, right? And then turning around and saying, oh, those people are jerks. It doesn’t hold, it really, really doesn’t hold.

So, I think that that’s where the energy should have gone. And it still can, it still can. We can take these issues back.

RG: So, we’ve got some audience questions we’ve got to get to here. So, here’s one: In a world and a future where human history is being collected as data by wealthy companies and then repurposed by AI, what do you see as the role of a writer? How do you compete, and ensure your words are portrayed as they should be? That’s from Natasha.

NK: Oh, hi Natasha. Where are you? Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah.

I mean, it’s funny, I quoted Arundhati Roy, who I’m lucky to call a friend, and she said to me 20 years ago, you can’t control what happens to your ideas once you release them. And that was before AI and social media. It was just, you know, the thing she was saying is, for better and for worse. People do awful things with one’s ideas, and they also do wonderful things, and you actually can’t take credit for either of them.

So, I think to write is to be misunderstood, but it’s also to have this amazing experience of having your words meet other brains, and have them add all kinds of things that never occurred to you. I’ve talked about this project as being a kind of first attempt at a weird little map of what I see through the portal, but I’m just one set of eyes seeing it, you know? And the fun part is the part I’m in right now, where people are going like, you missed a whole mountain range over there, you know?

And what about this path? Writing is such collective work. Even when you’re all by yourself, you’re hearing this cacophony of voices that are influencing you, that are your sources, that are your references, that are the other writers that made you. And then the work goes into the world, and then you do it all over again.

And that’s actually been the funnest part about this particular book, is that, because it doesn’t make any pretext of being definitive about anything — it’s very personal, it’s very quirky, it’s very particular — it has inspired, already, some incredibly wonderful writing in other writers.

So, we can’t control it, but I think there’s a lot of beauty in it.

RG: Would you clone yourself if you could? No name on this one.

NK: I would absolutely not. No.

RG: It doesn’t work out in any of the stories that you write about in your book.

NK: No. No.

RG: Never a good ending.

NK: There’s an under underappreciated doppelganger film called Dual — I think it’s a made-for-Netflix film — where the main character played by Karen Gillan gets a terminal diagnosis, and she lives in a world where you can create a clone, so that your friends and family don’t have to feel grief. It’s more a metaphor for how bad we are at grief, right? And how much the culture we’re in tends to not feel, and numb. And so, yeah, how about having a technology where nobody has to feel sad things?

Yeah. There’s a line in it, where it turns out that she was misdiagnosed and she’s going to live, and that means she has to fight her clone to the death. And they say, we can’t have two of you walking around, that would be ridiculous! Tell me about it.

RG: As a college student and climate activist, I’m inspired constantly by your work. What advice do you have for people like me who want to do the kind of writing and research you do?

NK: Well, I think one of the things we really need now are some success story writings. We’ve got plenty of reasons to feel down. There was just a great piece that came out — I just tweeted it — by Liza Featherstone in In These Times about the story of how New York State won a really fantastic energy democracy piece of legislation. And it’s a great pincer of climate justice organizing and DSA folks in office who are able to receive that pressure. And it’s a wonderful kind of success story that I think we need to spread.

You know, right now in Brazil, there’s a celebration going on because they beat back Bolsonaro, and they’re starting to be some really progressive policies about the Amazon enacted. And some indigenous ecofeminists have been elected into the Brazilian cabinet. It’s exciting. We don’t think about that enough.

So, yeah. I would say, tell those stories. And, as a writer and as a researcher, figure out how we can crack this, and spread the good news if you can.

RG: Last question for me, and then, if you want to read a little bit more …

So, one of the main things I took away from your book is how much fear of the mirror world shapes our own approach to truth and to our own politics — justified, I think, fear — which then ends up linking the things that we believe, with our tribe, with our partisan politics. And you become unable, then … You end up with a situation where things that don’t have any obvious partisan valence take one on.

Like, I understand why most progressives say the minimum wage should be higher, and conservatives say there should be no minimum wage. Like, that makes ideological sense. It doesn’t make ideological sense to talk about COVID origins. That doesn’t fit into a partisan [valence]. Or what you wrote about with potential complications that the virus produces during pregnancy or during a menstrual cycle. Like, that shouldn’t have anything to do with partisan politics. Yet, it did.

On the vaccine, for instance, as it became increasingly clear that it wasn’t stopping the spread, it was impossible for Democrats to talk about that. And I feel like the fear that you write about in your book, it helps to explain that. So, how can people break out of that, so that they don’t continue to produce the monsters in the mirror world?

NK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that what’s really dangerous about these figures, to me — Bannon, Malone — is the way they’re kind of mixing and matching these very, very dangerous scapegoat policies of various kinds with these issues that are not, traditionally, issues for the right, and that have a lot of potency. And so, I think the most important thing we can do is reclaim those issues, because they’re only available to be picked up if we’re not using them to full effect, right? I mean they can use them but it won’t have the same kind of power of truth-telling that it’s having at the moment. So, I think that is incredibly important work.

I think, as a journalist, there just needs to be a little bit of just doing our jobs, right? I think people can handle more complexity than we sometimes give them credit for. So, you can say that there are some adverse reactions to vaccines, and people can still make an educated decision about it. And if you don’t, then they’re going to go do their own research, and they’re going to end up in the arms of some people who are really, really untrustworthy.

What you were referencing around vaccines and pregnancy, it’s incredibly important for pregnant women to be vaccinated, because your immune system is suppressed when you are pregnant, because your body needs not to reject the fetus. And so, if you get COVID when you’re pregnant, there’s a really good chance you’ll get quite sick. This was not really explained, it was just sort of treated like, “oh, what a ridiculous idea, people…” You know?

And so, I think just doing some basic education and also explaining … And also just treating people a little more kindly. Like, that’s a really legitimate question. I was afraid of everything when I was pregnant. I was afraid of eating soft cheese when I was pregnant, so I can understand why people were afraid of these vaccines. And I think it was honestly a failure of scientific communication that that sort of simple fact was not explained properly, but I just saw a lot of mocking of people who had those concerns, and I think a lot of people were pushed into… They were suddenly getting their advice from Instagram momfluencers, and that was super bad, you know?

RG: Do you want to finish with a [reading]?

NK: I’ll do one last reading. Maybe I’ll just stay here if that’s okay. Storytime. Doppelganger storytime.

So, a lot of the book is about the way we avoid looking at the shadowlands, because we’re implicated in them. And I quote this wonderful British writer named Daisy Hillyard, who has a different kind of take on doppelgangers. And she talks about something called “the second body.” And what she says is that we all have two bodies. We have the body that we’re in right now, which we’re aware of, right? But there is also another body that is out there in the world doing our bidding, and that body is implicated in oil wars, and drone warfare, and extinctions, just because we are all in this system. Not because we like it, but because we are just all in it.

And that second body, that reality, that is us, too. Like, that is our tax dollars, that is our purchasing decisions, that’s us. It’s so, so hard to hold, and we throw up all of these projections and distractions, including putting so much work into perfecting ourselves, our brands, our bodies, our families, that we don’t really have much time left for the collective work that really is our only hope.

So, the last chapter is called “Unselfing.”

NK (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): James Baldwin, speaking about the double projected onto him as a Black man in the United States observed that it had everything to do with a person doing the projecting. What was a white man seeing when he saw Baldwin? It wasn’t me, he said. It was something he didn’t want to see. And do you know what that was? It was, ultimately, yes, his own death, or call it, trouble. Trouble is an excellent metaphor for death.

So many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death or trouble, and death feels awfully close these days. As close as a fentanyl-laced pill, a heat dome, a hate crime, an intake of virally loaded breath. Much closer for some than for others, as usual, but not far enough, I suspect, for anyone’s comfort.

So how do we stop averting our gaze? How do we face our second bodies and our mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them? What would it take to stop running? To know, really know, what we already know.

Some of the climate scientists whose work I most respect have come around to an understanding that there is an intimate relationship between our overinflated selves and our under-cared-for planet. Charlie Varon, a legendary coral scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the Great Barrier Reef, now in its death throes, describes the journey of his life as one of decentering himself so that he has the headspace to truly see other life forms, human and non-human alike.

It was a hard-won lesson, which began with losing his young daughter, Fiona Ornone, to drowning. Leveled by personal and ecological grief, he aspires now to dissolve into the reef he studies, to, quote, “Feel like coral, or a fish.” This recalls the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s description of observing something beautiful, whether a bird or a painting, as an occasion for unselfing.

Varon’s humbling journey to unselfing may well hold a key to our collective survival, because it means that our role here on Earth is not simply to maximize the advantage of our lives, it’s to maximize, protect, regenerate all of life. We are here not just to make sure we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives. Not to chase clout, but to chase life.

This is something else we might choose to learn from our double walkers. The idea that each one of us has a lookalike walking around somewhere means that no one is quite as special or unique as we might have imagined ourselves to be. Within capitalism’s hall of mirrors, this revelation tends to be told as a horror story, as embodied by Jesse Eisenberg’s character in The Double, the one who whimpers, “I’d like to think I’m pretty unique.” This is the must-kill, must-stab, must-be-the-last-me-standing response to doppelgangers that threads its way through Western literature, film, and monotheistic religion. But there is also the option of viewing our doubles the way fake Philip Roth does in “Operation Shylock.” Hooray! I’m not alone in this cruel world.

Because we are not alone, at least not as alone as it can feel. Connections and solidarities and kinships are available to all of us should we choose to guard the boundaries of ourselves less jealously. We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us, and we are still connected to them. Some aren’t even human. Some are coral, some are whales, and they are there to connect with, if we can get out of our own way for long enough.

To be clear, I’m not planning to embrace my doppelganger as a long-lost relative. But doppelgangers, by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty, can help teach us this lesson, that we are not as separate from one another as we might think. Not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who have been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal duels.

It’s the same lesson the pandemic tried to teach us in those early days. No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another. Self-involvement, however it manifests — my doppelganger’s megalomania, my various neuroses, your fill-in-the-blanks — is a story in which the self takes up too much space, just as the story of Judeo Christian Western civilization puts the human, (read: white male powerful human) at the center of the story of life on this planet, with all of it created for our species.

None of it is true. Whether we are loving ourselves too much or loathing ourselves too much, or, more likely, doing both, we’re still at the center of every story, we’re still blotting out the sun. All of which is why, over the course of this now-concluding journey, I have come to embrace Naomi confusion as an unconventional Buddhist exercise. I could never quite get the hang of non-attachment before this but, I think, thanks to her, I have.

[Audience clapping.]

NK: Thank you, Ryan.

RG: Thank you, Naomi.

NK: That was fun. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.

RG: Thank you so much for doing this, and congratulations on the book.

NK: Thank you so much, Ryan. It was so fun. Listen to Deconstructed!

[Deconstructed end-show theme music.]

RG: That was Naomi Klein, and that’s our show. Her latest book is Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was engineered by Lena Moreno, and technical coordination by Cory Choy of Silver Sound. And special thanks to Politics and Prose in GW. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or review, it helps people find the show.

If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or at Ryan.Grim@theintercept.com. Put “Deconstructed” in the subject line; otherwise, we might miss your message.

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and “the Mirror World” appeared first on The Intercept.

If your anger at Fox News is directed toward Tucker Carlson, you’re focusing on the symptom rather than the cause of what’s wrong. It is the Murdoch family, which owns Fox News, that’s the biggest advocate in America for the “great replacement theory.”

It’s right to be furious about Carlson espousing the racist conspiracy theory that inspired a white supremacist to kill 10 people in Buffalo last weekend, but Carlson serves at the pleasure of Rupert Murdoch and his heirs. Even if popular pressure forced Carlson off the air, the Murdochs would just find or create another racist host to take his place, probably a worse one. (They’ve done it before.) That’s why we need to focus on the Murdoch family, on its base of support in corporate America, and ask a simple question: Shouldn’t the Murdochs become the next Sacklers?

The decisive role of the Murdochs was emphasized this week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who implored them to cease platforming “great replacement” lies. “For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote in a letter to Rupert Murdoch, his eldest son Lachlan, and two Fox News executives. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”

In other words, the Murdochs are Stormfront with clout.

Due to public pressure, most major advertisers have pulled away from Carlson in recent years, and other programs on Fox News are heading in that direction. But it doesn’t really matter: The network derives most of its income from cable providers that pay generous fees to carry it. Comcast and other cable companies do not think twice about pouring nearly $2 billion a year into a pseudo news operation that’s been described as a “hate-for-profit racket.” So long as there’s not too much of a stink — which a campaign called #UnFoxMyCableBox is aiming to create — cable providers do not mind enriching a family whose marketing of intellectual poison remains an attractive business proposition.

The Murdochs have adopted an ancient strategy associated with money launderers and bootleggers who do not wish to live in the shadows: They surround their objectionable endeavors with reputable ones. Challenges to their propriety are diminished by the legitimate things they actually do and the upstanding associates they really have. The Murdochs, for instance, possess an array of valuable assets in the U.S. that include a network of TV stations that broadcast sports and entertainment programs. This gives the family a loyal army of bankers, producers, actors, sports stars, and journalists who are willing to see them as they wish to be seen and uninterested in asking about those other things they do with their money and time.

Just last week, Lachlan Murdoch, who runs the family’s sprawling empire on a day-to-day basis (Rupert is 91 years old), had a friendly earnings call with a group of Wall Street analysts. The softball financial questions from the representatives of Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America steered miles away from the political untidiness at Fox News. Nobody asked why Lachlan, when Carlson breaks another taboo, responds by texting or calling his favorite host to let him know the family is behind him all the way.

On Monday, Lachlan was back in the establishment’s kind embrace, this time with advertising executives and media buyers who were attending the “upfront” presentations of his family’s U.S. broadcast units: Fox Entertainment, Fox Sports, and Fox News. Lachlan, according to Variety, was dressed in sneakers and watched as his management team outlined their offerings for the coming year, including the next Super Bowl and World Cup, as well as entertainment programs featuring, among others, actors Jon Hamm and Susan Sarandon. The presentation about Fox News made no mention of the network spreading the idea that white Americans are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants, and Carlson’s name was not uttered once.

The inevitable truth is that corporate America loves the Murdochs. Powerful executives who would leave a room if Alex Jones or Steve Bannon presented himself are delighted to have a moment with Rupert or Lachlan.

Hollywood and the Murdochs

Is there any way to disconnect corporate America from the family that operates the “central node” of the far-right conspiracy machine?

Reader, I have mused about this a lot. Again and again. Perhaps too much. In fact, maybe I have a problem. But the dilemma of Fox News and the Murdochs does not go away, it just gets worse. Government action is not the answer, as the protections of the First Amendment exist for good reason. The key question, in my mind, isn’t whether the government should allow the Murdochs to operate a racist cable network — they have that right — it’s whether major corporations should line up to do business with them.

The prospects are not good for a change of heart in corporate America. For instance, it’s impossible to imagine that Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner who is paid $63 million a year by billionaire team owners to make as much money for them as possible, will suddenly decide to pull the plug on the league’s lucrative $2.3 billion-a-year contract with Fox Sports. Goodell, remember, is the man who had no problem with the banishment of quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people.

But let’s think creatively. Fox Corp., the parent company of the Murdochs’ networks in the U.S., is a shareholder-owned firm in which the Murdochs have a controlling stake. What would happen to the share price if NFL players or their union spoke out against the owners of Fox Sports and called for the league to not renew its broadcast rights (which unfortunately don’t expire for a number of years)? Alas, there’s a tremendous disincentive for players to criticize the Murdochs, because they could forget about ever being hired by Fox Sports as a commentator after they retire. And Goodell might be tempted to allow the Kaepernick treatment for any dissidents, meaning that their playing careers could be in jeopardy too. So this thought experiment isn’t encouraging.

Balance sheets do not have line items for doing the right thing by turning against the first family of “great replacement.”

How about the Murdochs in Hollywood? The major companies that will no longer put their ads on Fox News are glad to have their wares advertised on Fox television shows like “The Simpsons.” Corporations respond to consumers, and while consumers punish them for supporting political programs on Fox News, that’s not the case for sponsoring “The Masked Singer” on Fox TV. Absent consumer pressure, there’s no market-driven reason for any company to withdraw its ads from, say, “The Cleaning Lady.” Balance sheets do not have line items for doing the right thing by turning against the first family of “great replacement.”

What about the creative talent? While Hollywood proclaims itself to be devoutly anti-racist, there’s little sign that the enlightened writers, actors, and producers who create Murdoch’s entertainment programs are having second thoughts about who they work for. Susan Sarandon, famous for her political activism, was on the upfronts stage last week to promote her new Fox show and did not, in front of Lachlan Murdoch, seize the moment to pull a Nan Goldin.

Goldin is an art photographer who set off a dramatic wave of protests against the Sackler family — the owners of the pharmaceutical company that flooded the U.S. with the addictive painkiller OxyContin. Goldin became addicted to opioids after OxyContin was prescribed for her tendonitis, and in 2018 she led a now-famous protest at the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which she and other activists threw prescription bottles into a reflecting pool and shouted “Sacklers lie, people die!” Those protests came amid a wave of lawsuits that recently culminated with a settlement in which the Sackler family agreed to pay as much as $6 billion to communities harmed by the opioid epidemic and transfer ownership of Purdue Pharma. The family’s name has been taken down from the Met and other museums.

Lawsuits against the Murdochs have not gotten far because the First Amendment offers broad protections for news organizations and individuals in ways that no constitutional provision or law protects a pharmaceutical company. Proving direct harm from an opiate is far easier in a court of law than proving direct harm from a broadcast. There are exceptions, but they are narrow. While the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been sued into bankruptcy for saying the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that’s because he was accused of defamation — making false statements about the parents of the slain students and causing them damage.

You never know what a bit of protesting might do, however. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find examples of anyone in the television business, even people who don’t currently work on Fox shows, protesting against the Murdochs in a consistent and public way. It’s a pattern that seems to affirm the silencing effect, in itinerant Hollywood, of not knowing who will sign your next paycheck. Though one exception is Judd Apatow, the prolific director and writer who for years has been drilling holes into the family Murdoch.

Sure people in the administration will quit. Who will show some honor and quit working for @FoxNews ? Who will stop working for Lachlan Murdoch and the people who monetize division, racism, corruption, bad covid information which kills and treason?They helped create all of this.

— Judd Apatow ?? (@JuddApatow) January 7, 2021

Reporting the Murdochs

There’s been extensive discussion in the media about needing to cover the GOP as an extremist entity that threatens democracy rather than as a standard political party. The same discussion should probably be raised about Fox and the Murdochs. Should they be covered as something other than a conservative news outlet with a cranky proprietor who enjoys watching his children battle each other for his attention and love? If so, what would that mean?

For a long time, news organizations have treated the Murdochs with generosity and indulgence, as a tale of financial success and succession intrigue. I’m not referring just to the usual suspects of CNBC and MarketWatch, but also the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. Just watch this 2018 public interview of Lachlan Murdoch by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin and try not to cringe at Sorkin’s knee-bending solicitude. The only remotely tough question came during the audience Q&A from a New Yorker reporter.

The Times has improved in the past few years, starting with an excellent series in 2019 that was headlined “How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World.” In April, the Times published another lengthy investigation, “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” But this kind of hard-nosed criticism remains patchy. In March, the Times published a puff piece about Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son. The article, “How a Murdoch Hopes to Save American Democracy,” was more than 1,300 words of fluff about a supposedly centrist member of the Murdoch clan donating to nonpartisan causes. It neglected to mention that Kathryn Murdoch has never really criticized Fox News — the closest she has come is saying on Twitter that she agreed with a tweet in which Jake Tapper urged the Murdochs and Fox to put country before profits — and it failed to note that her husband played a loyal and key role in the family empire, stepping aside in 2020 mainly because his father finally chose Lachlan as second-in-command.

One of the lessons of the past few years is that journalists need to call things by their names, and that means, when covering Fox News, naming not just the hosts who mouth the words that inspire violence, but the family that approves of these words and pays for them to be spread from coast to coast. This is a drum I’ve been banging for a long time, and while the coverage of the Murdochs has improved, it has a ways to go. In an otherwise acceptable news story this week about the conservative media’s embrace of “great replacement” ideas, the Washington Post mentioned Tucker Carlson 15 times — but did not once mention the Murdochs.

Update: May 24, 2022
This story has been updated to include a tweet that a representative of Kathryn Murdoch, asked for comment before this story published, brought to The Intercept’s attention after publication.

The post After Buffalo, Will Corporate America Turn Against the Murdochs and Fox News? appeared first on The Intercept.

Following President Joe Biden’s press conference Wednesday afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez spoke with The Intercept to elaborate on her critique of the state party and discuss the role of abortion and the youth vote in the midterms, Ukraine, and the political distinction between unemployment and inflation. 

An unedited (except for ums and such) transcript of part one of the Q&A is below. Part two, on the evolution of the left and her relationship to it, is here.

Ryan Grim: What did you make of Biden’s press conference?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I mean, I was able to catch the beginning of it, I think most of it. But I think it was smart for him to come out right away and to really continue and formalize what was already emerging as the narrative, which is that this was, despite Republicans potentially taking back the House by a very slim margin, to really cement this as a Democratic victory and not a Republican one. I think it was smart to do that. And I think it was quite notable that he mentioned young people and the climate crisis and youth turnout. I think it was just a smart thing to do in order to frame, overall, some of what we saw.

RG: Because of that big polling miss, it makes it easier for him to do that. But I’m curious if you think Democrats could have done better. What could they have done differently to make it an even better night?

AOC: Well, New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map. I have a front-row seat to what was going on here, so I think it’s natural for me to gravitate towards that. But I think even nationally, what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide; I think that a lot of these races were much more uphill than what we saw in other places. I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York State. And so I think we definitely could have done better there. And I think that that’s kind of like the glaring hole in where we did not perform as strongly as other areas in the map did.

RG: What were those key differences, you think between the way they were run in New York and elsewhere?

“[New York Democrats] ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund, which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying.”

AOC: I think policing was a big one. I think the choice among certain Democrats to validate Republican narratives and amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it — validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was, you know, other key and top priorities.

I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund, which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives. So I think that was one prime mistake.

And I think another prime mistake is that in New York State, I think that — Cuomo may be gone, but his entire infrastructure, much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganized, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organizing across the state. And so when that languishes and there’s very little organizing happening, yeah, I mean, basically, you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into. And so I actually think a lot of these Republican games aren’t necessarily as strong as they may seem, I think it’s really from an absence. And it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York State Democratic Party.

“Cuomo may be gone, but his entire infrastructure, much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there.”

We saw that with India Walton. We saw loud and clear there were a lot of canaries in the coal mine from the state ballot initiative. I mean, Jay Jacobs [the New York State Democratic Committee chair] — Republicans put millions of dollars into defeating the redistricting ballot measure last year that would have protected the map, that would have put us ahead. And so I really believe that we would have won Democratic seats, potentially gained Democratic seats in New York State, but Republicans put millions of dollars against this ballot measure, they organized against it, and the New York State Democratic Party didn’t drop $1 in making sure that we got this thing passed. And this was in an off-year election, this was in 2021. We could have done this. And the fact that that happened, and there still was no implication for the state [party], and for state party leadership. A lot of this was really about these calcified political machines being asleep at the wheel, and there being a complete lack of desire to hold any of it accountable.

RG: And you called for Jay Jacobs to resign. What leverage do you and other progressives in the state have to make that happen? Is there anything being done organizationally to push that? What kind of structure would you see replacing the structure of the former Cuomo folks?

AOC: Well, I think, right now, the New York State Democratic Party, the way that it is currently structured, is very reliant on the governor. And I think that between Cuomo resigning late last year, Hochul then very unexpectedly taking the gubernatorial seat, then immediately dealing with a natural disaster, having to contend with a potential primary and then a general, I don’t really think that there’s been as much breathing room to address that issue in that whole environment.

But it’s very clear that the New York State Democratic Party was designed under Cuomo to be very reliant on the governor’s seat; the governor very much determines who the state party chair is, etc. And I think that, given how progressives really organized and helped deliver that margin, I think that there very much is room for a conversation to be held here about how we can restructure how the party is selected and established in perhaps a more decentralized way, or perhaps in a more democratic way, that is more representative of communities and more encouraging of engagement across the state — and less meddling, to be frank. Because these little cuts really do build up, whether it was the failure on the ballot initiative, whether it was the refusal to recognize and respect when progressive candidates do win democratic nominations outright that the party doesn’t work against its own nominees, which is what happened at Buffalo.

You know, I can say: I’ve been in Congress for four years, I have never had a conversation with the New York State Democratic Party chair ever. In fact, he’s done nothing but attack progressive Democrats all across the state. What he has done is created an environment where the only, quote unquote, or the main, quote unquote, legitimate Democratic candidates worthy of support are those who fight both progressives and Republicans, which is clearly not a winning strategy, especially not in the state of New York. And so when he has invested so much energy into demoralizing the grassroots and making sure that a lot of this grassroots energy gets busted up all across the state, of course we’re going to see these margins swing towards Republicans.

And so I think there really is something to be said here about a change in leadership and a change in structure of the state party, because this was really — I mean, when, in 2018, when Cuomo was running against Cynthia Nixon, the state convention first of all didn’t even invite really any progressives that were there, even after my I won my primary. But beyond that, it voted to endorse Cuomo by a margin of something like 97 percent, which is nowhere near what the primary was; it was like a banana republic. And so it really just solely exists to just reaffirm the image of the governor, as opposed to actually investing in infrastructure that promotes democratic organizing.

A lot of it is also driven by big money. And both the real estate and charter lobbies invest very heavily and have an enormous amount of influence in terms of what candidates get Democratic support in the state and which ones don’t. But I think that even if there’s no movement on the state party, I think their neglect has created enough space for there to be alternative structures to pop up. And some already have, like, if you look at NYPAN, the New York Progressive Action Network, they were kind of an offshoot of the Our Revolution chapters that cropped up all across New York state, but they’ve actually retained their infrastructure, and they’ve continue to remain active across the state. I think that NYPAN’s organizing is very ripe to fill the role that the state Democratic Party has left vacant if we don’t reform it in a more serious way.

RG: And one of the key players in that kind of real estate/charter school/state party apparatus that you talked about is [House Democratic Caucus Chair] Hakeem Jeffries. Do you think that there ought to be a reckoning for what his role is in this? It looks like he’s going to make a bid for party leader if Pelosi steps down. What do you think the repercussions are of how New York played out for that?

AOC: Well, you know, I think what we should really do is — I think there are quite a few figures who really affirmed and really pushed this playbook. And it’s not even just this year. I think there has been a multiyear strategy to try — it’s essentially been a campaign within the Democratic Party — to undermine progressive politics and try to mischaracterize it as toxic. And I think a continued insistence on that is going to hurt the party. Because I think one of the big things that we learned last night is that not only is it not true, but that candidates who refuse to overcompensate and overly tack right were actually rewarded for sticking to their values, and while doing their best to represent their communities.

“There has been a multiyear strategy to try — it’s essentially been a campaign within the Democratic Party — to undermine progressive politics and try to mischaracterize it as toxic.”

I personally do think that there should be a political cost to being heavily backed by big money. That, to me, is just a primary concern. And regardless of who it is in this discussion about generational change in the Democratic Party, I think we also need to be looking at donor bases. And we shouldn’t be shifting in a direction where the party or our party leadership becomes even more dependent on large donors and corporate backers, not less dependent, especially in a time when more Democrats are being elected independent of that and where the infrastructure for small-dollar fundraising has only grown and become more vibrant.

So I do hope that there really is reflection on some of the strategies that went awry in New York, and how that was different from other places in the country. And I do hope that there is a reflection on being outwardly antagonistic towards a very enthused progressive base, especially one in which young people delivered these wins. If you look at the difference between Tim Ryan and John Fetterman, as races, some of the preliminary data is suggesting that they had the same turnout in almost every demographic except young people. And as we know, young people skew way progressive within the party. And so when you outwardly antagonize, and outwardly seek to belittle and distance oneself from progressive values, you demoralize your base. I think there’s gonna be a lot more of that analysis as more data rolls in. But it’s not to say that everybody has to be holding the same line on progressive causes dependent on their community. But it doesn’t — I do think that this is a signal that being outwardly antagonistic, including trying to defeat progressive candidates, trying to demoralize those bases, is not healthy for the prospect of democratic gains.

RG: The election did offer a clear mandate for abortion rights, not just the House and Senate races, but in every state it was on the ballot. Yeah, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan, California, Vermont — the pro choice side won. So what do you think Democrats can do with that mandate? You know, just saying like, “Vote again and vote harder in 2024” can’t really be all there is. What should Biden do? What should Congress do with this new mandate?

AOC: Depending on how slim this margin is, if Democrats are somehow able to eke this out with a one or two seat — a similar margin that we’ve had — I think we need to go all out: We need to codify Roe v. Wade. If we’re able to pick up our Senate margin, then we deliver on the things that we weren’t able to deliver before. I think we try again on a $15 minimum wage. I think we codify Roe v. Wade, I think we go for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, I think we go all out on the litany of legislation that was stalled by [Sens. Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema. And I think it’s a very unique opportunity for us to do that in a very big way.

Now, if the Republican caucus, it ekes this out with a very narrow margin — which some folks are saying may be the case — if that is the case, I think we take advantage of the disorganization of the Republican caucus. I do not believe that Kevin McCarthy is a strong leader whatsoever. And I think we inflict a lot of pain on this. And either it becomes enough of a liability with them that they have to let something through because they’re just getting killed on this issue, or they lose in two years.

But on top of that, I also think that the results of tonight or last night do give Biden actually a bit of a strengthened mandate, in that I believe that the message from the electorate was very clear. And I think that over the last two years, there has been a lot of self doubt about how far to go.

“We learned an economic lesson, which is that full employment is politically stronger than inflation.”

And I think we learned an economic lesson, which is that full employment is politically stronger than inflation, as opposed to when we were in the situation under Obama, where they tried the other tack and unemployment was punished much more severely. And so I think we learned that economic message on employment. I think we learned [the value of] a very strong message on abortion. And whether that means Biden leaning into his pen a little bit more on executive orders and other tools at his disposal, I think that that’s going to be very important, including the bully pulpit.

And I also think that there was very strong implications around public safety that, like, once and for all, after two years of the party insulting criminal justice organizers, accusing them of sloganeering [and] of trying to out the conservatives on this issue — I actually do believe that there was a very clear message here that the American electorate understands that the conversation about public safety extends beyond policing. And that it also includes many other issues as well.

Because it’s like what we say back home. We were able to communicate to our electorate, you know, are we here to talk about police? Or are we here to talk about bringing down crime? Because those are two different conversations. And I actually think that that’s starting to sink in for people more that this is not about rejecting safety. But this is about actually solving the problem and using evidence-based approaches to tackle this problem. And so I don’t think we run away from these things anymore, and I don’t think we run away against health care writ large. I think, depending on what happens with the House, if we have the opportunity, we also need to strike the Hyde Amendment as well. And I think that that’s going to be increasingly important. And if we retain the Senate, and even if the House goes towards Republicans, given the very narrow margin of Republican victories, they too are also going to have to negotiate, they too are also going to have to compromise. And I think that they are in a much weaker position as a party, which means they have more to concede — not us. And we can stand in that in that confidence, in that power a little bit more.

RG: Picking up on that point a bit more, when you’re talking about inflicting pain on McCarthy, or on the Republicans. Are you thinking discharge petition on Roe? Because, like, you’ll probably have at least 210 members?

AOC: Yeah, I think discharge petition is an excellent vehicle. I do think that using rules is going to be quite important. I know that that’s going to be subject to negotiation within the Republican caucus as well. This is something that they’ve already started to use as a lever. And so part of me doesn’t want to — I want to make sure that we’re navigating this carefully. Because, like, motions to recommit, once one party kind of messes with it, it could create a precedent. And so I would be concerned if they did something like try to blow up the process of discharge petitions, because it’s such an essential part of our of our procedures. And they use them as well. They use discharge petitions as well, they’re not always successful, but it is a mechanism.

RG: Speaking of discharge petitions, on the stock trading ban, you had pushed a discharge petition, and then withdrew it after Pelosi promised to bring that to the floor. I’m sure you saw [Virginia Rep.] Elaine Luria, looks like [Iowa Rep.] Cindy Axne is trailing; both of them were kind of like public defenders of congressional stock trading and just got hammered for it during their campaigns. Do you think it was a mistake to withdraw that, and where is that fight now?

AOC: I’m trying to remember when this happened, I believe it was early summer when this happened. And so when I filed the discharge petition, for me, I felt like it was important to file it because it felt clear to me that leadership was trying to — or it just felt clear to me that there was just a lot of slow walking around this. And I felt like there was just kind of a hope that this was just gonna try to disappear into the background. And I just filed my discharge petition in an attempt to get this thing going again. And as far as that happened, it was successful, we were able to get leadership to move on this.

I think that there were some of these negotiations that were happening in good faith and not only when we filed the discharge petition, because the thing is, that petition was filed for my bill with [Reps. Joe] Neguse and [Raja] Krishnamoorthi. But we do have a broader coalition of people who support the concept in general, but there are many different kinds of proposals that are out there. And so I had concerns that it wouldn’t be successful without the other folks in that coalition on board, because we really needed like everybody to sign this thing in order for us to get to this vote.

And so I think that just what the discharge petition was successful in was was getting leadership to take this seriously, get momentum for it, but I also think that it was helpful in bringing this coalition together. We were able to do that press conference, but not only that, we were also able to come together and really start negotiating much more seriously on what a piece of compromise legislation among all of us with different proposals looks like.

When we actually came to that in early fall, that was when leadership announced their bill, frankly, without consultation with anybody in that coalition. And that was very shortly before we recessed it; it was just like a week or two before we recessed. So whether it was a mistake or not to withdraw it? I’m not sure. I think there were definitely some positives to it. And I certainly reserve my right to do it again. Because I do think there’s a point where we are running out the clock here, and we need to get this thing done. It will not happen under a Republican Congress, that’s for sure.

RG: And Democrats also hammered progressives for that [Congressional Progressive Caucus] letter encouraging the pursuit of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, you know, saying that like doing it right before the election would end up hurting Democrats. That letter, as you know, that was retracted. You never commented on that, on whether you still stood by it. And you and other progressives have been criticized for not laying out your thinking on kind of what the progressive position ought to be when it comes to this war. I don’t know if you saw this, but Russia just announced it’s withdrawing from Kherson, which is a massive defeat for them. But so why hasn’t there been more of a progressive voice on the debate over war funding? And what’s your thinking on what the U.S. approach should be now?

AOC: Well, to be clear, both the decision to publish that letter at that time and withdraw that letter at that time were decisions that we were not made privy to. But in terms of the content of the letter — like timing aside, in terms of the content of the letter — I believe that a lot of it is quite consistent with what we’ve also been hearing from former Obama administration officials, the Biden administration, and now even recently, there have also been, I believe, some developments coming out of Ukraine, indicating an openness to negotiate under certain preconditions. And I believe that progressives have always advocated to leaning on diplomatic solutions, we should continue to lean on that.

I think that the large asterisk is: Will Russia, is Russia, how can we bring Russia to the table without compromising Ukrainian sovereignty and just core principles of self determination? But that is really what the landscape of diplomacy is about. And even when Obama was on “Pod Save America” several weeks ago, he discussed about how, at this present time, diplomatic relations are likely worse than they may have been almost at any point during the Cold War, which is a very dangerous place to be. And so the reaction to the publication of this letter, I think, continues to be a bit overblown. And I think that there’s almost a — it’s almost like people are looking for a problem, where there really I don’t think is any intent for there to be one. I also think that it’s quite consistent with what we’ve been hearing from, frankly, the Biden administration, former Obama administration officials, and even certain Ukrainian officials. And now when it comes to that recent development on Russia, I do believe that there’s some skepticism that we’re hearing from Ukrainian officials about whether that is — the genuineness or authenticity of good faith that that announcement was made, but you know, I think that’s something that we will soon see play out.

RG: Back on that point about making some pain for Republicans on abortion rights, if you do end up losing those seats in New York, probably a lot of them are going to be uncomfortable with the Republican position and politically vulnerable around it. Yet they do feel pretty confident saying that they’re against [the Women’s Health Protection Act] because they caricature it as, you know, you’re killing babies right before birth. But WHPA does go beyond codifying Roe v. Wade, so where do you come down on the question of trying to get get the codification of Roe into law versus holding out for the kind of maximalist WHPA legislation?

AOC: Well, you know, I think when it comes to something like WHPA, I think that a lot of this is just about messaging. And so, Roe, I think in public imagination, I believe that what Roe really stands for and what people really see as Roe is, is a woman or person’s ability to have bodily autonomy and make these decisions between them and their doctor. And Republicans, where they tried to go in against WHPA is by trying to slice and dice and make these questions about 15 weeks or 20 weeks or 30 weeks. And I think for a very long time, people have kind of run away from that fight. I don’t think that we need to litigate number of weeks. I think, if anything in the aftermath of Roe, there have been an enormous amount of conversations about the enormous amount of circumstances in which this is not applying to this kind of myth of third-trimester elective abortions where, like, there’s nothing else that’s wrong.

I think that when we try to, like, really bring this down and campaign on WHPA, I think we do ourselves a disservice. I think we can remain focused on the overall principle here, which is people should be able to make these decisions between themselves and their doctor. I mean, I know people who have been in situations where they are, they are in like late second, sometimes even early third trimester and horrifying complications arise. And the procedure to save the mother’s life is known as an abortion, even though the fetus was not viable. And so, you know, I think especially in places like Westchester County, we can make this an issue, we just need to actually make it an issue. And we need real organizing happening in communities like these, but I don’t think we need — I don’t think we’re at the place of concession on that. Because I just don’t think that we’ve tried. I don’t think we’ve exhausted our options here by any means.

RG: And any thoughts of anybody in the progressive wing running for leadership?

“That’s a Herculean feat, for us to be able to pass the legislation that we did with the margins that we had.”

AOC: I don’t know because there’s still a lot of question marks that I don’t know what a lot of these leadership races may look like. I still think that there’s questions about what’s even going to happen in terms of transitions. Like, I don’t think that any of that has really been made clear yet. That may also be a result of the fact that we don’t know what the final tally is. I think there are going to be different considerations where if we end up eking this thing out with a one or two seat majority, not too dissimilar from the three or four seat majority that we had dealt with.

I think people are going to prioritize different characteristics and leadership. I think that the value and the ability to hold this caucus together and organize it, that’s a Herculean feat, for us to be able to pass the legislation that we did with the margins that we had. It’s really quite unbelievable. And so if we are in the majority again, with that very small margin, I think there’s going to be a focus on making sure that we have someone that can really retain that ability. But if we’re the minority, I think people may prioritize different kinds of skill sets to navigating being an opposition party in the minority, and so I’m not too sure yet, I think all these races being called are going to have an impact on what direction people go in, and whether they decide to run for things or not as well.

The post AOC: The New York State Democratic Party’s Corruption May Have Cost Democrats the House appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, Democrats miraculously avoided the sort of major rout at the polls normally associated with a new president’s first midterms. Most surprisingly, Democrats still have a narrow path to maintain control of the House of Representatives if a few outstanding races swing their way. That path would be even wider if not for a disappointing set of losses in New York. Ryan Grim speaks with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, about what went wrong in the state.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: It’s Saturday. And as you may have heard, there were midterm elections back on Tuesday. And we still don’t know who’s going to control the House of Representatives.

Democrats — still — shockingly, have a very narrow path to maintain their majority in the House. If you want to check in over the weekend on how a few key races are going, the ones that will decide the fate of the House of Representatives, pause this and go get a pen.

Here are the races to watch: Democrats need to win just four of the following elections. The longest shot that’s still possible is California 27. That’s Mike Garcia versus Democrat Christy Smith. The DCCC left her for dead — and even worked against her during the primary, and she’s down by just 16,000 votes. If they break hard enough for her there’s still lots out there to count and she could potentially win.

Then there’s California 45, 22, 3 where the Democrats are all down by less than 10 percent. In Oregon 5, Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner is down just two points with a very narrow path to victory despite the fact that The Oregonian has called that race. We’ll talk about her race in a moment with the head of the Working Families Party, Maurice Mitchell, whose organization did the lion’s share of the work on her behalf.

In Arizona’s 6th District — that’s Tucson and southeast Arizona — Democrats are behind by just two points with a lot left to go.

In Syracuse, that’s New York’s 22nd District, Democrats are down 1.5 points. Now, back in California, two races are within a point and very much winnable for Democrats. That’s California 41 and 13. And then, of course, there’s Lauren Boebert, the MAGA of all MAGAs, who is up roughly 1,000 votes and probably going to a recount in Colorado.

So if they win four of those and hold all the ones that they currently lead, they will have a 218 to 217 margin.

Now the painful part for Democrats is that if they hadn’t done so badly in New York, they’d have an even easier path to the majority. Democrats started the race with an 11-seat margin in New York. But next session, it’ll be down to just a four-seat margin if they lose the last race still being counted, as it looks like they probably will.

Now, this week, I asked Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez what she made of the disaster that was New York State:

Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I mean, New York, I think, is the glaring aberration. And what we see in this map. I mean, [laughs] I have a front-row seat to what was going on here. So I think it’s natural for me to gravitate towards that. But I think even nationally, what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide. And I think that that’s kind of like the glaring hole in where we did not perform as strongly as other areas on the map did.

RG: What were those key differences, do you think, between the way they were run in New York and elsewhere?

AOC: I think policing was a big one. I think the choice among certain Democrats to validate Republican narratives and amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it, validating these narratives, actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races is that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was, you know, other key and top priorities. I think Democrats in New York did a couple of things: They ran ads that were explicitly very anti-defund, which only served to re-invoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. And then even what we see is that if we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund. You really talk about it in the frame of what we do on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective electorally without having to lean into Republican narratives. I think that was one prime mistake.

And I think another prime mistake is that in New York State, Cuomo may be gone, but his entire infrastructure — much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery — that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganized, is sycophantic, it relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be a forming grassroots and state-level organizing across the state. And so when that languishes and there’s very little organizing happening, yeah, I mean, basically, you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into. And so I actually think a lot of these Republican gains aren’t necessarily as strong as they may seem. I think it’s really from an absence. It’s a testament to the corruption that has [been] allowed to continue in the New York State Democratic Party.

I mean, we saw that with India Walton.

RG: Mhmm.

AOC: We saw it loud and clear. There were a lot of canaries in the coal mine from the state ballot initiative. I mean, the Republicans put millions of dollars into defeating the redistricting ballot measure last year that would have protected the map, that would have put us ahead. And so I really believe that we would have won Democratic seats, potentially gained Democratic seats in New York State, but Republicans put millions of dollars against this ballot measure, they organized against it, and the New York State Democratic Party didn’t drop a dollar in making sure that we got this thing passed. And this was in an off-year election! This was in 2021. We could have done this. And the fact that that happened, and there still was no implication for the state, and for state party leadership, I mean, a lot of this was really about these calcified political machines being asleep at the wheel, and there being a complete lack of desire to hold any of it accountable.

RG: And you called for Jay Jacobs to resign? What leverage do you and other progressives in the state have to make that happen? Is there anything being done organizationally, to push that? What kind of structure would you see replacing the structure of the former Cuomo folks?

AOC: Well, I think, right now, the New York state Democratic Party, the way that it is currently structured is very reliant on the governor. And I think that between Cuomo resigning late last year; Hochul, then, very unexpectedly taking the gubernatorial seat, then immediately dealing with a natural disaster, having to contend with a potential primary, and then a general, I just don’t really think that there’s been as much breathing room to address that issue in that whole environment.

But it’s very clear that the New York State Democratic Party was designed under Cuomo to be very reliant on the governor’s seat; like the governor very much determines who the state party chair is, et cetera. And I think that, given how progressives really organized and help deliver that margin, I think that there very much is room for a conversation to be held here about how we can restructure how the party is selected and established in perhaps a more decentralized way, or perhaps in a more democratic way, that is more representative of communities and more encouraging of engagement across the state — and less meddling, to be frank.

Because these little cuts really do build up, whether it was the failure on the ballot initiative, whether it was the refusal to recognize and respect when progressive candidates do win Democratic nominations outright that the party doesn’t work against its own nominees, which is what happened in Buffalo Or I can say, I’ve been in Congress for four years, I have never had a conversation with the New York State Democratic Party chair ever.

RG: Mhmm.

AOC: And, in fact, he’s done nothing but attack progressive Democrats all across the state. And so what he has done is created an environment where the only quote-unquote — or the main quote-unquote, legitimate Democratic candidates worthy of support — are those who fight both progressives and Republicans, which is clearly not a winning strategy, especially not in the state of New York.

And so when he has invested so much energy into demoralizing the grassroots and making sure that a lot of this grassroots energy gets busted up all across the state, of course, we’re going to see these margins swing towards Republicans. And so I think there really is something to be said here about a change in leadership and a change in the structure of the state party — because, I mean, in 2018, when Cuomo was running against Cynthia Nixon, the state convention, first of all, like didn’t even invite really any progressives that were there, even after I won my primary. But beyond that, it voted to endorse Cuomo by a margin, something like 97 percent —

RG: [Laughs.] Mhmm.

AOC: — which is nowhere near what the primary was right. It was like a banana republic.

RG: Mhmm.

AOC: And so it really just solely exists to just reaffirm the image of the governor as opposed to actually investing in infrastructure that promotes Democratic organizing. And so, you know, I think that there’s a lot here; a lot of it is also driven by big money, and both the real estate and charter lobbies invest very heavily and have an enormous amount of influence in terms of what candidates get Democratic support in the state and which ones don’t.

RG: And one of the key players in that kind of real estate-charter school state party apparatus that you’ve talked about is Hakeem Jeffries. Do you think that there ought to be a reckoning for what his role is in this? It looks like he’s going to make a bid for party leader if Pelosi steps down. What do you think the repercussions are of how New York played out for that?

AOC: Well, I think what we should really do is like — I think there are quite a few figures who really affirmed and really pushed this playbook. And it’s not even just this year. I think there has been a multi-year strategy to try — it’s essentially been a campaign within the Democratic Party — to try to undermine progressive politics and try to mischaracterize it as toxic. And I think a continued insistence on that is going to hurt the party.

Because I think one of the big things that we learned last night is that not only is it not true but that candidates who refuse to overcompensate and overly tack right, were actually rewarded for sticking to their values while doing their best to represent their communities.

And so, you know, I personally do think that there should be a political cost to being heavily backed by big money. That, to me, is just a primary concern. And regardless of who it is in this discussion about generational change in the Democratic Party, I think we also need to be looking at donor bases. And we shouldn’t be shifting in a direction where the party or our party leadership becomes even more dependent on large donors and corporate backers, not less dependent, especially in a time when more Democrats are being elected independent of that, and where the infrastructure for small dollar fundraising has only grown and become more vibrant.

So I do hope that there really is reflection on some of the strategies that went awry in New York, and how that was different from other places in the country. And I do hope that there is a reflection on being outwardly antagonistic towards a very enthused progressive base, especially one in which young people delivered these wins.

If you look at the difference between Rep. Tim Ryan and Rep. John Fetterman’s races, some of the preliminary data is suggesting that they had the same turnout in almost every demographic except young people. It’s not to say that everybody has to be holding the same line on progressive causes dependent on their community. But I do think that this is a signal that being outwardly antagonistic — including trying to defeat progressive candidates, trying to demoralize those bases — is not healthy for the prospect of Democratic gains.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: That was AOC. And if you want to read the full Q&A that I did with her, that’s over at theintercept.com.

Now, the Working Families Party, meanwhile, had a hell of a cycle. WFP started out in New York, but it’s been slowly expanding across the country largely playing in local races.

This cycle, they expanded in earnest to the federal level, both House and Senate, and helped usher in a new class of Squad members including Rep. Greg Casar in Austin, Rep. Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, and Rep. Delia Ramirez in Chicago.

Maurice Mitchell is the national director of the Working Families Party, and he joins us now.

Maurice, welcome to Deconstructed. Thanks for joining me.

Maurice Mitchell: It’s good to be here.

RG: So I wanted to talk a lot about New York and the catastrophe that was over there.

MM: Mmm.

RG: But first — it’s Friday afternoon, this will come out Saturday morning. Votes are still coming in, we probably still won’t know when people start listening to this, what the outcome is in the House. And some of that depends on California, some of it depends on Lauren Boebert. Some of it depends on Oregon 5.

I want to zero in really quickly on Oregon 5, which is a race that we covered a bunch, you guys played heavily in. This was where Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a progressive, took on Kurt Schrader, the former chair of the Blue Dogs, who was a very vocal opponent of the Build Back Better agenda, even was one of the few Democrats who was willing to kind of say he was against it.

MM: That’s right.

RG: Rather than play cute and be like: No, no, no, I’m for it. I just would love it to be a little bit different.

Like privately, in a call we obtained with No Labels, he said straight up that he was going to focus on killing it.

MM: That’s right.

RG: So he loses. And now, where are we now?

How did you guys decide to get into that race? And tell us about Oregon 5, where that stands?

MM: Sure. So, I think it’s pretty well-known that progressives formed a legislative united front with the Biden administration to pass Build Back Better. And progressives, I think we’re really the most loyal and thoughtful strategists and played a really great inside-outside game in order to pass the Build Back Better agenda.

Now, in the final sort of yards, we had a group of sort of turncoat Democrats in the House. And, you know, Rep. Schrader is a great example of that, sort of become chaos agents and throw the whole agenda into seemingly unending chaos with their objections.

And he, specifically — and you have to understand one of the planks of the Democratic Party’s platform that is resoundingly popular with most people, is the plank around controlling the cost of prescription medicines.

RG: Mhmm.

MM: And this was an area where there is no constituency for this, right?

RG: Right. [Laughs.]

MM: There’s a broad-based constituency to control the cost of prescription medicine. He chose the position where there’s no constituency. The only constituency is the pharmaceutical companies, where he objected to that. Right. And so —

RG: And he even said, if he didn’t do that, he wouldn’t be able to fund his campaign. Do you remember that?

MM: That’s right. It couldn’t be more clear that he was aligning around corporate interests against the clear interests of the majority of people in the country, and certainly his constituents.

And we understood, coming out of that process, that we had to use the primaries as an opportunity to give a rebuke to these turncoat Democrats that were disloyal to the agenda and disloyal to the president. And he was on the top of our list. And we had a really amazing candidate in Jamie McLeod Skinner, who I think presents to us the avatar of what it looks like for a progressive to run in a populist way that brings together the entire community, including some Republicans and independents, as well as people who identify as progressive, on a populist, pro-people agenda. And Jamie is one of the best communicators for that, in a district that is largely rural in a district that has a purple district, Jamie routed him. And it’s important to note that Jamie was outspent five to one. And he got the President’s endorsement after being disloyal to the President, and with the President’s endorsement, and being spent out with outside money, including some of that pharmaceutical money, five to one, Jamie routed him.

RG: And tell me, it felt like it was extra unusual because she had almost the entire local Democratic party apparatus, all of the different county operations, decided to reject their incumbent Democrat and endorse her and actually work pretty hard for her. Usually, if progressives are trying to unseat an incumbent, they also have to go up against some of the local Democratic machines because they’re aligned with the incumbent. But he had broken so far, that she not only had the kind of national progressive support and local progressive support but even like party support across the district.

MM: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I think a lot of Jamie’s race challenges the mainstream or centrist orthodoxy around progressives, right? This idea that the progressives can’t build broad coalitions — like, Jamie built that. And I think it’s it’s exemplified in the fact that you had the Democratic Party infrastructure, cutting ties with the incumbent, as well as many in labor organizations and others choosing, in this moment, to align with her because he had gotten so far right and so, so deeply connected to and so nakedly cynically aligned with the corporate line, that it was unconscionable to support him. And it showed in the outcome, and I think it demonstrated for us, it vindicated our belief that progressives could run and win in any context.

So coming out of that primary win, we made sure to communicate to anybody who would listen, that you should put your smart money on Jamie, that this race would be close, that she was the right candidate for the seat. And, unfortunately, the National Democrats did not invest in the race.

And, Jamie, as we’re talking, we’re still counting votes in Jamie’s race; it is going to be razor-thin, whatever the outcome is. And if Jamie wins, it will be a win for progressives without a question. If Jamie loses, then a lot of those national Democrats are going to have to do some serious soul-searching — and shame on them, for, and we’ll talk about New York later, but for pulling $6 million of national resources into Sean Patrick Maloney’s race, for example, and not a dive into Jamie’s race.

RG: So I was talking to some national Democratic operatives who were pleading their case today. Some of them pointed out well, DCCC put about $1.8 million across the race. But it is also true that in the remaining weeks, both the DCCC and House Majority PAC, which is a super PAC, kind of tied to Democratic leadership, just pulled out.

One operative said: The data just wasn’t there.

They were arguing: All we can do is look at the data and the data wasn’t there.

They want to say it wasn’t ideological, because there is a lot of suspicion among progressives that one of the things that goes into the calculations that these national Democrats make is not just straight-up who is going to be most likely to win, but who is the more centrist, pro-corporate Democrat, and if this is somebody who knocked off a corporate Democrat, that it might be a little harder for them to get a hearing in Washington that their race is worth supporting.

MM: I don’t buy that argument. I will say this: I want to engage in a good-faith debate with folks. And I think people could differ around strategy. And people that I differ with around strategy aren’t immediately corrupt — I don’t want to at all assume that. But I do want to push back on this argument that there just simply wasn’t any data to suggest that. I mean, we were regularly in conversation — we don’t just talk to progressives when we’re running in the general election, we talk to anybody, including folks that we usually aren’t aligned with on a number of issues, because we have a shared interest in having a House majority for Democrats. And so we were providing countervailing evidence that suggested that she was close. And people made up their minds based on what was strategically relevant for them.

I think it’s clear that our analysis was closer to reality than theirs. And we weren’t just basing it on feels and vibes; we were basing it on data as well.

RG: Right. And then the numbers are bearing that out. The people I know out there say the chances that she’s going to make up the gap are very slim — not impossible — but it is going to be very close.

MM: That’s right.

RG: No matter what.

Do you have any insight into California before we go to New York? Did you play in any of those? Or did you watch any of those races? Because of that, it looks like the House is going to be decided there.

MM: Yeah, I have less visibility into the California congressional races. We played more heavily in the assembly races and some of the municipal races. So I’m more of an observer as it relates to the California races.

RG: You’re refreshing the New York Times or AP with everybody else?

MM: [Laughs.] Exactly.

RG: So in New York —

MM: Yeah.

RG: — how far back would you go to pinpoint this immediate catastrophe?

MM: Well, I don’t want to take you into the recesses of Gov. Cuomo’s strategic mind, so, but this is what I would say, because it’s multifaceted, right? And Gov. Cuomo, for anybody who doesn’t know, a former Democratic governor, who governed in a very, very top-down, one-man-rule sort of way, even at the detriment of his own party, even at the detriment of the members of his own party, and famously empowered Republicans in the state senate in order to form an alliance that allowed him to decide what legislation got passed, and basically to foil progressives — and to specifically foil the Working Families Party, right?

RG: Mhmm.

MM: And we became his almost singular obsession, figuring out how to topple us for cycle after cycle. So, Gov. Cuomo, a lot of his infrastructure is still in place, like a lot of his appointees and judicial appointees. So Democrats drew lines through the redistricting process, and Republicans sued, it went up to Gov. Cuomo’s appointees in the judiciary, and those appointees threw a grenade into the process. And they decided on the side of the Republicans, and totally redrew the lines, and made them less favorable to Democrats. So that is one aspect of this sort of perfect storm that we’re in, right?

RG: And I interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week. And she had mentioned that there was a ballot referendum in 2021, that would have implicated that decision; that the Democrats decided just not to play in at all and Republicans spent heavily on it. Were you guys involved in that? What is she talking about there?

MM: Oh, yeah.

RG: I’ve got to cop to not covering that.

MM: Well, sure. That’s correct.

I mean, the Democratic party apparatus in New York, because it has existed so long as a one-man-rule party is anemic. And the apparatus has missed so many opportunities, including many of these ballot measures. And this is one of them. If that had gone the right way, we wouldn’t be in this situation. If Gov. Cuomo governed like a Democrat, we wouldn’t be in this situation. And if looking at the lines, and looking at the lines in this less favorable condition, if Sean Patrick Maloney, who is a New York Democrat, but also the chair of the DCCC, didn’t operate in one of the most nakedly selfish manners you can imagine for the chair of the DCCC and jump seats — so he left his district, and he pushed Mondaire Jones out of his district because he wanted to be in a safer district —

RG: Mhmm.

MM: Right? And what’s fascinating about this, so follow this: He pushed Mondaire Jones out and Mondaire ended up running in a district that covers parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, which was much safer for Democrats. He ran in this district, and he ran to the right; he punched to the left. He called out the defund movement, he was probably the most pro-police candidate.

RG: He got money from the police, even!

MM: Yeah! And he sort of bought into the crime hysteria that was manufactured in part by Republicans, but also some Democrats. And he lost. He lost his race. The chair of the DCCC lost his race.

Directly next to him, in the Ryan race. So Ryan embraced —

RG: Was that the seat he left?

MM: Yes, that’s the seat that he left! The seat that he left!

RG: Right. [Laughs.]

MM: In that seat, the candidate embraced WFP. And he ran as a populist — pro-abortion, and also ran on a number of economic populist issues in a very purple, really challenging seat. And he won!

RG: And that’s a seat that Maloney himself thinks was more difficult to run.

MM: Absolutely.

RG: That’s why he left it.

MM: Yes. And the other part of this that actually, you know, it’s a New York story, but there are national implications: because he was the chair of the DCCC and of course yet, you know, he says that he recused himself from all of those decisions. The National Democrats sent $6 million of national resources into his losing campaign. Now just imagine if a fraction of that money went to Jamie’s campaign. Right? We might be having a different conversation about her race. We might not be talking about counting ballots right now.

So, to me, the story is about the New York party and the colossal, strategic, and political failure that was gathering over years of Cuomo rule, of missed opportunities, of weak infrastructure. I’ll give another example: There’s a Brooklyn county party that actually has some capacity. And Brooklyn is one of the most intensely democratic counties. You think if you’re running a statewide race, you would have a major turnout operation; they did not spend one dollar turning anybody out. In fact, by most standards, and you could look at the cover of Long Island’s Newsday, which is no paragon of leftist thought, on the cover of Newsday, when they’re talking about the Hochul win, they credit the Working Families Party as a critical component of that win, because we were doing the traditional voter contact, texting, visibility at poll places, visibility in communities, organizing, phoning people, and building momentum around progressives and others voting on Row D for the Working Families Party, all across the country — all across the state, rather. And most observers agree that the work that Working Families Party did in migrating people towards our line and organizing people to feel excitement around Kathy Hochul and Antonio Delgado is, in part, what made a horrible night for Democrats less horrible in New York.

RG: Yeah, people in Brooklyn and who worked in Manhattan were telling me that they couldn’t really tell that there was an election going on that day if you walked out of your apartment. Was that about right?

MM: That’s right. I mean, I’ve talked to a number of voters that said if they didn’t get voter contact from WFP, they didn’t get voter contact. If they didn’t get mail from WFP, it did not happen.

And you have to understand: There was a lot of money raised and spent. I’m unsure exactly how that money landed.

The other thing I would say, when you factor in all of these factors, and Antonio Delgado is a perfect example, he was an incumbent in a purple seat, right? And the governor, Kathy Hochul, plucked him out of his purple seat and chose him as her lieutenant governor running mate. Right? She could have chosen anybody —

RG: Pretty late — like we’re talking late in the cycle there.

MM: Yes. So I mean, you factor in all of these decisions — independently these are poor decisions; collectively, they create the colossal mess that are the outcomes that folks are still processing in New York, and the one, from our standpoint, as progressives, the one ray of sunshine is how progressives showed up. I mean, the other rap on progressives is that progressives aren’t disciplined, progressives are disloyal, progressives aren’t strategic.

I mean, in this case, progressives in New York showed up for a slate that, on a lot of levels, we don’t agree with. But we understood that our prime directive was to defeat a MAGA Republican in Rep. Lee Zeldin and to prevent New York from flipping over to the Republicans, which actually became a more and more credible threat.

RG: Mhmm.

MM: That was our number one prerogative. And thank God we have our own ballot line in New York, where we can encourage progressives to feel proud to pull the lever for candidates that they might not necessarily see eye-to-eye on a number of issues. We do see eye-to-eye with almost all Democrats around the question of whether or not we should live in a democracy or whether or not MAGA Republicans should have any power.

RG: And so I was thinking recently, or thinking yesterday, about what would have happened if Letitia James, who had floated a bid against Kathy Hochul for governor, let’s say she runs and she wins a primary, that wouldn’t have necessarily changed a lot of the kind of underlying structures that drove what happened in this race on Tuesday. So you still would have seen a lot of losses in Long Island, Sean Patrick Maloney probably still loses, some of these other races probably go down as well. I was imagining what a kind of celebration of hate there would be for the progressive wing of the party if that had happened. Like it would be — MSNBC, CNN would just be, would just have declared: Well, this shows what happens if you have a progressive on the top of the ticket.

And now, obviously, they can’t do that because she wasn’t on the top of the ticket. And it kind of exposes how empty that rhetoric would be. But do you think I’m right? Am I imagining the correct scenario?

MM: Oh, absolutely. And many people actually don’t know that. The New York’s Attorney General, Tish James began as an independent, not Democrat, but independent Working Families Party candidate.

RG: First ever elected, right?

MM: In a general election against the Democrats, as a Working Families Party candidate. Right.

But absolutely, I think what you’re saying — the intense bias of the media and strategic bias against progressives is real, right?

And so I’ll give an example: I’m not hearing pundits. I’m not hearing anybody use that logic in trying to understand Sean Patrick Maloney’s loss. Right? There’s not a lot of pundits suggesting that the tough-on-crime rhetoric, and this sort of embracing the most maximalist position on policing is what clearly lost it for Sean Patrick Maloney. Nobody’s arguing that his ideological point of view is why he lost. And that’s fair because an electoral loss is multifaceted. It could have been a number of things. It could have been a combination of things. See, when they lose, they’re able to carry nuance. When we lose, the nuance is out the window. And the story is once again progressives lose it all. Right? And so: I do think that that bias has become so ingrained, people don’t even challenge it, right? But it’s real.

RG: And on that crime question, in my conversation with AOC, she also brought that up and she criticized Maloney and others for parroting and really reinforcing Republican talking points on the crime question and not putting forward their own vision. The nuance, or the complication that I would add to that, and I’d like to get your response to this, is that progressives also didn’t really offer a counter-narrative for at least maybe the first year of the kind of national public safety debate. The argument you had here instead was: Well, you’re misreading the crime stats. And some crimes are up, other crimes are down. There seems to be a real reluctance to engage with the fact that crime was up because progressives didn’t want to reinforce what Fox News was saying and what Republicans were saying and so, instead of finding a middle ground, went with: Well, these certain crimes are not up.

So, in hindsight, was that a mistake? And what is the progressive message on crime?

MM: Sure.

RG: Because if you look at polling from the Center for American Progress, progressives do have messages on public safety and crime that can resonate. But to me, it felt like they weren’t actually making them because they felt like if they validated that, they were validating Fox, and they’re validating the attacks on policing. And so they just stayed away from it and tried to change the subject.

MM: Well, I mean, there’s so much to say here, and I wouldn’t just focus on Sean Patrick Maloney. Any conversation about the failure of Democrats and centrists on this issue has to include Mayor Adams. His whole shtick is constantly scaring New Yorkers, instead of developing a platform, just sort of manufacturing more and more hysteria around crime. And, in doing so, when Democrats do that, our feeling is that they align with the right-wing narrative and what they’re saying is that Democrats and Republicans both agree that Democrats don’t have a handle on violent street crime, right? Which makes it even harder for Democrats to operate successfully, politically.

But to your other point, number one: Absolutely. I believe strongly that progressives should lean into the debate around public safety and policing. And there are strong, popular progressive messages around that. We’ve done our own testing on this. We’ve done our own research and polls, and we feel strongly that a message that, number one, acknowledges how people are actually feeling and also then pivots to the things that we know most people agree with progressives works: Most people, independents and Republicans as well agree with the basic notion that the roots of crime lie in things that police can’t generally solve, like mental health, and chemical addiction, and homelessness, people actually understand that. And when you talk about the investments that need to be made in order to make us all safe and in order to create public safety, a lot of people — progressives, independents, and Republicans — actually get that. It makes sense to people. What we also learned is a few things: Number one: The hysteria — yes, people are concerned about crime. But the hysteria around crime somehow superseding all the other issues that people care about, we weren’t seeing that. It was a prevailing issue, but inflation, and abortion continued to record very highly in all of the polling that we were doing. So we understood that people were dealing in an environment where they had multiple things that they were wrestling with.

The other thing I would say is that when you see the data on crime, and you see the number of voters that suggests that x percentage of people are concerned with crime, within that number, our country is very racialized. We’re in a very racially segregated country. Within that number are Black people who live in urban communities where street crime is actually more of a real day-to-day reality. Those voters also have factored all of that in and pretty consistently, percentage-wise vote, for Democrats. So their concern around crime doesn’t also somehow suggest that they might shift to vote for MAGA Republicans.

RG: Mhmm.

MM: And they’re part of that overall percentage of people that are concerned around crime. So there’s a lot of nuances there: how people are prioritizing that concern, the types of communities they live in, their actual lived experience with street crime, or violent crime, or inter-community violence, and then how the political calculus is working for them in order to decide whether or not to vote generically for a Republican or a Democrat.

And the last thing I’ll say is: We want to see Democrats and progressives not be afraid of their shadow when it comes to policing, and when it comes to crime, and public safety, and our hope is following what I think most people would agree is a historic election for Democrats that some of the hysteria might be able to break, and we can engage in a more rigorous policy-based conversation about what actually needs to happen. And there, I actually think that progressives have a lot of solutions that are very, very popular and progressives should absolutely lean into it. Our research suggests that progressives could win over people based on a pro-investment-in-communities-response to public safety.

RG: Yeah, and I also wonder if Rikers is, itself, driving crimes. Rikers has always been awful. Like, always, but it feels significantly worse in the last couple of years. And I wonder if there’s something about the utter collapse of Rikers, that is then having a boomerang effect in making the streets less safe for a variety of different reasons, some of which I could probably put my finger on, some of which I couldn’t, but just kind of feel right. And that just feels stuck. You’ve got the left saying we need to shut Rikers down, but then you’ve got all these communities rejecting all the alternatives to Rikers. And it just seems like this complete hellhole and ongoing human rights catastrophe that is Rikers is just sitting there, and just getting worse and worse and worse.

MM: Yeah. I can’t speak on it based on direct experience on those campaigns, although I have relationships with folks who are deeply involved in the Rikers campaign. I can say generally because I do have some depth in general on the subject of policing and the criminal legal system, I do think that Rikers is actually a helpful example of everything that’s wrong with our criminal legal system.

And I want to get back to the point that I made earlier: There’s actually a lot of shared agreement across race and across ideology on a number of core understandings around the criminal legal system. Most people agree that our criminal legal system is not working. Right? There’s very few people who look at what’s happening on Rikers and think: Yeah, that’s ideal. Things are working, right?

And so, therefore, most people are interested and want to lean into reform of our criminal legal system, including independents and a lot of Republicans. And most people think that police should be held accountable when they do bad things, including independents and a significant percentage of Republicans. That’s after all of the sorts of copaganda, and all of the like wall to wall, Fox News hysteria on defund the police and everything else, that people still understand a very core way that our system, our system of policing, and our criminal legal system, is not operating optimally are operating in line with our values. And I do think that that does give me some hope that after this election, right — I do think that the election and how much hysteria was placed on policing and the system, it almost made it impossible, I think, for any political actors to do anything significant.

But now that the election is over, and now that I think most observers recognize that voters, in as much as they cared about public safety and crime, they also cared about a lot of other things. And this idea that there would be this red wave that the Republicans would serve that was mainly comprised of peoples’ hysteria and anxiety around crime, I think most people understand that that actually isn’t the case. And that’s going to inform people’s both policy and political calculus going forward.

RG: So nearby, over in Connecticut, Jahana Hayes hung on and that made it a sweep of the congressional delegation, she’s a progressive running in a swing district there. But Gov. Ned Lamont, running for reelection, the progressive governor who people might remember who he beat Joe Lieberman way back in 2006, or 2008, or whenever that was, and then Joe Lieberman ran as an independent and stopped him from becoming a senator, he’s now governor of Connecticut, you guys became weirdly a major part of that race. Can you talk about that a little bit?

MM: Sure. So, in Ned Lamont’s last race — and for folks that don’t know, Working Families Party, we’re a lot of things but in New York and Connecticut, we have a ballot line based on something called “fusion,” which I won’t go into, but it allows an independent third party like us to cross-endorse the Democrat, right? So we have that fusion line in Connecticut. And Gov. Ned Lamont won his election with a razor-thin margin and the votes on the Working Families Party line certainly were the margin of victory.

In this election, in 2022, Gov. Ned Lamont had the same general election opponent, right? So it’s the same head-to-head. The difference, though, is that the Republicans chose to hit him really hard on policing and a tenuous relationship to defund the police through the Working Families Party endorsement. And they threw a lot of money and a lot of mail on this particular line of attack. And when all things are said and done, and when all the ballots are counted, the margin of victory had grown between his last race and this race. And so it’s as much of a scientific A/B test as we can on the impact of some of these attacks. Elections are multifaceted, but in as much as people claim that these attacks are just slam dunks, I think there’s enough counterfactual evidence to suggest that’s not true.

RG: Yeah. And Minneapolis elected a public defender to be a prosecutor out there. And you had, in Los Angeles, the comptroller, a lefty, he ran a whole bunch of ads and billboards that were just showing a bar graph of how much money police were getting compared to all the other social services in Los Angeles; seems that he’s going to end up exceeding either of the mayoral candidates in vote totals, cruising to election. And so you did have some races that complicated the narrative that the Democratic position on policing was going to lead to a wipeout.

But at the same time, I was interested to hear you say that Democrats do need to acknowledge the increase in crime, the fact that people do feel less safe out in the streets now than they did a couple of years ago. And that just saying: Well, it’s not as bad as 1995 — that isn’t enough.

So what conversation are you hearing among the kind of progressive leaders who are shaping policy? Are you hearing a lot of people who are using some of these wins to say: We don’t need to talk about this at all, we can just stay the course.

Or are there more people going in your direction and saying: Now that the election is over, we need to think very deliberately about how we’re going forward while completely collapsing in the face of the attacks.

MM: I think people are taking this very, very seriously. And I think there’s three things that people need to do: Organizing 101, you need to meet people where they’re at. And in as much as people feel authentic concerns and anxiety, you need to engage with them in an emotionally appropriate way. If people are feeling anxiety, you don’t bust out a bar graph.

RG: [Laughs.] Right. Yes.

MM: That’s just not how that works.

RG: “Look, crime was worse in 1993, in this city! Why are you scared?”

MM: Yeah. So there’s that. Number two: most people actually think that police are doing way too much. But most people agree that if police focused on — there’s like a lot of agreement that police should do the things that if you stay up too late, and you’re watching either MSNBC or CNBC, all of those shows, police solving murders, that stuff [laughs] —

RG: Yes.

MM: — people generally accepted that that would be a really good use of policing and their skills. Now, solving for homelessness, and chemical addiction, and youth outreach, and all these other things — and being psychologists? Most people think, like, yeah, we shouldn’t be holding them to that broad, sprawling mandate. And there’s ways of talking about that, where progressives can, number one, engage in an emotionally appropriate way to people who are feeling all types of anxiety, right? And sometimes that anxiety is so multi-layered, right?

Perhaps, there may be less factual evidence, but for example, in New York, with Mayor Adams parroting these lines every single day, if you’re watching the news and you see the most horrible example of street crime on the local news, that’s gonna cause some anxiety, even if you’re relatively safe in your own community, right? That’s real. People’s emotions are real. People’s feelings are real, and debating around that is not necessarily helpful. So that’s number one.

Number two: I think acknowledging that many people do agree that police have a role in doing things like solving violent crimes and solving heinous crimes like rapes and other crimes that should be solved, and there should be accountability. Most people believe in accountability. And I think talking about accountability is actually a progressive value that progressives can really lean into.

And pivoting to the solutions, all of the investments outside of police, that most people agree would make communities safer, I think tying those things together is how progressives can really lean into this debate in ways that are emotionally empathetic and responsive, and also aligned with our values, and also are ultimately good policy solutions.

RG: Well, Maurice, thank you so much for taking some time. I really appreciate it.

MM: Thank you!

[End credits music.]

RG: That was Maurice Mitchell, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by William Stanton. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you soon.

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Most media outlets treated Flynn’s videotaped oath last summer, in which he uttered a well-known QAnon slogan, as a sort of coming-out story about a onetime Trump insider who had gone off the rails. The video has since become the subject of a lawsuit by members of Flynn’s family who claim that “left-wing media outlets began to spread false narratives” about the Flynn family’s connections to QAnon. An Intercept investigation has found that Flynn’s ties to the QAnon phenomenon stretch back much further than the July 4 weekend last year when the video first appeared, however, to the days immediately following Trump’s 2016 election victory.

That November, nearly a year before the first cryptic clue from QAnon’s organizers – known as a “Q drop” — appeared on the online message board 4chan, Flynn told a roomful of Trump supporters that the president-elect had been borne into office by an “army of digital soldiers.” The phrase “digital soldiers,” which Flynn later trademarked, has become a central QAnon rallying cry and a key indicator of the movement’s growing turn toward violent extremism and insurrection.

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who once oversaw military intelligence in Afghanistan and led a sprawling intelligence agency in Washington, would go on to become a central hero in QAnon’s conspiratorial narrative. But his move to trademark the term “digital soldiers” — ensuring that only he and others who obtain his express permission can profit from the sale of “Digital Soldiers”-branded merchandise — hints at his attempt to capitalize on a marketing and communication strategy that resonates with the Q community.

Flynn hitched his financial fortunes to QAnon at least as early as the summer of 2019, when he was facing a mountain of legal costs, The Intercept’s investigation found. His push to leverage QAnon’s viral popularity with the far-right coincided with his efforts to reverse his guilty plea for lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

The money-making virtual empire that Flynn, his lawyer Sidney Powell, and other Trump loyalists have built on the back of the QAnon phenomenon has long been hiding in plain sight. But in the wake of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, disinformation researchers began digging into the tangle of financial, legal, and business relationships that have fueled the growth of a far-right conspiracy theory the government has classified as a serious threat. Data and records reviewed by The Intercept for this report were provided by the January 6 Research Consortium, a joint initiative of New America and Arizona State University focused on investigating social media’s role in contributing to election-related violence at the Capitol and across the country.

What began with the launch of Flynn’s legal defense fund in 2017 has morphed into an intricate network of conspiracy-promoting websites and companies. Among the firms linked to Flynn and his surrogates, including Powell, are entities registered in Florida, Virginia, and Texas, some of which are inactive; they include a political action committee and a related firm now at the center of a $1.3 billion libel lawsuit connected to the 2020 presidential election.

Flynn, Powell, and their lawyers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The constellation of conspiracy-propagating enterprises reveals how Flynn’s background in irregular warfare, signals intelligence, and psychological operations collided with the strange underworld of hacker culture, alternate reality games, and far-right extremist message boards and spurred the rise of a movement with a cult-like global following.

While QAnon was originally spawned on far-right social media sites, disinformation researchers have tracked the movement’s migration from the fringe to the mainstream on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. QAnon’s global following claims that an unlikely amalgam of mainstream media, Democrats, wealthy billionaires, and Hollywood movie stars are part of an elite cabal of bloodsucking child traffickers out to destroy the United States. A hallmark of the thousands of posts and reposts of QAnon content is the co-optation and repurposing of anodyne catchphrases such as “Save the Children,” “The Great Awakening,” and “We Are The Storm.”

In QAnon folklore, a covert group of military officers tapped Trump to run for president. “The Storm” refers to what the movement’s adherents say are Trump’s ongoing efforts to have members of the “deep state” arrested and sent to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay; references to stormy weather and “The Coming Storm” are threaded throughout QAnon content. Another popular QAnon theme is the exhortation to “take the oath,” an apparent reference to the pledge sworn by QAnon followers, which is widely known as the “Oath of the Digital Soldier.” At the end of the video showing Flynn and his family taking a version of the oath, which is similar to one sworn by members of the U.S. armed forces and others who work for the government, Flynn uses the phrase “Where We Go One, We Go All,” a reference to a quote from the 1996 movie “White Squall” that has also been shortened to a catchall meme for the QAnon movement: #WWG1WGA.

The scope and timing of Flynn’s engagement with the QAnon phenomenon — and the role he and key allies played in promoting false claims about election fraud — are coming into sharper view as Flynn’s stature and influence in the QAnon universe continues to grow. Flynn’s pledge on July 4, 2020, reignited long-running speculation about his role in an online influence campaign that law enforcement officials have linked to violent incidents, including the murder of a leading member of the Gambino crime family in New York and the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Over Memorial Day weekend, Flynn headlined a Q-themed conference in Dallas where he apparently endorsed a Myanmar-style military coup aimed at reinstating Trump as president. Flynn later backtracked from his remarks, but that didn’t stop several prominent politicians from calling him out.

The Daily Beast reported in March that four Trump allies and campaign surrogates, including Flynn’s brother Joseph, had recently registered a 501(c)(4) — a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” that can engage in lobbying and advocacy — called “Defending the Republic, Inc.” in Florida. A lawyer who volunteered to work on Trump’s post-election legal challenges, Peter Haller, created a Florida political action committee, Defending the Republic PAC, Inc., around the same time. Additional public records indicate that Mike and Joseph Flynn, along with Powell, are listed as directors of a Texas corporation by the same name that shares an address with Powell’s Dallas legal offices. The Texas corporation was established on December 1, 2020, less than a week after Trump pardoned Flynn, who was facing up to six months in federal prison.

Ties between Flynn’s legal defense fundraising campaign and his online business efforts became more pronounced beginning in May 2019, about a month before he fired the lawyers who had convinced him to accept a plea deal in connection with charges that he lied to investigators about his contacts with Russian officials implicated in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Soon after Flynn sought to trademark the term “digital soldiers” and resilientpatriot.com began redirecting to his legal defense fund, he appeared on Parler under the handle @GenFlynn. His presence there coincided with a sharp increase in the number of posts on the platform that included QAnon-themed hashtags, according to a review by the New America-ASU team of more than 183 million posts and comments by Parler users from the time the right-wing social media platform was launched in August 2018 until it was temporarily taken offline in the wake of the January 6 riot. Posts made under Flynn’s handle include an exhortation to take “the oath.”

“#DigitalSoldiers must fight on battlefields NOT of our choosing,” according to an October 2020 post that appeared on Flynn’s Parler account. “Allowing tyranny to reign over liberty keeps us from breathing freedom’s fresh air and informing our democracy of the grave threats our constitutional republic faces. Read, listen, understand, comprehend and respond with facts and sound analysis. That is how Digital Soldiers Fight back.”

A separate but related analysis of Parler posts archived by an anonymous hacker shows that #digitalsoldiers — Flynn’s signature online rallying cry — appeared in no less than 2,700 posts from Parler’s 2018 debut through January 6, 2021. The use of #digitalsoldiers gradually increased from May 2020 to January 2021, when Parler was temporarily deplatformed. Posts containing #digitalsoldiers echoed across Parler as reposts, pushing the hashtag up the ranks of the top 200 most posted terms and often drawing engagement from tens of thousands of Parler users each time.

Corporate filings and other records show, however, that Flynn began flirting much earlier than 2019 with the idea of mobilizing what he called an “army of digital soldiers” to rally conservatives behind Trump and mount a far-right political coup.

As far back as the fall of 2017, Flynn and his surrogates began probing the possibility of deploying a viral online information operation that would tap into the minds of millions of social media users.

As far back as the fall of 2017, public documents, internet registry records, and media interviews show Flynn and his surrogates began probing the possibility of deploying a viral online information operation that would tap into the minds of millions of social media users. Flynn first registered one of the central companies in his online business empire just two months after he resigned under cloud from the Trump administration in 2017. (All but one of the sites connected to Flynn’s network of online enterprises founded between 2017 and 2019 are now defunct.)

The story of Flynn’s attempt to capitalize on the “army of digital soldiers” he conjured to support Trump has not been publicly told until now. That may be partly because the cast of characters, companies, and websites behind Flynn’s lurching quest to profit from his insider status within the military and the highest echelons of Washington’s national security establishment is so sprawling that it seems nearly impenetrable.

Raising an Army of “Digital Soldiers”

Flynn articulated his vision of leveraging digital media to mount a political insurgency at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Veteran’s Day weekend five years ago.

In November 2016, less than a week after Trump had been elected president, Flynn spoke at an event hosted by the Young America’s Foundation. A co-founding organizer of the right-wing flagship Conservative Political Action Conference, the YAF has kickstarted the political careers of dozens of well-known Republican Party personalities, including nativist former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. The anticipation among the high school- and college-aged conservatives in the packed hotel conference room was palpable as Flynn bounded up to a speaker’s podium at the front of the room.

Buoyant and glowing with the excitement of the moment, Flynn declared that the sheer force of a digital “insurgency” had helped Trump win the presidency. The online campaign that Flynn had helped Trump wage was nothing short of a total break with the politics of the past, he said. “This was not an election,” Flynn told the audience of young conservatives, “this was a revolution.” Trump, Flynn declared, had been elected by an “army of digital soldiers.”

That moment would cement Flynn’s pivotal role in QAnon mythology. The video of his November 2016 speech and his role in defending Trump after his departure from the White House have since been referenced in countless QAnon posts, transforming him into the victim-hero of a fantastical, conspiratorial plot to save America from child traffickers, liberals, and the “deep state.”

The first Q drop didn’t appear online until October 2017, when an anonymous user on 4chan posted a curious message about the supposed secret war Trump was waging against a “liberal cabal” running covert child trafficking networks. The online movement grew partly in response to mainstream news coverage at the time of Mueller’s investigation into allegations that members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

Over time, cryptic messages posted by “Q,” who purports to hold a high-level security clearance, gained a wider following as they migrated from 4chan to the 8chan, then 8kun message boards and spilled across more mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. A December 2020 NPR/Ipsos poll found that 17 percent of Americans surveyed subscribe to idea that a “group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

A primary strand of QAnon’s ur-narrative is that the person behind thousands of Q drops is a high-ranking military or intelligence official who sees it as their patriotic duty to serve as a backchannel between Trump and his loyal constituents. Flynn features prominently in many Q drops. References to “the oath” became popular after “Q” urged followers to “take the oath and serve your country” on June 24, 2020, and become “digital soldiers.” After #TaketheOath began to ricochet across QAnon communities on multiple platforms, Flynn’s posts garnered thousands of comments, a separate analysis by New America and ASU researchers found. A video of Flynn’s oath last July received 100,000 likes when Flynn posted it on Twitter.

Previously unreported events following Flynn’s November 2016 “digital soldiers” speech raise questions about his role in the origins of the QAnon movement. Days after he spoke to YAF, when his name was being floated for a high-level job in the Trump administration, a website called resilientpatriot.com was created, according to internet registry files. While Flynn’s name does not appear in domain name records for that site, the registry records for another Flynn-linked website list mflynnjr@resilientpatriot.com as the registrant email; Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr. also used the name Resilient Patriot on Twitter.

If the elder Flynn played a role in creating resilientpatriot.com in November 2016, it would have been an unusual move for a potential presidential appointee. Many White House officials go to great lengths to avoid extra scrutiny of their business and personal affairs, and it is common practice in Washington for nominees to scrub their social media accounts and reduce their digital footprints.

Flynn was named national security adviser but held the job for less than a month before he was accused of lying to Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador during the transition period. He resigned in February 2017. Two months later, in April, Virginia public records indicate that the state issued a receipt to Flynn for the creation of a company called Resilient Patriot LLC; Flynn’s LinkedIn page lists him as president of a company of that name. At the time, a contrite Flynn had offered to testify before Congress on what he knew about Russian interference in the 2016 election in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

That summer, Flynn’s sister Barbara Redgate and brother Joseph Flynn started a fundraising campaign to help pay Flynn’s legal bills. Web archives indicate that resilientpatriot.com had lain dormant for a time, but at some point after Flynn’s family launched the legal defense fund, Flynn’s resilientpatriot.com site was repurposed, according to website registry records. Starting in May 2019, resilientpatriot.com began redirecting visitors to mikeflynndefensefund.org, according to internet archives.

Initially, the fund garnered donations from thousands of supporters, Flynn’s brother told the press. By Joseph Flynn’s reckoning, however, mounting legal fees appeared to be outpacing donations.

Flynn and his family reportedly determined that one way to make a dent in the bills would be to sell Flynn’s three-bedroom house in the leafy suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. In December 2017, Washingtonian magazine featured splashy photographs of the home’s interior, saying that Flynn had bought it for about $774,000 and that he planned to sell it to pay off his mounting legal costs. A few months later, Flynn’s brother told ABC News that the retired Army general had listed his home at $895,000. (The house later sold for slightly less than that.)

Flynn remained in serious financial trouble in the spring of 2019. After pleading guilty in the Mueller investigation and enduring a bruising inquiry into his company, the Flynn Intel Group, for allegedly failing to report connections to the Turkish government, the disgraced general was reportedly staring down an estimated $4.6 million in unpaid legal bills.

That May, as special counsel Robert Mueller announced that his expansive investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election would soon end, Flynn took his first tentative steps toward launching a new fundraising vehicle, seeking to register “Digital Soldiers” under his name with the trademark division of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He abandoned the registration of those words alone in May 2021 but applied to trademark “Digital Soldiers” when used in tandem with his distinctive red, white, and blue three bars and three stars logo — a nod to his rank as a retired three-star Army general.

The trademark registration shows that Flynn seeks to hold exclusive rights to prevent anyone from selling similarly marked goods. Perhaps more than any other detail, it documents his desire to sell to QAnon adherents; wherever his logo with “Digital Soldiers” is used on anything from T-shirts to swimsuits to mugs and tote bags, he wants to benefit financially.

The trademark documents Flynn’s financial connection to the QAnon movement; wherever his logo with the words “Digital Soldiers” is used, he wants to benefit.

That August, digitalsoldiers.us was created, according to internet archive and domain registry records. The listed registrant for that site is mflynnjr@resilientpatriot.com. Another site advertising a fundraising event for Flynn — digitalsoldiersconference.com — was registered on August 9, 2019. The conference website’s landing page includes an image of an American flag with the stars arranged in a large “Q” beneath the words “The battle is joined. Victory will be ours.” Scheduled for September 14, 2019, at an upscale mall in Atlanta, the Digital Soldiers Conference was the most visible sign yet that Flynn had yoked his personal brand and fundraising efforts to QAnon’s radical ideology.

“America,” the website for the Digital Soldiers Conference declared, “is on the verge of a digital civil war,” and “Flynn is a true American hero fighting the Deep State who put everything on the line for God and Country.”

The site announced that Flynn would be a keynote speaker alongside former Trump campaign adviser and fellow Mueller casualty George Papadopoulos and other MAGA influencers. The website advertised $99 general admission tickets for the conference, while a “VIP All Day” pass cost $500. Those interested in a sit-down dinner with Flynn and front-row access to speeches could buy the “Ultra VIP” ticket package for $2,500. The “majority of proceeds from the Digital Soldiers Conference will go to benefit The Mike Flynn Defense Fund,” the conference website promised.

“To be an outspoken conservative now on social media is to be a pariah. If you’re a patriot and love your country, you’ve been called Nazi, Fascist and White Supremacist,” the site crowed. “Republicans may control the White House and Senate, but these cubicle cowboys control the Media, Universities, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.”

Flynn’s lawyer Powell even filed a petition a month in advance to secure permission for him to travel outside his home state to attend the conference, despite a pending review of his legal appeal in a D.C. court. But Flynn apparently pulled out after Mother Jones reported on the event’s connection to QAnon.

By October 2019, Flynn’s “digital soldiers” websites were joined by a real-world company: Digital Soldiers Media, LLC. Florida public records list Flynn, his brother Joseph, and his son Michael Flynn Jr. as managers of the company and show an address in the tony retiree suburb of Englewood, Florida, where Flynn recently bought a home.

Right-Wing “Citizen Journalism”

Part of the Digital Soldiers business plan appears to have been to sell T-shirts and hoodies bearing Flynn’s name and logo. The T-shirt sale model parallels another Flynn-backed website called “The Shirt Show USA,” which also aims to capitalize on Flynn’s hero status among QAnon followers.

But the sale of “WWG1WGA” T-shirts featuring Flynn’s name at $32 apiece was a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of dollars supporters were asked to cough up in a pay-to-publish scheme first advertised on a website linked to Flynn through his Digital Soldiers brand.

“We have an army of digital soldiers: citizen journalists,” an archived version of the digitalsoldiers.us site’s landing page declares, borrowing directly from Flynn’s 2016 speech. It goes on to note that digital soldiers “from all over the world have stepped up to fill the void where real journalism once stood.”

“Soon,” the site promised, “you will be able to submit your story to the Digital Soldiers website, where in partnership with UncoverDC.com, it will be vetted, edited, and shared with our network of thousands of fellow Digital Soldiers.” The digital trails leading from Flynn’s digitalsoldiers.us to UncoverDC surfaced in the analysis of data collected from Parler social media accounts by the New America and ASU team.

UncoverDC.com was created on May 31, 2019, according to internet registry records; soon after, a company called UncoverDC, LLC was registered in South Carolina, according to public records. Run by online influencer Tracy Beanz, the site taps into the “alt-tech” movement that sprang up after major social media companies began taking a more aggressive approach to content moderation in the wake of deadly clashes between protesters at the 2017 “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Like many alt-tech sites that seek to monetize access to specially curated content generated by far-right influencers, UncoverDC offers paid membership options.

Flynn has long professed a fascination with journalism. He has likened reporting to intelligence gathering in his public writings about spycraft and in interviews on lessons learned about how intelligence operations could better support counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In those war zones, Flynn advocated the use of open-source intelligence centers to enhance counterinsurgency campaigns and augment the ability of fusion centers to gauge potential emerging threats and target insurgents. He also launched the architecture for military officials and diplomatic and humanitarian aid advisers in Afghanistan to share information about sociocultural dynamics that could influence everything from the price of rice to how Afghans might vote in an upcoming election.

Chock full of conspiracy theory-laden stories on topics ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines to local and federal elections, UncoverDC offers a glimpse at a rapidly evolving business model that is increasingly favored by many far-right influencers, QAnon devotees, and Trump insiders like Flynn. Many of the website’s listed staff are right-wing, alt-tech influencers. Several are one-time micro-influencers and citizen celebrities whose substantial social media following earned them recognition and ad revenues on mainstream platforms like YouTube, but who, after falling afoul of content moderation rules on mainstream platforms, migrated to more fringe platforms like BitChute, Gab, and Parler.

From Dark to Light

Beanz is listed as UncoverDC’s editor-in-chief, and an archived version of digitalsoldiers.us states that that site is a “project of General Flynn and UncoverDC,” linking the sites via a trail of digital breadcrumbs. One of several conservative micro-influencers who have ridden the QAnon wave, Beanz is a central player in Flynn’s growing online profile. A bio on UncoverDC indicates that she worked on Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign and Trump’s in 2016.

Beanz also hosts a podcast called “From Dark to Light” and touts her credentials as an “investigative journalist.” The podcast features talk show-style banter and interviews with well-known far-right figures, including one with Flynn himself. A recent episode released in April featured Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman who paid Flynn’s firm for research and lobbying work related to Fethullah Gülen, a well-known Turkish opposition figure.

Beanz, whose given name is Tracy Diaz, was a featured speaker at the “March for Trump” rally in Washington in November 2020. A month later, she appeared alongside Flynn at a Women for America First rally that promoted Trump’s false claims of election rigging. She recently won a leadership position in the Horry County Republican Party in South Carolina; in a video posted on her YouTube channel, Flynn helped her celebrate the victory at an outdoor rally in late April.

Another video on Beanz’s YouTube channel, titled “We are the Storm,” includes montages of the Capitol building against the backdrop of a storm darkened sky interspersed with video clips of Trump and photos of Democratic politicians like Rep. Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The video includes a hypnotic soundtrack similar in style to those accompanying QAnon videos and ends with a clip of Trump tracing an imaginary figure in the air and referencing “the calm before the storm,” an iconic image that plays a central role in the QAnon mythos.

In response to an email requesting comment for this story, Beanz invited an Intercept reporter to join her on her podcast. Beanz also noted that she has “litigation in process against several other outlets that have falsely accused me of being part of some larger QAnon conspiracy and I am hesitant to take part in any interviews that may be edited or taken out of context.” Beanz did not respond to a follow-up email.

UncoverDC combines characteristics of a vanity publishing scheme with those of a political fundraiser.

UncoverDC combines characteristics of a vanity publishing scheme with those of a political fundraiser. A chance to engage directly with Beanz gets pride of place on the site’s “Support” page. For $125 a month, users who sign up for the “Say So” editor’s tier can get their investigative contributions published on the site. Those seeking more tailored access or a private audience with Beanz can sign up for the “Luminary Tier,” where a $2,000 donation will also secure access to a group chat. For an even more intimate experience, Luminary Tier members can pay $3,000 to have Beanz “convince a doubter on a hot topic” or $6,000 for a chance to see their name on the site’s “FOUNDERS page.” Donations of any denomination can also be made via PayPal.

Several of Flynn’s lengthy statements appear prominently on the site in blogposts under his name, including a statement posted in February about the elections and a call to join Jericho March, a far-right Christian nationalist group that counts Oath Keepers militia chief Stewart Rhodes and Flynn as among its most prominent members.

Despite the digital dots connecting Flynn’s constellation of websites, there is no express mention of him on the UncoverDC masthead. But in addition to Flynn’s having authored several posts on the site, Beanz and others cover his legal travails and political activities closely. After Trump pardoned Flynn in November, the site’s coverage of Flynn’s activities intensified leading up to and immediately after the Capitol siege on January 6.

Rallying the Digital Troops

It is on Parler, and across the digital annals of Flynn’s websites and business enterprises, that flashes of the violent future of American politics become clearest.

Flynn apparently joined Parler under the handle @GenFlynn in mid-July 2019 but did not post from the account until September, when he announced that he was “coming in for a landing! And a soft one too!!!” He only posted a few comments using that handle the rest of that year, but the tempo picked up considerably after June 23, 2020, when a single line — “Digital Soldiers are on the move (get ready!)” — appeared under his name.

Flynn’s next post appeared on Parler the same day that Twitter temporarily locked Flynn’s lawyer Powell out of her account, and it may have been the first significant sign of the scale of Flynn’s plan to promote the “digital soldiers” cause on alt-tech platforms. “America’s Guardian Angel of American Justice @SidneyPowell1 twitter account has been suspended,” Flynn wrote. “Trust me, she will not be silenced, nor should she be. Digital Soldiers must keep fighting.” The post garnered 9,000 “echoes,” Parler’s version of reposts; overall it garnered 16,000 upvotes, the equivalent of “likes” on Facebook or Twitter.

The New America-ASU review of Parler data indicates that QAnon-themed hashtags, including Flynn’s #digitalsoldiers, are among the site’s most popular. Posts including #digitalsoldiers appear to have generated more traffic on days when Flynn, Trump, or both headlined the news cycle, such as when the video of Flynn and his family reciting the oath and the well-known phrase associated with QAnon “Where We Go One, We Go All” was posted online last July, and shortly after Flynn and Powell were banned by Twitter.

The review also found that several Parler accounts that behaved like automated bots amplified Flynn’s QAnon-related posts on the platform at a rate of thousands per hour. For example, on at least six occasions, Parler user @Reeseysnotsorry averaged more than one post or comment per minute, and on many occasions averaged more than one post or comment every two minutes, for a total of more than 17,000 posts and comments.

While ASU researchers emphasized that it can be difficult to establish when and whether social media posts are amplified by bots as opposed to a group of people who farm out a single account to many users, the push to amplify Flynn’s #digitalsoldiers on Parler dovetailed neatly with key political events during the 2020 presidential election campaign such as Election Day and Flynn’s appearance at a post-election rally in Washington, D.C., in December that devolved into violent clashes between Proud Boys and counterprotesters. Thousands of mentions of related terms, including #digitalarmy and #digitalwarriors received tens of thousands of engagements on Parler, many peaking at key milestones in the timeline from the days leading up to Election Day on November 3, 2020, and after.

As returns from the 2020 presidential election began to roll in from around the country, it became apparent that the race would be close. When the results tipped toward Joe Biden, Trump and his allies made it clear they would contest them.

On December 1, Powell, who had represented Flynn when he sought to reverse his guilty plea, registered the Texas corporation “Defending the Republic, Inc.” Flynn and his brother Joseph were added in an amendment to Texas corporate registry records on December 12, the same day Flynn gave a rousing speech on the National Mall during the pro-Trump Million MAGA March.

Then, on December 31, 2020 — a little less than 24 hours after Republican Sen. Josh Hawley declared his intent to challenge the certification of the Electoral College results — Flynn posted a lengthy quote from George Washington calling for Americans to rally as an army:

My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do, and more than can be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty, and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.

Battling the “Deep State” Virtually

Flynn posted Washington’s rallying cry for a revolution 13 days after a White House meeting between Trump, Flynn, Powell, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and others to discuss the election. It was at that White House meeting where Powell suggested that Trump should seize voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and where the group reportedly discussed Flynn’s notion that Trump should impose martial law and re-run the elections. In the days that followed, Flynn took to Parler and Telegram, a messaging app, to urge his followers to protest the election outcome at the January 6 rally in Washington.

All the while, during that crucial period in December 2020 when Trump and his supporters sought to overturn the election results, Byrne, Powell, Flynn, Flynn’s brother, and other key Trump surrogates like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell were building the back-end architecture for a dark-money fueled political campaign.

On January 8 — just two days after hundreds of militia members and conservative Christians stormed the Capitol to try to derail the certification of Biden’s victory — Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that named Texas-based Defending the Republic, Inc. and Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell as defendants. Dominion sued Powell, Lindell, and Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani over baseless claims made by all three that Dominion voting machines and software were fraudulently rigged to eliminate or “flip” ballots cast for Trump to Biden.

Dominion’s lawsuit claims that Powell’s law firm, defendingtherepublic.org, and the Texas-based Defending the Republic Inc., are Powell’s “alter egos.” Visitors to Powell’s websites were invited to donate, “but depending on the website or hyperlink the user follows, they are directed to make checks payable to various entities,” according to Dominion’s suit and archived versions of defendingtherepublic.org. An announcement about the launch of the Defending the Republic PAC also appears on sidneypowell.com.

Powell has countered that Dominion’s “alter ego” references improperly blur the line between the corporate entity and Powell as a person, and that the claim is factually incorrect.

Web archives show Powell’s eponymous website has touted her work on Flynn’s federal legal case and linked to several other sites, including dtrpac.com, which redirects to defendingtherepublicpac.com, a website launched soon after Election Day last November. An earlier version of defendingtherepublic.org stated that donations would be used to support lawsuits brought by Powell based on unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and directed visitors to several other sites, including hereistheevidence.com, a crowdsourcing site for reporting election “irregularity.”

“Millions of dollars must be raised to defend the Republic as these lawsuits continue to be filed to ensure victory,” Powell stated on the Defending the Republic website in 2020. At the time, there was no visible reference on the donations page to the Florida PAC, which was added to the page in April 2021. The change to the website came one month after the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued a subpoena to GoDaddy requesting information about the owner of defendingtherepublic.org. Other than Sidney Powell, there is also no mention on the site about any of the people listed as directors, agents, or managers of Texas-based Defending the Republic, Inc., and it is unclear who benefits from donations made via defendingtherepublic.org.

On June 15, officials with the Florida commission, which is also known as the FDACS, lodged an administrative complaint against Powell’s Texas-based firm Defending the Republic, Inc., saying that the website’s donation page “misrepresented” the Texas firm’s charitable status in Florida and its ability to accept donations. In a statement issued a few days later, the FDACS described Defending the Republic, Inc. as “legal fund involved in conspiracies related to the 2020 presidential election” and said that the department had found the firm had violated state law. “Defending The Republic has a choice to make – they can come into compliance with the law, or face large fines and court orders,” commissioner Nikki Fried said in the statement.

Lawyers for Dominion contend that Powell only registered the Texas for-profit firm after claiming during several media appearances that she had set up a website for a nonprofit organization to support a litigation campaign aimed at overturning the outcome of the 2020 election. Dominion’s lawyers contend that Powell began soliciting donations on her website in early January on the premise that Defending the Republic was a nonprofit organization, although Defending the Republic PAC had not been officially registered as a nontaxable entity with the IRS at the time.

Flynn is not named in the suit, but Dominion notes Powell’s tie to defendingtherepublic.org and to the Texas-based firm that in December 2020 filings listed Flynn and his brother as directors. The website named in the lawsuit, defendingtherepublic.org, is linked to the West Palm Beach address where the Florida-based PAC is registered. That is also the address listed for former Trump White House liaison Emily Newman, who shows up in registry records for the Florida nonprofit.

The two Florida firms bearing the names “Defending the Republic, Inc.” and “Defending the Republic PAC, Inc.,” were registered in Florida in February. Florida public records indicate that Newman, Flynn’s brother, and Lindell are registered as directors of the 501(c)(4), Defending the Republic, Inc. The 501(c)(4) is no longer active.

On March 22, Powell filed a motion to dismiss Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against her, claiming that “reasonable people” would not accept as fact spurious claims about election fraud that she’d made on the Defending the Republic website or in the press. In a declaration attached to Powell’s motion, former Overstock.com CEO Byrne is listed as the chair and CEO of Defending the Republic. He now claims to have resigned.

Although Michael Flynn is also referenced several times in Powell’s legal brief, no mention is made of his having been listed as a director in the Texas firm’s original filings. Nor is there any reference to Flynn’s brother Joseph, or to Joseph’s connection to the Florida-based Defending the Republic, Inc.

Lawyers for Dominion declined to comment on the case.

At the Memorial Day QAnon-themed conference in Dallas, Powell repeated her false claims that the presidential vote was rigged.

Taking Over “the Idea of Information”

Dubbed the “For God and Country Patriot Roundup,” the Dallas event sparked controversy after Flynn seemed to suggest that the military should mount a coup to reinstall Trump as president. He quickly backtracked, but his comments in Dallas echoed his suggestion in December that military authority could be invoked to restore Trump to the White House. They are also entirely in keeping with Flynn’s repeated appeals to patriotism through posts on Parler and other platforms that venerate the military as a sort of Praetorian Guard of Trump’s presidency.

Flynn’s post, for instance, of George Washington’s Revolutionary War-era words calling for a citizen-led uprising, were emblematic of the grand vision Flynn had spelled out in his calls for a virtual insurgency, and they resonated in the far-right online market he has sought to corner. #digitalsoldiers has appeared most frequently alongside hashtags like #redpill, #qarmy, and #thegreatawakening, according to at least one reliable aggregator of digital tags. In the days leading up to January 6, the hashtag became a clarion call to the far-right to mount an insurgency against Trump’s political detractors.

On his now-defunct website digitalsoldiers.us, Flynn had equated the “army of digital soldiers” to citizen journalists. The wave that had elevated Trump was “an insurgency — irregular warfare at its finest in politics,” Flynn declared in an excerpt from his 2016 post-election speech to the Young America’s Foundation posted on the site. “The journalists we have in our media did a disservice to themselves. More than that, they did a disservice to our country. So the American people decided to take over the idea of information. They took over the idea, and they did it through social media.”

QAnon-themed, right-wing sites similar to those promoted by Flynn appeared to gain more prominence as Trump’s false rhetoric about the election began to build during the course of the 2020 campaign. A search of historical domain registration information shows that digitalarmy.com was registered on GoDaddy in November 2020. A company called Digital Army LLC is registered in Nevada under the name of Sean Schoepflin and an entity called For God and Country Trust, according to records.

It is not known whether Flynn’s digital soldiers websites relate to digitalarmy.com. The sites employ similar tactics to engage users to sign up as “citizen journalists,” but the architects of digitalarmy.com apparently had bigger ambitions. On October 30, 2020, announcements of the coming launch of a “censorship free platform for truth-seekers” appeared on a local broadcast news channel in Youngstown, Ohio. The announcements were picked up by radio and television news outlets in rural areas from Ohio to Nebraska.

The term “digital soldiers” was repeated again and again in connection with the broadcast media push and online rollout of digitalarmy.com. “Monetization will occur after elections, via brands that are built and funded by digital soldiers,” a statement from digitalarmy.com proclaimed. “These digital soldiers will be given ownership of the developed brands and supported by the Digital Army worldwide.” Curiously, both the digitalarmy.com statement and the newswire press release that was pushed out across the country made oblique references to QAnon, stating that “Digital Army has spent the last three years working alongside the ‘Great Awakening’ to develop a foundation for change.” The “Great Awakening” is part of the foundational Q myth about the coming revolutionary rise of the right against the “deep state.”

Most of the online enterprises Flynn was linked to between 2017 and 2019 are no longer active. The lone survivor, the “citizen journalism” site UncoverDC.com, shares a curious feature with digitalsoldiers.us.

Both sites were registered by Anonymize Inc., a subsidiary of Epik.com, a Washington state web hosting firm popular with far-right extremist groups. Epik was best known in 2019 for doing business with the 8chan message board that gave life to #Pizzagate and sparked white supremacist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Hanau, a suburb of Frankfurt, Germany.

Additionally, Epik has hosted BitChute and Gab, two far-right social media platforms cited by civil rights advocates for hosting content posted by Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group. Epik also briefly hosted Parler on its servers after Amazon booted the platform following the violent siege at the Capitol.

How much Flynn knew about Epik’s willingness to do business with white supremacists is anyone’s guess, but the company’s profile as a safe haven for right-wing extremism was well established when both digitalsoldiers.us and UncoverDC.com were set up in 2019.

The post How Trump Ally Michael Flynn Nurtured — and Profited From — the QAnon Conspiracy Theory appeared first on The Intercept.

The far-right candidate for the Republican nomination in Porter’s CA-45 House district, Nick Taurus, disrupted Porter’s first in-person town hall since the pandemic began, at a park in Irvine. Taurus, wearing a blue “American First” cap and flanked by his father and a handful of fellow Trump supporters, brought the online tactic of trolling to life by heckling Porter aggressively enough to provoke a fight with other members of the crowd.

After at least one Trump supporter standing near Taurus was knocked down, and a small canopy collapsed, Facebook video of the incident recorded by a witness, Bethany Gilboard, showed that Porter rushed toward the conflict, and put her arms around an elderly woman and a Navy veteran who were seated near the hecklers.

Taurus was then seen on video calling for the police to arrest a man who had shoved his father. A man identified by Irvine police as a Porter supporter was given a citation and released, and officers took a report of assault and battery.

An altercation ensued and punches were thrown at Katie Porter’s Town Hall event when her ‘America First’ challenger Nick Taurus showed up to confront her with some of his supporters. pic.twitter.com/Wiq6qwInx7

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 12, 2021

After the event, the Los Angeles Times reported, Taurus badgered members of the audience to say if they were from America. One Porter backer, Alex Mohajer, a political activist and commentator, wrote on Twitter that the Taurus contingent “called me a faggot and told my 72-year-old Iranian American mother that she wasn’t a real American and should go back to Iran.”

While Taurus’s stunt failed at its original purpose — since he had hoped to get viral video of himself railing against Porter during the Q&A section of the event — the physical altercation did succeed in getting the Los Angeles Times to quote directly from an unhinged rant against Porter he had posted on Instagram and to report the anti-Porter slogans chanted by the hecklers, which were prepared by his campaign.

Porter told “Pod Save America” on Monday that the fact that Taurus said he had crashed her event to “confront” her was a clue that he and Republicans who failed to condemn the provocation were not interested in “civil dialogue” or debate. “Confronting someone is an aggressive act, it’s not an act of mutual respect,” Porter added, “it’s inconsistent with democracy.”

Taurus, 29, is a rabid Trump supporter but also an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, the founder of the openly white supremacist America First movement who has been kicked off social networks but embraced by Rep. Paul Gosar, the far-right Arizona Republican whose objection to certifying his state’s vote in the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6 helped provoke the storming of the Capitol. Fuentes, who took part in the 2017 white power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was outside the Capitol on January 6 and encouraged the crowd to block the transfer of power.

https://twitter.com/NickTaurus45/status/1410409527388741636

Taurus met Fuentes last month, days after the racist influencer had called the raid on the Capitol “awesome,” as Zachary Petrizzo reported for Salon. “Trump was awesome because he was racist. Trump was awesome because he was sexist,” Fuentes told viewers of his “America First” streaming show. “The only thing Trump wasn’t awesome for was being antisemitic; he wasn’t antisemitic.” (Fuentes appears unwilling to read between the lines of Trump’s speeches and offhand remarks.)

When he stepped forward to confront Porter on Sunday, Taurus was wearing the blue “America First” cap Fuentes sells to dedicated fans, who are united, in part, by their deep antisemitism.

After he disrupted Porter’s event, Taurus recorded a rambling Instagram live account of the incident in which he referred, again and again, to the fact that employees of J Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group for liberal Zionists, or their family members, are among Porter’s leading donors. Rather than explain clearly that all of these individual donors are Americans who support Israel, Taurus incorrectly referred to J Street as “a foreign lobby” and, with scarcely concealed antisemitism, accused Porter of being “concerned more about what’s going on in Tel Aviv” than in her district.

Taurus, who announced his candidacy last month with a statement claiming that Americans are currently oppressed by “anti-White extremists and the GAY mafia,” is also a fervent supporter of the racist, homophobic leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. During a stint teaching English in rural Hungary after college, Taurus got his young students to pose for a photo he posted on Facebook flashing the “OK” hand gesture, used by online white supremacists to signify white power.

“It’s okay to ??? a whole ????? by yourself.”

This photo of Nick Taurus in a Hungarian classroom still gives me weird vibes. Wonder what subject he taught… pic.twitter.com/V8eEbQaOTt

— InMinivanHell (@inminivanhell) July 13, 2021

Taurus and his father Marcae have been intentionally provoking conflict for years. In 2017, they started at least two fights when they appeared on the campus of Cal State Fullerton in MAGA hats holding signs that read “Islam is rape culture” and “Muhammad is a terrorist.”

“I came here to be purposely provocative,” Taurus told Ashlyn Ramirez of the Daily Titan college newspaper at the time, claiming that his pro-Trump, anti-Islam display was just about free speech.

At a right-wing rally in Huntington Beach in February, Taurus loudly, and mistakenly, accused a far-right videographer, Kalen D’Almeida, of being “antifa” because he was dressed in black and wearing a mask.

At the Tito Ortiz protest, a conservative journalist got accused of being Antifa by other conservatives ? pic.twitter.com/vJM4msPofe

— Borrachinha Depot (@FullContactMTWF) February 11, 2021

When D’Almeida — who had spent most of the previous year trying to undermine left-wing activists, by gathering video of violence on the fringes of racial justice protests — claimed to be a “nonpartisan” reporter, Taurus replied, “Nonpartisan? What does that mean?”

More recently, Taurus harassed the son of a local official during a deranged anti-vaccine protest outside her home in May. “Your mom sucks!” Taurus chanted at Orange Country Supervisor Katrina Foley’s son, after he had retreated into his house.

“Your mom is a big pharma wh0re,” OC anti-Science protester Nick Taurus yelled from his megaphone as Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley’s son arrives home during a “peaceful protest” out front of his house. pic.twitter.com/I7TAUTqsnS

— InMinivanHell (@inminivanhell) May 30, 2021

Taurus and other megaphone-wielding protesters had descended on Foley’s home in Costa Mesa after she voted in favor of voluntary digital vaccine passports, which would document covid-19 vaccination status. Foley, a Democrat, told the LA Times that she regretted that her Republican colleagues had caved to pressure from anti-vaccine activists and decided to shelve the use of an app that would have offered local businesses “a convenient, opt-in, voluntary” way to confirm that patrons had been vaccinated. “We are appeasing a very small faction of our community who actually are not going to get vaccinated,” she said.

While Taurus’s toxic political views appear to have generated little support in the district, at least so far — as evidenced by the fact that he has just 18 Twitter followers, and barely 500 people, not all of them fans, have subjected themselves to his Instagram rant about the Porter event — there is something chilling about his presence in the race, no matter how marginal, given his history of engaging in violence at racial justice protests.

After he provoked the fight at Porter’s event, antifascist activists in Southern California worked to draw the attention of political reporters to clear visual evidence of Taurus attacking protesters last year. But what’s perhaps more disturbing is that Taurus himself seems proud of his violent track record.

Two weeks after he announced his candidacy, Taurus posted video of a speech he gave in which he called on right-wing activists to take action to stop left-wing protesters. “We shouldn’t be letting them come out and protest,” he said. “They’re not here to protest; they’re here to provoke us. Never forget that. Their very presence is a provocation.”

This video, posted on social networks by @NickTaurus45 – the white supremacist who provoked a fight at @RepKatiePorter's event on Sunday – appears to show that he is proud to have been filmed attacking racial justice protesters (via @donna_susan12)pic.twitter.com/J239wXLhYX

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) July 13, 2021

The video closes with a brief montage of political violence carried out by Taurus set to the soundtrack of Barry Goldwater’s infamous 1964 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president. As Goldwater intones, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” the video cuts to a clip of Taurus stealing a “Black Lives Matter” sign from a protester in Yorba Linda, California, in September, and ripping it up. Then, as we hear Goldwater say, “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” we see video from his father’s Facebook page of Taurus punching a man he had badgered and provoked at a pro-Trump election protest organized by the family in Laguna Hills in December.

Updated: July 13, 9:40 p.m. EDT
This article was updated to add information about belligerence by Nick Taurus at protests in Huntington Beach in February and Costa Mesa in May.

Correction: July 17, 6:47 p.m. EDT
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the man who was knocked down during the disruption of Rep. Katie Porter’s town hall event as a supporter of Nick Taurus. The man, Joe Camera, claims that he was not a supporter of Taurus before the event, although he posed for a photograph with him that day, in which the two men had their arms on each other’s shoulders. According to Camera, the photograph was taken after the event, not before it.

The post White Supremacist Candidate Who Disrupted Katie Porter Event Has a History of Violence appeared first on The Intercept.

Historians tend to frown on the practice of imagining “alternate histories.” Two people who don’t are Danny Bessner and Matt Christman, hosts of the new podcast “Hinge Points.” On each episode, they take an historical “hinge” moment and ask, could it have been different? What if, for example, the German Social Democrats had not fallen in line behind the march to war in 1914?

Ryan Grim: In the summer of 1914, after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand threatened to engulf Europe in violence, the workers of the world were faced with the question of war or peace.

That August, with war fever at its hottest, the German Social Democratic Party threw its weight behind the war. It cleared the way for a continent-wide conflagration.

That decision cut squarely against Karl Marx’s prediction that the working class would refuse to go to war against itself, that class solidarity was stronger than nationalist solidarity. Now, to be fair to his friend Frederick Engels, in 1887, after Marx had died, Engels did in fact forecast just such a war, writing: “No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Eurepe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done […] only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.”

But in 1914, once the German workers party approved the war, so did the rest of the European socialist parties, as they had little choice at that point. From there, Engel’s prediction came half true: It did unleash an undreamt of violence, and it did create the conditions for working class revolution, but they only succeeded in Russia, while they were put down in Germany.

All of this is explored in a new podcast called Hinge Points, hosted by Matt Christman and Danny Bessner, that takes historical moments and asks the question:“What if?” In this case: What if the leadership of the German Social Democrats had decided not to vote to approve the war loans?

This type of counter-factual musing is frowned upon by serious historians, but I’m not a serious historian, so I happily smile on it; I think it’s not only an engaging way to learn about historical events, but it’s also a useful creative exercise to get you thinking about what kind of world is possible, and what kind of world isn’t.

It can help us think about what’s possible today, in what has become a deeply confusing era. That confusion follows the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which was followed a decade and a half later by the financial crisis, and a decade after that by a pandemic. What kind of world is possible emerging from that, and what is our role in creating it?

To work through this, I’m joined by the hosts of Hinge Points. Thank you both for joining me.

Matt Christman: Thanks for having us.

Danny Bessner: Thank you very much for having us.

RG: So Danny Bessner, he’s the co-host of the American Prestige podcast, also a foreign policy professor at the “Scoop” Jackson School at the University of Washington. Do I have that right?

DB: Oh, yes, you do. [Laughs.]

RG: Excellent.

And Matt Christman is the co-host of the podcast Chapo Trap House.

So you’re both collectively doing the podcast Hinge Points now. How did this come about?

What drove you to launch this project?

DB: Well, I think Matt and I have become friends. And we’re both kind of history nerds: I got a PhD in European and American history. And Matt has been reading history his entire life.

And, in particular, Matt does this type of historical thinking that I think is really valuable, which is this type of really big historical thinking, macro-political thinking, looking at big structures from 30,000 feet. And that’s really not a type of historical thinking that one is able to do in the American Academy. The American Academy, as many people might know, is incredibly specialized — and to advance your career in the historical profession, you really have to focus on something narrow.

So for me, as someone who’s an academic, it was just refreshing and fun to talk to Matt about these sorts of large, big questions that we have about history, and particularly about where we are in 2021. And over the course of the last year or so just having these conversations really made it seem to us that there was really a space for this type of big historical thinking to discuss in a public forum, particularly when it came to the fate of the left and where the left finds itself in 2021.

So we found ourselves talking about these historical hinge points, and that was really the genesis, at least from my end, of this project.

MC: Yeah, I’ve said [it] before, it’s like an autopsy of the human civilizational project as we’re sort of living in the corpse of it.

RG: Yeah. And, Matt, a running theme of yours for for a while now has been kind of the pervasive sense of just fundamental powerlessness, that so many people feel and you’ve talked a lot about the way that that expresses itself in our politics: pushing people into polarized camps, shouting at each other in a culture war that the only point of the war is to fight it so that people can’t ignore the fact that they can’t actually do anything about their material reality.

And so: Did this podcast sort of flow out of that a little bit? Like, if we can’t do anything right now, at least we can learn from what went wrong in the past, so that it gives us a chance.

MC: It definitely was. I found myself in a situation of having this absolutely accidental and baffling — and frankly, probably immoral job of talking about politics at this point in history and feeling like I didn’t really have a lot to say about what should happen, or what the contours of the moment are just because of how stultified everything feels and how much it feels as though we are in a fallow period in many ways. That doesn’t assume that that’s going to persist — in fact, I think it can’t persist — but it does limit your ability to be useful, really, if you’re focusing on the politics of the moment, because as you pointed out, the politics of the moment are illusory.

So, for myself, if I wanted to say anything that I thought could be interesting, that might be interesting to other people, it would be to look backward, and to identify those moments of contingency — where things happen one way, that could have gone another way, and just imagining the possibilities that existed and that were foreclosed upon. Because if you can identify and dissect those moments in the past, it allows you to apply that thinking to the moment that you live in and and remember that every moment is filled and suffused with possibilities. And that only after events have coalesced, after an action has been taken, can you really say that something is fully determined. And since we’re always living in a moment of contingency because we don’t know where this is all going to go, thinking about previous moments of contingency not only let us see what matters, but how we can think about identifying what matters around us.

RG: And as of now you’ve put out two episodes so far — I don’t want to rehash them since people can and should go listen to them. They’re enjoyable, even though they’re deep dives into very discrete periods of time. The first one you do looks at the German Social Democratic Party’s decision to effectively vote for World War I, put war credits but get behind the war effort. And the second one looks at the German Revolution of 1918-1919. Again, the Social Democratic Party plays this interesting role in it.

And I learned a great German word — Danny, do I have it right? Dickenbonze?

DB: [Laughs.] Yeah, dickenbonze, which basically means like the fat, big wigs.

RG: And we have these in the U.S., these are the kind of the labor bosses who have grown fat on the dole of the workers’ pay. Who had the famous quote: “Nothing is too good for the working class”?

MC: Samuel Gompers, baby.

RG: — when he was criticized for being too fat of a fat cat.

So you talk about how the workers organize themselves into this party structure. Necessarily, as a result of that, they have these fat cats on top of them. And so when the decision comes to be made, the material reality that the fat cats or dickenbonze are living in affects their decision-making, because now all of a sudden, they have a lot to lose, and they’re not engaged in the alienating aspect of labor.

MC: Yes.

DB: Yes.

RG: Then, in the second episode, it comes back in an interesting way in the way that this revolution, this is a spontaneous revolution that is able to be crushed not just by the dickenbonsen who are now in government, but also by the fact that there is no kind of coordinated leadership the way that there was in the Soviet Union.

So it’s set up this contradiction — tell me if you think I’m saying right — that without organized leadership, you can’t pull off a revolution, but with an organized revolution, the leadership doesn’t want to make a revolution?

MC: Right. Yeah.

DB: Right. Yeah, and this is the ultimate problem, I think, that socialist parties faced in parliamentary democracies and throughout the history of modernity.

And I just think, just take a step back — the larger question that we’re trying to ask in those two episodes, and an additional one that’ll come later, is what happens when the working class didn’t do what some Marxists and Marx himself perhaps thought they would do, which was essentially unite across national boundaries and not kill each other in the maelstrom of World War I?

And I think that without even thinking about it, Matt, and I focus three of our first episodes on this problem because, in a real sense, I think we’re living in the hangover of that problem. What happens if the proletariat does become conscious of itself and do what it’s supposed to do, and lead this sort of a communist socialist revolution?

And so I think from that question, we then got into questions of like, the literal mechanisms of party leadership and who is acting on behalf of the workers, how are they acting on behalf of the workers, and how does what might be termed their bourgeois-ification inform the strategic decisions that were made, both in 1914, and then 1918-1919, during these German revolutions.

And I think this is the fundamental tension of the entire thing, which is you do need that sort of coordination, but it needs to be a coordination that’s directly connected to sort of the lived experience of alienated labor. But that is not an experience that one has when one becomes essentially an administrator of a political party.

And you see echoes of this debate across the North Atlantic world and throughout the Global South as well. And I think you see it, for example, in the United States with debates over the professional managerial class, the PMC, what role do they have in a working class revolution? And I think just history shows that it’s not an especially effective one.

RG: And, Matt, you made, I thought, an interesting point about the Russian Revolution, that because the revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, were essentially criminalized that they had just as much risk not making revolution as they did making one. They weren’t comfortable enough.

MC: Yeah, absolutely.

In 1917, the leading edge of the connected, working class party, the Bolshevik Party, that by over the course of the summer of 1917, as the Provisional Government lost legitimacy, was able to consolidate significant support among a majority of the active workers in the critical cities, where it was led by people who if a revolution didn’t happen, would probably have all been executed, or at the very least been, had to flee back into exile, which was just not a situation that existed for the leaders of the center of mass of German Workers in the cities who are SDP bureaucrats who had been part of a legal party for a generation, and who had well ensconced themselves in the structures of the German bourgeois state at that point.

RG: And you talked about how in 1919, there was, what was it called, a Kapp Putsch?

MC: A Kapp Putsch.

RG: [Laughs.] So basically a right-wing coup.

MC: Yeah, sort of a Kornilov affair for post-war Germany. Yeah.

RG: Yeah. And so it made me wonder: If there was no Kornilov affair in the summer of ’17. Do you then not get the consolidation and the support behind the Bolsheviks that fall?

MC: I think that that’s very likely. But of course, the thing to point out there is that the Kornilov affair was in large part orchestrated by Alexander Kerensky.

RG: Right. Right.

MC: Like the thing about the Bolshevik Revolution, and the absurdity of people who want to blame the Bolsheviks for taking power, is that they were only allowed to take power by the repeated and just a stunning inability of any level of power in the Russian state, both the czarists and then the provisional government, to do anything like provide a basis for legitimate governance.

Although, and we’ll talk about this in a future episode that I guarantee will get a lot of people mad at us, but I’m very excited for that to happen — but even in that case, without Lenin showing up when he did, the Bolsheviks probably would not have had the will to pull off that coup. But their consolidation of power only happens after the Kornilov affair.

And as we said in the episode about Germany, the Kapp Putsch, happens after the creation of the Freikorps, after the suppression of those early revolts, after the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic, and doesn’t have that galvanizing effect of bringing together a coherent and well-organized revolutionary party that the Kornilov affair had in Russia.

DB: And just to briefly piggyback off that, I think that also has to do with the relative levels of development in two societies.

MC: Yes.

DB: In some sense it’s really not the most useful thing to compare what happens in Germany with what happens in the Russian Empire. One because the conditions were just very different. And perhaps most importantly, from the perspective of Marx’s theory, their levels of development were just totally different. And what we talk about in that future episode — I think people will get mad at us — is what did it mean for the International left to be centered in Russia/the Soviet Union and we approach that question in an interesting way that I hope people will at least find compelling and worthy of discussion.

MC: And also just try not to moralize it.

DB: No, not at all.

MC: And I think what makes it easy to talk about is just how much more so than the German Revolution, which was really stillborn, the Russian Revolution is incredibly contingent at a several points you can see things going in a drastically different direction, which raises the question: Well, OK, imagine those things had changed, then what new contours emerge in the working class struggle for self-awareness and power that would be happening all across the world no matter what, in the crisis following the end of World War I.

RG: I actually wanted to ask you about the Russian Revolution. And I don’t want to steal too much thunder from a future episode, but because I do agree with you that that it was so contingent on Lenin and Trotsky pushing their crew to make this revolution and then also making sure that they didn’t cave in the days following and open themselves up to a giant socialist coalition government that would have just been a retread of the failed provisional government.

MC: Yeah.

RG: It really did seem like a force of will, like these guys just winning arguments in backrooms. And so the question, then, is what if they lose those arguments? And you just continue to get a failed liberal democracy in Russia over the next couple decades? What I’m curious about is what you think that would do to U.S. foreign policy?

DB: This is our question. Well, the way we approached it was less about U.S. foreign policy, and what does that mean for what might be termed “the North Atlantic” left writ large? And the questions that I think we ask are: What if international leftism wasn’t centered in the Soviet Union, a society at a very different level of development, run by very particular people at a particular time? What would it mean if leftism didn’t become as discredited as it did? Obviously, that effort would have been, I think, undertaken regardless of whether the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. But what would it have meant if one wasn’t able to tar U.S. leftists, or German leftists, or French and British leftists with the accusation of being a fifth column of a foreign power? And what would it mean, if the Western left wasn’t oriented in some significant way toward the common turn and other Soviet bodies? And I think this is what might annoy people, given our particular approach?

MC: And what would it mean if you didn’t have a situation where there is a profound schism within the working class movement of every Western country over the question of how to orient themselves towards Moscow?

RG: Right. And then from the U.S. perspective, do you think that the U.S. war hawks and the ones who were pushing an imperial agenda would be as successful, let’s say, pursuing the Vietnam War? Does China go communist? And let’s say it does, is that enough for the U.S. to go wage war in Vietnam? Or does the United States start to have a little bit more tolerance for social democratic movements? As you guys know, across the 20th century, you couldn’t be for raising taxes in Brazil without risking assassination at the hands of some U.S. agent or some U.S. operative? So it really changes the course of what’s possible in all of these countries.

DB: I think that’s precisely right. And I think it opens up new opportunities.

Personally, I think after World War II, the United States is going to affirm some sort of global hegemony. I think that is over determined once France falls in the summer of 1940. I think that really freaked out a lot of Americans and it really refigured what they thought of themselves in terms of a global scale. They were going to go outside the Western Hemisphere and even more outside the Philippines.

Now the character of that empire, I think, was shaped profoundly by the Soviet Union, and particularly once, in the autumn of 1949, once China quote-unquote falls to communism, once the Soviets acquire a nuclear weapon, I think that kind of sets the stage for the decades-long Cold War that we had.

So what happens if that doesn’t happen? I think that you do get an imperial American foreign policy. But I think it takes a different form.

Vietnam, I’m not sure if you get the precise war that happens there. But I do think you get the United States trying to assert dollar hegemony which, of course, happened before the end of World War II. And I do think you get the building of bases around the world. But you might get a less virulent anti-socialism domestically; I think you might see something more along the lines of what happened in the United Kingdom, with the creation of some form of national health service and some more social democratic reforms, though I do think that imperialism is over-determined.

RG: Matt, what do you think it does domestically to the U.S.?

MC: Well, I think what it does to the U.S. and to other countries is it changes the dynamic mix of the labor struggle such that when the global crisis of capitalism that was kind of kicked off by World War I and continued through the 20s and 30s, that when the forces array, you know, are politically to respond to that, that perhaps instead of there being this international context for communism as an alternative to, to capitalism, and communism as defined by the actions of the Soviet Union as it builds power and defends itself against an encirclement by capitalist powers bent on its destruction, but rather by specific conditions within the countries in question, and if that happens, you might see a completely different axis of conflict, which I do think is inevitable in the 1930s and 40s worldwide than the one that we ended up with. And I think that’s one of the more interesting parts of it is because you could imagine a world where the absence of communism being integrated into the state competitive framework the way it was after the victory of the Bolsheviks, and in Russia, rather a still internationalized, de-territorialized working class movement but that still would assert itself in specific national contexts. And maybe instead of a world war, like the one we got, there is instead a kind of collection of intertwining cascading civil wars.

RG: Any other teases you can give about future moments you’re going to look at?

MC: We’re thinking of this as the first season. We’re probably going to do more. The response has been pretty encouraging so far. But for now, these are mostly pretty modern. The latest is 19th century with the Lincoln assassination and alternative Reconstruction; the most recent, for us, is 9/11 and the consequences of that, and then I think our second season will probably go back into the mists of time to find more outlandish and frankly kind of fun counterfactuals back when — the farther back you go, the more loose everything feels.

DB: And we also intend to expand beyond the broad North Atlantic world in future seasons, incorporating the Global South, incorporating areas outside of Europe and the United States. But this one, I think, was really motivated by trying to look back on where we are in 2021 from the American political situation in the wake of the Bernie defeat. And I think that going forward, as Matt said, we’ll go back to antiquity, we’ll go to the Middle Ages, Charlemagne will make an appearance, Genghis Khan will make an appearance I’m sure, and really try to expand our vision in a more macro way.

MC: This season basically assumes as overdetermined the triumph of Anglo-American capitalism as the context for global development in the 19th and 20th centuries. And I think, in the future, we’re going to try to maybe go back and say: OK, well, what could have happened to have prevented that from occurring, or change the specific nature of capitalism’s triumph, that kind of thing.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: So to go back to the myth of pre-Covid 2020s, speaking of Bernie’s loss, and also speaking of contingent decisions by roomfuls of people, curious to get your take on, what happens if Jim Clyburn decides that it’s not in his interests to weigh in South Carolina, and Barack Obama decides it’s not in the interest of his legacy to be against this youth’s freight train that’s barreling out of Nevada, and he’s just gonna let this play out.

And let’s say that Sanders does fairly well. He was polling well in South Carolina coming out in Nevada, he does well there, he does well on Super Tuesday. It’s no guarantee, but let’s just pretend he wins. How do you feel like some of this year’s events would have gone differently? Just start with Afghanistan, if he were in the White House?

MC: Well, for me, personally, when we were picking hinge points and things to talk about, I kind of have to balance the importance of the imposition of conditions by a certain action, and then the contingency involved. How few decisions would have had to be different for something significant to be different? How many specific choices of individual people and also random events could be changed to get a drastically different outcome?

And with Bernie, I don’t see a lot of plausible alternatives. Too many things would have to be different in a way that is not really explicable. Like I can’t imagine why Clyburn would not do what he did. It is in Clyburn’s interest to endorse Biden at that point. There’s no world that we live in where Jim Clyburn in the position he’s in does not want to prevent Bernie from being the nominee. The same thing goes, I think, for Obama. So I can’t imagine things being different in that respect. And that’s why I want to look back to when maybe there was more slack in the line, and there was more give in the system, and there were more moments of possibility now. Like, there’s fluidity around us now, but I don’t think it resides at the level of national politics.

DB: I think that one of the reasons that our politics seems so sterile right now, and something that I’ve been arguing for a bit, is that we have the institutions of mass democracy, political parties, the mass media, but the way power actually functions in this society is really located within an administrative state.

So that’s, I think, a big disconnect — we have things like popular movements, like protests against George Floyd’s murder, and all of those things and it seems like nothing seems to change because we have the appearance of mass politics, but actually, the way power functions is more of an administrative hyper-elite way.

So I just wanted to say that, but in terms of being different with Bernie, I mean, just to put my cards on the table, I was a foreign policy adviser to the Bernie campaign. And so I was thinking a lot about this when it seemed like he had a real chance, and I, at least, thought that he really did have a real chance. And one of the things that I think would have been undertaken, at least in the realm of foreign policy, where I was located, was that I think you would have had, for the first time, a general strategic reassessment of the entire structure of American hegemony or the American Empire.

I remember one time we were asked to present blue-sky ideas. And what I noticed is that one of the most complicated problems that the left faces — the anti-imperialist left faces — is that in a lot of ways, we don’t even know where power is located. It’s devolved, the authority of the American state, and it was designed this way consciously, is so devolved, both in terms of its domestic power, but also internationally. So one of the things that I wanted to do was literally just create a series of task forces to map this Leviathan; to map this octopus-like structure that is situated around the globe.

So I think what would have been one of the most important things is that in those early years of Bernie, you would have gotten an actual power-mapping of this incredible structure and an actual reassessment of things like the defense budget, of things like the 750 overseas military bases, of things like allowing the uniformed military to have such an influence on U.S. foreign policy. And that’s, I think, unique because I agree with Matt on this generally, presidents do have really restricted power. And in some sense, the way that he and I always put it is that the algorithm has become conscious.

But I think one realm where the President does have a fair amount of power does relate to American security politics. And I think it was a real missed opportunity to reexamine the global hegemonic structure that the United States has been building since 1945, and even more so since 1989. So it’s a real shame that he didn’t win.

RG: And I’m curious how you think about what Biden’s been up to this year in the context of that kind of static political situation that you described. When we post this podcast, it should be Friday, this evening, the House will be voting or not voting, depending on how it goes, on this Build Back Better Bill, this $1.75-$1.9 trillion package that extends the Child Tax Credit —

MC: — knocked down from $3.5 trillion.

RG: Well, Bernie started it at $6 trillion. Then they passed it through the Senate at $3.5. Now it’s down to, I think, $1.9 but they’re already telegraphing it’ll be knocked down again, if it gets to the Senate. At the same time, it includes, what? $600 billion in climate, clean energy stuff, Child Tax Credit, childcare subsidies, that sort of thing.

How do you think about that type of federal movement in the context of the depression about the overall situation?

MC: I mean, I guess I have a hard time understanding what the ask is of the average American when it comes to paying attention to and having an investment in questions like what passes within the House and Senate? Because it is manifestly not in our hands what comes out of this bill.

DB: Exactly.

MC: We have nothing to say about it. And so, as an American, I can hope, certainly, that there’s good stuff in it. And I can hope that that good stuff can help me and that it can impact my life and impact other people’s lives. But beyond that, just vague preference for better legislation rather than worse, the same way that I have a preference for a sunny day rather than a cloudy one, I don’t really know what we’re, as people, supposed to take from it from a political perspective, because we are out of the loop.

RG: And the contrast with 2008 and 2009 is interesting. In 2008, you had this giant upsurge of enthusiasm, and this organized effort to elect Barack Obama, and then he consciously kind of demobilized people and we know the result of that.

But with Biden’s election, Biden didn’t have to demobilize anything. Even before Covid, he would do these Iowa rallies, and you’d have 12 people show up, and half of them would leave saying that they had shown up as a Biden supporter and were now on the fence. And that was it! Like, that was the end of the campaign, because then Covid hits MSNBC signals that it’s over, and he wins, and then he stays in Wilmington through November.

MC: Doesn’t have to do any public interactions, after having accumulated just a snowball of gaffes just in the few appearances he did make in Iowa and New Hampshire. He just got to be behind, just be in this big bunker.

DB: And I think this just shows again, like we often talk about politics in this country in a way that is just absolutely disconnected from how power works. He’s not a popular guy, he never was a popular guy, and that’s totally unrelated to whether he won the election and how he governs. So I think that’s one of the most important things that we on the quote-unquote left can do at this moment of our absolute lack of influences to really rethink how we even understand politics in this country. We’re oftentimes using old language and old models that don’t reflect the actually existing structures of the American state. And I don’t love making pronouncements about what the left should do, but I’ll do it anyway. I do think we should actually look at the state and where power actually lies instead of just using the old phrases of like, organized protest. Because those things I don’t think necessarily work in the context of American power and 2021.

RG: And If I were to struggle to grasp for some meaning or purpose to what I do with my day every day, every week, every year, besides entertainment — what’s the purpose of this podcast? I hope people enjoy listening to it, and I hope people enjoy reading the things I write, but that really ought not to be the only purpose. And I guess the best that I could come up with would be that there are impressions — and I’m curious for your take on this — there are impressions that people in the administrative state and people in Congress have about what people want to happen, that have some vague influence on the decisions that they make, perhaps only at the margins. Is there anything more than that? Or is even that a reach?

MC: I mean, I think that there is a general understanding of what people would prefer to have, and would rather have not. The polling is pretty explicit about what people would like. And you can rationally imagine how certain programs would be broadly enjoyed by people, whatever their ideological masks that they put on it, they would enjoy experiencing them. And that is a contributing factor to the game theory of people in office.

But that is the product of an ambient, like cultural churn, it cannot be coordinated as the thing. And that means it’s not to be condemned, like pursuing political engagement, at the level of partisan investments and public expression is not something to be condemned, because it’s inevitable: What would be the point of condemning something that people are going to naturally want to do to express some sort of control over their lives? And so they’re going to do it. You can’t assume they won’t. And they’re going to do it in such a way that expresses this inchoate yearning for the old social democracy, that all the structures that we currently live under-required to work, required to accumulate legitimacy for the population.

DB: Yeah. And just to put a fine point on it — I mean, I think I go back to Marx here, which is the number one impulse of the science of historical materialism is to understand your moment and how it actually works and how it actually functions. And I think that’s something really useful that people in the media who have a large platform are able to genuinely contribute to: to help their audience appreciate what is actually going on and not necessarily take place in the partisan scrum that I think Matt rightly says we’re essentially disconnected from and we essentially have no real say over what happens in the administrative state — and even kind of perversely in Congress at this point.

RG: To take it from another angle, maybe another way to get myself out of bed in the morning would be to say that: Even if this is all spring training, you’ve got to keep loose.

MC: That’s exactly it. We have a desire to control our destinies. Some of the people in America are always going to imagine that as being political participants. Being a political participant requires knowing something about what’s going on politically, and having views, and having preferences and expressing them even if it’s just by talking to people around the watercooler, or posting online, or volunteering for a campaign, or running themselves or giving money. That’s all part and parcel to the experience of being a political subject, and political subjects are going to be essential to any socialist project in any situation.

So participating in the culture in this fallow moment to build one political identity over another absolutely is an inevitable and necessary part of the process of, as you said, training and being aware of what the moment calls for.

RG: I feel much better now. Thank you.

MC: [Laughs.]

DB: You’re welcome.

MC: No, it’s the same thing I tell myself, and it’s, of course, self justification — because who wants to dig ditches — but to me, it also seems unavoidable. There is no way to, as a person, which everyone has to assume themselves to be an individual. There is no left in a meaningful sense in this country. So you can never say: I want this to happen. And then when you’re imagining it assumes a coordinated group of people carrying it out with you. That’s not on the table. It’s really you doing things, even the representations of like, significant rupture, and conflict with the state that we’ve seen, are the result of individual decisions — like the George Floyd protests were, by and large, the decisions of individuals to respond to the specific stresses and outrages of the moment with mass action, but action that’s predicated on individual preference, rather than some sort of organized —

DB: — coordinated thought.

MC: Exactly. And absent that, we’re just individuals. And if you accept that, it really does humble you. But the good part of that is that it takes a lot off your shoulders. It really isn’t up to you to have the exact correct opinion on everything; it really isn’t up to you to see change happen in your lifetime, because it probably isn’t — what is up to you to do is to live a life that is that feels aligned at every access with the project of determining for yourself and expressing for yourself a individuality, a personal identity, aligned with values, internal, and social. And from that position, then you can just ask yourself in every axis of your life: What should I be doing? But not assume a can opener that says: Forget these questions. The only real thing that changes is turning the wheel of history. I can’t approach any of the problems in my life until we have radically altered the relationship between humans and capital. That is not anything anyone can assume is going to happen in anything like a near timeframe. What you do have is every other thing in your life that you have to address. And you should.

DB: And I think that’s also freeing — because what Matt’s saying, and we talk about this quite a bit, is that that doesn’t mean that you have to define yourself as like a Bolshevik or Menshevik or a Trotskyite.

MC: Right.

DB: That is not ultimately that meaningful in the context of the United States in 2021. So this is actually a freeing impulse, I think, to disconnect yourself from those ultimately, identitarian approaches to politics that are effectively self branding. And I understand that this is what we all do. I’m on Twitter. I get it. We all like attention. And we all like to feel morally right. But what Matt is saying is really a freeing way to approach politics given the realities of power in 2021 America.

MC: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I understand the argument for why you should have a developed theory of the state right. But how often in your day-to-day life does that question come up?

DB: Right.

MC: So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put a lot of time, effort — and most importantly, in my opinion — emotional investment into determining the question, because you don’t have a lot to do with it other than have it as a badge of identity. And as a way to socially signal, mostly online, but also in social situations. It is in the clouds.

So you can have preferences that way; everyone is going to accumulate preferences. But they can just be that. They don’t have to be the locus of your identity and the thing that drives you to action, because at that level of abstraction, mostly, the only action that that level of abstract identity can push you towards is either spectacular acts of self validation, which is for the few and the brave, or totally consequence-free, indulgent expressions of social identity — and preening — on an online format. Those are the only things you can do with something at that level of distance from the questions of your daily life.

RG: People often try to give you advice. They say: Just log off, man. But what you’re saying is —

CM: You can’t! No. We’re cyborgs.

RG: — actually, no, you can’t log off, but just relax and live a good life.

MC: Exactly. We’re cyborgs.

DB: I actually wrote a little piece about this for The Nation. And I think that’s totally — as Matt just said — we really are cyborgs. To live in 2021 is to be partially online, at least on social media. So that’s not really an impulse. So much of our daily sociality.

MC: If you already are, I should say — like, if you aren’t yet, like people can point to, a lot of people aren’t online. Yeah. They have not had the surgery basically. They have not imbibed the nanobots. But it is a very difficult thing to detach yourself from socially. Absent some sort of radical break of circumstances, which some people are going to carry off —

DB: — the equivalent of a monk, basically — it’s very difficult. Most people aren’t monks or ascetics. So that’s not particularly good advice. And I think what we need to do, as Matt is suggesting, is learn to live with this thing in a healthy way. It’s the emotional part that’s the problem. It’s just screaming at people online and allowing that to affect you. It’s developing parasocial relationships with people who you don’t know that I think is really unhealthy. So you have to put these things in a meaningful perspective, given the political reality of where we are.

MC: Yeah, precisely.

RG: Great. Well, I think we’ve worked that out.

DB: We’re done here.

RG: So I really appreciate you guys coming on — again, the podcast is called Hinge Points. It’s terrific. It’s much better than thinking about our current condition. But we’re going to continue!

MC: We gotta! We can’t go on, but we go on

RG: Anything else you want to plug, by the way?

MC: I guess our respective podcasts. Chapo Trap House over here.

DB: And American Prestige over here.

RG: Yes, both excellent listens.

MC: Oh, and me and Chris Wade, we just wrapped up the Hell of Presidents podcast on Stitcher. Last episode came out last week. This Friday at 4 PM ET, we’re going to do a Twitch Q&A for any questions anybody who listened to that podcast has about presidents. We can go through them. We can do counterfactuals. We could read their astrological signs! It’ll be a fun wrap-up, for anyone who listened to that pod.

RG: It sounds fun. For people who don’t use Twitch much, how do they get there?

MC: Twitch.tv/chapotraphouse. You don’t have to sign in. You don’t have to do anything. It’ll just be on the screen. You can ask questions without having to do any icky interaction with the Twitch AI, or whatever the fuck. That’s what I would do, that’s for sure. I don’t have a Twitch account. People can gift me subs all day and I won’t be able to do anything with them.

RG: Excellent. Well, I look forward to asking: What would’ve happened if Zachary Taylor had lived?

MC: That’s a really interesting one, because you really could have a civil war on a much accelerated time frame!

RG: Mmhmm.

MC: If you do not have Fillmore there to carry off the compromise. That is a very good one.

RG: I’ll drop it in the chat.

DB: [Laughs.]

MC: OK.

RG: Alright, thanks so much.

MC: Yes. Thank you.

DB: Yeah. Thanks so much.

[Credits music.]

RG: Well, thank you both for being here. That was Danny Bessner and Matt Christman, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you soon.

The post Rewriting History appeared first on The Intercept.

“The crops and little shelters people used when they worked the land were washed away,” Nuñez told The Intercept in a telephone interview. “They are just gone without a trace.”

Hurricane Eta devastated Indigenous communities in Central America this month as the U.S. formally withdrew from the world’s foremost climate accord. While international attention remained focused on the U.S. elections, Hurricane Eta made landfall in northeastern Nicaragua and then proceeded to make its way across Honduras, with severe impacts on Guatemala and other countries in the region as it headed back out to sea and regained hurricane strength before hitting the Florida coast.

With another hurricane, Iota, now bearing down on Central America, Triunfo de la Cruz will use its schools as shelters and is ramping up efforts at the donation distribution center it set up to manage the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. When Nuñez spoke with The Intercept, the community had not received any aid from the municipal government, but food supplies were coming in.

“They are from people with relatives here,” Nuñez said. “They are Garifuna sisters and brothers who live outside the country.”

There are Garifuna communities in Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua, but after Honduras, the largest Garifuna population resides in New York City. The Garifuna diaspora in the U.S. maintains close ties with coastal communities in Central America, and cross-border mutual aid networks offer support in the face of disaster. Garifuna have been heading north and sometimes back for decades.

Migration often spikes in the wake of crises, and the only comparable precedent for Eta’s destruction is Hurricane Mitch, which devastated northern Central America in 1998. Within a few months of Mitch’s landfall, U.S. and Mexican authorities reported record numbers of apprehensions of Hondurans fleeing the disaster. The fallout from Eta and Iota may create similar conditions.

Lost in the Flood

As often happens, the populations that least contribute to climate change are bearing the brunt of its impacts. For many, it is disaster upon disaster. Indigenous territories were already under siege from violence, extractive industry and energy projects, tourism development, cattle ranching, and monoculture export crop plantations.

As Eta slowly made its way north, days of rain caused widespread flooding: washing out highways and bridges, submerging entire towns, and generating mass displacement. Millions of people have been affected. There are more than 145 confirmed deaths across Central America so far, but the toll will likely continue to rise. Many of the people missing are buried under landslides.

The populations that least contribute to climate change are bearing the brunt of its impacts.

That is the case in Quejá, an Indigenous Maya Poqomchi’ village north of Guatemala City where a mountainside gave way, burying close to 100 residents. Rescue workers had to call off the search due to increasingly unstable conditions as the rains continued. Several smaller landslides in other Indigenous highland regions also killed villagers.

Some predominantly Maya towns and communities in Guatemala remain partially or even fully submerged. Diversions of rivers by oil palm companies in eastern Guatemala exacerbated the flooding, according to Robin Macloni, director of the Defensoría Q’eqchi’, a Maya Q’eqchi’ rights and development organization based in El Estor, 190 miles east of the capital.

“Maize, bean, chile, and other crops were definitively lost in the Polochic region,” Macloni told The Intercept. “There are communities that lost everything.”

Hurricane Eta made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane before being downgraded to a tropical depression as it advanced overland. For many, it is reminiscent of Hurricane Mitch, which left at least 11,000 people dead and thousands missing. Eta’s death toll does not come close to that, but as with Mitch, Honduras was the hardest hit, and recovery will likely be measured in years or even decades.

Hurricane Mitch was considered a rare event, but that is no longer the case with Eta and Iota. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been so extreme that the naming of tropical storms ran through the alphabet well before Eta came along. Iota became a Category 5 hurricane on Monday and is expected to bring dangerous levels of rainfall to the countries hardest hit by Eta. “This rain would lead to significant, life-threatening flash flooding and river flooding, along with mudslides in areas of higher terrain,” according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

(Left/Top) A woman carries her son as she walks on the mud at Bordo del Lancetilla village flooded by the overflow of the Lancetilla river on Nov. 3, 2020 in Tela, Honduras. (Right/Bottom) People who were forced to abandon their homes in the San Pedro Sula Valley due to floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Eta take refuge in a makeshift camp underneath an overpass in Chemelecon on Nov. 7, 2020. Photo: Yoseph Amaya/Getty Images; Seth Sidney Berry/SOPA/AP

In the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels, countries worked together to determine global measures to address and slow down climate change. The U.S. was a signatory to the resulting accord, the Paris Agreement, which entered into force in 2016 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord, but because the accord prevented signatories from giving notice of withdrawal for three years following ratification, the U.S. withdrawal officially occurred right when Eta was bearing down on Central America.

Eta made landfall in Nicaragua’s North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, first hitting the predominantly Indigenous Miskito coast before moving inland over more remote Indigenous Mayangna communities. The Mayangna won a groundbreaking collective land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2001, but cattle ranching — linked to Nicaraguan beef exports to the U.S. — has been expanding for years into their territory and a biosphere reserve.

“We are invaded more and more every day,” said Byron Bucardo, a Mayangna leader from the Bosawas region. “Outsiders, who we call the colonos, arrive and they have help from municipal government officials, politicians, certain lawyers, and even some ex-leaders engaged in illegal land sales.”

Non-Indigenous settlers, some of whom work in tandem with large-scale cattle ranchers, clear-cut sections of the largest remaining tract of tropical rainforest in Central America, their cattle contaminate water sources, and they are often armed and aggressive. Dozens of Indigenous people in Nicaragua’s autonomous regions have been killed in recent years, including Mayangna villagers.

“There have been 12 murders this year,” Bucardo told The Intercept. “The authorities do not care.”

Some Mayangna villages are a day’s walk from the nearest road, and most do not have a cell signal. Not everyone got advance warning that Eta was headed their way, Bucardo said, and flooded communities are experiencing outbreaks of high fevers and diarrhea.

“They don’t have potable water resources. They get water from the rivers,” he said. “When the rivers swell, they bring contamination and dead animals.”

More than a week later, Bucardo said, food is scarce, no aid has arrived, and flooding and violent settlers complicate travel in and out of some areas.

Displaced by Climate Disaster

Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala are the three most impoverished countries in Central America. Democracy is fragile at best after decades of U.S.-backed military dictatorships and civil wars, and high levels of polarization, corruption, and mistrust in government present severe complications for aid coordination efforts. In Honduras, for example, President Juan Orlando Hernández was an unindicted co-conspirator in a case against his brother, a former congressman convicted last year by a U.S. federal court on drug trafficking charges.

A team from Doctors Without Borders has been providing medical aid, including mental health services, at shelters in Choloma, Honduras. A textile factory-dominated area that is now the country’s third largest city, Choloma experienced severe flooding and displacement during Hurricane Eta, and the government has issued evacuation orders for low-lying areas ahead of Hurricane Iota’s arrival. Prior to Iota, health problems were already apparent in the shelters.

“Skin complications and respiratory symptoms will be continuous,” said Juan Carlos Arteaga, the Doctors Without Borders team leader in Choloma.

Arteaga’s main concerns are related to midterm consequences. Mental health crises are likely to become more acute and the coronavirus will remain a threat, as will a potential epidemic of dengue, chikungunya, or Zika, he said. The mosquito species that can carry the three viruses, all of which can be fatal, breeds in stagnant water, and floodwaters have receded in some areas but not others.

In shelters in northeastern Nicaragua, the government confirmed 354 cases of malaria. In Guatemala, health officials confirmed 86 Covid-19 cases in shelters in the Alta Verapaz department. In Honduras, doctors from a public hospital in San Pedro Sula stated that there have been coronavirus cases in some shelters.

Arteaga is also worried about basic supplies for evacuees, particularly food, given the initial outpouring of contributions in crisis situations often drops off long before the need subsides. “In the early days, there is always a lot of support,” he told The Intercept. “That usually fades.”

Hundreds of thousands of people were internally displaced across the region, and it is unclear how many will be able to return to their homes. The damage and displacement from Hurricane Mitch in 1998 contributed to the rise in Honduran and Salvadoran migration to the U.S. Both nationalities were granted temporary protected status in the wake of Mitch, allowing people already in the U.S. to remain due to conditions back home.

“At present there are no international cross-border protections for people who are displaced by climate-related disaster,” said Kayly Ober, who manages the Climate Displacement Program at Refugees International, an NGO based in Washington, D.C.

National and temporary mechanisms such as temporary protected status have significant limitations and drawbacks, according to Ober. TPS only applies to people already in the U.S. when the status is granted, which excludes populations with less social and economic capital. It is a status that has to be renewed every six to 18 months and is often under threat of sudden termination.

Guatemala’s government has made a formal request for TPS for Guatemalans in the U.S. in the wake of Eta. “I very much doubt that this administration would take that request seriously,” Ober told The Intercept, noting that the U.S. government’s stance on TPS is likely to shift drastically in January. “Biden says he wants to ensure a pathway to citizenship for TPS holders.”

A spokesperson for Guatemala’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to The Intercept’s query as to whether the Guatemalan government would consider making a second request for TPS after Biden takes office, should the Trump administration reject the request.

In Panama, most Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community residents have no intention of migrating to the U.S. or any other country. Many have been trying to defend their lands from mining and hydroelectric dam projects in recent years. But now, in the wake of Eta, some residents will need to be relocated within the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, the most populous Indigenous jurisdiction in Panama and one of the country’s most impoverished regions.

“The national government did not respond immediately,” said Ricardo Miranda, a member of the National Council of Ngäbe-Buglé Youth. “It reacted late and made things more chaotic.”

Although Eta’s path was nowhere near Panama, rains from the storm caused extensive damages in the western province of Chiriquí, including Ngäbe-Buglé territory. Seventeen people in Panama died and two dozen are missing. In the Ngäbe-Buglé village of Boca de Remedio, a landslide buried a family of six. The bodies of a 35-year-old man and two children were recovered, but the search for the remaining three was halted due to risk, Miranda told The Intercept.

Hundreds of families have taken shelter in schools in Boca de Remedio and other villages in two Ngäbe-Buglé districts. In one area, the land is sinking and collapsing. In another, an overflowing river washed away homes. Key roads were destroyed, and now some villages that did not suffer damage from Eta’s rains are cut off and running out of food.

“An immediate response is urgent,” said Miranda, who has been helping coordinate aid efforts as part of his work with the youth council.

Some 850 miles away, Triunfo de la Cruz has pressing needs too, such as sleeping mats and sheets for the local school shelters, said Nuñez. When the pandemic hit, elected community council president Sneider Centeno had approached Nuñez, a nurse, about getting involved with the community aid center, and the two began working together closely.

But in July, Centeno and four other community men, including Garifuna federation members who were active in land rights struggles, were abducted from their homes by armed men wearing uniforms of the police directorate of criminal investigation. No one has heard from them since.

“To me it feels like it just happened today,” said Nuñez, her voice breaking. “As Garifuna we demand justice, and we demand they be brought back alive.”

After Centeno’s forced disappearance, a few people withdrew from the community aid efforts out of fear, but Nuñez never took a step back. If anything, she is even more committed to the initiative. Upon hearing the news late last month of Eta’s imminent arrival, Nuñez coordinated with a group of young women, and they are now working overtime as Hurricane Iota approaches. Centeno is often on her mind.

“I am doing this work in his memory,” she said.

The post Hurricane Eta Devastates Central America as U.S. Withdraws From Climate Accord appeared first on The Intercept.

The Intercept and “Democracy Now” team up for a live Super Tuesday broadcast.

Intercept Co-Founding Editor Jeremy Scahill joins “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, Juan González, and Nermeen Shaikh to host a conversation with guests across the country, including analyses from The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, Mehdi Hasan, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Lee Fang, Akela Lacy, Robert Mackey, and other guests.

March 3, 7 p.m. to midnight ET.

The post Super Tuesday: Live Coverage From The Intercept and “Democracy Now” appeared first on The Intercept.

Question: What metrics will you use to make that decision?

Trump while pointing to his head: The metrics right here. That’s my metrics. pic.twitter.com/SIbO5N6Bqx

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 10, 2020

In Greece, for example, the nation is briefed at 6 p.m. each evening by Dr. Sotirios Tsiodras, an unassuming professor of medicine who studied infectious diseases at Harvard and now leads the Greek government’s coronavirus task force. Tsiodras, often reading from his notes, has been credited with helping to rally the nation to quickly accept a national lockdown that has, so far, been more successful than most, largely by presenting the science in a calm, rational voice of authority. On the rare occasions when his level-headed facade has cracked — like a moment last month when he appealed to Greeks to protect their elderly relatives by staying at home — the impact has been all the more powerful.

Greek chief epidemiologist, on being asked “why make a fuss over old and sick people”, broke down.

“They’re our mothers and fathers; grandmothers and grandads. This is my answer: We honour and respect everyone – them especially. Without them we have no identity; we don’t exist.” pic.twitter.com/OhZm0BPVyW

— Alex Andreou (@sturdyAlex) March 22, 2020

On Friday, Tsiodras announced that there were 56 new cases of Covid-19 in Greece, and four more deaths, bringing the total number of cases to 2,011, with 90 fatalities. He ended his opening remarks by calling for solidarity with the country’s Roma minority. “There is no room for discrimination, for hatred, for fear, for division, for divisions in our society or in the rest of the world’s societies,” Tsiodras said. “What we need to overcome, what will help us overcome this pandemic, is above all unity and solidarity between us.”

Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has used Twitter not to attack regional officials or complain about the lockdown’s impact on the economy, but to share a video showing how successful the drive to empty the nation’s streets has been.

??? ????? ?????????? ???? ????? ??????, ??? ????? ???? ??????? ??? ?????? ??? ???????? ???? ????? ??? ?? ??????????? ???? ?? ????????, ??? ???? ???? ??? ???? ??? ???????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ??? ??? ????????: ??? ?????? ?????????. ??????? ?????. ????????? ???????. pic.twitter.com/FRBUYeeqXg

— Prime Minister GR (@PrimeministerGR) April 8, 2020

In other words, Greeks live in something like the parallel universe Americans could inhabit if Trump would refrain from commenting on subjects he knows nothing about and let Dr. Anthony Fauci deliver calm, fact-based updates on the fight against virus, and occasional empathetic comments on the health disparities it has revealed in American society.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: "When all this is over, and as we've said, it will end. We will get over Coronavirus, but there will still be health disparities, which we really do need to address in the African American community."

Full video here: https://t.co/3w9Yv5OBxU pic.twitter.com/jWLD9nkoCP

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 7, 2020

In France, President Emmanuel Macron is nowhere to be seen when the daily update on the spread of Covid-19 is delivered on live television by Dr. Jérôme Salomon, an epidemiologist who is the chief medical advisor to the nation’s department of health. Salomon also takes questions from the press, because, according to L’Obs, a French news magazine, Macron wanted the public to be informed by a trusted expert, not a politician.

#Coronavirus #COVID19 | Vos questions
Quand la production industrielle de tests sérologiques pourra-t-elle commencer en France ?
? la production a commencé
? Notre responsabilité est d’assurer leur fiabilité.

? Revoir les points de situation : https://t.co/odeOOiexPR pic.twitter.com/2SXu3UGsXc

— Ministère de la Santé et de la Prévention (@Sante_Gouv) April 10, 2020

Although Macron did spend Thursday in Marseille, meeting with Prof. Didier Raoult, a virologist researching the potential use of the drug hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients, the French president, unlike Trump, has declined to endorse the untested treatment as a miracle cure.

Les images d'Emmanuel Macron avec les équipes du Pr Didier Raoult à Marseille pic.twitter.com/uNgUHWOtDy

— BFMTV (@BFMTV) April 9, 2020

Germans also get their daily updates on the battle to slow the spread of the virus from a medical expert, Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for disease control.

In Ireland, updates are delivered daily by Dr. Tony Holohan, the country’s chief medical officer, despite the fact that its current leader, Leo Varadkar, is also a doctor.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan reports 25 more deaths from Covid-19 and 480 new confirmed cases | | Follow live updates: https://t.co/rBeqjRImf4 pic.twitter.com/zE3KIltvoT

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) April 10, 2020

Holohan, like Tsiodras and Fauci, has become a local celebrity since the start of the pandemic because he is seen as a man of integrity who speaks in plain language.

Canadians get bilingual updates on the virus from news conferences led by an elected politician, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, but she largely defers to the medical experts, the chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, and her deputy, Dr. Howard Njoo.

Rather than attacking his political opponents or whining about criticism from the press, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has dedicated his media appearances to making the case to the public for the necessary measures recommended by the scientists.

Prime Minister Trudeau warned that smaller outbreaks could be the "new normal" for Canadians until a vaccine is developed for COVID-19. Watch more here: https://t.co/FWDEyCnScw pic.twitter.com/xigrnOG4Ai

— CTV News (@CTVNews) April 9, 2020

At a provincial level in Canada, British Columbia’s daily briefings are led by Dr. Bonnie Henry, a public official modest enough to admit that part of the region’s success so far has been down to “luck.”

Why is B.C. doing a better job of flattening the #COVID19 curve compared to Ontario and Quebec? Luck, preparation and the timing of the province’s later spring break are factors, says Dr. Bonnie Henry. pic.twitter.com/jrRpKR0rI9

— CBC British Columbia (@cbcnewsbc) April 7, 2020

In Spain, ministers deliver the updates, but alongside a medical expert, Dr. Fernando Simón, the director of Spain’s health emergency center, who was himself infected with the virus in March. The doctor, who has achieved a kind of cult status, recently rejoined the briefings by video link from quarantine.

? VÍDEO | Fernando Simón: “Progresivamente se irán levantando las medidas de precaución. Será la parte más difícil porque será más complicado que la gente mantenga la tensión, tendremos que ser mucho más conscientes de nuestros actos para evitar un repunte en la epidemia” pic.twitter.com/MS8CIOEuRu

— Cadena SER (@La_SER) April 8, 2020

Even in countries where politicians take the lead in providing updates, like Austria and Japan, officials have, unlike Trump, modeled good public behavior by observing social distancing and wearing masks.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, an anti-immigrant populist tycoon, has superficial similarities to Trump, but embraced the science fully enough to declare a state of emergency before the country’s first Covid-19 death took place. Babiš allows the coronavirus press conferences to be handled by his health minister and, having made masks mandatory in public last month, wears one himself when addressing the nation.

Jsou Velikonoce a mám n?co na srdci. Ve 20.05 na ?eské televizi, Nov?, Prim? a Radiožurnálu. pic.twitter.com/0d8GPfzmd6

— Andrej Babiš (@AndrejBabis) April 9, 2020

The daily briefings in Britain, which are led by a senior politician, have been criticized by some observers as overly political — even Trumpian “defensive look-how-well-we’re-doing drivel.” At one news conference before he became infected with Covid-19, Prime Minister Boris Johnson even shared the Trump-like boast that he had continued to shake hands, even while visiting a hospital treating coronavirus patients.

"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everyone."

Boris Johnson says he has not refused to shake hands with people during the #COVID19 outbreak.

More on this story here: https://t.co/6N1ZLNKpvT pic.twitter.com/yV1qkQkDkh

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 3, 2020

Yet at each briefing in London, the senior elected official leading it has been flanked by two medical experts who have been free to field questions from journalists after the politician’s opening remarks.

When asked by @Peston what can the UK learn from Germany, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said: 'We all know Germany got ahead in terms of its ability to do testing for the virus and there's a lot to learn from that'

More here: https://t.co/QtaSVIv1kv pic.twitter.com/jpRrBy0teF

— ITV News (@itvnews) April 7, 2020

Even two of the planet’s most Trump-like leaders, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, have allowed the experts to speak, mostly unimpeded.

Erdogan was criticized for initially downplaying the threat posed by the virus, but permits his health minister, Dr. Fahrettin Koca, to deliver science-based, daily updates on the effort to combat its spread.

A?I ÇALI?MALARI ?Ç?N öncelikle ba?ar?lmas? gereken, virüsün izole edilmesiydi. ?ki bilim adam?m?z bunu ba?arm?? durumdalar. Erciyes Üniversitesi’nden Prof. Dr. AYKUT ÖZDARENDEL? Hocam?z?, Ankara Üniversitesi’nden Prof. Dr. AYKUT ÖZKUL Hocam?z? halk?m?z ad?na kutluyorum. pic.twitter.com/PGYCsVosxw

— Dr. Fahrettin Koca (@drfahrettinkoca) April 8, 2020

Bolsonaro, who has made a show of flaunting social distancing guidelines, and threatened to fire his health minister, Dr. Luiz Henrique Mandetta for supporting it, still lets the doctor lead the daily updates for the public.

Presidente @jairbolsonaro pára para comer numa padaria de Brasília. pic.twitter.com/uVcRWqyZDj

— Eduardo Bolsonaro?? (@BolsonaroSP) April 9, 2020

On Thursday, Mandetta warned the public to beware of “false prophets,” promising cures, and mocked anti-vaxxers, claiming that as soon as a vaccine is developed for Covid-19, they will be the first to take it.

O ministro da Saúde, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, fez questão de se posicionar totalmente ao lado da ciência e pediu que a população tome cuidado com “falsos profetas”. Mandetta ironizou grupos antivacina. “Na hora em que houver uma vacina para coronavírus, serão os primeiros a tomar” pic.twitter.com/CbiIZXZGX8

— UOL Notícias (@UOLNoticias) April 9, 2020

Bolsonaro shares Trump’s fixation on the possibility that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could be a miracle cure for Covid-19, and his impatience with medical experts who want to see proof that it is safe and effective in randomized clinical trials before recommending it to patients. Last month, Facebook and Twitter deleted video of Bolsonaro saying that the drug was “working” everywhere to cure Covid-19, flagging it as a violation of their policies against spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

As a result, Mandetta has reportedly resisted pressure from Brazil’s president to approve the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients at the first signs of illness. The health minister said earlier this week that doctors could prescribe the drug for outpatients, but they would have to take responsibility for the risks of possible side effects if they do. In the past two weeks, there have been 43 cases of heart trouble related to hydroxychloroquine treatment among coronavirus patients in France, according to that country’s drug safety agency.

Updated: Saturday, April 11, 4:09 p.m. PDT
This article was updated with a new headline and to add information about how Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is handling the crisis.

The post Trump’s Ridiculous Behavior at Pandemic Briefings Baffles a Watching World appeared first on The Intercept.

But we are also in a moment of great reckoning, because of the courage and determination of activists, the Movement for Black Lives, and good people across the country. This reckoning is a confrontation of the legacy of racism and genocide upon which this nation was built. Monuments to slave owners, traders, and Confederate generals are being pulled down as the uprising against police violence has regained momentum. A new generation of abolitionists is picking up the mantle and building upon the work of the activists, scholars, and martyrs who came before them. Many of these activists are mobilizing around both broad and specific goals, among them defunding the police, abolishing the carceral system of jails and prisons, and attacking the systems and symbols of racism and white supremacy.

It is vitally important that during a time such as this, we take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture, the historical context, and the possibilities that lay before us. On the latest episode of Intercepted, Robin D.G. Kelley joined us to discuss all this and more. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and the author of several groundbreaking books, among them “Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times,” “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination,” and “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.”

What follows is a transcript of the extended conversation with Kelley, lightly edited for context and clarity.

Jeremy Scahill: Robin D.G. Kelley, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Robin D.G. Kelley: Thank you.

JS: So I want to begin just with the most recent events. We had Trump on Saturday giving this rally to six thousand people. They had a stadium that could have fit 19,000 people. Six thousand people are in there. Trump originally was going to hold it on the Juneteenth holiday. He then moved it one day later. At that rally, Trump claimed that the left is trying to “desecrate our monuments.” And as people across the country are continuing to rise up against police brutality, police murders, systemic racism in this country, demanding the removal of Confederate monuments to slaveholders, put Donald Trump’s comments and his decision to hold this rally in Tulsa in a historical context.

RK: Right, well there are a couple of things. One, this also happens to be the 99th anniversary, or commemoration, of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. And so choosing Tulsa wasn’t an accident. Just like choosing Juneteenth, June 19th, as the original date for this event wasn’t an accident. And I think Tulsa has a very interesting story, not because of what we typically talk about — that is the destruction of the Greenwood community in 1921, which was a Black community often called Black Wall Street because there was a significant Black business district — but there’s a carceral story to it. And that is after destroying this community, with the support of the police and deputized white men in Tulsa, destroying hospitals, public libraries, businesses, churches. After that, they literally incarcerated some 7,000 people, Black people, interned them in camps and held them there through the winter of 1921-1922. So imagine you’re rendered homeless and you’re forced into internment camps and your crime was being Black. Because in some ways victims of that kind of violence was the Black community and, again, it’s sanctioned by the state, sanctioned by the state department. White mobs come in and they literally destroy homes and loot. And so here is an example of looting in which Black property is stolen, taken, and destroyed. And over 300 Black people were killed, at least that much, we know that.

So the other aspect of course is that choosing June 19th initially was a kind of double slap in the face. Juneteenth represents emancipation, you know? It is the date, June 19th, 1865, when Galveston, Texas was occupied by the Union army and there was a declaration that slavery had come to an end. In other words, it was when Texas fell during the Civil War. It’s not true to say that Black people didn’t know they were free. Many people did know that, but the point of the fact is that Juneteenth had become a day of celebration of abolition, but it was also, historically, at least for the last century and a half, a day of reflection and organizing on the part of Black communities. I mean Juneteenth was the day in 1968 chosen to have a massive solidarity rally in support of the Poor People’s Campaign. Juneteenth was the date that the Black Radical Congress was launched in 1998. Juneteenth is the day that a lot of struggles around housing, opposition to police brutality, other issues, also just reflecting on the question of freedom and democracy. So there’s a long history of Juneteenth as representing the very opposite of what Trump tried to claim, and that is to turn that date into a reassertion of his authoritarian rule and in many ways it was a white rally.

Tulsa, Oklahoma as a whole is a really interesting place for another reason, which I don’t think anyone ever talks about, and that is that during the 19th century, with the Homestead Act — which itself was a means of continuation, of the continuation of dispossessing Indigenous peoples — the Homestead Act actually created an opportunity to have all Black towns. Oklahoma happened to have more all Black towns than any other state in the Union. And many of these towns were, like the Greenwood district, places of Black autonomy, economic independence, and those towns were all subject to racial pogroms and violence. Many of them were razed, destroyed, or just starved of basic necessities like access to water or other kinds of things that people need to maintain towns. So, in some respects, Oklahoma has been a battleground state for both Black freedom and, in some respects, for white supremacy.

And one other small thing about Oklahoma, and we don’t talk about this either, in the period of disfranchisement — late 19th century, early 20th century — Oklahoma was one of those places where poor whites, many of whom were also disfranchised. And that’s an echo of a memory that many people in that stadium, all 6,000 of them, have no understanding of. Even in the framework of white supremacy, the class politics, the class rule in a place like Oklahoma could lead to the disfranchisement of poor white people. I mean, this is the reality that we’re facing and to me it has echoes for the next stage of American politics.

JS: You wrote a very powerful op-ed in the New York Times recently and I wanted to ask you a bit about that because at that same rally in Tulsa, Donald Trump claimed that Democrats want “rioters and looters” to have “more rights than law-abiding citizens.” In your New York Times piece, you explored how this obsession with looting and looters has been used for a pretext for expanding the police and their budgets and their operational capabilities and how it ultimately centers on the question of: What kind of society values property over Black life? How is Donald Trump using that word “looters” in this instance? I mean, set it in the historical context of this country.

RK: “Looting” is a Hindi term that says more about the British looting of India — that is, colonialism — than it says about, you know, what we call “flash looting,” as these massive riot-related acts of theft. And so in some ways what Trump does is so typical. In other words, he’s not, he doesn’t break with tradition. The tradition in this country has been to identify looting as criminal behavior. That is, to either treat it as an extension of protest strategy, but what it does is it creates a false equivalence between the state’s relentless use of lethal violence — as if that’s the least important thing — and the kind of episodic political violence by people who are trying to fight back, or people who are taking advantage of the crisis, of the lack of restraint, to try to get commodities. Especially in a context where over 40 million people have applied for unemployment. But to me that’s even less important than what Trump is doing. By targeting, by marking people as looters, it not only has a kind of racial context — that is the looters are the people who are disrupting the country, who are the folks who are dependent on welfare, poor, violent — but by focusing on looters, there’s a long history of identifying looters as a criminal element. Yes, there are lots of reasons for looting, but once you do that, it justifies increased expenditures and expansion of police, and even the militarization of the police.

And let me just give you an example. So in the 1960s, you could pick up almost any article in the press from the 60s and you’ll see the exact same question being posed today. Why do they loot? Why do people loot? And we know that the answer’s always wide-ranging: economic, political, it’s criminal, it’s senseless, it’s normative, it’s deviant, all these things. But one thing that came out of those articles was what became the prevailing theory of law enforcement. And that is that once looters were identified as hard-core criminals who just hadn’t been caught, as thugs, political scientist James Q. Wilson took this idea that looters were basically criminals — they were not people in acts of desperation, they were not people who were acting based on the lack of restraint or responding to a crisis — but once they become criminalized then, Wilson, in this 1968 essay, extended the argument to say looting is an expression of latent criminal tendencies in Black communities. And from that seed, he and criminologist George Kelling created broken windows theory. And broken windows theory policing basically makes this argument that criminals flourish in bad neighborhoods. And when people disrespect their community, they disrespect the authority and therefore law and order. Looters are those who disrespect authority and law and order. Therefore, we have to be able to tamp down on the smallest infractions, because any infraction — loitering, jaywalking — could lead to violent crime.

And so broken windows theory, which of course we know now has been repudiated, ignores the structural racism that created horrific conditions in these communities, that suppressed home values, that led to the divestment of services to certain urban communities that cause health and environmental problems, that reduce jobs, led to high unemployment, and also reduce legal protections for working people, people of color, the poor in urban communities.

So in some ways, it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You create policies that quite literally kill people, deny them basic goods and services, deny them employment, deny them a livelihood, and that level of desperation — people who are basically desperate and you police them through what is essentially a kind of fascist structure of violence, rendition, and we’ve seen that in places like Chicago, where people are brought to places and tortured, and you have this criminalization of community as opposed to dealing with crime. And so broken windows theory as a response to the notion that poor people are, themselves, poor people themselves hold — or Black people, in particular — hold latent criminal tendencies then leads to this kind of violence and it allows the police to basically function, with almost no boundaries.

The police, under broken windows, targeted Black and brown communities. It targeted street vendors. And the targeting of street vendors, which is pretty interesting, not only undermine aspects of Black economic livelihood, but it also in some ways reflects the high profile killings of people like Eric Garner and Alton Sterling, and others, under the pretext of prosecuting people who are selling things illegally. And so that pretext becomes the basis for prosecution, the basis for violence, and then ultimately some of these killings. And so to me, that’s part of the story of looting. What I try to do in the article is kind of flip the question of “What is a looter? Who is doing the looting?” And what we’ve seen, often, is that the very system of racial capitalism has, in many ways, been the source, has been the looter.

JS: You just mentioned the term “racial capitalism.” I hope people are familiar with the work of Cedric Robinson, but if you can lay out your understanding of that term, of “racial capitalism,” and really explain that for people.

RK: Racial capitalism, as far as Cedric Robinson, the late political scientist, understands it or explained it basically was built based on this idea that capitalism itself is not distinct from racism. The way we think of racism is that racism is a by-product of capitalism. That is, capitalism emerges and racism is a way to divide workers. It’s a way to extract greater value from, say, enslaved people, Indigenous people, etc. But what Cedric argued was that the grounds of the civilization in which capitalism emerges is already based on racial hierarchy. And that racial hierarchy is not necessarily the global one, it’s even within Europe itself that racial distinctions were ways in which early capitalism was able to take advantage of certain groups over others, whether it’s in terms of wages, whether it’s in terms of dispossession and forcing people off the land, using violence against the Irish, for example. We don’t think of the Irish as a racialized group, but in many ways, in the 16th century, that’s what they were.

And so if you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people, convincing, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden and other people are designed to accept, to embrace the wealth of that, then what you end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also relies on an ideology or racial regime, and the racial regime convinces a lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through slavery, through Jim Crow, through land disposession, convince them to be or support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based in white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty miniscule. Du Bois called this the “wages of whiteness.” It’s like an ideological wage that doesn’t always translate materially. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

So if you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy, of the racial regime under which it’s built. And we can see how this works with the police all the time. I mean, when we talk about the police and we talk about defunding the police, we know of the police as generators of revenue, currently. That there’s an accumulation of fees and fines that the police rely on. We also talk about the kinds of support that police unions get, qualified immunity, for example, is part of the contract. We think of qualified immunity only in terms of the power of police unions against a democratic state that says, oh we actually want to tamp down on that. But, if you think about what the police do, the police protect capital. The police were designed to protect property going back to, not just the slave patrols, but even the system of jails in cities in the 19th century. Those jails were designed to hold fugitives, runaways. When you’re trying to track down a runaway slave you pay a jail a fee to hold that enslaved person until the master could come, identify the person, and take them back into slavery. So when you think about the whole system of policing, it’s organized around property. Protecting property against union strikes. Protecting property against anti-racist movements. Protecting property against workers in subjugated groups. So if that’s the point of the police, then we shouldn’t be surprised that qualified immunity or that the violent acts of the police would be supported by capital. Why is that? Because capital needs a police force that could terrify people. That’s what the police do. So when we look at the relationship between the cost of police, the police budgets, and the amount of money being shelled out to settle police misconduct cases, we’re talking about billions.

In my city, in Los Angeles, $880 million was shelled out between 2005 and 2018 over police misconduct suits, wrongful death suits, these kinds of things. Why do we do that? Why do we let that happen? Companies like Target, Walmart, they give money to police foundations, donate money to make sure that the police are operable. Wall Street benefits from police violence through the use of these police brutality bonds. That is that they facilitate the creation of public bonds to pay out these settlements because cities and municipalities don’t have the money to pay them out so they borrow the money. And then Wall Street benefits from facilitating these things. Banks do as well. Not just loaning money, but in terms of the fees that go into these kinds of transactions. You would think that capitalists trying to be as efficient as possible would say, this has to stop. But imagine if you have a police force that’s not a terror force. A police force that says, of course, labor has a right to strike and to occupy a workplace. Of course people have a right to protest and to protest freely and to protest militantly and to engage in forms of civil disobedience that disrupts business as usual and the police back off. That’s not going to work. And so there’s a way in which even the notion of racial capitalism is undergirding police activity in municipalities that support violent police activity, even though it may undermine their reputation as cities. A place like New York City is a good example.

JS: Recently we featured the work of the abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore and at the beginning of that special that we did with her, she set the context for the murder of George Floyd by beginning with the deputizing, the kind of informal deputizing of a clerk at a convenient store who suspected that Floyd was trying to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill. And that individual, as she described it, was sort of deputized, then brings in the armed forces, the police. That was sort of the moment that it started. And we also see this with white people calling the police on African-Americans who are entering their own buildings where they live. This sense in our society that, oh, well, we need to immediately call the people with guns to respond to our discomfort, or our sense that maybe someone is violating, when we boil it down to it, a nothing law. The idea that he was passing off a $20 bill, even if it was true: really? You want to call in armed thugs to respond to him who then kneel on his neck for almost 9 minutes? But that broader culture that exists in this country now, where everyone is essentially deputized to snitch on other people or to call in the armed squads to take care of the problem.

RK: Oh, absolutely. And what’s sad about this, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore is absolutely right, what’s sad about it is that everyone is deputized in many ways — immigrant communities, even Black communities — because we have been, in some ways ideologically brainwashed to believe that any disruption, anything that’s not quite right, the first people you call are the police. Rayshard Brooks is another example, in which a Wendy’s employee, not knowing what to do, wanting to make sure the drive-thru line continues as Rayshard Brooks falls asleep at the wheel, calls the police. Now, we’re getting to a point where people are realizing that the police are not the people to call. But imagine that’s your first call, thinking, OK, if you could just wake him up, the option, of course, would have been to go outside and try to wake him up and move the car out. But no one knew what the outcome was going to be, or at least they didn’t think about the outcome. And as a result of that phone call, this man’s dead.

And so, I do want to give a happy example, like a positive example of an alternative to calling the police. Part of defunding the police is a recognition that the police, as constituted, make life more dangerous for vulnerable populations even as it creates a sense of false safety for white people. And so a really good example is in Brooklyn there was a group called Sister to Sister and they were dealing, in their community in Brooklyn, in the 1990s, they were dealing with a lot of cases of domestic violence. And these were immigrant communities for the most part, working class communities. They would call the police. Individuals would call the police. The police would come, and rarely come. When they did come, the first thing they would often do is arrest people for violating their citizenship status or their undocumented workers, harass people, and they wouldn’t solve the problem. So Sister to Sister, a group of young women, decided: we need to keep the police out and we need to figure out a way to deal with domestic violence on our own. So they develop workshops, street theater, vigilance committees, trainings, so that men, women, kids in the community, understood how to deal with domestic violence, how to reduce it and recognize that this is not something that, that intimate violence is not simply within a single household, but it affects the whole community. And as a result of their work, they were able to reduce the number of calls to police and reduce domestic violence significantly.

So part of what we have to think about is, how do we get out of the habit, or the reflex, of dialing 9-1-1 or calling the police to solve the most basic issues, issues that should have been solved by simply compassion, neighborliness, and just thoughtful responses. Because the fact of the matter is, Rayshard Brooks was probably terrified at the very moment that he woke up and saw a police officer in his face, because here’s someone who had gone through the system, who had been incarcerated, who knew the consequences. Even if he didn’t think the consequences would be he’d be shot, but just the arrest alone could have destroyed his life, an economic livelihood that he barely cobbled together as a convicted felon. So part of it is, many people are deputized and don’t realize it. Unless we learn better ways or different ways to care for one another, we’re going to continue to have this situation where we call the police and the police will continue to kill us.

JS: You have a new book coming out, “Black Bodies Swinging,” and in that book you write, “Reverend William Barber is right, we are living through a third Reconstruction and the great rebellion of the summer of 2020 marks a moment of reckoning between real freedom and fascism.” Can you expand on that?

RK: Yes, of course. So this is a third Reconstruction and there are two things I’m trying to deal with in this book. One is to really amplify the fact that this generation, this generation of abolitionists, have the most visionary conception of abolition in history. The first Reconstruction in the 1860s, and I know The Intercept had a great, great piece about Du Bois and Black Reconstruction, but that first Reconstruction was an effort to expand social democracy to include everyone. And it faced a backlash, that is it was crushed under the weight of racial terror, Jim Crow, disfranchisement. The second Reconstruction was an attempt to expand the democracy we had to include all people, but also deal with some of the social justice issues of housing and police violence, but had a conception of it which is still based on a system where you can just sort of tweak the Constitution, or tweak our rights and have them apply. The presumption was the constitutional basis of our system was sound, we just had to fix it to include everyone. This generation is saying it’s not sound and it never has been sound. It’s been based on dispossession, white supremacy, and gender violence. And so this vision of abolition is not simply, and from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work, it’s not simply: better jails, better police, better training. It’s: no police, it’s no jails, no prisons. It’s creating a new means of justice that’s not based on criminalization but based on affirmation and reparation, and by reparation that is trying to repair relationships that have been damaged and destroyed as a result of five centuries of warfare against Indigenous peoples, Africans, poor white people, Asian-Pacific Americans, and Latinx populations.

So here is an opportunity to actually transform not just the nation, but the entire world. And what I’m hoping will not happen, but may happen, is what happened after the second Reconstruction and the first Reconstruction, that is a kind of backlash. The fascism that we recognize in the 1930s resembled the fascism of slavery and the fascism of the post-Reconstruction period, resembled the 1970s in which the Klan was resurrected and, the prison-industrial complex expanded, in that period. What we’re witnessing after 2020 is going to be either fascism or abolition, or maybe something else, I’m not sure. But this is a very exciting time, and so what the book tries to do is, not so much predict what’s going to happen, but understand that 500-year history through the autopsies of particular individuals who have died over the last few years and then to recognize what is unique about the generation that emerged. And by that I don’t say emerged in 2012, but I’m saying a generation that really emerged in the late 1990s that developed this particular vision of abolition.

JS: As you’re speaking I’m also just thinking of the fact that’s in front of all of us now and that is that it seems pretty clear that on the ballot in November, in terms of major party candidates, there’s going to be Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and you’re talking about a generation that came of age in the late 90s. Joe Biden was a major player in shaping the so-called criminal justice policies of the United States government. He was, as he said, a close friend of the segregationist Strom Thurmond. Joe Biden has repeatedly lied about his own involvement with the civil rights movement, about getting arrested in apartheid South Africa trying to go and visit Nelson Mandela. By all fair accounts, Joe Biden has been a major part of the problem in this country and yet here we are with the basic choice boiling down to Donald Trump for four more years or Joe Biden. I’m wondering your bigger picture thoughts on what that says about our society that those are the two major party candidates at this moment in history.

RK: Right, it says something about the failure of electoral politics to solve this problem. Because, imagine a political conundrum that leaves us with the choice of going back to Clinton-era policies, the policies that stripped us of the protections of Glass-Steagall, the policies that expanded the prison-industrial complex, the policies that criminalized immigration even further than before. I mean these are the same policies basically and Biden represents that. And so if we see this as, “elect Biden by any means necessary,” then I think we’ve lost. I do agree that a Trump White House, with the backing of the apparatus of state violence, is a much more difficult place to fight these fights, but at the same time, I think that this radical generation sees a much bigger fight ahead and that no matter who is elected, no matter who is in the White House in the fall, this fight has to continue. Because this is not just a fight to restore an old democracy, but to create a new one.

And it’s happening in the electoral sphere. Some of the most exciting campaigns, like in New York City for example, there’s all these people contesting incumbents, many of whom consider themselves liberals, making real strides at the local level, state legislature, city council. And in, also, all these fights around who’s going to be district attorney. That is the so-called law enforcement officer in many major cities. Progressive district attorneys, in fact, are embattled against police departments and police unions who see them as putting some handcuffs on their ability to conduct violence. So there’s these battles going on at the very local level, but I think that there’s a much bigger thing going on and as long as we silence the critique of Biden and the Clintons and Obama, because then we miss, we miss what the struggle is really about.

And I’ll give you just two more examples, two more interventions. One is that, in this book, I make the argument that the 1990s was critical and it’s not an accident that some of the most visionary organizations and movements emerge in the Clinton era: Critical Resistance, the Black Radical Congress, groups like Power — these were organizations that were fighting Clinton era reforms and policies. And the same thing with 2012, with Trayvon Martin — Black Lives Matter emerges in opposition to Obama era reforms and policies locally, and nationally, and internationally. And one last thing I should say, because none of this stuff can be limited to the domestic sphere. The kind of visionary abolitionist politics that we see as a throughline from the 1990s to the present was also directed at foreign policy — Clinton foreign policy, certainly George Bush foreign policy, and Obama. And recognizing that, as long as we continue to have a foreign policy that is built on war, built on drone strikes, the same violence that is replicated in the cities of the United States is replicated in the Arab world, is replicated elsewhere. As long as the happens, as long as we continue to maintain relationships between, like, the repression of Palestinian populations and populations in the United States through tax dollars, then we’re going to be stuck. This vision of abolition is one that’s trying to end forms of state violence and American expansion throughout the globe. And it’s very important because this is also a generation that recognizes that much of what we think of as policing, that modern policing got much of its training abroad, abroad in Haiti during the occupation after 1915, abroad in the Philippines, during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, abroad through the daily exchange campaigns or relationships between Israel and the United States, where training of U.S. police officers by Israeli military was part of preparation for urban insurgencies, that sort of thing.

And I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know the outcome. But I do know that if there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization of the United States and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity we have. And there’s no possible way that a Joe Biden is going to lead that. If anything, he and his folks are part of the problem.

JS: When I was preparing to talk to you, one of the subjects and a piece of your work that I was most excited to ask you to share from is your book from a couple decades ago, “Hammer and Hoe,” which tells the story of the 1930s and 40s, coming out of the Great Depression, how Communists took on Alabama’s repressive, racist police state, and engaged in a battle that is not so different from the analysis that you’re offering now from this newer generation of radical abolitionists. I’m wondering if you could share with people an overview of that book, of “Hammer and Hoe,” and share some of the stories that you researched and brought to life in it.

RK: Right, right. That’s actually really a great question. So that book is 30 years old, that’s how old I am.

JS: I have the 25th anniversary edition.

RK: Right [laughter], exactly. It came out in 1990. And it came out at a time when the Cold War had been declared victorious by the Reagan administration, I mean, before that. And after that was, that’s the end of the Cold War and so Communism is dead. That was the story. And so this is a story about the 1930s. A party made up overwhelmingly of Black working people in rural areas, as well as in cities like Birmingham and Montgomery, and in many ways they carried what some might argue is kind of the radical tradition, radical sort of wing of the civil rights movement. Fighting for the right to organize, fighting for relief for the unemployed, fighting to keep people in their homes and not be evicted, and ultimately trying to fight for democracy in the South and throughout the country. And, in some ways, it’s a very exciting story because it precedes the civil rights movement and it recovers a vision of social democracy that even the civil rights movement at its heyday didn’t quite grasp.

The Communist Party in Alabama had some white membership. It actually organized white working people. They actually tried to organize former klansmen into the organization and got some in there and, most importantly, they saw themselves as a multiracial movement that can create democratic, anti-capitalist society — true abolition for the entire United States, but also in solidarity with what they saw as a worldwide movement.

One of the things that made the Communist Party in Alabama different than, say, other movements was the confidence that they had that they were part of a global insurgency. I mean, there were people, right, I interviewed people, like a man named Lemon Johnson, who believed that when cotton pickers went on strike in 1935, he believed that any significant violence from the planter class would be met with the possibility of Stalin sending troops through Mobile, Alabama to protect them, to engage in class warfare against the planter class. I mean, that belief in internationalism was extraordinary. This is also an organization that believed in armed self-defense and practiced it when they could, but they also believed in making themselves invisible when necessary for the movement to survive another day.

So there’s so many lessons to be learned from the Communist Party of Alabama, but there’s also a lesson to be learned about how movements can be wiped out, how their history can be destroyed, because by the Cold War, by 1948, though individual communists continued to do their work, the party wasn’t simply outlawed but it was crushed under the pressure of Bull Connor and his regime. We think of Bull Connor in the streets of Birmingham in 1963, but in 1948 he was doing much the same thing in terms of crushing the Black left, or the interracial left in the South.

So that history, really, we need to come to terms with it because I do think that the best of this generation is an echo of that moment and it proves to me, and this is a really important lesson, that anti-racism and class solidarity, are just, are not trade-offs. They’re not mutually exclusive. We’ve been living in this world where we’re sort of deciding, are we going to be fighting for the class or fighting against racism? As if somehow these things are separate. This was a generation that laid the groundwork for the generation of activists we’re dealing with now. And it really does show the importance of fighting all forms of oppression, not just race and class, but gender oppression, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, that none of these things can be separated off and left to the side. That a truly, fundamental abolitionist future requires that they all be held together. And the Communist Party of Alabama shows that that actually could happen.

JS: On that same issue and sort of to bring it into the contemporary moment, there’s been a lot of talk from the Trump White House about Antifa and outside agitators being the real problem here and in your work you’ve studied and written about how this trope about outside agitators has been used throughout history in a systemic effort to attempt to discredit legitimate political movements, including Black rebellion. What is your assessment of the way that Trump is using that trope of the outside agitator right now?

RK: So the outside agitator is a very old trope to delegitimize any legitimate claims of social movements. It’s been used all over the world and in this particular instance, and specifically Antifa, which stands for anti-fascism, or anti-fascist, is a way of not just delegitimizing movements, but it’s also a way of delegitimizing struggles against fascism. And it is a way of targeting groups like anarchists, for example, many of whom have been at the forefront of mutual aid campaigns and working really around how to try to prefigure, new communities of solidarity. And so you vilify these groups and when you vilify those groups you do several things. One, you justify the criminalization of them. Outside agitator equals communist has been a way that the United States has been able to pass legislation to jail, imprison, and deport people who are considered outside agitators. It’s not an accident that anti-sedition laws in this country have come very close to anti-immigrant laws. In other words, they follow one another. Much of anti-immigrant laws have been based on the fear of sedition within the United States. And we’re seeing the same thing now. I mean, even the idea that immigrants are responsible, not just for the violence, but immigrants are responsible for Covid deaths. This sort of thing happens all the time. The xenophobia works. The other thing is that outside agitators is a form of xenophobia that works to shore up white support, despite the fact that many of the people that support the Trump regime don’t benefit from those policies. And so it’s a very effective strategy but one that, in this particular generation, particular moment, I don’t think is working very well.

One of the things that we see in these demonstrations in 2020 is the extent to which they’re vastly multiracial and diverse. Diverse not just in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality but diverse also in terms of age and even status. So that’s something that, where there’s evidence that the old idea that you could sort of divide, create a wedge in a movement using the outside agitator, that’s kind of problematic. On the other hand, there are, I should say this, because this is actually important, there are examples where the outside agitator claims have been effective, in part because of the violence perpetrated by agent provocateurs. I mean, in other words, there are some outside agitators, not Antifa, but the Boogaloo Boys, for example, which is not uncommon to have agent provocateurs cause violence, promote violence, perpetuate disruption and even engage in forms of assassination as we’ve seen recently in California. And so, there’s a way in which Trump and his ilk can take the idea or the fear of the outside agitator and flip it to vilify those who are genuinely fighting for social justice and for an end to policing and ignore, completely ignore if not justify the activities of groups who are actually trying disrupt these really important movements for social justice.

JS: You also have outside agitators in the form of actual police or FBI, the COINTELPRO program for instance. But that also is an element of this throughout history, that “law enforcement” agents actually infiltrate movements and try to encourage acts of violence. We’ve certainly seen that post-9/11, where the FBI has had a PhD in breaking up its own terror plots that we discover later they were actually at the center of it. It’s not just private actors, it’s also state actors that do this as well.

RK: Absolutely, absolutely. And a lot of taxpayer money, a lot of taxpayer revenue went into paying for police, local police, red squads, and FBI agents who have been at the center of these kinds of disruptive plots. One of the unfortunate things maybe was one of the unfortunate outcomes, recently, of the film “BlacKkKlansman.” It left a lot of people with the impression that undercover cops do good things. And that is that the story of a Black police officer in Colorado infiltrating the Klan, though it’s not quite what happened but the story that he infiltrated the Klan makes the police out to be the heroes. In a film, by the way not to criticize Spike Lee because, who wants to do that, right? But in a film in which the Black student organizations are seen as incompetent. And it’s a very scary thought that we’re being taught through popular culture that the police actually do these really good things. The same police officer, by the way, Ron Stallworth, also infiltrated groups like the International Socialist Organization, some of the left organizations. And, if I remember correctly, also had, supported or was involved in some of the other Black movements like the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.

So what we see mostly — and again this is across the board, this is not just the Trump administration but the last century of administrations — the focus has been on infiltrating and undermining movements that have at least set out on an agenda for liberation, abolition, social justice. So what are the organizations? Go back to the Garvey movement of the early 20th century, the Social Party, communists, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, all the way up through to this idea of the Obama administration infiltrating Black Lives Matter. The idea of the “Black identity extremists.” The notion that there’s a black identity extremist without the equivalent — The fact that organizations that are saying, “we really want an end to police killings,” are “black identity extremists.” By the way, a movement that had always been open to people across racial and ethnic lines to participate, and yet the kinds of resources that are needed to try to outlaw or end white racial terrorism — the Klan and similar organizations, anti-semitic organizations, the militia groups — these are not the groups being infiltrated or undermined or even outlawed. These are the ones that President Trump has described as being filled with, “very fine people.”

JS: As we wrap up this conversation, Robin, I wanted to bring it full circle and return to the discussion on racial capitalism in this moment of the pandemic. Arundhati Roy, the great Indian writer, described coronavirus as a portal and I’m wondering what your assessment is of the racial capitalist system at this moment in an election year with this rebellion that shows no signs of ceasing, with Trump in power and with so many people having their lives and their livelihood put in the sniper scope of the government and the pandemic.

RK: Right. Absolutely, I totally agree that this pandemic is a portal. And as a portal, it is just an opening. And as an opening, nothing’s guaranteed, but it’s an opening because it exposed the structure of racial and gendered capitalism and the violence meted out to people who are most vulnerable. So Covid-19, of course, exposes the fact that it’s a lot of poor people dying, exposed, not protected. That the healthcare industry and the industry assigned to care for the aging have utterly failed for lack of resources and forms of structural racism. That the same kinds of inequalities in the same, the same kinds of limits that have made Black and brown people not just poor but unhealthier, having lack of access to health care, all that became clearly exposed through the Covid-19 pandemic. And then following that, the fact that people are already dying from Covid-19 and then dying from state violence, with the video of Ahmaud Arbery, for example, the killing of Breonna Taylor — Breonna Taylor as an EMT worker in Louisville — that these kinds of things exposed both the underside of the health crisis, but also the topside of it, that is the continuation of racial violence, state sanctioned violence that are taking peoples’ lives or making it difficult for people to live. So when folks carry the sign around a protest saying “Stop killing us”— “Stop killing us” is a slogan that we’ve been carrying for centuries, and in some ways it’s aimed at ending state sanctioned racist violence, but also ending the violence of poverty; the violence of a health care system that has continued to ignore our own health care crises and to reproduce inequality; the violence of dilapidated housing; the violence of a kind of economic strangulation. That would lead people like Rayshard Brooks, for example, to cobble together a life working in a Mexican restaurant and sitting in Wendy’s in a community where the unemployment rate and the per capita income — the unemployment rate is staggeringly high and per capita income is incredibly low. I mean, it’s not an accident that these things converge.

The question is, what are we going to do in this portal? Do we have the political will to basically recognize the fact that all these conditions are inseparable, that all these conditions — you cannot simply reform your way out of this. But they have to be destroyed and be built all over again in order to create a humane society, a society that cares about human beings and life itself — not just human life but all life — over wealth accumulation and property. I mean that’s really the question that I think Arundhati Roy is posing and many of us are posing. What kind of society will we have? And this is an opportunity to change it all. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen. But I don’t think many portals open up. And this particular portal, I would argue, wasn’t simply rendered open by Covid-19. It was rendered open by what Covid-19 revealed in terms of the contradictions of society that claims to be a democracy and claims to care about people but actually cares more about property and wealth accumulation than the lives of the most vulnerable.

JS: I have to ask one last question then to follow up on that. It’s a big question, so you can share any aspect of it you want, but I think you beg the question there. Is it possible to end a society that is rooted in racism while leaving capitalism intact?

RG: That’s a great question and it is the question that has been asked in South Africa, and that is can you end apartheid and leave capitalism intact? No. I mean, South Africa is our portal, in some ways, of recognizing why the only future that is a truly abolitionist future is the dismantling of capitalism and the racial and gender structures that oppress us because capitalism was created on the grounds of a theory of inequality. Inequality was foundational to capitalism. The inequality of who has land and who doesn’t. The inequality of why certain people should get paid a small wage and that the wealth produced, the surplus produced should be in the hands of a handful of people. And that theory of inequality is sometimes based on the idea of physical differences, intellectual differences, the idea that no one is the same and some people should be beasts of burden and other people should be the recipients of wealth accumulation. I mean that is ultimately based on ideas about race and gender. And as long as we hold onto those ideas and as long as capitalism exists as a means of accumulating wealth through exploitation, then those ideas are not going to go away. You can’t get rid of them. So that’s why I think this generation is seeing that both need to be dismantled. I’m not saying everyone says that. I know that there are some people who are making the argument that we need a kinder and gentler capitalism. But what does that actually mean if capitalism is still based on extraction of peoples’ labor, and peoples’ knowledge, and peoples’ bodies turned into wealth held by a few?

So, to me, this is not a matter of a slight redistribution, like let’s give more crumbs to the poor. Nor is it about just ending poverty as we know it. It is really about creating a structure of caring and repair in which we all can benefit from our labor and our kind of collective generosity and create a whole new ethos, not just for the United States but for the world.

JS: On that note, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley I want to thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted. It was my honor.

RK: Well it was mine. It was such a great pleasure to talk to you. So brilliant.

The post Scholar Robin D.G. Kelley on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country appeared first on The Intercept.

“The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and national. It will be endowed with a great capacity for emotional involvement and will be equally imperative, since it is deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing” — Roberto Alvin, Brazil’s culture minister, January 15, 2020.

“The German art of the next decade will be heroic, romantic, objective, and free of sentimentality, national with great pathos and equally imperative and binding, or nothing” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi culture minister, October 8, 1933.

The Nazi content, style, and aesthetics of the six-minute speech, set to the score of a Wagnerian opera, are impossible to overstate or even adequately describe in words. It has to be seen to be believed. For that reason, The Intercept has translated the speech into English and is publishing a video of it because it should be seen by everyone:

Brazil’s O Globo newspaper featured this surreal headline on its front page: “Bolsonaro fires Culture Minister after he copies Nazi speech.” The German paper Deutsche Welle featured the photo of the 1933 speech of Goebbels that Alvim copied next to the one delivered by the Brazilian culture minister to juxtapose how similar it was on all levels, beyond just the words.

The content of Thursday’s speech was nothing new for Alvim, once a respected theater director who reinvented himself as a far-right religious fanatic. In his short stint as Bolsonaro’s culture minister and in the months leading up to his appointment by the Brazilian president, he has issued a series of similarly shocking comments — just not quite as shocking as blatantly and deliberately mimicking the speech, style, and mannerisms of Hitler’s most notorious propagandist. 

On social media, he has declared himself fighting a “cultural war” in favor of “conservative artists”; denounced one of Brazil’s most beloved actresses, the 90-year-old Fernanda Montenegro, as a “dirty liar” for whom he harbors “contempt”; and attacked the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “Edge of Democracy” was just nominated for an Academy Award, as a leftist propagandist disseminating lies.

Notably, Alvim was fired only after the embassies of Germany and — far more importantly to Bolsonaro — Israel issued condemnations containing harsh language rare for diplomatic communications. The Israeli Confederation of Brazil said, “Such a person cannot command the culture of our country and must be removed from office immediately.” The German Embassy in Brazil said, “The period of National Socialism is the darkest chapter in German history, bringing infinite suffering to humanity. …We oppose any attempt to trivialize or even glorify the era of National Socialism.” The center-right presidents of the Brazilian Senate and House also demanded Alvim’s firing, leaving Bolsonaro with little choice. When announcing the firing, Bolsonaro called the speech “an unfortunate pronouncement.”

But it is difficult to believe that absent those reactions, Bolsonaro would have fired his culture minister, whom he has repeatedly defended and praised, including in a Facebook Live chat immediately prior to the instantly notorious Nazi speech, hailing him as representative of “the real culture.” Sitting with Alvim prior to his speech, the Brazilian president said, “Beside me, here, Roberto Alvim, our culture secretary. Now we do have a real culture secretary that serves the interest of the majority of the Brazilian population, conservative and Christian population.”

Whatever else is true, Alvim’s speech, though more stylistically extreme and indelicate in how crassly it copied pure Nazism, is consistent in content with the posture of the Bolsonaro government toward artistic expression and cultural norms generally. Bolsonaro — though currently on his third wife while still claiming to be devoutly Catholic — has also adopted a form of evangelic fanaticism, a rapidly growing political force in the country, as part of his public identity and ideology (his current wife is evangelical).

Bolsonaro, somewhat ironically in light of the current controversy, has also made unyielding devotion to Israel critical to his political and religious identity (he has traveled to Israel repeatedly, offered unstinting support for the Netanyahu government against Palestinians, and was baptized in 2016 in the Jordan River while the Brazilian Senate voted to impeach the center-left President Dilma Rousseff). 

While all of this has caused many of Brazil’s small Jewish communities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to support him, it has little to do with affection for Jews. Like many evangelicals, Bolsonaro appears to believe in some form of the Rapture (which, in its crudest form, holds that Israel must be united in order for Jesus to return and send all nonbelievers — including Jews — to hell), and like many authoritarians, adores Israel’s capacity of military and intelligence superiority and its animus toward Muslims, and wants as much of its surveillance technology as he can get for domestic purposes. As is true of many far-right leaders, Bolsonaro worships Israel but not necessarily Jews.

Aggressive and harsh public morality is a central prong of Bolsonaro’s political appeal. He featured as part of his 2018 campaign cultural themes similar to Alvim’s speech — including a false but highly effective warning that elementary school teachers were using something he calls “gay kits” to convert young children in order to allow homosexuals to recruit them as sex partners — and generally has waged a war on any art or artists who diverge from Bolsonaro’s vision of what pure nationalist art is. One of Alvim’s predecessors as culture minister resigned after the Bolsonaro government cut funding specifically to LGBT-themed art. 

Earlier this week, Academy Award nominations were unveiled and one of the five contenders for Best Documentary was a Netflix film by the Brazilian director Petra Costa called “Edge of Democracy,” which warns of the dangers faced by Brazilian democracy. Though the film principally focuses not on Bolsonaro but on the impeachment of Dilma and imprisonment and election-barring of Lula, it has become a target of contempt by the Brazilian Right. After it received its Oscar nod, both Alvim and Bolsonaro publicly denounced the film as leftist agitprop “fiction” (though Bolsonaro, when asked, acknowledged he never saw it).

A far graver assault on artistic expression occurred on Christmas Eve when a member of the right-wing party to which Bolsonaro belonged until recently threw a Molotov cocktail at the building that houses Porta das Fundos, the production company responsible for a Netflix film that features a gay Jesus with a boyfriend. Bolsonaro’s Congressman-son had inveighed against the film as “trash.” Last week, a Bolsonaro-linked right-wing judge stunned the country, and Netflix, by issuing a censorship order forcing Netflix to remove the film from its streaming platform, a ruling overturned by a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Nazi-style nationalism and crude public assaults have been repeatedly featured by Bolsonaro in his remarks to journalists. On Thursady, addressing a new book critical of his government by a Brazilian reporter of Japanese descent, Thaís Oyama, Bolsonaro said he does not know what she is doing in Brazil, adding: “This journalist … In Japan she was going to starve to death.”

Last month, in response to a reporter’s question about the still-unfolding scandal involving his Senator-son’s corruption and the family’s links to violent paramilitary militias, the president said “you have a terribly gay face,” and told another reporter to “ask your mother about your father.” When questioned earlier this week about a scandal involving his Communications Minister who has private contracts with the same television outlets whose public budget he is responsible for determining, the president responded: “are you talking about your mother?”

A report issued earlier this week by a press freedom group documented that Bolsonaro is directly responsible for the majority of the attacks on journalists and media outlets. It cited, among other things, Bolsonaro’s repeated public incitements against journalists as well as his public threats that I might be imprisoned for the series of exposés published this year by the Intercept about his Justice Minister and his accusations that my marriage to a Brazilian Congressman and adoption of Brazilian children was a fraud.

Earlier this month, Bolsonaro pronounced that books in schools have too much content and need to be made “softer” and warned that “beginning in 2021, all the books will be ours,” proclaiming that they will have the Brazilian flag and national anthem on their cover. He added that “they will be made for us. The country will vibrate…. There will be the Brazilian flag on the cover, there will be the national anthem there.” He claimed that the “idiots” who have been in charge of Brazilian education have been propagandizing children with the “gender of ideology” that “encourages boys to wear skirts” and “other things that I don’t want to talk about here.” On Thursday, he said leftists “do not deserve to be treated like normal people.”

In sum, Bolsonaro has spent years spouting classically fascist ideology. The manifestation of undisguised Nazism by his Culture Minister was just a slightly more crass and naked expression of his ideology and mentality. Many Brazilian elites who supported Bolsonaro largely because of their admiration for his Chicago-trained, austerity-loving Economics Minister Paulo Gedes and his corrupt law-and-order Justice Minister Sergio Moro (the subject of the 2019 Intercept’s exposés) are now feigning shock and outrage. But Alvim’s speech simply shined a light on the true face of the Bolsonaro movement — one which all to many political and media elites decided to ignore, or pretend was just a game, because they were eager for the parts of Bolsonaro’s ideology that served their interests.

The post Bolsonaro, Under Fire, Dismisses His Culture Minister for Giving a Nazi Speech, but It Is Still Representative of Brazil’s Governing Ethos appeared first on The Intercept.