Torture. Rape. Murder. I cannot get the gruesome images of these brutal crimes out of my head. “Welcome to Chechnya: Inside the Russian Republic’s Deadly War on Gays,” which premiered at the Sundance Festival in January and airs on HBO next week, is one of the most harrowing films I have ever seen.

“Imagine in the 21st century, in a supposedly secular country,” says David Isteev, at the start of this acclaimed documentary, “you have cases where people are killed simply because they are homosexual — where they are maimed, where the families of these people are urged to kill their children and siblings. It’s unreal.”

“Welcome to Chechnya” follows Isteev, emergency program coordinator for the Russian LGBT Network, and his fellow activists as they risk their lives trying to protect gay Chechens from being targeted both by the authorities and their own families.

Chechnya is a small Muslim-majority republic in southwestern Russia. It is also a place where gay people live in terror. Since 2017, there have been a series of state-sponsored anti-gay purges across Chechnya, in which hundreds of gay men have been arrested and detained in secret prisons. The purges were first revealed by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in April 2017 and later corroborated by Human Rights Watch, among others.

“We documented a large-scale, vicious, anti-gay purge” marked by  “torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings,” Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director at Human Rights Watch, told me in a phone interview from Moscow. In 2017, a detainee told Human Rights Watch, “They electrocuted us, beat us with pipes, kicked us, and punched us, they made other inmates beat us, they called us names, spat in our faces.”

In December 2018, there were reports of a second wave of arrests and attacks against gay Chechens. Yet there has been little coverage of their plight over the past 18 months. For David France, the award-winning director of “Welcome to Chechnya,” it makes no sense to talk of a “first” or a “second” purge, as it is all part of a single ongoing campaign of persecution against gay Chechens. “They are still being hunted,” France told me in a phone interview from New York.

The hunter-in-chief is Ramzan Kadyrov, a thuggish, tiger-loving autocrat who was installed as president of Chechnya by Russian President Vladmir Putin in 2007. Kadyrov, Lokshina said, “has been enabled by the Kremlin to run Chechnya as his own fiefdom, effectively as a state within a state, where international human rights law, and even Russian legislation, is not taken into account.”

Like every good tyrant, Kadyrov has a list of “undesirables” who are demonized and scapegoated for all of the country’s problems — and top of his list are gay people. It is the Chechen leader who ordered the rounding up and detention of gay men, who he calls “subhuman” and “devils.” In recent years, he has also been “justifying and encouraging” so-called honor killings of gay Chechens by their families while his administration, France explained to me, refuses to prosecute such crimes.

In an interview in July 2017, HBO sports reporter David Scott asked Kadyrov about the anti-gay pogroms in his country. “We don’t have those kinds of people here,” Kadyrov responded. “We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.”

“Praise be to god,” the Chechen president added. “Take them far from us, so we don’t have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”

Kadyrov has been welcomed with open arms across the Middle East. The Chechen strongman likes to portray himself as a devout Muslim and has clamped down on alcohol while enforcing Islamic dress codes and endorsing polygamy. He sees his war on gay people as part of his “Islamization” project. France described him to me as a “madman and a despot” who “bends Islam to his own use.”

To be clear: There is nothing in Islam that justifies or excuses the torture or persecution of any group of human beings. Yet the fact of the matter is that homophobia, as I have written previously, is rife in many Muslim communities across the world. Chechnya, though, is in a gay-hating league of its own. As Human Rights Watch has noted, the Russian republic “is a highly conservative, traditional Muslim society; homophobia is intense and rampant, and homosexuality is generally viewed as a stain on family honor.”

Last March, more than 30 countries signed a joint statement at the U.N. Human Rights Council calling for “a swift, thorough and impartial investigation into the alleged persecution” of gay people in Chechnya. With the exception of Albania, not a single Muslim-majority country signed onto the statement. Meanwhile, Muslim communities across the West fundraise and lobby for persecuted Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, Uighurs … but not Chechens being “hunted” by Kadyrov and his goons. Those Chechens, it seems, are the wrong kind of Muslims — they are gay Muslims.

The vicious pogroms against gay men in Chechnya, however, cannot only be laid at the door of Islam or Muslims. Russia itself is plagued by homophobia — encouraged both by the Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s president. “It’s obvious where Putin stands,” a frustrated Russian LGTBQ activist says in “Welcome to Chechnya.” “If they told him that gays were being killed, he wouldn’t give a damn.” In 2013, Putin signed the now-notorious “gay propaganda” law, which criminalized the distribution of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.” Polls suggest a majority of Russians believe gays are conspiring to “destroy” the country’s values, while 1 in 5 of them want to “eliminate” gay and lesbian people from Russian society.

Then there is the global context: As the director, France, reminded me, homosexuality remains illegal in more than 70 countries across the world and is punishable by death in eight of them.

Is it any wonder, then, that activists talk of a “gay genocide”? In May 2017, in fact, three French gay rights groups filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court accusing Chechnya of a policy of genocide against gay people. The legal problem, though, as France points out, is that the Genocide Convention applies only to “national, ethnical, racial, or religious” groups, thereby excluding persecuted LGBTQ communities.

Nevertheless, France draws a direct comparison with the Holocaust. “This is the first time since Hitler’s regime that there has been an open, government-directed policy to round up and liquidate LGBTQ people,” he told me. Between 1933 and 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany’s law against homosexuality, and of these, approximately 50,000 were sentenced to prison. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps on similar charges, where an unknown number of them perished.”

“Never again” has (rightly) become the global mantra, in reference to the Holocaust. But, with regard to gay people, it is happening again. Right now. In Chechnya.

So where, today, is the outrage from our politicians or the press? Where are the protests? Why the lack of global support for this repressed minority? As Lokshina pointed out to me, most Western countries have failed to provide a “safe haven” for gay Chechens fleeing persecution. The United States under Donald Trump may have imposed financial sanctions on Chechen leaders, for example, but it hasn’t admitted a single LGBTQ refugee from Chechnya.

Remember, our inaction, our indifference and, above all else, our silence makes us complicit in these crimes against LGBTQ communities. But it’s much worse than that. Our silence also emboldens brutal demagogues like Putin and Kadyrov — and lays the groundwork for further human rights abuses across the board. “If there’s no punishment,” says an exhausted-looking Isteev toward the end of the film, “if LGBT people are regarded as subhuman, if you can do anything to them, it means that tomorrow, anyone can find themselves in the shoes of gay Chechens.”

“Welcome to Chechnya“ airs on HBO on June 30.

The post Chechnya Is Trying to Exterminate Gay People. Our Silence Only Emboldens Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov. appeared first on The Intercept.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, who has been representing New York’s 16th Congressional District since 1989, has one of the most hawkish — and shameful — Democratic foreign policy records on Capitol Hill.

Let’s start with Iraq. Engel was among a minority of House Democrats to vote for the illegal invasion of Iraq. “It would be a monumental mistake not to support” George W. Bush, he proclaimed on the House floor in October 2002, as he disingenuously tried to link Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Al Qaeda and the wider “war on terror.” He told his colleagues, “In this era of terrorism, the U.S. has to be proactive.” Lest we forget, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed as a result of that vote.

Then there’s Iran. President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or Iran nuclear deal, was negotiated not just between the United States and Tehran, but with the other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany and the European Union. The historic 2015 agreement saw the Iranian government publicly reaffirm that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons” and, to quote Obama, subjected Iran “to the most comprehensive, intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”

Yet Engel, then the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opposed Obama’s Iran deal. In September 2015, he was one of only 25 House Democrats to vote against it — compared to 162 Democrats who backed the JCPOA. (Engel has since said he reluctantly supports the Iran deal and criticized Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from it).

How about Saudi Arabia? In 2016, Engel was one of only 16 Democrats to join with 200 Republicans and defeat a measure that would have banned the sale of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. Cluster munitions, as my colleague Alex Emmons noted, often leave behind “mine-like explosives that kill civilians and destroy farmland decades after a conflict ends.”

At the time of the vote, Saudi jets were in the midst of dropping U.S.-made cluster bombs on civilian areas in Yemen — and Engel helped them to carry on doing so!

The House Foreign Affairs Committee chair has since shifted his position on Saudi Arabia, and even voted to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen in 2019. Yet his opposition to the Saudis only goes so far: In December 2018, the month after the CIA determined that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, for example, Engel told NPR that he did not want to see MBS “punished.”

“We need to talk to him about the disagreements we have,” said the New York congressman. Got that? Disagreements.

There’s also Egypt. Engel was a vocal supporter of the violent military coup in Cairo in 2013, which led to the mass killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters in Rabaa Square, and the imprisonment and torture of tens of thousands of Egyptians. The New York Democrat also slammed the Obama administration for daring to consider cuts in U.S. aid to Egypt’s brutal military. So much for his support for human rights!

And, of course, how can we forget the Israel-Palestine conflict? Engel is one of Israel’s most die-hard supporters on Capitol Hill, often taking positions to the right of that country’s own leaders. As foreign policy scholar Stephen Zunes has documented in the Progressive, Engel “was an outspoken supporter of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,” insists the United States “should veto any and all U.N. resolutions critical of Israel,” and has “pushed for defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.”

Despite growing support for conditioning aid to Israel from across the party’s political spectrum, and from Democratic voters, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chair has denounced the proposal to condition aid as “one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.” Time and again, he puts all the blame for the occupation … on the occupied Palestinians themselves.

Is it any wonder, then, that the pro-Trump lobbyist Morton Klein, who has his own lengthy history of bigoted remarks, has called Engel his “friend” and a person “who fully understands the truth of the Arab-Islamic war against Israel and the West”?

Backing illegal wars and coups. Appeasing foreign dictators. Defending Israel’s repression of the Palestinians. This is the Engel foreign policy record. He may be presented in the press as “mainstream” or a “moderate,” but his votes on Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia put him in a hawkish, hard-right minority inside of his own party. In fact, as my colleagues Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy revealed, a Republican super PAC is helping fund Engel’s reelection effort, behind the scenes, via a $100,000 donation to a pro-Engel super PAC called Democratic Majority for Israel.

Meanwhile, his primary opponent, educator and activist Jamaal Bowman, has defended the humanity of Palestinian children and told me in a recent interview that when the Israeli government is committing human rights violations “we have to have honest conversations about that.” Bowman also pointed out that, unlike Engel, he does not “take a dime from weapons manufacturers” and supports “dramatically” reducing defense spending.

Rather than backing Bowman, Democratic Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn, and Adam Schiff have lined up behind Engel. Hillary Clinton decided to make the New York Democrat her first primary endorsement of 2020. “The establishment is racing to save the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Shane Goldmacher.

Bowman, in stark contrast, has the backing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and — on Tuesday — Elizabeth Warren.

Like so many politicians who are keen to bomb brown people in the Middle East, and ask questions (or offer regrets!) later, Engel has a nasty streak. Forget his hot-mic confession that he “wouldn’t care” about speaking at an event on racism if he didn’t have a primary to fight. Forget his campaign’s attempt to smear Bowman as a communist. Forget his ludicrous dismissal of AOC’s endorsement of his opponent as a sign of dictatorship.

Consider, instead, the manner in which the New York congressman treated a Muslim student at Manhattan College, in April 2019, after she dared to challenge him over his long history of support for Israel’s human rights violations.

Engel’s response to this young, female student of color?

“You know, you ought to be nicer too,” he said. “Put a smile on your face. It wouldn’t hurt.”

The post Rep. Eliot Engel’s Positions on Foreign Policy Are Hawkish — and Shameful appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is right. The anti-racism protests that have convulsed cities across the United States are also being used as cover, to quote the president, for “acts of domestic terror.”

In late May, for example, three Nevada men were “arrested on terrorism-related charges in what authorities say was a conspiracy to spark violence during recent protests in Las Vegas,” reported the Associated Press. Federal prosecutors say the men had molotov cocktails in glass bottles and were headed downtown, according to a copy of the criminal complaint obtained by AP.

“People have a right to peacefully protest,” said Nicholas Trutanich, the U.S. attorney in Nevada. “These men are agitators and instigators. Their point was to hijack the protests into violence.”

But here’s the thing: None of these three men were members of antifa, the left-wing, anti-fascist protest movement that has been blamed both by the president and his attorney-general Bill Barr for recent violence. They were all self-identified members of the so-called boogaloo movement, aka “boogaloo bois” aka “boojahideen” — perhaps the most dangerous group that, until the past week or so, most Americans had never heard of.

The complaint filed in Nevada last month described “boogaloo” as “a term used by extremists to signify coming civil war and/or fall of civilization.” According to Cynthia Miller-Idris, an expert on domestic extremist groups at American University, members of the boogaloo movement “are all united by the idea that they are fighting against government ‘tyranny’ and want to launch a violent insurrection against the government and bring about a second civil war.”

Their weird name comes from — I kid you not! — the much-mocked 1984 movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a sequel to, and near-copy of, the original “Breakin’,” starring Ice T. “Boogaloo boys style the forthcoming war as a repeat of the American civil war,” explained the Economist in May. “The Hawaiian shirts that dot the crowds are a reference to ‘the big luau’, another name for the ‘boogaloo’, which celebrates pig (police) roasts.”

Name and dress sense aside, though, there’s nothing silly or funny about them. The Anti-Defamation League, while documenting how white supremacists have “adopted the boogaloo concept,” also referred to the boogaloo movement’s “casual acceptance of future mass violence” as “disturbing.”

These are heavily armed men, many of them with military training, looking for new and greater opportunities for violent protest.

Remember: These are heavily armed men, many of them with military training, looking for new and greater opportunities for violent protest. Miller-Idris told me that the boogaloo bois have mobilized “over the past six months in three separate waves of protests” — against attempts by state legislatures to reform gun laws; against the coronavirus lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders; and now as part of the demonstrations and marches against police brutality and racism, in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

Worryingly, their movement is growing online at breakneck speed. As Reuters reported last week, citing a study from the Tech Transparency Project, “tens of thousands of people joined boogaloo-related Facebook groups over a 30-day period in March and April as stay-at-home orders took effect across the United States. … Project researchers found discussions about tactical strategies, weapons and creating explosives in some boogaloo Facebook groups.”

In March, Timothy Wilson, a 36-year-old Missouri man with neo-Nazi ties, was shot and killed by the FBI after plotting to bomb a hospital in the Kansas City area on the first day of the lockdown. Wilson had told an undercover FBI agent that he had wanted “to create enough chaos to kick start a revolution” and referred to his planned attack as “operation boogaloo.”

In April, Aaron Swenson, a 36-year-old Arkansas man, was arrested after he threatened to kill a police officer on a Facebook Live video. “I feel like hunting the hunters,” he wrote on Facebook, where he also made “boogaloo” references, according to the police.

The boogaloo bois don’t operate in a vacuum. Their goals, methods, and personnel overlap with a number of far-right, anti-government groups that also pose a significant threat to law, order, and race relations, from the Proud Boys, to the Oath Keepers, to the Three Percenters, to the Sovereign Citizens. Don’t forget the Ku Klux Klan either: The Virginia man arrested for driving his truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters over the weekend is head of a local KKK chapter.

Some of us have been trying to sound the alarm for several years now. In 2015, a survey of law enforcement agencies found the vast majority of respondents ranked “the threat of violence from anti-government extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims.” In February, prior to both the coronavirus lockdowns and the George Floyd protests, Trump’s handpicked FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that the bureau had raised its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a “national threat priority,” and revealed how extremists motivated by racial or religious hatred made up a “huge chunk” of the FBI’s domestic terrorism investigations. (Of course as my Intercept colleague Alice Speri has previously reported, a considerable amount of the FBI’s domestic terror investigations focused on individuals and groups it labeled “black separatist extremists,” a phenomenon that does not actually exist.)

Yet Trump, of course, isn’t interested in terrorists of the far-right variety — no matter how many Americans they kill or maim. He refused to apply the label of “domestic terrorism” to the white supremacists who murdered Jews at synagogues in Pennsylvania and California. He refused to apply it to a supporter of his who sent pipe bombs to a number of high-profile Democratic politicians and donors. After a Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested on suspicion of plotting to commit an act of white nationalist terrorism, Trump simply said it was a “shame” and a “very sad thing.” After the massacre of 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand, Trump denied white nationalist terrorists were a growing problem and dismissed them as “a small group of people.”

Trump, of course, isn’t interested in terrorists of the far-right variety — no matter how many Americans they kill or maim.

But antifa, on the other hand? “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” declaimed the president on Twitter on May 31 — despite the glaring lack of evidence connecting antifa elements to any of the recent violence or looting.

You know who has been linked to it? The armed guys in the Hawaiian shirts. And not just the trio with molotov cocktails in Nevada. In South Carolina, a 22-year-old man, who the local sheriff’s department accused of being a supporter of boogaloo, was charged “with inciting a riot and aggravated breach of peace.” In Denver, police seized assault rifles and gas masks from a 20-year-old protester who “identifies with the ‘boogaloo’ movement.” In Georgia, “self-identified” boogaloo supporters “armed with rifles and handguns” were spotted among protesters in downtown Athens. In a memo, the Athens police chief called the boogaloo movement an “extremist organization” that aims in part “to instigate race wars across America.”

Let’s be clear: Far-right extremists are hijacking nationwide protests against racism to push for … a race war! While the boogaloo “might have elements that are closer to libertarians … 90 percent of the boogaloo material is racist,” Mia Bloom, an expert on online extremism at Georgia State University, told me. According to Bloom, therefore, “we can expect a lot more violence in the lead up to the 2020 election.” Miller-Idris of American University agrees. “I think we should be very concerned about the violent potential of these groups,” she told me. “There have always been fringe seditionist and anti-government militia groups but this phenomenon represents a more rapid growth in both online and offline space than we have seen before.”

The president and his attorney general, then, have stumbled on an undeniable truth: There is a domestic terror threat in the United States. We need to recognize it in order to protect against it. But here’s what Trump and Barr won’t say: That terror threat comes not from anti-fascists in black masks, but from actual fascists in Hawaiian shirts.

Update: June 10, 2020
This story has been updated to note that the FBI devoted considerable resources to investigating “black separatist extremists,” a phenomenon that does not actually exist.

The post How the Far-Right Boogaloo Movement Is Trying to Hijack Anti-Racist Protests for a Race War appeared first on The Intercept.

In March, as the coronavirus spread through the nation’s biggest city, the mayor of New York City was proudly “telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid the normal things they would do”  because “if you are not sick … you should be going about your life.” His advice may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers.

In April, he angrily singled out the “Jewish community” in a tweet, threatening a vulnerable minority with mass arrests for breaking social distancing rules — which he himself had violated just three days earlier.

Yet late on Saturday night, as mass protests against police brutality raged across New York City, the Democratic mayor crossed a new and grotesque line: He went on live television, on NY1, to defend and excuse police brutality against those protesters.

De Blasio needs to resign.

He should resign because his comments on Saturday night were brazen and disgusting lies. Two New York Police Department vehicles were filmed ramming into protesters behind a barricade. The mayor said the video was “upsetting” but claimed that it was “inappropriate for protesters to surround a police vehicle and threaten police officers,” adding that the officers had to “get out” of that “impossible” situation.

The police were surrounded? They had no other options? The (viral) video evidence suggests otherwise.

The Mayor of New York City just lied to 8 million New Yorkers. pic.twitter.com/4tnJCWyZ51

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) May 31, 2020

It is clear that neither police car was surrounded; both drivers could have reversed but chose instead to plough their vehicles into the crowd of people in front of them. So who should we believe? De Blasio or our own lying eyes?

He should resign because he is behaving less like a leader and more like a sociopath. “If those protestors had just gotten out of the way we wouldn’t be talking about this situation,” is an actual quote from the mayor of New York City, in his live broadcast on NY1. Got that? The unarmed people on the street run over by armed men in cars should … blame themselves for being run over!

He should resign because he is starting to sound like the far-right Republican president he once wanted to replace (until he had to end his presidential campaign last September because he was polling at less than 1 percent nationally.) This, I kid you not, is another astonishing quote from the mayor: “Any protester that tries to take the humanity away from a police officer and devalue them just because they are a public servant is no better than the racists who devalue people of color and particularly black men in America.”

To quote New York human rights lawyer Kumar Rao, “This is Bill de Blasio’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ moment.” (It is also worth noting here that the “very fine” white nationalist in Charlottesville, Virginia, who killed Heather Heyer did so by driving his car into a crowd of protesters!)

On Sunday morning, de Blasio acknowledged “mistakes” and called for a city review of police behavior. This is far from enough. He should resign because he has a history of failing black New Yorkers on this crucial issue of police brutality. For five long years, de Blasio stubbornly refused to call for the firing of the police officers involved in the death of Eric Garner in 2014. “He also delayed for years a departmental trial that could have led to the officer’s dismissal,” as the New York Times pointed out last July.

Earlier this month, the mayor defended the NYPD’s violent enforcement of social distancing guidelines against communities of color — while ignoring official data showing that black New Yorkers “who make up a quarter of the city’s population, accounted for more than two-thirds” of those arrested for social distancing offenses.

He should resign because he ran for mayor in 2013 on a platform of police reform, and even put out a campaign video slamming “stop and frisk,” which featured him in conversation with his then-15-year-old black son Dante. That ad, titled “Dignity,” is often credited with helping him secure victory in the mayoral election. At the Democratic presidential debate in Miami last June, de Blasio again invoked his son. “For the last 21 years, I have been raising a black son in America,” he said. “I have had to have very, very serious talks with my son, Dante, about how to protect himself on the streets of our city and all over our country, including how to deal with the fact that he has to take special caution because there have been too many tragedies between our young men and our police.”

Yet hundreds of black teenagers, who look just like Dante, will continue to be targeted, brutalized, and killed by New York’s “finest.”

And Dante’s father will continue to shrug his shoulders and say they should just have just gotten out of the way.

Shame on him.

The post Bill de Blasio Needs to Resign. By Defending Police Violence, He Has Betrayed New Yorkers. appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s official: Donald Trump now has the blood of 100,000 people on his tiny hands.

On Wednesday, the coronavirus death toll in the United States crossed the 100,000 mark, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

One. Hundred. Thousand.

It’s difficult to comprehend the enormity, the sheer horror, of that six-figure number. For context, that’s more people than “ever died in a single year from HIV/AIDS, drug overdoses, gun violence, or car crashes in the US.”  That’s more Americans than “died over seven decades in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars.” That’s more than 33 times the number of people who died on 9/11.

Next up, the World War I milestone. Within a matter of days, the number of deaths from the coronavirus will surpass the number of U.S. military fatalities (116,516) from the Great War. Those lives were lost over the course of more than 19 months — compared to less than four months now.

It did not have to be this way — because the vast majority of these deaths were preventable

Don’t believe me? In the United States, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was on January 20. Three days later, Vietnam confirmed its first case of Covid-19. Today, the death toll in the United States has crossed 100,000. The number of deaths in Vietnam?

Zero.

How about South Korea, which confirmed its first case on the exact same day as the United States?

Less than 300 deaths so far.

According to epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, “an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19 … might have been prevented by putting social distancing policies into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2, when there were only 11 deaths in the entire country.”

Ninety. Percent.

Putting those policies into effect even a week earlier, they say, would have resulted in “approximately a 60-percent reduction in deaths.”

Think about that: tens of thousands of Americans would be alive today had Trump take action sooner.

But he didn’t. He was off playing golf and holding rallies, while denouncing Democrats for “politicizing” the coronavirus and calling it their “new hoax.” He was comparing it to the seasonal flu and claiming that it would “miraculously” disappear, while opposing the testing of sick Americans on a cruise ship because he liked “the numbers being where they are.” He was praising the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus, while silencing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was trying to sound the alarm bell. (She hasn’t been heard from since.)

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and The Guardian, among many others, have published deep dives on Trump’s botched response to this pandemic. “Lives were endangered and I believe lives were lost,” whistleblower and vaccine expert Dr. Rick Bright told Congress earlier this month. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, conceded in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that there was “a lot of pushback” within the administration to social distancing and lockdown measures early on in the crisis: “I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.”

So what now? Will we solemnly if briefly mark this latest grisly milestone and then… move on?

We have normalized a multiplicity of Trumpian excesses, abuses, and crimes over the past three and a half years. Will we now normalize mass deaths too?

How did Americans who “lost our shit when 3,000 people were killed on 9/11,” to quote journalist Julia Ioffe, and launched multiple wars, drone strikes, and torture programs in response, become inured to 100,000 deaths at home? And what happened to the shock and outrage that we saw at the start of this crisis? Are we suffering from pandemic fatigue?

Perhaps racism is behind our seeming indifference. Deaths from Covid-19 have been disproportionately black and brown. “When you start seeing where the cases are coming from and the demographics — I’m not worried,” said a member of the public who was interviewed by the Washington Post while out and about in a wealthy, white suburb of Georgia. Got that? The demographics. “Unfortunately the American population is … very diverse,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told CNN, while trying to defend the record U.S. death toll. Got that? Very diverse.

Then there is the thick fog of misinformation. Blame China! Blame the World Health Organization! Blame Barack Obama! As the media critic Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, has argued, Trump’s plan “is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible … by ‘flooding the zone with shit,’ Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial.”

And, of course, there is the well-documented “human tendency to turn away from mass suffering,” the way in which our sympathy levels go down as the number of deaths go up. “One death is a tragedy,” goes the old saying attributed to Joseph Stalin, “a million deaths is a statistic.”

In fact, Stalin never said it. Trump, however, has gone out of his way to callously minimize and dismiss the rising U.S. death toll. When it stood at 86,607 deaths, he declaimed: “It’s a very, very small percentage. I say it all the time — it’s a tiny percentage.”

One hundred thousand men, women, and children cannot be reduced to a “tiny percentage.” Nor should we forget their names, their faces, their legacies. Philip Kahn, 100, a veteran of World War II. Margit Buchhalter Feldman, 90, a survivor of the Holocaust. Jorge Ortiz-Garay, 49, a Catholic priest. Dez-Ann Romain, 36, a high school principal. Skylar Herbert, 5, a kindergartener. I could go on and on and on.

Yet Trump doesn’t seem to give a damn. Having slammed Obama for golfing during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, which killed only two people in the U.S., Trump spent the past weekend back at his own golf course, as deaths from Covid-19 approached the 100,000 mark. There has been no remorse, no regret, and few condolences for the families of the dead. Shamelessly, the commander-in-chief has preferred to take a victory lap as the bodies literally pile up.

This is sociopathy on steroids. So let us not be complicit in this malign madness, in this slow-motion normalization of mass deaths. Be upset. Get mad. Speak out.

As Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez pointed out in a recent essay for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “The problem with normalizing deaths” is that “it allows more deaths” and “makes it easier for the horrors of virus deaths to fall off the broadcast news chyron, to divert resources away from public health and for future politicians to treat the next pandemic even more glibly.”

In recent weeks, Trump’s normalization strategy has involved deliberately and disingenuously moving the goalposts over and over again: He predicted “50 to 60” thousand deaths; then “60,000 to 70,000“; then “75, 80 to 100,000 people.”

But as we remember and mourn the 100,000 victims of Covid-19 here in the United States, I can’t and won’t forget his worst prediction of all, his biggest lie, from February 26: “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Trump lied. One hundred thousand people died.

The post It’s Official: 100,000 Are Dead of Covid-19 in America, and Their Blood Is on Trump’s Hands appeared first on The Intercept.

If you were to draw up a list of the most plain-spoken, passionate, and progressive women in American public life, you would have to include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and Sara Nelson somewhere near the top. All of them, of course, were loud and ardent advocates for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential primaries.

Imagine my surprise then — or was it disbelief? — to discover on Wednesday morning that they had been appointed as co-chairs of three of the six “joint task forces” that are meant to unify the Democratic Party on policy in the run-up to November.

NEW this morning: Biden and Sanders roll out the members of the 6 Unity Task Forces that will offer recommendations to the DNC platform cmte and to Biden. Includes @johnkerry, @EricHolder, @vivek_murthy, @aoc, @RepJayapal, @rweingarten, @econjared, @StephanieKelton. pic.twitter.com/fGHHFJcUVE

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 13, 2020

Jayapal, sponsor of the Medicare for All bill in the House, is co-chair of the health care task force. Ocasio-Cortez, sponsor of the Green New Deal bill in the House, is co-chair of the climate change task force. Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a champion of organized labor, is co-chair of the economy task force.

To be clear: These three co-chairs will be representing Sanders and his vision for the party. It was the Vermont senator who recommended them for these positions, and pushed to have them included. Remarkably, though, it was Joe Biden, Mr. Status Quo himself, who signed off on them.

“We’ve set up joint committees together to deal with how we would deal with everything from the virus all the way down to education, the criminal justice system, the new green deal, etc.,” the former vice-president told a Las Vegas TV news outlet. “I’m working with Bernie and his people and, so, we’ve made some changes and listened to Bernie supporters. And for example, we have, you know, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. She is on one of the panels as well.”

This is all, to borrow an old line of Biden’s, “a big fucking deal.” It isn’t only the impressive trio of AOC, Jayapal, and Nelson who feature on these panels. Also on the health care task force is Abdul El-Sayed, who ran an insurgent campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Michigan and is the co-author of a book on Medicare for All. Also on the economy task force is Stephanie Kelton, a pioneer of Modern Monetary Theory and author of a forthcoming book on deficit hysteria. Also on the climate change task force is Varshini Prakash, executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement — the progressive group behind the Green New Deal that gave Biden’s presidential climate plan an “F” rating in 2019. Meanwhile, Heather Gautney, an activist-scholar and top Sanders adviser, is co-chair of the education task force.

Kudos to Sanders for suggesting such outside-the-Beltway names but — and some on the left might not want to hear me say this — kudos also to Biden and his team for accepting them.

Above all else, kudos to grassroots organizations and activists on the left who demanded the presumptive Democratic nominee reach out to them. “Biden’s announcement demonstrates the progressive movement’s growing power as a key constituency within the party,” Waleed Shahid, of Justice Democrats, told me. “As the Democratic nominees, Bill Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Hillary Clinton did not make a major effort to appoint progressives.”

Yet Biden has. And his own appointments to the six committees aren’t all bad, either. Rep. Karen Bass, who has one of the most liberal voting records in the House, is his choice for co-chair of the economy task force, while neoliberal ideologues like Larry Summers and Erskine Bowles are, thankfully, nowhere to be seen. AOC’s fellow co-chair is former Secretary of State John Kerry, who signed the Paris climate accords on behalf of the United States.

If personnel is policy, as the old saying goes, then this should be seen as a clear victory for progressives. These six committees, according to the Biden campaign, “will meet in advance of the Democratic National Convention to make recommendations to the DNC Platform Committee” and to Biden directly. The task forces, the former vice president has said, “will be essential to identifying ways to build on our progress and not simply turn the clock back to a time before Donald Trump, but transform our country.”

If personnel is policy, as the old saying goes, then this should be seen as a clear victory for progressives.

This, incidentally, is a welcome change in tone and rhetoric from the Biden of 2019, who pledged to a group of wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.” A source close to Sanders tells me the current pandemic has had a major impact on Team Biden: “They realized they messed it up last time, when it came to the Great Recession. This is the time when ideas matter most.” The former vice president himself conceded to an audience on Zoom a few weeks ago: “The blinders have been taken off because of this Covid crisis.”

Cynics on the left might see this new language, and these new appointments, as merely progressive window-dressing what will be a business-as-usual presidency. I can’t honestly blame them. Biden is an untrustworthy figure. He is obsessed with cutting deals with Republicans. And he has a long history of doing the bidding of corporate interests — from Big Finance to Big Pharma to Big Oil.

But he is also, to quote Noam Chomsky, an “empty vessel.” “With a Biden presidency, the activism of a popular movement will make a big difference,” Chomsky told me last month. “Trump’s probably immune, but Biden will be open to it.”

So far, he seems to be. Those progressives who agreed to join these joint task forces may have made a similar calculation. In a Twitter thread, Sunrise Movement’s Prakash said “the decision wasn’t easy to make. It’s no secret that Biden wasn’t the favorite candidate of our movement or of young ppl broadly.” Nevertheless, she wrote, “I feel a responsibility to win whatever we can from this platform.” El-Sayed borrowed an analogy from football to explain his own reasoning: “Drive for the touchdown–but a field goal is still 3 pts on the board.”

Still, the cynics may be proven right. Perhaps Biden will ignore the recommendations from these task forces. Or perhaps he’ll embrace them — and then ignore them once he’s sworn in.

But I’m not so sure. Why would he appoint former presidential candidate John Kerry — doyen of the Democratic Party establishment and a close personal friend of his — as a task force co-chair, only to ignore Kerry’s recommendations? And why would he take the risk of including progressive firebrands such as Ocasio-Cortez and Nelson, who could quit and denounce him at any time? “He’d be playing with fire” if he ignores them, a top ally of Bernie Sanders tells me. “You think AOC’s not gonna burn you?”

Still, there is no room for complacency. The grassroots left must keep up the pressure on the Biden campaign — and keep up its demands. Membership on these joint task forces is nowhere near enough. How about — as even former Obama staffers Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer have suggested — calling for a prominent Sanders-aligned progressive (Rep. Ro Khanna?) to be made a co-chair of the Biden campaign? Why not also insist on the appointment of a senior member of the Sanders camp to any presidential transition team? And, above all else: Why not push for Sen. Elizabeth Warren as VP?

Remember: Personnel is policy. Those who have agreed to work with Biden and company are not stooges or sellouts. The outsiders haven’t morphed into insiders. Believe it or not, there is an actual strategy here. Ocasio-Cortez summed it up in a tweet defending her decision to co-chair the climate change task force: “Inside pressure. Outside organizing.”

The post Biden Taps AOC and Jayapal to Help Shape Party Policy. Isn’t This a Win for Progressives? appeared first on The Intercept.

That same day, back in Venezuela, another ex-special forces soldier with connections to the longtime bodyguard of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, releases a video announcing the two men were working for his private security company, on a mission to detain and extract President Donald Trump and bring down the government in Washington, D.C.

Two days later, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also happens to be the former head of the country’s feared intelligence agency, gives a press conference at which he chooses to deny only “direct” involvement in the operation. “If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” he added, with a smirk.

What do you think the reaction would be here in the United States? Among political and media elites? In national security circles? Wouldn’t the U.S. press be running endless pieces denouncing and berating Maduro? Wouldn’t cable news be rolling on it? Does anyone doubt that the U.S. military would be preparing to attack targets across Venezuela in retaliation?

Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed over the past week — but in reverse, and without any sense of shock or outrage in the United States.

In this photo released by Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication, Jorge Rodriguez shows a video of American Airan Berry, a former U.S. special forces soldier associated with the Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp USA, during a televised statement in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 7, 2020.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, spoke at a press conference where he issued his very carefully worded denial: “There was no U.S. government direct involvement in this.” He also couldn’t help but brag to reporters about how it “would have gone differently” if the United States had been behind it. (Memo to Pompeo: Google “Bay of Pigs.”)

Who knows? Perhaps Washington wasn’t involved this time. Perhaps Trump is correct to say that this particular fiasco, which sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, “has nothing to do with our government.”

Then again, this is an administration of liars, fabulists, and grifters. Dishonesty is the hallmark of the Trump White House. Their denials, therefore, are pretty worthless.

Plus, there is the recent history to consider: the demonization and strangulation of Venezuela has been a bipartisan project in Washington, D.C., since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the socialist “pink tide” in the late 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration encouraged and supported a (failed) coup against Chavez. (As I later reminded former Bush official Otto Reich — who was accused of meeting with the plotters beforehand — the CIA had warned him and his colleagues that a coup attempt would be made five days before it occurred!).

In 2015, the Obama administration made the absurd decision to formally declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At the time, the United States was 11 times bigger in terms of population, 600 times richer in terms of GDP, and with a military budget 1,800 times the size of Venezuela’s.

In 2019, the Trump administration called Maduro “illegitimate” and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. So far this year, Washington has indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism; refused to suspend crippling sanctions on Caracas despite the spread of Covid-19; and deployed U.S. warships near Venezuela in what has been described as “one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power.”

Regime change is the explicit policy of the U.S. government.

To be clear: The regime in Caracas is brutal, autocratic, and corrupt. More than four million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years; the president’s approval ratings hover around 10 percent.

But anyone who claims that U.S. opposition to Maduro is based on a concern for democracy or human rights in Venezuela is either dishonest or deluded. The United States has a long history of supporting strongmen around the world — and especially in Latin America. Think Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Or Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Or Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. The list goes on and on.

No, the real reason the United States is obsessed with toppling the government in Caracas is, of course, because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — but leaders opposed to both the United States and capitalism. In fact, Trump and his cronies have a habit of saying the quiet part loud. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed in his book, “The Threat,” at a briefing with intelligence officials in 2017, Trump asked why the U.S. wasn’t at war with Venezuela, pointing out how “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

In January 2019, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

We do not know whether Trump and Co. were involved in the Goudreau-inspired attempted attack on Maduro. What we do know, though, is that they continue to try and starve and bully Venezuela into submission. If the Trump administration gave a damn about the people of that country, it would heed calls from everyone from the pope, to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, to a group of congressional Democrats, to suspend sanctions and help Caracas fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But it won’t — because it doesn’t.

The post The “Coup” Attempt in Venezuela Seems Ridiculous. But Don’t Forget — Regime Change Is the U.S. Goal. appeared first on The Intercept.

Meet Josh Hawley, the junior Republican senator from Missouri. Hawley has grabbed plenty of headlines during the coronavirus crisis, from his push to have the federal government “cover 80 percent of wages for workers at any U.S. business,” to his call for a block on “federal relief funds to universities with massive endowments” such as Harvard and Stanford.

“Hawley reflects a post-Trump populism within the Republican Party that seems likely to outlast the 45th president,” observed Vox’s Emily Stewart in a wide-ranging profile of the senator in October of last year. For Stewart, the telegenic, 39-year-old Republican has “positioned himself as a defender of the middle of the country against the supposed ‘elite’ class.”

The Atlantic’s Emma Green described him in November as “a potential lead architect of Trumpism after Trump,” whose speeches “are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy” on income inequality, big corporations, and labor unions.

Perhaps Hawley’s biggest cheerleader on the left is Matt Stoller, who has claimed that the Republican senator is “right about a lot of things” and even suggested that Hawley “may have the populist economic lane to himself.”

This is nonsense. Yes, Hawley is no Ted Cruz or Rand Paul. And, yes, “Trumpism without Trump” is a good line. But, in fact, most of the available evidence suggests that Hawley, like Trump, is a fraud and an opportunist.

Anti-elitist? Hawley may constantly rail against “elites” and talk up his own “small-town” background, as he did in a much-discussed keynote address to the National Conservatism conference last July, but he himself is the son of a banker and a graduate of two of this country’s most elite universities, Stanford and Yale. Following Stanford, he went to teach at one of England’s most prestigious private schools, St. Paul’s; following Yale, he went to work for one of the world’s biggest law firms, Hogan Lovells. He met his wife while clerking for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. Josh is no regular Joe.

Anti-tech crusader? The Missouri senator, as Stoller and others point out, has joined with progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren to lambast big tech for its “business model of addiction.” Warren, however, goes after Facebook and Google because she wants to curb their financial and monopoly power; Hawley goes after them not just because of their economic clout but also because, like every other elected Republican, he thinks they’re mean to conservatives. In 2019, the GOP senator introduced a deeply flawed bill to challenge their alleged political bias and even stopped by at Trump’s ridiculous White House Social Media Summit to address an audience of far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists. (For the record, there is zero empirical evidence of an anti-conservative bias on the major social media platforms.)

Most of the available evidence suggests that Hawley, like Trump, is a fraud and an opportunist.

Economic populist? His boosters on the left point to legislation that Hawley has introduced to try and tackle the electronic gaming industry, drug pricing, and college debt. But how do such (worthy) bills stack up against the rest of Hawley’s policies and positions? Wouldn’t you expect an economic populist to back higher wages and stronger labor unions? While running for the Senate, Hawley opposed ballot measures to raise the minimum wage for Missouri workers and to get rid of the state’s “right-to-work” legislation. (Thankfully, a majority of Missourians disagreed with him on both measures!)

Wouldn’t you expect an economic populist to try and guarantee health care for low-paid workers? As Missouri’s attorney general, Hawley joined a lawsuit brought by 20 GOP-led states aimed at overturning the Affordable Care Act, including its protections for people with preexisting conditions. He then campaigned for his Senate seat while claiming that he would protect such people.

Wouldn’t you expect an economic populist to challenge America’s oligarchy? While running for the Senate, Hawley took donations from right-wing billionaires such as the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel, and Bernie Marcus, while enthusiastically endorsing Trump’s tax cuts for the superrich as “the right way forward.”

Hawley is a faux-populist. Nevertheless, he is a threat to the left because, like far-right ethno-nationalists in Europe such as Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, he spins his reactionary welfare chauvinism as concern for the working poor. Hawley advocates for deep cuts to legal immigration and then — like Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and others on the U.S. far right — pretends they will help the “great American middle.” (They won’t.) This proud evangelical Christian and culture warrior — who has a rather alarming and theocratic vision for the United States — even backed Trump’s horrific “zero tolerance” policy at the border in 2018, which led to the kidnapping and caging of migrant kids.

There is nothing moderate or nuanced about Hawley’s — as opposed to Trump’s — brand of conservative nationalism. Last July, Jewish groups denounced him for his obsession with “cosmopolitan elites” — a longstanding anti-Semitic dog whistle — in his National Conservatism speech. His keynote also referenced “cosmopolitan” Jewish academics by name, as well as “money changing on Wall Street.” Yet three months later, the Missouri senator slammed a Jewish journalist — Greg Sargent of the Washington Post — as a “smug, rich liberal elitist.”

So don’t be fooled, progressives. Josh Hawley is not your friend. He may be polished and persuasive, well-read and well-groomed, but he remains your standard right-wing wolf in the clothing of a populist sheep.

Remember: Trumpism without Trump is still Trumpism.

The post Sen. Josh Hawley Is Cast as a GOP Leader After Trump. But Like Trump, He’s a Faux-Populist. appeared first on The Intercept.

Dear Joe Biden,

If you win in November, you will be 78 years old at your inauguration — the oldest person ever to enter the White House.

Sorry to be blunt, but the actuarial tables suggest there is a one in five chance you may not make it to the end of your first term. (Keep doing those workouts!)

Voters, therefore, will be paying more attention than normal to who you decide to pick as your vice presidential candidate — and heir apparent. Unlike in most previous presidential elections, who you choose to nominate as your running mate in 2020 really does matter. It could be one of the most consequential VP picks in modern American history.

So far, you’ve said you plan on picking a woman. And if some of the leaks from your campaign are to be believed, these are four of the top runners and riders: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, and Amy Klobuchar.

All of them are formidable politicians. Harris, the skilled inquisitor; Abrams, the voting rights’ champion; Klobuchar, the bipartisan Midwesterner.

But it is Warren who stands out from the rest. If you were to offer her the VP slot, the senator from Massachusetts has said, without hesitation, that she would accept it.

You should make that offer. And make it soon.

Of course, I have my own agenda here. Like plenty of others on the left, the reason I want Warren on the ticket is to keep you in check, while continuing to push for policies like universal health care, an end to the filibuster, and a wealth tax. She’s a progressive; you’re not.

But here’s the thing: there are three simple reasons why you should want her as your running mate too.

She’s popular. Yes, you soundly beat her in the Democratic presidential primaries — including, humiliatingly, on her home turf of Massachusetts.

Consider the latest polls, however. According to Axios, a new survey in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, commissioned by Donors of Color Action, found Warren to be “the overall candidate to beat” among potential vice presidential nominees, with “the most consistent support among white and black voters in both states.” She even outpolled Harris among black voters.

Meanwhile, a YouGov/Economist nationwide poll of Democratic voters found “one woman emerges as a clear choice: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren,” who “leads in every age group, and with both men and women.” She also happens to be the sixth most popular Democrat in the United States — you’re fifth! — and the most popular woman in the party.

Come November, and especially against Donald Trump and his #MAGA cult, you’re going to need an enthused and energetic Democratic base behind you. Yet despite your impressive primary victories, only in one in four of your own supporters say they are “very” enthusiastic about your candidacy. Your campaign rallies were, let’s be honest, pitiful affairs, while Warren pulled in overflow crowds of cheering fans and selfie-takers. “Warren has mastered the art of drawing thousands to her rallies,” noted the Associated Press last September.

Warren has charm, people skills, a common touch. Working-class white men may be your biggest fans; college-educated white women are hers. And the misogyny she’s had to endure so far may not be a problem in the general election. “Like most women,” your former White House colleague Jennifer Palmieri pointed out in the Boston Globe last week, “she could be even more effective when she’s campaigning for someone else, other than herself — then voters don’t get uneasy about all that ambition she has.”

She’s progressive. You spent much of the primary campaign trashing her positions (and Bernie Sanders’s!), but you may need a progressive on your ticket come November. Klobuchar is to the right of you; Abrams isn’t so progressive on some economic issues; and Harris may have a very liberal voting record as a senator but was far from a “progressive prosecutor” in California.

It’s Warren who is your bridge to the left of the party; she offers the ideological balance you need. Yes, need! There was a multiplicity of reasons for why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. But the number of Sanders-to-Trump voters hurt her; the number of Jill Stein voters hurt her; the number of 2012 Obama voters who stayed home hurt her.

How are you going to prevent any or all of that from happening again — by ignoring the left?

Sanders is too old and too male to be your running mate so Warren is the next best option.

She’s got a plan. Warren has a plan for (almost) everything — and often before anyone else. She was the first major presidential candidate to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, after reading every page of the 448-page Mueller report. She was the first candidate to publish a detailed plan to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. She continues to make the loud and relentless case for “government action” to “save lives and to rescue our economy.”

Isn’t this the person you want by your side not just in office, but as you run for office in the midst of an unprecedented crisis? Is there a smarter or more competent candidate out there? And isn’t competence what you’re trying to offer the American people, after four long years of Trumpian chaos and dysfunction? This is your chance to be the anti-McCain. Remember how your pal, the late senator from Arizona, unveiled the idiotic and unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate 17 days before the financial crash? Announcing the wonkish Warren as your running mate a month after the declaration of a national emergency would send the exact opposite message as McCain’s in 2008.

Perhaps with a nod to your own age and health, you have said — rightly! —  on more than one occasion, that the person you pick to be your vice president has to be “ready on day one to be president of the United States.”

If that is your key requirement — and I think it should be — then it has to be Elizabeth Warren. It just has to be. She is readier than the rest. She is even readier than you, Joe.

Sincerely,

Mehdi Hasan

The post Dear Joe Biden, Here’s Why You Should Pick Elizabeth Warren as Your Running Mate appeared first on The Intercept.

How else to explain the fact that a pandemic of global and historic proportions, a novel coronavirus that is infecting people in almost every country and territory on Earth, has been weaponized by the far right to attack … Islam and Muslims?

Take India, where the spread of the virus has been dubbed a “corona jihad” by supporters of the far-right BJP government; they  claim the pandemic is a conspiracy by Muslims to infect and poison Hindus. The government itself has blamed around a third of India’s confirmed Covid-19 cases on a gathering held in Delhi by a conservative Muslim missionary group called the Tablighi Jamaat; one BJP minister called it a “Talibani crime.” As The Guardian reports, “Muslims have now seen their businesses across India boycotted, volunteers distributing rations called ‘coronavirus terrorists’, and others accused of spitting in food and infecting water supplies with the virus. Posters have appeared barring Muslims from entering certain neighbourhoods in states as far apart as Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana and Madhya Pradesh.” There have even been reports of Indian Muslims being attacked, beaten, and lynched.

Did members of the Tablighi Jamaat behave recklessly? Yes. Do all of India’s 200 million Muslims bear responsibility for their behavior? No. “Virtually overnight,” wrote investigative journalist Rana Ayyub in the Washington Post, “Muslims became the sole culprits responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in India.”

But it isn’t just Hindu nationalist politicians or mobs. The country’s respectable press have joined in too. The left-leaning newspaper The Hindu published a cartoon showing the world being held hostage by the coronavirus — with the virus itself depicted wearing clothing associated with Muslims. (The paper later apologized for its “completely unintentional” decision to link the crisis to Muslim terrorists, and replaced it with a more neutral image.)

"The Hindu" news paper displays a cartoon of Corona virus with Muslim attire. What does this indicate. Are not these blood thirsty mainstreams done with Muslim hatredness?
Condemn #Islamophobia pic.twitter.com/pci9ELTMlV

— ?Ladeeda Farzana (@ladeedafarzana) March 26, 2020

The 24-hour news channel India Today ran an undercover investigation into so-called madrasa hot spots where the virus is allegedly being spread, and also posted a graphic on the number of Tablighi Jamaat-linked cases over an image of a Muslim prayer cap. “This is not journalism, this is hatemongering,” responded left-wing activist Kavita Krishnan, in a viral video. “History will remember you, history will judge you.”

She’s right. Over in my home country, the U.K., counterterrorism police have been “investigating far-right groups accused of trying to use the coronavirus crisis to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment,” according to a recent report in The Guardian.

These groups have been assisted by prominent far-right personalities, such as former radio shock jock Katie Hopkins, who suggested that U.K. police should physically assault any Muslims found praying in public, and English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, who shared a video allegedly showing British Muslims attending prayers at a “secret mosque” — a video later debunked and dismissed by local law enforcement officials.

Tell Mama, an organization that monitors anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.K., has documented numerous examples of British Muslims being harassed in recent weeks, including a hijab-wearing Muslim woman in south London who said she was approached by a man who “got in her face” to cough at her and claimed he had the coronavirus, while also hurling racial abuse at her.

Again, as in India, it isn’t only far-right figures using the pandemic to fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry but also mainstream media outlets. In a tweet on March 23, The Economist promoted a story on the Maldives by declaring that “the arrival of covid-19 was expected. The spread of radical Islam has been more of a surprise.”

Continue to look for ways that some media outlets instrumentalize #COVID?19 to heighten #Islamophobia.

Thanks to @Rowaida_Abdel for grabbing this screenshot before @TheEconomist took down the story and the tweet. pic.twitter.com/ysVqZz84H1

— Todd Green (@toddhgreen) March 23, 2020

The magazine has since taken down the tweet — but not the story itself.

Meanwhile, high-profile journalists in the U.K. and France have tried to use the forthcoming month of Ramadan to fearmonger about Muslims in the West breaking social distancing guidelines and spreading the virus. There is zero evidence, however, that Muslims in the U.K. or France are in favor of relaxing the guidelines or planning on reopening mosques in defiance of them. (And for the record, it was a Christian, not a Muslim, woman who told CNN she would be defying social distancing guidelines and attempting to attend a religious gathering because she was protected by holy blood!)

Here in the United States, too, the far right is mobilizing and trying to exploit the coronavirus to spread hate and violence. In March, the FBI fatally injured Timothy Wilson, an anti-government extremist, who was planning to bomb a Kansas hospital “that was providing critical care during the current coronavirus pandemic.” He had previously planned to attack, among other targets, “Islamic centers.”

He was no “lone wolf.” Homeland Security officials in New Jersey say neo-Nazi groups have been encouraging their supporters “to incite panic while people are practicing social isolation during the Covid-19 outbreak, which includes discharging firearms in cities and putting bullet-sized holes into car windows.”

As in the U.K. and India, such groups can take aid and comfort from well-known conservative media figures. “You think Covid-19 is bad?” wrote author and radio host Neal Boortz to his 200,000-plus followers on Twitter. “Give me a break. Wait until Muslims hit critical mass in America. You’ll look back on these times fondly.”

Los Angeles Times reporter Johana Bhuiyan, however, had a perfect response to the boorish Boortz:

Sweetie everyone’s already washing their hands five+ times a day, covering their face, not shaking hands + avoiding bars. Not only are we already here, you’re all Muslim. Salam brother. https://t.co/m6MDbyRrWs

— Johana Bhuiyan (@JMBooyah) April 2, 2020

Here is the great irony: While anti-Muslim bigots have tried to use the coronavirus to smear and demonize Muslims, the pandemic itself has exposed the ridiculousness of anti-Muslim bigotry.

The French and Austrian governments passed bans on face masks, in 2011 and 2017 respectively, as a way of targeting, and criminalizing, the wearing of the Muslim face veil, the niqab. Today, France’s National Academy of Medicine is calling for masks to be made obligatory for anyone leaving their homes during the lockdown, while the Austrian government has made wearing face masks compulsory for anyone entering a supermarket or grocery store.

In 2018, the Danish government insisted on making new citizens shake hands at their naturalization ceremonies — a move which, as the New York Times noted at the time, was “aimed at Muslims who refuse on religious grounds to touch members of the opposite sex.”

So you might assume the Danes had dropped that mandatory handshake now, right? Wrong. According to the Times, “the government in Denmark has asked mayors to suspend naturalization ceremonies … with no exception to the handshake for those who want to become citizens.”

We may defeat the Covid-19 virus in the months ahead, but it will take much longer to defeat the disease that is Islamophobia.

The post The Coronavirus Is Empowering Islamophobes — but Exposing the Idiocy of Islamophobia appeared first on The Intercept.

“The struggle of man against power,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera famously proclaimed, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Here in the United States, both politicians and the public tend to have the shortest of short memories. There is much collective “forgetting” that goes on in Washington D.C., New York, and beyond.

Consider those politicians and pundits who cheered on the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, while spreading lies about weapons of mass destruction, and continue to hold important and influential positions in politics and in the media; one of them is even on course to be the Democratic presidential nominee in November. Today, however, few mention Iraq in relation to any of these politicians or pundits.

Those bankers and economists who backed the disastrous economic policies that helped cause the financial crash in 2008 continue to lecture the rest of us on how to run the economy. Today, however, few mention the crash in relation to any of these people.

I wonder: Will we make the same mistake after the United States has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the biggest political, economic, and public health crisis in modern American history? Will we forgive those who got it so badly wrong and endangered our lives? Will we forget their dishonest and negligent behavior?

Only, I guess, if we abandon “the struggle of man against power,” to quote Kundera.

There has been much moving of goalposts in recent weeks as countless conservatives try to pretend that they have always taken Covid-19 seriously; there have been repeated and brazen attempts by prominent figures on the right (as well as the Democratic mayor of New York) to make their earlier denialism disappear down the memory hole.

Never forget: The president of the United States claimed to have the coronavirus “totally under control” because it was only “one person coming in from China”; he said it would miraculously “disappear”; he compared it to the flu; he tried to prevent sick Americans on a cruise ship getting off and getting tested because he liked “the numbers being where they are”; and he called concerns over the spread of the virus a Democratic “hoax.” Donald Trump also held daily White House press briefings where he berated the press; told countless lies; denied any “responsibility at all” for the crisis; and pushed unproven and risky drugs as a possible treatment for the disease, adding: “What do you have to lose?” As thousands of Americans lost their lives to Covid-19, the president bragged about his TV ratings and his Facebook followers, while also taking Twitter potshots at Hillary Clinton over Benghazi and her emails.

Never forget: Members of this Trump administration suggested that the coronavirus was not just “contained,” but contained “pretty close to airtight.” They compared deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from smoking and opioids; they even fired a Navy captain for daring to sound the alarm about the spread of the virus aboard his aircraft carrier, and he later tested positive for the disease himself. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, declared live on national TV that the Strategic National Stockpile was “supposed to be our stockpile” and not for use by hard-hit states.

Never forget: Republican members of Congress took photos mocking the spread of Covid-19; went swimming in the Senate pool hours after being tested for the disease; insisted on shaking hands with reporters on Capitol Hill; and told their constituents that it was a “great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant” — in clear defiance of scientific advice on social distancing. As millions of Americans were laid off from their jobs, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a long weekend in order to hang out with his buddy, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, back home in Kentucky; the following week, he passed a stimulus bill that did more to help big corporations than ordinary Americans, and he then shut down the Senate for a long recess.

Never forget: GOP governors across the country refused to close beaches, refused to stop going out to crowded public places, and either refused to listen to the scientific advice on social distancing or pretended to be unaware of it. By the start of April, as the death toll mounted, eight governors in the U.S. had “decided against issuing statewide directives urging their residents to stay at home” — and all of them were Republicans.

Never forget: Fox News hosts fell over one another between January and March to dismiss or downplay the threat from the coronavirus, which one described as “yet another attempt to impeach the president”; another said the more they learned about it “the less there is to worry about”; while yet another announced that “it was the safest time to fly.” The biggest name on Fox News, Sean Hannity, not only compared the coronavirus to the seasonal flu, but he also suggested that it might be a “deep-state” plot against Trump while accusing Democrats of “weaponizing an infectious disease” to “bludgeon” the president.

Never forget: the dozens of other right-wing media personalities who misread a graph and claimed that the “coronavirus is LESS dangerous than the seasonal flu” for people under 60; who derided those warning about the dangers of the virus as a “doomsday cult”; who suggested that we might be “better off if we gave [the coronavirus] to everybody” in order to save the stock market; who wondered whether it “might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die.” Glenn Beck, who once accused Barack Obama of trying to kill elderly patients with his “death panels,” insisted that older Americans should ignore the risk of infection and return to work because “even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country.”

Never forget: the numerous far-right Christian evangelical pastors who tried to blame the coronavirus on everything from the “transgendering” of “little children” to “a world that has turned its back on God.” One of them was arrested in Florida, after defying local coronavirus restrictions and holding packed church services. Another claimed to have destroyed the virus by blowing “the wind of God” on it during a sermon.

Never forget what these ridiculous and reckless people on the right said and did, how dangerously and shamefully they behaved, as American jobs were lost in their millions and American lives were lost in their thousands. Never forget — and, most important of all, never listen to any of these people about anything ever again.

The post After Coronavirus, Let’s Never Forget: Republicans Recklessly Put Our Lives in Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

The news is all coronavirus. Whether it’s cable news, national newspapers, public radio, or even my own Intercept podcast, we can’t get away from it.

The pandemic has overwhelmed us all; we talk, think, dream of little else.

But let me try and grab your attention for a few moments and point you in a different direction. How many of you noticed a rather disturbing New York Times story from Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt last week that was headlined, “Pentagon Order to Plan for Escalation in Iraq Meets Warning From Top Commander”? You didn’t? Well, in the midst of all the virus-related doom and gloom, it managed to send new shivers down my spine.

From the Times:

The Pentagon has ordered military commanders to plan for an escalation of American combat in Iraq, issuing a directive last week to prepare a campaign to destroy an Iranian-backed militia group that has threatened more attacks against American troops.

But the United States’ top commander in Iraq has warned that such a campaign could be bloody and counterproductive and risks war with Iran. In a blunt memo last week, the commander, Lt. Gen. Robert P. White, wrote that a new military campaign would also require thousands more American troops be sent to Iraq and divert resources from what has been the primary American military mission there: training Iraqi troops to combat the Islamic State.

Got that? A new military escalation in Iraq by the U.S. government “risks war with Iran.” That’s the “blunt” view of … the top U.S. general on the ground.

A conflict with Iran, as I have repeatedly pointed out, would be a strategic and humanitarian disaster. The United States would end up killing thousands of innocent Iranians; Tehran would lash out via proxy groups across the region, as well as the wider world; U.S. troops in Iraq would have a target on their backs; oil and gas prices would skyrocket. To quote the former head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, “Like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”

Question: What kind of maniac risks such a war in the middle of a global pandemic?

Answer: President Donald Trump, aided and abetted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien. As the Times notes, they “have been pushing for aggressive new action against Iran and its proxy forces — and see an opportunity to try to destroy Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq as leaders in Iran are distracted by the pandemic crisis in their country.

To be clear: An Iranian dies from Covid-19 every 10 minutes, while 50 people become infected in the Islamic Republic every single hour. The death toll is fast approaching 3,000. Yet for Trump and his top aides, this is an “opportunity” to push their hawkish, nay ghoulish, agenda.

As is so often the case, though, the U.S. military leadership is less keen on a new Middle East conflagration than the U.S. civilian leadership. “Military leaders, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been wary of a sharp military escalation,” reports the Times, “warning it could further destabilize the Middle East at a time when President Trump has said he hopes to reduce the number of American troops in the region.”

Remember the U.S. assassination of Iranian general and spymaster Qassim Suleimani on January 3? It feels like a lifetime ago. The Trump administration claimed at the time that the killing of Suleimani was “aimed at deterring future Iranian retaliation plans.”

How did that work out? On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that “Iran-backed militias are becoming more audacious in attacking U.S. personnel in Iraq, with rocket strikes against military bases occurring more frequently and, for the first time, in broad daylight.”

So by the administration’s own metrics, as Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, tweeted, the assassination of Suleimani “failed to achieve its goal. But according to the unfalsifiable logic of ‘maximum pressure’ the only answer is always… more pressure, more escalation.”

Right. By the administration's *own stated metrics* the (illegal) Soleimani assassination failed to achieve its goal. But according to the unfalsifiable logic of "maximum pressure" the only answer is always… more pressure, more escalation. https://t.co/SNnAq9Rcnx

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 28, 2020

More pressure. More escalation. This is precisely what Lt. Gen. Robert P. White seems to have been trying to warn against. Will anyone, though, heed his warning? Will Democrats in Congress be willing or able to call for hearings on the administration’s reckless and dangerous Iran policy, in the midst of our current coronavirus crisis? Trump and his underlings don’t seem to care about the domestic implications of starting a new foreign war. This is an administration that publicly announces a fresh round of punitive sanctions on Iran’s battered economy, while privately urging U.S. military commanders to escalate a conflict with the Iranians on Iraqi soil.

Less than two weeks ago, in a piece about the cruelty and callousness of maintaining sanctions on Iran while a pandemic rages across that country, I described the people in charge of the U.S. government as “sociopaths.” Now we discover, courtesy of an internal memo written by a U.S. general and leaked to the New York Times, that strangling the Iranian economy isn’t enough for Trump and Co. They are bent on using the spread of a deadly disease as cover for a new war.

Perhaps “sociopaths” was an understatement.

The post Beware of Trump Using the Coronavirus as a Cover for War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Dear Mr. Vice President,

It’s time. We can’t wait any longer. You need to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

You know what it says: “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

The truth of the matter is that President Donald Trump does not have the mental capability to “discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Amid an unprecedented political, economic, and public health crisis, the commander-in-chief is unwell — and unfit.

You know this. On Friday, you were standing next to the president in the White House briefing room when NBC correspondent Peter Alexander asked him what he had to say to Americans who “are scared right now” because of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump responded with inexplicable rage, denouncing Alexander as a “terrible reporter” for asking a “nasty” question, and then mocking the owners of NBC — telecom giant Comcast — as “Con-cast.”

It was an insane response to the simplest of simple questions, but don’t take my word for it. “These are psychiatric symptoms, not simply boorish behaviors,” tweeted John Talmadge, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “Trump is mentally ill, cognitively compromised, brain impaired. He can’t even recognize a softball tossed his way.”

But you can, Mr. Vice President. You later went up to the podium and answered Alexander’s question: “I would say, ‘Do not be afraid to be vigilant.’” You seem to be able to do the job of president that Trump is manifestly unable to do. You have won praise for your handling of the crisis from senior Democrats like Washington Gov. Jay Inslee — in stark contrast to your boss, who lashed out at Inslee and called him a “snake.” As the New York Times has also reported, some of your former critics at the state level “have changed their mind about Mr. Pence, who has given near-daily briefings and, they said, has become a reassuring presence even as Mr. Trump has intermittently tried to retake the stage.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of you or your far-right politics. I am well aware of your long history of challenging the science on everything from climate change to evolution to cancer. But, this time round, you recognize the scale of the problem, the scope of the crisis, the severity of the threat posed by Covid-19.

The president, bizarrely, inexcusably, outrageously, does not. He is off in his own demented, fact-free, navel-gazing, alternative universe. Again, don’t take my word for it. Listen to Bandy X. Lee, clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. Trump “dangerously lacks mental capacity,” she told me, “which he exhibits through his inability to take in information and advice, to process critical information, or to consider consequences before making impulsive, unstable, and irrational decisions that are not based in reality but fight reality.” At press conferences, she added, he pushes “delusional-level distortion and misinformation” because he is “disconnected from reality.” His leadership, she concluded, is “more harmful than if we had no president.”

This is a president who rambles, rants, and raves; who spent weeks downplaying the spread of the novel coronavirus and ignoring warnings from his own intelligence agencies; who claimed to be unaware that Americans who need tests are unable to get them; who uses press briefings not to inform the public but to regularly attack the press; who went golfing while health professionals begged for resources and equipment; who has repeatedly contradicted his own top scientists by pushing unproven drugs as a treatment for Covid-19; who tried to buy a vaccine from Germany but only for “exclusive” use in the United States; who took a break from crisis management to go on Twitter and complain about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Benghazi.

How is this behavior not utterly unhinged? How does it not justify you invoking the 25th Amendment on behalf of the American people, who are being infected by Covid-19 in rapidly increasing numbers?

Look, I get it. You’re a sycophant. You’re a coward. You’re afraid of standing up to a vicious boss and his cultish supporters. But ask yourself this: Are you more afraid of Trump and his MAGA base, or for your own life and the lives of those you love and cherish? This past weekend, you and your wife had to get tested for Covid-19. It is only a matter of time until someone you care about tests positive or — God forbid — dies from the disease. In years to come, do you really want to look back on this historic moment and regret not having stepped in, with the clear authority granted to you under the Constitution, to do a better, saner, more stable job of fighting the pandemic than the current occupant of the Oval Office?

Perhaps you think the supermajority required in both chambers of Congress for you to stay in office if the president resists his removal and formally declares in writing “that no inability exists,” makes it impossible for you to successfully invoke the 25th Amendment.

But events are moving fast. Nothing is predictable anymore. And, as Adam Gustafson pointed out in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 2008, under the Section 4 process, “the Acting President can enjoy at least four days of presidential power — four days to advance his own policy goals, to prove himself a capable executive, and to acclimate Congress and the public to his presence in the Oval Office. By the time Congress is allowed to vote, the deck may already be stacked against the President.”

It is also worth noting that in 2016, when Trump picked you as his running mate, the New York Times reported that it was because of your “unimpeachable conservative credentials, warm relationships in Washington and a vast reservoir of good will with the Christian right.” If anyone can persuade Republicans in Congress that Trump has to go, that he is mentally unable to perform his presidential duties during this historic crisis, it’s you.

Remember: The framers of the 25th Amendment deliberately decided against providing a definition of the “unable to discharge” phrase. However, the late Birch Bayh, the senator from your state of Indiana who sponsored the 25th Amendment, made it clear that it related to mental, as well as physical, inability. “It is conceivable,” Bayh said, “that a President might be able to walk, for example, and thus, by the definition of some people, might be physically able, but at the same time he might not possess the mental capacity to make a decision and perform the powers and duties of his office.”

Do you really believe that Trump has the “mental capacity” to protect millions of Americans from this pandemic? A president who tried to prevent dozens of infected Americans on a cruise ship from returning to the United States because, he admitted, “I like the numbers being where they are”?

Remember also: This is a decision for you to make, based on your own insights and experiences, with or without the assistance of medical professionals. “What the framers of the 25th Amendment had in mind was a judgment call by the vice president and by the cabinet,” John D. Feerick, Fordham School of Law’s former dean, told me. Feerick, who assisted in the drafting of the amendment in 1965, pointed out that the framers picked the vice president and “principal officers of the executive departments” for this task because, as a result of their proximity to the president, they would have the greatest insight into the president’s mental health and stability. As high-level political appointees of the president, they would also have the greatest credibility in the eyes of Congress and the public, and could not be automatically dismissed as political opponents or partisans.

You must act now. Extreme times call for extreme measures. Yes, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment has never before been invoked by a vice president. But, then again, as you yourself probably realized long ago, no vice president has ever before had to deal with a president like Trump.

Last October, after your boss glibly suggested he might “destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, suggested that the president should be detained and examined. “Am I the only psychologist who finds this claim and this threat truly alarming? Wouldn’t these normally trigger a mental health hold? Right and Left must set aside politics and agree that there is a serious problem here,” Gilbert tweeted.

A “serious problem” is an understatement. Millions of American lives are at stake. Yet the American president is out of control, out of touch with reality. You know it. I know it. Anyone with eyes and ears knows it.

Sincerely,
Mehdi Hasan

The post Dear Vice President Mike Pence: Please Use the 25th Amendment to Remove Trump and Save Us From the Coronavirus appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. government is run by sociopaths.

How else to explain the Trump administration’s callous disregard for the lives of ordinary Iranians in the midst of this global coronavirus crisis? How else to make sense of U.S. officials doubling down in their support for crippling economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, despite the sheer scale of the suffering?

The spread of Covid-19 has been nothing less than a catastrophe for the people of Iran. On Monday, Iranian officials reported another 129 fatalities, “the largest one-day rise in deaths since it began battling the Middle East’s worst outbreak.” Dozens of Iranian government officials, parliamentarians, and religious leaders have lost their lives to the disease. The death toll now stands at 988, and the total number of cases has crossed 16,000 — roughly, nine out of every 10 cases in the Middle East! Globally, only China and South Korea have had more confirmed cases and yet, as the AP notes, the real number in Iran “may be even higher.”

To be clear: A lot of the responsibility for the death and suffering in Iran has to lie with the Iranian government, which has been grotesquely incompetent and deeply dishonest. “The official response was glaring denial of the magnitude of the crisis,” wrote Iranian doctors (and exiles) Kamiar and Arash Alaei in the New York Times earlier this month. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they noted, even “accused the country’s enemies of exaggerating the threat of the coronavirus.”

Nevertheless, U.S. sanctions on Iran, which have had a devastating impact on the economy, have made things much worse. The government has been forced to request an emergency $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has written to several world leaders to tell them how his country’s fight against the coronavirus has been “severely hampered by US sanctions.” His foreign minister Javad Zarif accused the U.S. government of “medical terrorism.”

The Trump administration — in the form of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin — continues to insist that sanctions do not prevent humanitarian aid. This is, technically, correct. Yet as Human Rights Watch pointed out in October 2019, months before the novel coronavirus outbreak in Iran, “while the US government has built exemptions for humanitarian imports into its sanctions regime … in practice these exemptions have failed to offset the strong reluctance of US and European companies and banks to risk incurring sanctions and legal action by exporting or financing exempted humanitarian goods.” The result, concluded the human rights group, “has been to deny Iranians access to essential medicines and to impair their right to health.”

Imagine being both so cruel and so unreasonable that you make George W. Bush and Dick Cheney look compassionate and reasonable in comparison.

In fact, as the Atlantic Council noted in May 2019, “despite the fact that sanctions exempted humanitarian goods, the US Treasury Department had previously prosecuted medical companies for selling small amounts of medical supplies to Iran, which in turn, has had a deterring effect on other companies doing business with Tehran.”

So it is any surprise, then, that Iranian suppliers of respiratory masks, surgical gowns, and ventilators are now saying they are out of stock? Or that the Iranian government is struggling to import the raw materials that it needs to manufacture antiviral drugs?

In late February, the Trump administration made a minor adjustment to the sanctions regime and allowed some humanitarian aid to arrive in Iran in coordination with the Swiss government. Sanctions relief, however, needs to go much further and much faster. As Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the few progressive foreign policy voices on Capitol Hill, tweeted last week: “We need to suspend these sanctions before more lives are lost.”

She’s right. And there is precedent here: When a massive earthquake killed 26,000 people in the city of Bam, in southeastern Iran, in December 2003, the Bush administration allowed for a temporary suspension of sanctions. As journalist Negar Mortazavi has recounted, “multiple U.S. military planes landed in Iran for the first time since the 1979 revolution” and “transferred over 150,000 pounds of medical supplies and more than 200 civilian personnel from Boston, Los Angeles, and Fairfax County in Virginia, to assist Iran in search and rescue, emergency surgery, and disaster response coordination.”

Yet the Trump administration has refused to budge. Imagine being both so cruel and so unreasonable that you make George W. Bush and Dick Cheney look compassionate and reasonable in comparison.

On Monday, the Chinese and Russian governments demanded the U.S. suspend sanctions on Iran as a result of the pandemic. The Chinese foreign ministry called on the U.S. to “immediately lift unilateral” sanctions on the Islamic Republic, which it described as undermining the “delivery of humanitarian aid by the UN and other organizations.” Referring to “illegal” and “anti-human” U.S. sanctions, the Russian government accused Washington of “purposefully” cutting off millions of Iranian citizens “from the possibility of purchasing necessary medical supplies.”

Yet, again, the Trump administration has refused to budge. Imagine being both so cruel and so out of step with the international community that the Chinese and Russian governments have the moral high ground over you.

The unilateral reimposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2018 was a clear violation of international law, according to the International Court of Justice. It was not mandated by the U.N. Security Council, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the effect of sanctions on human rights has since slammed the Trump administration’s “illegal and immoral forms of coercion,” calling it an “economic attack” on the Iranian people.

Of course, an attack on the Islamic Republic is what the hawks in Washington have always craved. On Sunday, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton was once again agitating for a new war with Iran. Meanwhile, Bolton’s former colleagues over at the neoconservative pressure group United Against Nuclear Iran, as Eli Clifton revealed, have been “urging major pharmaceutical companies to ‘end their Iran business,’ focusing on companies with special licenses — most often under a broadly defined ‘humanitarian exemption’ — to conduct trade with Iran.”

There is only one word to describe such behavior: sociopathic. Millions of Iranians, remember, could lose their lives from the virus.

But we have been here before. Brutal U.S. sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children. Multiple senior U.N. humanitarian officials quit in protest of the policy, with one of them denouncing it as “genocide.”

And the U.S. government’s response? “We think the price is worth it,” declared then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

As ordinary Americans line up at grocery stores and pharmacies across the United States to stock up on prescription medications, do they have any clue that their Iranian counterparts are being denied medicines and basic goods because of U.S. government policy? And as the number of deaths in Iran from Covid-19 continues to soar, exacerbated by a horrific U.S. economic embargo, do ordinary Americans think the price is worth it?

The post The Coronavirus Is Killing Iranians. So Are Trump’s Brutal Sanctions. appeared first on The Intercept.

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Bravo, Donald Trump.

I never imagined I would ever write these three words. It pains me, in fact, to see them on the page.

But credit where credit is due. Over the weekend, at the Sheraton hotel in Doha, Qatar, the Trump administration was able to achieve in its first term what the Bush and Obama administrations were either unable or unwilling to do over two terms each: Sign a peace deal with the Taliban.

Officially entitled “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” this three-part, four-page document guarantees a timeline of 14 months for the “complete withdrawal” of all U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan; a Taliban pledge that “Afghan soil will not be used against the security of the United States and its allies”; the launch of intra-Afghan negotiations by March 10; and a “permanent and comprehensive” ceasefire.

No peace deal is perfect, and the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” is no exception to that rule. But it is the beginning of a much-delayed diplomatic process to bring an end to America’s longest — and most unpopular — war. Trump tried and failed to do it in 2019. In 2020, he may have succeeded.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no doubt that if Barack Obama had signed such a deal with the Taliban, he would have been pilloried by the same Republican politicians and Fox News pundits now cheering Trump’s agreement. Obama, for example, was scorned and slammed for releasing five Taliban detainees in exchange for a captured U.S. soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, in 2014; Trump, on the other hand, has agreed to the release of an astonishing 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

I am also aware that Trump has never been consistent on Afghanistan, nor does he give a damn about ordinary Afghans. He has cut U.S. aid to the country; bragged about dropping the “mother of all bombs” on it; pardoned two U.S. army officers accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan; and casually and repeatedly discussed killing millions of Afghans, including in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. Last year, according to the U.N., there were more than 10,000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, with around a quarter of them killed or wounded by the U.S. military and its allies. Their blood is on Trump’s hands — in the same way that the blood of thousands of Afghan civilians killed and injured between January 2009 and January 2017 is on Obama’s.

For far too long, Iraq was the “bad war” and Afghanistan the “good war.” Yet there was nothing “good” about the decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan. None of the 19 hijackers were Afghans. The 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany, not Kabul or Kandahar. Yes, there were Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan but the Taliban, lest we forget, had agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country, on the condition that the United States provided some evidence of his guilt. The Bush administration refused.

Nevertheless, in September 2001, there was massive support across the political spectrum for attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan. The vast majority of Americans backed Bush’s decision to invade and believed it would end in victory. So did the New York Times editorial board. The only member of Congress to oppose the conflict was the indomitable Rep. Barbara Lee, who warned of the danger of embarking “on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”

Nearly two decades later, it is difficult to overstate what a catastrophic disaster this particular “open-ended war” has been — both for the American and Afghan peoples. Where to begin? Some 2,400 American soldiers killed and more than 20,000 wounded. More than 58,000 Afghan security forces killed. More than 100,000 Afghan civilian casualties. More than half the population below the poverty line. More than $2 trillion spent. A quadrupling in opium production. Endemic corruption. War crimes. The cover-up of child sexual abuse. The rise of ISIS in Afghanistan. The list goes on.

Today, the Taliban control or contest nearly half the country’s districts which, according to data from the Pentagon, is “more territory … than at any point since 2001.” Meanwhile, five months after the Afghan presidential election, the official winner Ashraf Ghani is still trying to form a government while his main rival Abdullah Abdullah has declared himself the victor, crying “fraud” and “treason” in the process.

It wasn’t only the Iraq invasion that was defined by official deceit and dishonesty. As a damning investigation by the Washington Post, based on leaked government documents, revealed in December 2019, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Those who now line up to criticize or condemn Trump for trying to end this “unwinnable” war have yet to grapple with the shocking revelations contained in these “Afghanistan Papers.” Trump, of course, isn’t interested in peace — or the truth. The U.S. president craves a photo op with Taliban leaders and knows that he also needs a diplomatic win. Above all else, he hopes to use a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to bolster his prospects for reelection in November.

But guess what? Sometimes bad people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Yes, Trump is an awful president and an even more awful person. But just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump could do this historic deal with the Taliban.

As political scientist Barnett Rubin, who has advised both the U.S. State Department and the United Nations on Afghanistan, told me, “no rational, conventional, predictable U.S. politician would take the political risks needed to negotiate seriously with the Taliban.”

Will a deal between the two sides hold? Can either Trump or the Taliban be trusted to stick to the terms of the agreement? Does it give away too much to the insurgents, in return for too little? Maybe. The bigger question, according to International Crisis Group President Robert Malley, is: What’s the alternative?

“The fact that the Taliban got so much out of the deal is not, primarily, a result of anything the Trump administration did,” Malley told me. “It is because, after two decades, the U.S. has failed to win an unwinnable war.”

For Malley, who was a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, “it would have been far preferable if a deal had been reached years ago, when the Taliban were in a weaker position” but it would be “far worse if a deal were not reached now, based on the illusory belief that, somehow, the Taliban will be in a weaker position tomorrow.”

As with Iran and the nuclear agreement, though, there are plenty of hawks in Washington, D.C., who still want to hold out for a better deal in Afghanistan.

They’re deluded.

For a deal to work, it requires agreement on all sides. “A ‘better deal’ that one side rejects is not a deal at all, but a dream of a better world,” said Rubin. “We all have such dreams, but eventually we have to wake up.”

Unless, he added, “we are dead.”

The post On Afghanistan, Three Words I Never Thought I’d Write: Bravo, Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

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You would have to go back to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to find another example of where our political and media elites were so out of step with reality; so off in their predictions and prognostications; so keen to peddle myths and misinformation. (On a side note, whenever we mention Iraq, it’s always worth recalling how Sanders opposed that disastrous conflict, whereas his rivals Michael Bloomberg and Joe Biden both supported it.)

Let’s consider the nonsense that has passed for “reporting,” “commentary,” and “analysis” on Sanders over the past year or so.

He isn’t electable. The 78-year-old independent senator from Vermont, goes the argument, is too old and too kooky to win — and also, Americans won’t vote for a socialist. Yet in the wake of his blowout victory in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, Sanders has won the popular vote in every single one of the first three states. You might think the concept of electability should be connected somehow to, y’know, actually winning elections (hello Joe Biden!).

But those are primaries. How about the general election? Well, at least according to the latest national CBS/YouGov head-to-head polling, Sanders beats Donald Trump by a (slightly) bigger margin than any of his Democratic rivals.

Forget national polls. What about the battleground states in the Rust Belt? According to the latest UW–Madison Elections Research Center survey, Sanders has a bigger lead over Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania than all of his Democratic rivals, and the same 2-point lead over Trump in Wisconsin as Biden and Elizabeth Warren. (By the way, does anyone with a brain really believe that Bloomberg, an elite billionaire from New York, has a better chance of winning the Rust Belt than Sanders, a working-class socialist from Vermont?) 

He has a ceiling on his support. Sanders, said the critics, wouldn’t be able to reach out beyond the left, beyond young voters, beyond his base. In Nevada, however, Sanders won a plurality of self-identified “moderate” or “conservative” Democrats. In fact, as the Washington Post’s Matt Viser tweeted: “The Sanders win was emphatic: he prevailed among those with college degrees and those without; in union, and nonunion households; in every age group except over 65… and even narrowly carried moderates and conservatives.”

Sanders’s critics have long ignored the reality that the senator from Vermont is popular with grassroots Democrats of all backgrounds. Not only is he the most popular member of the Senate, but he also has the highest net favorables of any presidential candidate with Democratic voters. He also happens to be the candidate who the biggest proportion of Democrats “expect” to prevail against Trump. As Peter Beinart noted in The Atlantic last week, “Across the ideological spectrum, ordinary Democrats like Bernie Sanders.”

Some on the right of the party have tried to argue that Sanders has been benefiting from his “moderate” opponents splitting the vote between them; they have pointed to the fact that Iowa gave 54 percent of its votes to Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Biden combined, versus 44 percent to Sanders and Warren, while New Hampshire gave 53 percent to the three moderates, versus 35 percent to the two progressives. Yet in Nevada, Sanders alone won more votes than Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Biden combined. And, in head-to-head matchups, Sanders beats each and every one of his Democratic rivals — including Bloomberg by 15 points!

He has a problem with people of color. The longstanding argument that Sanders struggles with black and Latino voters, that his supporters tend to be white, male “Bernie Bros,” is perhaps the most pernicious and dishonest anti-Sanders argument of them all. After three contests, it is clear that the Jewish senator from Vermont is now heading a multiracial, multifaith coalition of both Democrats and independents. In Nevada, this past weekend, he is estimated to have won a whopping 70 percent of the Latino vote.

Meanwhile, among black voters nationally, Sanders is now in a virtual dead heat with Biden who, we were told, had a “lock” on this particular minority community. Is it any wonder, then, that in South Carolina, often described as Biden’s “firewall” state because black voters make up at least 60 percent of the Democratic electorate, Sanders has been able to slash the former vice president’s lead from 29 points last month to just 5 points last week? (South Carolina now looks more like the border wall than a firewall.)

His policies are extreme and unpopular. Sanders, goes the argument, is a socialist who backs radical policies too far to the left of not just the electorate as a whole, but even mainstream and moderate Democratic voters. Yet in Iowa and New Hampshire, as I pointed out earlier, a clear majority of caucus-goers and primary voters backed Medicare for All over the current private insurance system. In Nevada, too, 6 in 10 Democrats said they supported a Sanders-style single-payer health care system.

At a national level, a (narrower) majority of Americans support Medicare for All, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, then, it is Sanders, and not Biden or Bloomberg, who is the real centrist candidate — in terms of pushing policies popular with most Americans.

So, will Bernie Sanders secure the Democratic presidential nomination at this summer’s Democratic National Convention? Probably. Will he defeat Trump in November? No idea.

The point is, however, that he can win. He has as much chance as any other candidate — if not a better chance. Anyone telling you otherwise is a liar or a fool — or both.

Correction: February 25, 2020
A previous version of this article misstated that, as was reported by other outlets, Sanders is the first candidate to have won the popular vote in the first three states of the primary. He is not.

The post Finally, Can We All Agree? Everything We Were Told About Bernie Sanders Was Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.

The 2016 Republican presidential primaries were a living nightmare for Muslim Americans. From start to finish, GOP candidates fell over one another to fan the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobic hysteria. We all recall, of course, Donald J. Trump calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” But do you also remember Trump saying that he would “strongly consider” closing mosques and setting up a database for all Muslims in the United States? How about Sen. Ted Cruz’s pledge to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods,” or Sen. Marco Rubio’s plan to shut down Muslim cafes and diners? “If I have to monitor a mosque, I’ll monitor a mosque,” proclaimed Sen. Lindsey Graham.

In 2016, Republican presidential candidates were openly fantasizing about surveilling and spying on Muslims. Yet just a few years earlier, in the nation’s biggest city, a Republican mayor had succeeded in going beyond mere rhetoric: Michael Bloomberg oversaw the mass warrantless, suspicionless surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers, as the New York Police Department “mapped” where they prayed, ate, studied, and worked.

Today, the billionaire media mogul is polling third in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and has secured endorsements from dozens of high-profile Democratic mayors and members of Congress.

I cannot help but ask: Have these elected Democrats lost their minds? Have Democratic voters in, say, Florida, where Bloomberg is now leading in the polls, taken leave of their senses?

In recent weeks, much has been made of Bloomberg’s support for racist and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices, which targeted and terrorized African American New Yorkers. Much less has been made of his support for racist and unconstitutional surveillance practices, which targeted and terrorized Muslim New Yorkers. Why is that? How to explain the shameful silence? Could it be because Islamophobia, as I have pointed out before, still isn’t taken seriously by the mainstream media, as well as many liberals and Democrats? Or is it maybe because billionaire Bloomberg has paid prominent liberal groups to turn a blind eye to his Islamophobic record?

After all, that record is pretty indisputable. Much of the damning evidence against Bloomberg and the NYPD was amassed and documented by the Associated Press in a wide-ranging, Pulitzer Prize-winning, and devastating series of articles published in 2011.

During Bloomberg’s three-term tenure as mayor of New York, the NYPD worked with the CIA to deploy teams of undercover agents, known as “rakers,” into Muslim neighborhoods to gather information. “They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs,” reported the AP. “Police have also used informants, known as ‘mosque crawlers,’ to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.” The AP also noted that on one occasion officials “even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.”

The NYPD, added the New York Times, “eavesdropped on thousands of conversations between Muslims in restaurants and stores in New York City and New Jersey and on Long Island.” Paid informants were “under orders to ‘bait’ Muslims into saying inflammatory things.”

In 2015, a federal court ruling compared the ethnic profiling and covert surveillance of Muslim communities living in Bloomberg’s New York to the discrimination faced by “Jewish Americans during the Red Scare, African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II.”

As with stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg defended surveillance as a vital crimefighting measure. “We have to keep this country safe,” he declared in 2012 — despite the fact that the surveillance of Muslims in New York produced “not one actionable piece of intelligence,” as even NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton later admitted.

Yet on stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg has since apologized, telling a black church last November, “I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong.” Last week, he apologized again to African American communities, saying that he had failed to “understand then the unintended pain it was causing to young black and brown families and their kids.” Whether we accept or even believe Bloomberg’s half-hearted and belated apology for stop-and-frisk, at least he felt the need to offer one.

But what about his warrantless surveillance of Muslims? What of the pain caused to young Muslim families and their kids? There has been no apology, no regret, no contrition whatsoever from the former mayor turned presidential candidate for his role in what has been described by civil rights activists as “one of the most chilling campaigns against religious liberty in modern American history.”

Nor does Bloomberg’s wider record on Muslims and Islam inspire much confidence. Yes, he defended the construction of a controversial Muslim community center in lower Manhattan; yes, he has criticized Trump’s Muslim ban. But the former Republican mayor has also referred to the “crazy Islamic world” while heaping praise on the Chinese dictatorship, perhaps the most Islamophobic government on earth right now. There are multiple tweets from Bloomberg praising the Chinese Communists for their record on climate change; zero tweets condemning their mass detention of the Uighur Muslims.

But back to surveillance: In recent days, with the emergence of audio recordings of Bloomberg making racist remarks and the renewed debate over stop-and-frisk, a number of public figures and activists have declared that they cannot bring themselves to vote for Bloomberg if he is the Democratic candidate against Trump. The Muslim American angle is important to consider here: On Sunday, Asad Dandia, a young Islamic studies graduate from Brooklyn who was a victim of the NYPD surveillance program, tweeted about the “enormous mental and emotional stress” that it caused to him and his family and called Bloomberg a “monster.”

Bloomberg terrorized me and my people. His surveillance brought enormous mental and emotional stress to my parents, who *still* ask me to vet any new friends.

Like my brother Raf, I will never shame folks for refusing to vote for that monster. I may even join them in abstaining. https://t.co/itRXU4vUF8

— Asad ??? ?? (@AsadFromNYC) February 16, 2020

But isn’t Trump worse than Bloomberg? The greater evil? Of course he is. It’s worth noting, however, that the former Republican mayor’s surveillance of Muslims in New York earned the praise and admiration of one particular Republican presidential candidate during the 2016 GOP primaries.

“You’re going to have to watch and study the mosques, because a lot of talk is going on at the mosques,” candidate Trump told MSNBC. “And from what I heard, in the old days … we had great surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City.”

To be clear: Bloomberg spied on Muslim Americans. Trump praised him for it. And now, some Democrats want Bloomberg to defeat and replace Trump in November.

So I ask again: Have they lost their minds?

The post Bloomberg Apologized for Stop-and-Frisk. Why Won’t He Say Sorry to Muslims for Spying on Them? appeared first on The Intercept.

Goodbye, Joe Biden.

Bernie Sanders is now the undisputed frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Last week, in the Iowa caucuses, Sanders won the popular vote by a clear margin in both the first and second rounds. 

On Monday, he took the lead in a national Quinnipiac University poll for the first time in the 2020 Democratic race. 

And yesterday, in New Hampshire, Sanders won with a narrow victory over former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Biden came in fifth.

What a difference a year makes. When he launched his second presidential campaign, in February 2019, the independent senator from Vermont was mocked and written off by much of the pundit class. The Washington Post’s Henry Olsen called him a “one-hit wonder,” adding: “After a few concerts that attract ever more ‘selective’ audiences, he will likely drop out and retire, his influence consigned to history.” (On Monday night, a whopping 7,500 people turned out for a Sanders rally headlined by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as rock band The Strokes, in Durham, New Hampshire.)

On Twitter, Olsen’s fellow Post columnist Jennifer Rubin described Sanders as “yesterday’s news” and suggested he would face “stiff competition for youth vote” from Beto O’Rourke. (O’Rourke quit the race in November, while Sanders won almost half of 17- to 29-year-olds in Iowa and more young voters in New Hampshire than “all of the other candidates combined.”)

Yet another Post columnist, David Von Drehle, wrote how Sanders would find “that his moment is gone, his agenda absorbed by more plausible candidates, his future behind him.”

Then there was MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who claimed Sen. Elizabeth Warren would “blow out Bernie pretty early on. Bernie will lose his votes to her.” (Warren, for the record, came third in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire.)

MSNBC political contributor Jason Johnson went even further: “I see Bernie Sanders launching his campaign and by August, realizing he won’t be in the top five in Iowa, and dropping out.”

Do they never learn? For the second presidential cycle in a row, the political pundits have had to eat crow. During the 2016 race, former Obama strategist David Axelrod dismissed Sanders as the candidate with whom Democratic voters would only “flirt” or have a “fling” with. The Vermont senator went on to win 13 million votes and 23 states.

Four years later, Sanders has come from behind to dominate the first two contests of the 2020 Democratic race. In Iowa, he declared victory while calling for a partial recanvass of the chaotic and messy results. Remember: Over the past four decades, no candidate has won in both Iowa and New Hampshire and then failed to win the nomination.

Sanders beat Buttigieg by only a narrow margin in New Hampshire — especially compared to his 22-point victory over Hillary Clinton in the Granite State in 2016. Yet a win is a win, especially in the crowded 2020 field, and the only democratic socialist in this race now has what the New York Times has rightly called “that most prized and nebulous of assets: momentum.” Up next are the Nevada caucuses on February 22, where only a single percentage point separates Biden from Sanders. In South Carolina, which goes to the polls on February 29 and where Biden once led by a whopping 31 points, Sanders has narrowed the former vice president’s lead to 8 points in the latest Zogby Analytics poll. 

Biden, though, is in freefall: an embarrassing fourth in Iowa, a humiliating fifth in New Hampshire. Back in December, I argued on CNN that mainstream media organizations were ignoring the possibility that Sanders could win three of the first four states. In fact, he could now end up winning all four of them. 

No wonder Democratic Party elites are panicking. We hear the same tired arguments about Sanders lacking “electability.” These arguments conveniently ignore the fact that Sanders beats Trump in head-to-head polling; that the Vermont senator is the most popular member of the Senate; and that this self-proclaimed socialist has both the highest “net favorability rating” among Democratic voters as well as the most enthusiastic base. 

Plus, the only way to test “electability” is through actual elections, and so far Sanders is two for two. 

Iowa and New Hampshire, though, weren’t only victories for the senator from Vermont; they were also victories for Sanders’s signature issue, Medicare for All. Asked last week in an entrance poll how they felt about “replacing all private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone,” 57 percent of Iowa caucus-goers said they backed it, while only 38 percent were opposed. 

In New Hampshire, on Tuesday, again almost six in 10 voters said they supported a Medicare for All system over the current private insurance system, according to an early exit poll. 

Yet again, the pundits and prognosticators were wrong. “Iowa Democrats worry ‘Medicare for All’ hurts key industry,” read the headline in the Associated Press in December. “In Iowa, Single Payer ‘Medicare For All’ Loses Ground,” declared Forbes in August. “Medicare For All Isn’t That Popular — Even Among Democrats,” proclaimed FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver a month earlier.

“We’ve heard a lot about how Bernie Sanders is so ‘wildly out-of-touch’ with the Democratic electorate,” observed CNN contributor Kirsten Powers on Tuesday night. “Well, that’s not actually true.”

The message from Iowa and New Hampshire is clear. It was a big, big mistake to write off both Bernie Sanders and his No. 1 policy proposal. So going forward, will his critics make that same mistake again?

The post The Pundits Wrote Off Bernie’s Candidacy. In Iowa and New Hampshire, He Proved Them Wrong. appeared first on The Intercept.