“Love them both.” The slogan started out as a marketing tactic.

Two decades after Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion strategists were frustrated. They were still “teaching” people “that this was a baby and telling how abortion killed the baby,” recalled Jack Willke, head of the National Right to Life Committee, 20 years later. But women had grown fond of determining their reproductive fates, and the dead fetus photos and tiny feet lapel pins were not convincing them that criminalizing abortion was a good idea.

How to counter “the new argument of women’s rights?” NRLC leaders asked themselves. “We had to convince the public that we were compassionate to women,” said Willke. “Accordingly, we test-marketed variations of this theme,” and “Love them both” was born. 

This month it grew plainer than ever that the slogan is still no more than slick, and empty, marketing.

What we’ve seen in the states, Congress, and the courts is that those who are stingiest in supporting the health and well-being of mothers and children also would force mothers to have and support children they cannot afford or do not want. The consequences range from hunger to death.

Recently, the governors of 15 states opted out of a new federal program that will provide grocery money to food-insecure families with children over the summer, when free school lunches aren’t available. The states are Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming.

Some of these states are not opposed in principle but are administratively unequipped, at least for now. Alaska is backlogged with food stamp applications but has a summer meals program in place and is open to taking the federal money next year. Vermont also has a summer lunch program and is “very committed” to launching the federal benefit in 2025 when it gets a user-friendly system up and running, according to a deputy commissioner.

Others offer no excuse. Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, for instance, complained that kids are already too fat. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, another Republican, stated simply: “I don’t believe in welfare.”

Of the 15 states, seven ban abortion entirely: Alabama, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas. South Carolina’s ban starts at six weeks, Nebraska’s at 12, with limited exceptions. Bans enacted in four more states are held up in court. Among the 15, abortion is legal only in Alaska and Vermont. In fact, Vermont passed the first constitutional amendment protecting reproductive autonomy.

For the abortion-ban states, care for life apparently ends at 40 weeks. Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the country, followed closely by Louisiana; more than a quarter of the kids in both states are poor. (The two also hold the top spots for poverty among the elderly.) West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee — all no-abortion states — rank in the top 10 for child poverty.

Five of the states banning abortion lead in the percentage of residents without health insurance. Determined to deny food to poor families, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming are also holding back on federally funded health care; they are among the 10 states that have not extended Medicaid eligibility. The top 10 states for maternal mortality all ban abortion.

In Congress, the same pattern applies. Bills intended to support mothers and children are sponsored by Democrats. If they come to the floor, Republicans vote against them.

This summer, Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C., introduced the Advancing Maternal Health Equity Under Medicaid Act, with 12 Democratic co-sponsors. Of the 99 sponsors of the Maternal Health for Veterans Act, two were Republicans. When the House voted in 2022 on the Right to Contraception Act, it got 220 yeas from Democrats and 8 from Republicans; 195 Rs voted nay.

Only Democrats sponsored the Child Labor Exploitation Accountability Act. At the same time, Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., introduced the Orwellian-titled Teenagers Earning Everyday Necessary Skills Act, to expand working hours for 14- to 16-year-olds. One of numerous bills in Congress and many more in state legislatures intended to loosen child labor laws, this proposal was co-sponsored by Republican Reps. Troy Nehls of Texas, Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Tracey Mann of Kansas — fervent pro-lifers all.

(To their credit, some members of the GOP got behind a resolution encouraging the prevention of sunburn in minors.)

Meanwhile, the purpose of H.R. 1955, introduced in 2023 and sponsored by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and four other Republicans, is to limit funding to Department of Health and Human Services’ Maternal and Child Health agency in fiscal year 2024. In 2019, Biggs introduced the Abortion Is Not Health Care bill.

In 2022, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act — “to eliminate discrimination and promote women’s health and economic security” by requiring workplace accommodations for employees “limited by pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” — passed overwhelmingly in the House. The holdouts were all Republicans.

The next session, House Republicans sponsored a bill prohibiting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act “from applying to abortion or the coverage of abortion or abortion-related services.” It was called the Love Them Both Act.

But perhaps the greatest displays of Republican love this month were witnessed in Texas and Idaho. There, in lawsuits involving the state government, federal judges ruled that emergency room doctors may refuse to terminate a pregnancy, in compliance with state law and in violation of a federal law requiring ERs to stabilize all patients who walk through their doors.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Idaho case — a nod, observers believe, in Idaho’s favor. In other words, the highest court in the land may soon rule that it is constitutional to let a woman die rather than give her an abortion.

Love them both, mother and child? No. “Pro-life” loves neither.

The post Republicans Claim to Love Both Mothers and Children. Their Policies Prove They Love Neither. appeared first on The Intercept.

Dahdouh was thrown to the ground. “I lost balance to the point of faintly losing consciousness until I regained my strength,” he told The Intercept. “I tried to get up in any way because I was sure that another missile would target us — from our experience that’s what usually happens.” Dahdouh realized he was bleeding profusely from the arm and that if he didn’t get medical attention, he would die. He had also temporarily lost much of his hearing from the blast. He looked over and saw the three Civil Defense workers who had been accompanying the two journalists had been killed.

“In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up.”

Then, he saw Abu Daqqa lying on the ground some distance away. “He was trying to get up and it seemed like he was screaming,” Dahdouh said. “In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up. I decided to take advantage of the remaining glimmer of hope, which was to try to go towards the ambulance.”

Dahdouh somehow managed to make his way across the rubble to an ambulance hundreds of meters away and was evacuated to a nearby hospital. But Abu Daqqa, wounded in the lower part of his body, could not walk to the ambulance and was left lying on the ground. Hours went by, but emergency workers were unable to reach him without approval from the Israeli military. As his life slipped away, Al Jazeera posted a live counter on its broadcast showing the number of hours and minutes since Abu Daqqa had been wounded. When emergency crews were finally able to reach Abu Daqqa over five hours later, he was dead.

Over the course of those five hours, humanitarian organizations and fellow journalists repeatedly pressed the Israeli military to facilitate the evacuation of Abu Daqqa, according to people involved in the efforts as well as chat logs obtained by The Intercept from multiple journalists. The in-depth timeline of the hours before Abu Daqqa’s death shows that Israeli forces did not allow safe passage for emergency crews for hours, though they were aware a journalist was urgently in need of help.  

All told, Abu Daqqa had lain wounded and bleeding just two kilometers away from the nearest hospital, yet no one could reach him for well over five hours while his colleagues and much of the world watched. The Israeli military were well aware that an Al Jazeera journalist was lying helpless, The Intercept’s reporting shows, yet it did not allow emergency teams to safely pass for nearly four hours and did not send a bulldozer for over an hour after that. (The Israeli military did not respond to questions from The Intercept.)

Much of the evidence points toward a targeted Israeli strike on the Al Jazeera journalists. “In this area there was no one but us. Therefore there was no room for error by the Israeli army considering that drones, large and small, were in the sky in the area,” Dahdouh said. “They knew everything we were doing the whole time, and we were targeted as we were returning — of this there is no doubt.”

Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, and Abu Daqqa, a veteran cameraperson for the network, arrived at the Farhana school at around noon that day to cover the aftermath of an Israeli bombardment in the area, Dahdouh told The Intercept. Wearing helmets and flak jackets with the word “press” emblazoned on them, they made their way toward the school in an ambulance with a crew of uniformed Palestinian Civil Defense workers — a government branch responsible for emergency services and rescue — who had coordinated with and received approval from the Israeli military through the Red Cross to be in the area, according to Dahdouh.

Repeated Israeli airstrikes had left many of the roads impassable with rubble blocking the streets. Dahdouh said that on their way to the school, the ambulance had to stop at least three or four times over a distance of just 600 to 800 meters for the crew to clear rubble to allow for it to pass. Eventually, the Al Jazeera journalists and Civil Defense workers covered the final distance to the school on foot with the ambulance drivers agreeing to wait for the team up the street.

Dahdouh and Abu Daqqa spent around two and a half hours filming in the school and surrounding area, the buzz of Israeli drones filling the sky overhead the entire time. At around 2:30 p.m., they started to make their way back to the ambulance when an Israeli airstrike hit. 

Dahdouh put pressure on his wounds and stumbled to the ambulance, a distance of some 800 to 1,000 meters. Upon reaching the ambulance, he immediately told the emergency workers to go in and rescue Abu Daqqa. They insisted on first evacuating Dahdouh to a hospital and said they would send another ambulance to retrieve Abu Daqqa. Videos of Dahdouh in Nasser Hospital show him wincing in pain as he is treated for his wounds and calling for Abu Daqqa to be saved. “Coordinate with the [Red] Cross,” he says repeatedly. “Let someone get him.”

The head of Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, Walid al-Omari, was doing just that. Omari told The Intercept that he first contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross at 3:35 p.m. and asked them to liaise with the Israeli military to facilitate a rescue effort for Abu Daqqa. Omari said he kept in close contact with the ICRC both locally and abroad and that they put in a “great effort” to try and coordinate with Israeli authorities.

Dahdouh said he later learned from colleagues that early on in the ordeal, when ambulances initially approached the area to reach Abu Daqqa, Israeli forces fired in their proximity, forcing them to return and wait for approval from the Israeli military to go in. He also said Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews had demanded a Red Cross vehicle accompany them so that they would not be targeted by the Israeli military.

Meanwhile, news had begun to spread about Abu Daqqa’s dire state.

Orly Halpern, a freelance reporter and producer based in Jerusalem, learned what had happened when an acquaintance sent her a link to a story at 3:08 p.m. Halpern decided to post about it on a WhatsApp group of over 140 journalists of the Foreign Press Association, or FPA, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit representing reporters from over 30 countries. According to screenshots of the WhatsApp group obtained by The Intercept, at 4:27 p.m. Halpern outlined what happened and wrote: “Samer Abu Daqqa is seriously injured and still trapped at the school. The ambulance is waiting for Israeli forces to let it evacuate him. But that has yet to happen….Walid al-Umari, the AJ bureau chief said that ICRC is trying to liaise with the IDF. But still no progress. It has been two hours since they got hit. Maybe we can all call the IDF spox and demand that he be allowed to be evacuated.”

She continued in another post three minutes later: “What matters is to save the cameraman. And the Israelis need to allow the ambulance to reach him.” Halpern tagged Ellen Krosney, the FPA’s executive secretary, and added, “would the FPA be able to contact the IDF, too?” At 4:57, Krosney responded, “I’m getting involved in this.”

Meanwhile, other journalists in the group worked to confirm Abu Daqqa’s location, and one posted a photo of a map showing the position of two schools in Khan Younis — Haifa and Farhana — while another journalist confirmed that Abu Daqqa was at Farhana.

Halpern then posted contact information for three Israeli officials at 5:17 p.m., including the press office for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, an Israeli Defense Ministry agency, as well as the contact information for three senior Israeli military spokespeople.

Explaining her reasoning for sharing the contacts, Halpern told The Intercept, “I believe there is power in numbers. Even more so when those numbers are journalists. I don’t think my voice alone would have gotten the army to do something, particularly if the Red Cross hadn’t succeeded. But I thought that if many journalists contacted the army, along with the Foreign Press Association, then the army might be more pressed to act, particularly knowing that we were aware of the situation and that we would report on it.”

At 5:27 p.m., a full three hours after Abu Daqqa was wounded in the airstrike, Krosney wrote that Israeli authorities had still not granted permission for emergency teams to reach him: “Ambulances still not cleared, but I am in touch with IDF, who know about this. And they know the fpa members are deeply upset.”

Halpern continued to urge journalists in the group to individually message Daniel Hagari or Richard Hecht — both Israeli military spokespeople whose contact information she had just shared — to pressure them to facilitate a rescue effort. “If everyone who cares about fellow journalists writes a message to Hagari or Hecht and tells him that we as journalists are following this case, then there’s a much better chance that this will be resolved before Samer dies, if that’s still possible,” Halpern wrote.

“What matters is to save the cameraman. And the Israelis need to allow the ambulance to reach him.”

In parallel, a more focused effort by a smaller group of more senior FPA members was yielding responses from the army, but no real action. At 5:31 p.m., a journalist in the smaller group had messaged an army official and was told that the IDF was aware and handling the situation. Two minutes later, he got a new message back saying that the military’s Southern Command, which oversees Gaza, had been informed, but there were problems with “passage” from the school to the hospital. This was despite the fact that it was the Israeli military that had reduced many of the streets to rubble in earlier airstrikes and maintains near-constant drone surveillance of Gaza.

The smaller group got another message at 6:22 p.m. that the military was still working on it. At 6:27 p.m., four hours after Abu Daqqa was wounded, Halpern received word from her producer in Gaza that ambulances were still unable to reach the school. Meanwhile, Omari, who had been added to the WhatsApp group shortly after the discussion began, wrote: “The road is closed. A destroyed building blocks the road, they need bulldozer to open it. They can’t reach the school.” Halpern then posted to the group that they needed to request the Israeli military to send in a bulldozer to clear the way. At 7:02 p.m., Tania Kraemer, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for Deutsche Welle and the chair of the FPA, responded: “In touch with the IDF Orly. No news yet on the above.” At 7:23 — now after five hours of bleeding — the smaller group was told that the IDF was sending a bulldozer within 10 minutes and that it would take 20 minutes to reach the location.

Meanwhile, Halpern posted an update on the larger group chat at 7:25 p.m. that the Israeli military had approved a Palestinian bulldozer to come through.

It was too late. Palestinian emergency crews had finally managed to reach the school after a Palestinian-operated bulldozer cleared a path for an ambulance only to find Abu Daqqa dead. At 7:55 p.m., Halpern posted a message in the group chat she had received from her producer in Gaza that he had been killed.

Al Jazeera reported that Abu Daqqa had been subjected to continued shelling while he tried to crawl to safety. Dahdouh and Halpern said they received reports that Abu Daqqa was found without his flak jacket, several meters from where he was wounded.

The FPA released a statement shortly afterward, saying it was “alarmed by the [Israeli] military’s silence and [called] for an immediate inquiry and explanation as to why it apparently attacked the area and why Samer could not be evacuated in time to be treated and potentially saved.”

The next day, Al Jazeera announced it was preparing a legal file to submit to the International Criminal Court, or the ICC, over what it called the “assassination” of Abu Daqqa by Israeli forces in Gaza. The brief would also encompass “recurrent attacks on the Network’s crews working and operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.” In a statement, the network said, “Following Samer’s injury, he was left to bleed to death for over 5 hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying the much-needed emergency treatment.”

Gaza is now the deadliest place for journalists on record.

Reporters Without Borders also included Abu Daqqa in a war crimes complaint the group filed with the ICC regarding the deaths of seven Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza between October 22 and December 15.

Gaza is now the deadliest place for journalists on record. The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate has documented the killing of over 100 journalists in just three months. Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel’s war on Gaza — nearly all of them Palestinian — than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year. Many of the journalists still alive in Gaza have lost multiple family members and their homes.

Dahdouh himself has become a symbol of both the suffering and resilience of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. In October, his wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp where they had sought shelter after their house was bombed. On Sunday, his eldest son, Hamza, also a journalist, was killed alongside another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, in an airstrike on their car in the western part of Khan Younis.

“Holding the killer accountable is the least that can be done so that they don’t escape punishment every time, which leads to the continuation of the targeting and attacks of Palestinian journalists without accountability and without trial,” Dahdouh said. “The targeting and destruction of offices, like Al Jazeera’s offices; the targeting of Palestinian families, such as is the case with my family; and the targeting of homes, like my home that was destroyed and where there are no houses around it in the first place, so they know they are targeting the house of the head of Al Jazeera. It is clear that this is all happening in the context of pressure and punishment of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli military. Yet, as I always say, despite all the hurt and pain, we will continue in carrying this message and fulfilling our duty and relaying information and pictures and news to our viewers, so they can be the first ones with everything that is happening in the Gaza Strip.”

The post Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death appeared first on The Intercept.

In a statement, Biden said, “Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”

Yemen’s Houthis responded to Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip by attacking and blocking commercial ships in the Red Sea destined for or originating from Israeli ports. The attacks led to the near total shutdown of Israel’s port of Eilat in recent weeks. 

With Israel being brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, for allegedly committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the Houthi blockade of Israeli trade in the Red Sea could gain a newfound global legitimacy.

The strikes in Yemen more directly involved the U.S. in Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah, which, like the Houthis, are backed by Iran. Biden justified the strikes as a “defensive action” — a nod to the issue of presidential powers — and promised more measures to secure the Red Sea. “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary,” Biden said.

Immediately following the strikes, however, bipartisan members of Congress called into question the constitutionality of the attack. “It’s great to see the bipartisan opposition to this from the progressive left and populist right,” said Aída Chávez of Just Foreign Policy. “It’s appalling that instead of acting to stop Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration chose to further damage both our global reputation and our Constitutional system by launching a new unauthorized conflict against Yemen.” 

Progressives led the way in questioning Biden’s attack, but more moderate Democrats and a clutch of Republicans quickly followed suit.

“.@POTUS is violating Article I of the Constitution by carrying out airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval,” tweeted Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. “The American people are tired of endless war.”

“The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. 

“Section 2C of the War Powers Act is clear: POTUS may only introduce the U.S. into hostilities after Congressional authorization or in a national emergency when the U.S. is under imminent attack. Reporting is not a substitute. This is a retaliatory, offensive strike.”

“This is why I called for a ceasefire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. “Violence only begets more violence. We need a ceasefire now to prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region.”

“The United States cannot risk getting entangled into another decades-long conflict without Congressional authorization. The White House must work with Congress before continuing these airstrikes in Yemen,” posted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.

“These airstrikes have NOT been authorized by Congress. The Constitution is clear: Congress has the sole authority to authorize military involvement in overseas conflicts. Every president must first come to Congress and ask for military authorization, regardless of party,” said Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Ore. 

Khanna’s tweets sparked several Republicans to weigh in, most prominently Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who said, “I totally agree with @RoKhanna. The Constitution matters, regardless of party affiliation.”

“Only Congress has the power to declare war,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. “I have to give credit to @RepRoKhanna here for sticking to his principles, as very few are willing to make this statement while their party is in the White House.”

“Ro is absolutely correct on this,” said Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Far-right Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “The President must come to Congress for permission before going to war. Biden can not solely decide to bomb Yemen.”

“Exactly. We did not declare war. Biden needs to address Congress!” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, added in response to Khanna and Lee.

“The U.S. has a solemn responsibility to protect our service members in harm’s way, and free and open laws of the sea. While I’m glad that congressional leadership was briefed, Congress alone authorizes war. I’m also concerned this strike could lead to further escalation,” posted Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif.

“.@POTUS can’t launch airstrikes in Yemen without congressional approval,” iterated Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. “This is illegal and violates Article I of the Constitution. The people do not want more of our taxpayer dollars going to endless war and the killing of civilians. Stop the bombing and do better by us.”

“The President must come to Congress before launching a strike and embroiling the US in another conflict. Article I of the Constitution demands this of both Democratic and Republican presidents,” said Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn. “Americans don’t want more of our tax dollars funding these endless wars.” 

At the same time, several members of Congress expressed strong support for the strikes, as part of a broader push by Republicans for a military confrontation with Iran. 

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said the attack was justified: “These strikes are necessary, responsive, and proportionate—not escalatory. President Biden is right to act,” he said. “The Houthi attacks imperil the global economy and increase the risk of a wider war. Minimizing the risk of a regional conflict is the utmost priority.”

“The air strikes against these Iranian proxies is long overdue. The US must respond strongly to attacks against Americans or our interests, including freedom of navigation,” said Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio. “I hope these operations shift Biden’s posture from appeasement of Iran & its terrorist puppets.”

“We must stand in full support of sending the strongest message possible to the Iran-backed Houthi militants,” posted Rep. Don Davis, D-N.C.

“Iran sowed hatred across the Middle East, and the world is now reaping endless attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis,” said Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, who showed up to Congress in an Israel Defense Forces uniform on October 13, 2023. “It’s simple: If Iran is the state sponsor of terrorism, then Houthis are the terrorists. @POTUS should re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group TODAY.”

“Iran, the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, only understands one thing: strength. Today’s show of force against Iranian proxies that threaten American vessels in the Red Sea is long overdue. The sooner this administration embraces peace through strength in foreign policy, the safer we will be,” posted Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

While Biden justified his Yemen strikes without congressional authorization, in 2020, when President Donald Trump was escalating hostilities with Iran, he was a staunch defender of the notion that Congress should be consulted before taking military action that could spark U.S. involvement in a regional war. 

“Let’s be clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us into war with Iran without Congressional approval,” Biden said on Twitter at the time. “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”

Correction: Friday, January 12, 2024
Rep. Thomas Massie represents a district in Kentucky, not a district in West Virginia.

The post Biden’s Strikes in Yemen Are Unconstitutional, Bipartisan Members of Congress Say appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2020, I ran to be a Florida delegate to the Democratic National Committee after helping co-found the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017. I had just wrapped up a stint in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and in spite of the tension created by the primary, volunteers and former staffers decided to continue to engage with the structures of the Democratic Party in order to democratize the party and push it in a more progressive direction. 

My fellow progressive delegates and I were able to reform party rules in Florida, including ending something called the “weighted vote”: two positions from each Florida county had been able to vote in elections with a vote share proportional to the number of Democrats in that county, allowing a small number of operatives and consultants to have outsized control of the party. We were finally able to change that and move to a one-person, one-vote system.

Three years later, that project has become untenable for me. I can no longer morally engage with that kind of tinkering in the service of reform. I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza — and the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.

More than 23,000 people have been killed in retaliation against Hamas’s attack on October 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. An estimated 57,000 have been injured, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead. At least 9,600 of those killed are children. The Biden administration gives occasional lip service to the need for limiting civilian casualties while continuing to greenlight billions in military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. (I’ve been outspoken in my criticism of this assault and on Tuesday was caught up in the Twitter purge of critics of Israel. My account has since been restored.)

As this mass killing continues unabated and the Biden administration circumvents congressional authority to greenlight more weapons sales to Israel, and the Democratic Party is actively kicking off his primary opponents from the ballot in several states, I’ve decided the proper thing to do is submit my resignation. I will not be part of a structure of power that seems committed to support war crimes and undermine voters’ choices. 

The destruction in Gaza is so widespread that it already qualifies as one of this century’s most destructive wars, according to the Washington Post. The bombardment has flattened buildings and civilian infrastructure and has included attacks against hospitals that are supposed to be off-limits under laws governing warfare but are nevertheless targeted by Israeli forces claiming that they serve as Hamas operation centers. These claims have been proven to be unsubstantiated, as was the case of Al-Shifa Hospital, which was raided last month. A subsequent investigation also conducted by the Washington Post found that evidence did not support Israeli claims that the hospital was a Hamas command center.

The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. The United Nations says that more than 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and that severe water shortages are creating a deadly risk for children, with the looming threat of large-scale disease outbreaks. Unlawful weapons like incendiary white phosphorus have been used indiscriminately against civilians, according to Amnesty International, which constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

One of the things I found most concerning is that Biden is willing to trade human rights for more war funding — telling Republicans in ongoing talks over funding for Ukraine and Israel that the White House is willing to gut asylum protections and aid in mass deportations in exchange for those funds.

Biden and Democrats are looking to resurrect, and in many cases expand, the worst policies of the Trump administration. Immigrant families who have been here for years, even decades, could be rounded up and deported — calling this “expedited removal” rather than mass deportation. Also on the table is a beefed-up version of Title 42, the Trump-era emergency authority enacted under the pretense of pandemic-related health concerns that speed deportations at the southern border. The “Safe Third Country” restrictions being proposed by Democrats are Trump’s asylum ban creeping up under some centrist think-tank rebranding. 

These extreme, permanent changes to the immigration system will severely harm immigrants in our country and completely demolish what little credibility this administration has when claiming to be a bulwark against Trump-era policies. To do so in service of sending more money to a country committing war crimes is completely indefensible.

I was an undocumented person. I came here with my parents on tourist visas from Argentina and overstayed them hoping for a better life. I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life to help other immigrants navigate an unforgiving and broken process meant to keep them in the shadows while they labor away with no prospects for a proper retirement or social benefits. I can’t rationalize an effort to fund wars that create more destabilization and refugees while also destroying the asylum system that would provide some relief to those refugees. 

Modern asylum laws were created after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the public with the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces. They stemmed from the deep shame felt after World War II, knowing more could have been done to help desperate people fleeing desperate conditions. 

Throughout most of the war, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, fearing that they were Nazi spies and also motivated by ever-present antisemitism. In one of the most horrific instances of our country turning its back on desperate people, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 mostly Jewish passengers were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe where more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

The context is different, but the same is true today. The Biden administration threatens to turn back progress by negotiating with bad-faith actors and betraying their core supporters, all while throwing truly vulnerable people under the bus. 

Sending military funding to Israel as it engages in the mass killing of Palestinians is increasingly unpopular in the United States. Polling released on December 5 from Data for Progress shows over 70 percent of Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza. Hell, 61 percent of all voters support the call for a ceasefire. Instead of listening to public pressure and the polls, the administration is moving in the opposite direction of a ceasefire and is instead planning for a wider war.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. has historically thrown Palestinians under the bus, but past presidents have at times stepped in to curtail violence. Ronald Reagan, who I am not a fan of, famously called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the 1982 Lebanon War and told him that the symbol of that war was becoming a “picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.” When Reagan, infamous for supporting Central American death squads, is more critical of Israeli war crimes than Biden, we are in serious trouble.

For those of you who, like me, find the actions of the current administration unacceptable and would support an alternative candidate in the 2024 Democratic primary, your options are being limited. The Florida Democratic Party has joined several other states in barring any other candidate aside from Biden from appearing in this year’s primary ballot despite challengers like Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson polling between 5 and 10 percent each. Democrats should be given the option to vote for whichever candidate they want to support.

My time trying to navigate the hypocrisy and groupthink of party politics has come to an end. My only hope is that people continue speaking out, challenging the current status quo, and pressuring this administration and politicians in both parties to stop this senseless and intolerable bloodshed before more people die and this spirals into a broader and more destructive conflict.

The post I Resigned From the DNC in Protest of Biden’s Backing of Palestinian Slaughter appeared first on The Intercept.

The print media outlets, which play an influential role in shaping U.S. views of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, paid little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip. 

Major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias, with the New York Times seeing protests at its headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.

The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges. During this period, 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Today, the Palestinian death toll is over 22,000.

The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.

This anti-Palestinian bias in print media tracks with a similar survey of U.S. cable news that the authors conducted last month for The Column that found an even wider disparity.

The stakes for this routine devaluing of Palestinian lives couldn’t be higher: As the death toll in Gaza mounts, entire cities are leveled and rendered uninhabitable for years, and whole family lines are wiped out, the U.S. government has enormous influence as Israel’s primary patron and weapons supplier. The media’s presentation of the conflict means there are fewer political downsides to lockstep support for Israel. 

Coverage from the first six weeks of the war paints a bleak picture of the Palestinian side, according to the analysis, one that stands to make humanizing Palestinians — and therefore arousing U.S. sympathies — more difficult. 

To obtain this data, we searched for all articles that contained relevant words (such as “Palestinian,” “Gaza,” “Israeli,” etc.) on all three news websites. We then parsed through every sentence in each article and tallied the count of certain terms. For this analysis, we omitted all editorial pieces and letters to the editor. The basic data set is available here, and a full data set can be obtained by emailing ottoali99@gmail.com.

Our survey of coverage has four key findings.

Disproportionate Coverage of Deaths

In the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths. For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death that of Palestinians. 

“Slaughter” of Israelis, Not Palestinians

Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around. (When the terms appeared in quotes rather than the editorial voice of the publication, they were omitted from the analysis.)

The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4. 

One typical headline from the New York Times, in a mid-November story about the October 7 attack, reads, “They Ran Into a Bomb Shelter for Safety. Instead, They Were Slaughtered.” Compare this with the Times’s most sympathetic profile of Palestinian deaths in Gaza from November 18: “The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children.” Here “graveyard” is a quote from the United Nations and the killing itself is in passive voice. In its own editorial voice, the Times story on deaths in Gaza uses no emotive terms comparable to the ones in its story about the October 7 attack. 

The Washington Post employed “massacre” several times in its reporting to describe October 7. “President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’s massacre,” one report from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word “massacre” or “slaughter” once. The Palestinian dead have simply been “killed” or “died” — often in the passive voice. 

Children and Journalists

Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group. 

Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children — almost entirely Palestinian — in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles surveyed by The Intercept. 

Meanwhile, more than 6,000 children were reported killed by authorities in Gaza at the time of the truce, with the number topping 10,000 today.

Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” in headlines.

While the war on Gaza has been one of the deadliest in modern history for journalists — overwhelmingly Palestinians — the word “journalists” and its iterations such as “reporters” and “photojournalists” only appears in nine headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied. Roughly 48 Palestinian reporters had been killed by Israeli bombardment at the time of the truce; today, the death toll for Palestinian journalists has topped 100. Only 4 of the 9 articles that contained the words journalist/reporter were about Arab reporters.

The lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous. By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times ran multiple personal, sympathetic stories highlighting the plight of children during the first six weeks of the Ukraine war. 

The aforementioned front-page New York Times report and a Washington Post column are rare exceptions to the dearth of coverage about Palestinian children.

As with children, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times focused on the risks to journalists in the Ukraine war, running several articles detailing the hazards of reporting on the war in the first six weeks after Russia’s invasion. Six journalists were killed in the early days of the Ukraine war, compared to 48 killed in the first six weeks of Israel’s Gaza bombardment.   

Asymmetry in how children are covered is qualitative as well as quantitative. On October 13, the Los Angeles Times ran an Associated Press report that said, “The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that 1,799 people have been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women. Hamas’s assault last Saturday killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children and young music festivalgoers.” Notice that young Israelis are referred to as children while young Palestinians are described as people under 18. 

During discussions around the prisoner exchanges, this frequent refusal to refer to Palestinians as children was even more stark, with the New York Times referring in one case to “Israeli women and children” being exchanged for “Palestinian women and minors.” (Palestinian children are referred to as “children” later in the report, when summarizing a human rights groups’ findings.) 

A Washington Post report from November 21 announcing the truce deal erased Palestinian women and children altogether: “President Biden said in a statement Tuesday night that a deal to release 50 women and children held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners detained by Israel.” The brief did not mention Palestinian women and children at all.

Coverage of Hate in the U.S.

Similarly, when it comes to how the Gaza conflict translates to hate in the U.S., the major papers paid more attention to antisemitic attacks than to ones against Muslims. Overall, there was a disproportionate focus on racism toward Jewish people, versus racism targeting Muslims, Arabs, or those perceived as such. During the period of The Intercept’s study, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia (549 versus 79) — and this was before the “campus antisemitism” meta-controversy that was contrived by Republicans in Congress beginning the week of December 5.

Despite many high-profile instances of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism during the survey period, 87 percent of mentions of discrimination were about antisemitism, versus 13 percent mentions about Islamophobia, inclusive of related terms. 

When Major Newspapers Fail

Overall, Israel’s killings in Gaza are not given proportionate coverage in either scope or emotional weight as the deaths of Israelis on October 7. These killings are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures. Nor are the killings described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.” Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group’s strategy, whereas Palestinian civilian killings are covered almost as if they were a series of one-off mistakes, made thousands of times, despite numerous points of evidence indicating Israel’s intent to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure.

The result is that the three major papers rarely gave Palestinians humanizing coverage. Despite this asymmetry, polls show shifting sympathy toward Palestinians and away from Israel among Democrats, with massive generational splits driven, in part, by a stark difference in news sources. By and large, young people are being informed of the conflict from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, and older Americans are getting their news from print media and cable news. 

Biased coverage in major newspapers and mainstream television news is impacting general perceptions of the war and directing viewers toward a warped view of the conflict. This has led to pro-Israel pundits and politicians blaming pro-Palestinian views on social media “misinformation.” 

Analysis of both print media and cable news, however, make it clear that, if any cohort of media consumers is getting a slanted picture, it’s those who get their news from established mass media in the U.S.   

Othman Ali contributed reporting.

The post Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows appeared first on The Intercept.

One thing is true: Hamas and other Palestinian militants committed unspeakable sexual violence against Israeli civilians on October 7. “The full scale of the assault is yet to be uncovered,” according to a position paper published by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a nongovernmental organization.

Two things are not true: That the October 7 rapes and sexual mutilation were ignored or covered up by the United Nations gender-equality organization U.N. Women and a conspiracy of Western feminists, global human rights organizations, and U.S. progressives. Or that behind this alleged rape denial lies antisemitism: “#MeToo, except if you’re a Jew.”

Yes, some individuals and extreme-left organizations have denied these atrocities or upheld them as justified resistance. But it is not U.N. Women’s role to make day-after condemnations of unverified acts of violence against women, and verifying such acts, particularly amid the chaos of war, takes a long time.

There has been no cover-up. If anything, the public’s fixation on sexual violence heightens attention to the Hamas-led crimes. The scandal that unfolded in early December was largely manufactured by right-wing pundits who until this moment didn’t give a fig about rape. Mainstream media, which had grown correctly cautious after repeating unconfirmed reports about who bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October, could not resist feeding their audiences’ prurience. Then some feminists took the bait, creating false moral distinctions — and strategic divisions — between those who care about rape and those who also recognize the urgency of ending Israel’s occupation and indiscriminate killing.

Ultimately, the outcry distracts from the annihilation of Gaza and its people and lends Israel justification in perpetuating it. Needless to say, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is exploiting the opportunity.

How did U.N. Women, an unlikely villain, become the center of this whipped-up storm?

On October 13 — two days after Israel cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza while it continued its indiscriminate bombardment — U.N. Women, whose mission is to promote gender equality globally, issued its first statement on the war: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls,” it began. The 198-word statement called for “unrestricted humanitarian aid,” a restoration of the basics for survival to Gaza, and the “immediate release of hostages.” It reiterated the group’s support of Palestinian women in their fight for social, political, and economic rights. It did not say the same for Israeli Jewish women, who are already granted these rights under Israel’s Basic Laws. Hamas was not mentioned.

On October 20, the organization published a “Rapid Assessment and Humanitarian Response in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Among the bullet points: 493,000 women and girls were already displaced from their homes; 668,000 were in need of protection from gender-based violence. This document did not mention Hamas’s attacks either. It did not report on human rights violations or even provide a death toll.

The United Nations more broadly was not idle on the subject, however. Also on October 20, its Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory called for submissions to its investigation of war crimes committed on all sides of the conflict. The investigation, launched three days after the attacks, is applying particular focus to sexual and gender-based violence.

The first organized criticism of U.N. Women came on October 30 from the U.S.-based National Council of Jewish Women, the Israel Women’s Network, and 140-plus Jewish and Israeli women’s organizations. “It is inconceivable that a UN organization that is responsible for women’s rights is ignoring the hostages captured and held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the murder of hundreds of innocent people,” their statement declared. In fact, U.N. Women on October 13 did not mention Hamas, but neither did it ignore the Israeli murder victims or the hostages.

Absent from this critique — or from subsequent ones — was a demand for accountability on the part of the Israeli government, which had rejected a Palestinian proposal for a five-day ceasefire and hostage release in mid-October and was now botching its own investigations into the sexual crimes.

In early November, Israeli women’s groups flagged what The Guardian called “significant failings” on the part of the state “in preserving forensic evidence that could have shone a light on the scale of sexual violence committed against women and girls in last month’s Hamas attacks.” One report suggested that the investigation’s lack of cohesion and coordination was to blame for the failure to photograph, preserve, or properly examine the bodies for evidence of sexual assault before their burial. In fact, said the Times of Israel, the problem wasn’t necessarily incompetence; not using “time-consuming crime scene investigation protocols to document rape cases” was the result of forensic triage, which prioritized identifying the dead, burned, and decaying bodies. That decision, claimed the Times, “has fueled international skepticism over Hamas’s sexual abuse of victims.”

While the government was stumbling, it fell to civil society groups, such as the ad hoc Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children as well as Physicians for Human Rights, to document the assaults. One of the authors of the physicians’ group’s paper told the New Yorker that they excluded videotapes recorded by the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, in which Hamas fighters assert that they were ordered to commit the murders and “sully” Israeli women. Such evidence was “unreliable,” said the PHR author, because of what the paper called “severe concern that the interrogations included the use of torture.”

On November 22, the Civil Commission presented its findings to U.N. Women in advance of the Security Council meeting on the effects of the hostilities on women and children.

On November 24, U.N. Women deleted an Instagram post condemning Hamas’s “brutal attacks” and calling for immediate release of the hostages, and replaced it with one missing the condemnation of Hamas. It did so, according to a spokesperson, to convey support for the temporary truce and hostage exchange, which had been extended the day before the prescheduled post went up.

On December 1, eight weeks after the fact, U.N. Women released a statement “unequivocally condemn[ing] the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7.” It continued: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”

The right was first to portray these events as collaboration with terrorists. Fox News — the outfit that’s paid Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham hundreds of millions of dollars to fan white paranoia and inform white Christians that Jews are replacing them — was now the great protector of Jewish dignity and life.

Among those leading the charge was Tomi Lahren, an Ingraham clone who hosts a rant fest on the anti-woke sports channel OutKick. Before this, the only things Lahren had to say about rape were that women lie, rape culture isn’t real, and nongendered school bathrooms lead to sexual assault.

Nevertheless, she began to make the rounds. On November 29, Lahren growled alongside Martha MacCallum, another thin, white, Foxie blond, after watching a CNN clip of U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Sarah Hendriks explaining why the organization did not issue a straightforward condemnation of the Hamas attacks.

“U.N. Women always supports impartial independent investigations into any serious allegations of gender-based or sexual crimes,” Hendriks said. But investigation is not her organization’s department. She went on at length elucidating U.N. structure, “mechanisms,” and protocols. MacCallum called the response a “word salad,” composed of such arcane vocabulary as “‘context’ and ‘providing’ and ‘knowledge’” — and declared the whole thing a dereliction of moral duty.

It was indeed a specimen of the U.N.’s bureaucratic tone-deafness. Hendriks might have stressed the importance of statements based on facts, without whose accuracy the global body has no credibility.

She could have noted that documenting war crimes is a lengthy, painstaking process. Human Rights Watch issued a report two years after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, during which the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda raped and sexually mutilated a quarter-million Tutsi women, girls, and men. The International Criminal Court tribunal against the perpetrators began in 1998 and lasted until 2022. The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia spent nine years investigating war crimes committed during the Balkans wars of the 1990s including the rape, sexual torture, and enslavement of some 20,000 to 50,000 girls and women. The ICC is still looking into human rights abuses committed during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014.

Israeli officials have twice revised the death toll from October 7 downward from an original estimate of 1,400. In November they announced it was “around 1,200.” A month later the data were more precise: 695 Israeli civilians killed, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, for a total of 1,139. Lahav 433, the country’s FBI, does not expect to finish its fact-finding on the Hamas-led incursion for many months.

But on Fox News, the punchline was preordained. It’s time to defund the U.N., Lahren asserted. The National Review chimed in: “UN Women Is a Disgrace.”

U.N. Women’s December 1 statement satisfied no one. Instead, the field of wrongdoers widened to include those who had not adequately condemned U.N. Women for not condemning Hamas. At the top of the list were women. The conservative TV talk show host Piers Morgan framed a segment on the issue: “Why are so many female so-called progressives finding it impossible to come out and scream from the rooftops?”

As always, brown and Black congressional progressives had to be punished. In an interview with Dana Bash on CNN, Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., repeatedly expressed disgust at Hamas’s actions, but also allowed that “we have to be balanced about the outrages that are happening to Palestinians.”

That, apparently, was impermissible. Among Jayapal’s detractors was Concerned Women for America, which supports Israel because Israel “is an important issue to God.” (Here at home, though, CWA respects Jews so much that it “is leading a movement dedicated to impacting the culture for Christ through education and public policy.”) Feminists for Life, which does not support a rape exception for abortion, also took a swipe at Jayapal.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens also scolded the representative. His bona fides on violence against women can be found in other pieces, about, for instance, the “vindictive excesses” of the #MeToo movement. In 2016, he called antisemitism “the disease of the Arab mind.” Squad members Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also got their share of vilification.

Once the right broke the ice, scores of media outlets — from the Daily Beast to Northeastern University’s newspaper — joined in. CNN’s “The Amanpour Hour” had previously conducted two interviews, one with a survivor of the music festival attack and another with an Israeli psychologist who specializes in trauma, in which neither the journalist nor the subject mentioned rape. Now it ran a segment headlined “Are Reports of Sexual Violence on October 7 Being Ignored?” The sole interviewee was Israeli legal scholar Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who cited the Shin Bet videotapes in which Hamas soldiers confessed to receiving “instruction and permission” from their commanders “to perform these atrocities.” CNN host Bianna Golodryga did not challenge these claims and even appeared to reinforce them, referring to the report by Physicians for Human Rights, which had strongly suggested that Shin Bet extracted such statements with torture.

Liberal feminists took to the podium. On December 4, Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at an event with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Clinton. Sandberg leaned in courageously: “We need to hear your voices loudly and clearly saying, ‘Rape is unacceptable,’” she said.

Feminists began leveling accusations at other feminists. In The Forward, Letty Cottin Pogrebin indicted unnamed “sisters” (in quotes) who acknowledged the attacks but “minimized” them or “implored us to put the attacks ‘in historical and political context’” — a sin equal to “justify[ing] the mass torture and murder of women and girls.” Who were the traitorous feminists who have “turned a blind eye” to Jewish women’s suffering? “Turned a blind eye” was one of the only phrases Pogrebin linked — but the link led only to a piece in the United Kingdom’s Jewish News, also arguing that feminists are turning a blind eye to the horrors of October 7.

“Why have Western feminists been so slow to condemn Hamas rapes?” Katha Pollitt mused in The Nation. It took the National Organization for Women until November 30, she noted, to come out against the use of rape as a weapon of war — but it didn’t name Hamas. Planned Parenthood said nothing until December 5. Why? Pollitt doesn’t know. But she’s shooting at straw women. NOW is hardly the bravest body on the block. Its founders could not even agree on demanding the legalization of abortion. And since when does Planned Parenthood comment on rape?

“There is a litmus test” applied to Palestinians by Jews and Israelis in the anti-occupation left, said Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, a Jewish human rights litigator who challenges Israeli policies in court. Not only must Palestinians denounce Hamas, they must also do so in certain words, like “barbaric.” To fail the test is to be assumed indifferent to Jewish trauma. Equivalent denunciations — of the siege, the genocidal discourse of high Israeli officials — are not required of Jews.

This testing is not malicious. It comes from a desire, on the part of Jews, for comfort from one’s comrades in an hour of trauma. Nevertheless, it has a pernicious effect: silencing Palestinians, whose anguish and rage are both historic and reignited by the present, escalating catastrophe. Requiring the performance of caring undermines the unity needed to actualize it. “I am afraid this will tear apart the progressive left if we can’t get beyond it,” said Omer-Man.

The demand that feminists rebuke U.N. Women, and the implication that the failure to do so amounts to antisemitism, is another such litmus test. It undermines the solidarity critical to action. But it is destructive in another way. Whereas Palestinian–Israeli and Jewish anti-Zionist movements reject racial and religious fundamentalism, the dynamic here appeals to tribalism.

In Israel–Palestine, tribalism is being enacted as ethnic cleansing, which the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé defined as “an ideology that is being implemented in a place where there are two ethnic groups and one group wishes the disappearance of another group.” In the discourse about Hamas-led sexual violence, the tribalism demanding allegiance to one gender conflates care for one (or more than one simultaneously) with debasement of another. “When did intersectionality, a key ethos of 21st-century feminism, become Judenrein?” asked Pogrebin, in the ugliest sentence of her piece. Judenrein is a Nazi term meaning “cleansed of Jews.”

Only the vigorous enforcement of international human rights law — which is based on the equal valuing of all people — will end the violence. Such humanism, expressed through an anti-racist, anti-violence feminism, is embodied in an open letter entitled “Feminists for a Free Palestine. Stop the Genocide. End the Occupation” that was released at the end of October by 147 “scholars in feminist, queer, and trans studies who are rooted in social justice praxis.” Many of the signers were prominent activists and academics of color, including Angela Davis and the historian Barbara Ransby. Not a few were Jews, such as the political theorist Zillah Eisenstein. Signatures now exceed 1,000.

Those inclined to infer antisemitism from an emphasis on Palestinian suffering will find it in this letter, starting from the title. They will find bias here: “We refuse the killing, maiming, kidnapping, and imprisonment of children, without exception” — because the sentence ends: “and we remember that half the population of the Gaza Strip, which is effectively an open-air prison, are children.” The document does not indict Hamas.

But its universalist politics imply that indictment: “We refuse racist, Islamophobic, [and] antisemitic … discourse, and incitement to violence, without exception,” it says. “We refuse the racist weighting of human life, without exception. Humanity is not a hierarchy.” Its spirit is the opposite of the exceptionalism stirred by right-wing cynics in the U.N. Women flap. The letter ends: “Our feminism compels us to say: Free Palestine!” So does mine.

While critics of U.N. Women were giving the Israeli government a pass for treating the sexual violence as an afterthought, the Israeli government and its apologists were deploying the uproar to do what the prime minister does best: shift the blame.

The December 4 event at which Sandberg appeared was presented by Israel’s mission to the U.N. The National Council of Jewish Women, the group that organized the first letter of protest, describes Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state” and supports “full and equal rights for Palestinian citizens … who live within the Green Line.” In other words, not Palestinians who live in the occupied territories.

Catching up to the scandal in the first week of December, Netanyahu pointed the finger everywhere but at himself. First, unaccountably, he seemed to be chiding the Israeli press. “Were you quiet because we were talking about Jewish women?” he asked at a press conference, in Hebrew. Then he identified the real bad guys and switched to English for the world to hear. “I say to the women’s rights organizations, to the human rights organizations: You’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation,” the prime minister snarled. “Where the hell are you?”

And where are the Israeli women whose pain their prime minister and his supporters are retailing in all its grisly detail? They are disappearing into propaganda, becoming talking points to legitimize the pain of other women, children, and men in the killing field on the other side of the fence.

Correction: December 29, 2023
The piece previously referred to an Israeli constitution, which does not exist. Rather, it has a set of Basic Laws. The piece has been corrected.

The post There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7 appeared first on The Intercept.

Looking at the economy through the standard macroeconomic lens, everything points in a positive direction. Unemployment remains below 4 percent for the longest stretch of time in 50 years, and inflation has retreated without the pain of a recession many predicted. Yet many voters, including those in key demographics Biden needs to win, are not experiencing the economy in the same way.

At the beginning of the Biden administration, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a massive increase in America’s social safety net culminating in the passage of the American Rescue Plan at the start of Biden’s term. Americans received direct cash benefits from the government, health insurance was heavily subsidized, unemployment benefits were expanded, student loan payments paused, and the child tax credit sent cash to nearly every American family, lifting millions from poverty. That’s aside from the direct checks periodically ballooning people’s checking accounts, leading to the largest reserve of savings among consumers in American history. 

All of these programs, however, have since disappeared. The spending from programs subsequently passed by Congress is far more abstract to the general public, making it more difficult for voters to explicitly credit Biden. Infrastructure spending is critical, but the waters get muddied as Republicans who voted against the bill often show up at ribbon cuttings and issue press releases when projects break ground in their districts. Funding provided by the CHIPS Act is even more opaque to most Americans. The last two years have seen a transition from direct to indirect benefits.

Could the ending of these benefits, granted during the pandemic as part of the American Rescue Plan and other legislation that have since sunsetted, been overturned by the Supreme Court, rolled back, or ended by Congress be causing Biden’s weakness among certain key demographic groups — young voters in particular?

In other words: Have voters experienced a political rug pull, causing them to move away from Biden? During a crypto “rug pull,” the scammer abandons a project and runs off with their investor’s money. During a political “rug pull,” a benefit that a voter had is taken away. The taxpayers who were benefiting now feel poorer than when they started because they are forced to cover a shortfall once covered by the government.

To test this premise of whether “rug pull” voters exist, it made the most sense to look at student loan recipients. More than 43 million people hold student debt. Student loan repayments were first paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden famously issued an executive order to cancel $10,000 of each borrowers’ debt. Republicans sued to block it, and the Supreme Court struck down his plan. A Republican-led Congress, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling, forced the administration to restart loan payments this fall.

And by looking at student debt, while taking the survey, respondents would not be required to recall whether or not they received a benefit. Instead, they simply were being asked to disclose a fact about their current financial situation: whether or not they have student debt.

As part of an omnibus poll conducted by Positive Sum Strategies, a Democratic-leaning firm, I asked whether respondents currently had student loan debt, who they voted for in 2020, and who they planned to vote for in 2024. These questions were separated in the survey from political questions about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the 2024 presidential election to avoid questionnaire bias. 

The results give an initial indication about the impact of student loans on voters under 45: As of November 30, voters burdened with student debt under the age of 45 prefer Trump over Biden by 3 percentage points. Voters who do not have student debt choose Biden by 9 points.

(Biden canceled $132 billion in student loan debt debts for 3.6 million people in the past three years; many in this group would be included in the group with no student debt, which marginally favored Biden.) 

The first objection to drawing any conclusion from this data might be around the characteristics of the different cohorts. Maybe there’s something about holding student debt — related to wealth or education status, perhaps — that makes a person more likely to vote for Trump, meaning the fact of the debt itself is just a coincidence. Correlation but not causation, as they say. 

Perhaps. But that didn’t hold true in 2020, when the two groups voted in nearly identical ways. Voters with no student debt in 2020 favored Biden 47-27 percent, while voters with the debt preferred him by 45-29 percent. While Biden won 45 percent of voters with student debt in 2020, he’s winning just 31 percent of them now. Most have not gravitated to Trump: The former president carried 29 percent of young people with student debt in 2020 but only wins 34 percent now.

Among all voters, the pattern suggests that age plays a key role in voting as opposed to currently owing student debt (e.g. young people are more likely to have student debt). The fact that the effect is strongest when controlling for age (examining only those under the age of 45) strengthens the thesis.

The simplest explanation for this decline among young voters is, from 2020 to 2023, voters did not have to make their student loan payments. With an average student loan payment of hundreds of dollars per month, this amounted to a substantial deduction in borrowers’ monthly income and a worsening of their personal economic condition.

It should also be noted that both young voters with debt and without debt increased their support of Trump by 5 points, suggesting this issue has not yet driven a shift from Biden to Trump, but rather from Biden to undecided. 

Of course, this analysis does not mean the student debt payment restart alone drove the shift in general attitude attitudes. Those who would be swayed by a similar phenomenon, however, are also those who would feel the sting of the other rug pulls acutely, as well, from the child tax credit and beyond. Further research should be conducted into those who received other benefits that have disappeared in the last two years. 

With 11 months until the 2024 election, Biden could win back “rug pull” voters over the course of the campaign. However, while the Biden White House and Democrats place the blame for the student loan restart squarely at the feet of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans, most Americans are simply not in the weeds enough to understand these explanations. (Data suggests the adage holds true: If you are explaining, you are losing.)

While this data is not conclusive, it does suggest that the Biden campaign needs to do substantive work to bring these voters back into the fold. 

Positive Sum Strategies conducted an omnibus poll on November 29-30, 2023. The online sample consisted of 1,238 respondents weighted to education, gender, race, respondent quality, and 2020 election results. The margin of error is +/- 3.9.

Correction: December 21, 2023
The third chart was erroneously labeled as covering voters under 45. It covers voters of all ages, and has been updated.

The post Poll Shows Student Debt Policy May Be Killing Biden appeared first on The Intercept.

When a white man shot three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont, it struck much of America as the least likely place for the violence of Israel–Palestine to show its teeth. Vermont is peaceful. Vermont is civil. Vermont is tolerant. It had to be an aberration.

Jason Eaton — the man charged with shooting Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad — was brought up in Vermont. But he’d been living in Syracuse, New York, and had just recently returned to Burlington, where he bought the gun. He might not have had plans to stay. Yes, maybe it was an aberration.

I have lived half-time in Vermont for 32 years. The home my partner and I share is on a dirt road in a small town in the rural Northeast Kingdom, which is about as far as you can get, economically, culturally, and politically, from where the shooting took place. Burlington, the quip goes, is lovely because it’s so near Vermont.

Avoiding confrontation can leave conflict, and injustice, to fester.

I know Vermont niceness. My daily life there is often eased by it. It’s pleasant to live in a low-crime state. As a New York Jew, however, I’m skeptical that being nice is an antidote to violence. If anything, the shooting — and Vermonters’ responses to it — illuminates the dark side of civility. To be civil is to hold your tongue to avoid confrontation. But avoiding confrontation can leave conflict, and injustice, to fester.

It should go without saying that Eaton was not driven to pull the trigger out of frustration with an excess of good manners surrounding him. Vermont did not make him do it. If we can learn anything from what happened there, though, it is that the only way to the other side of conflict is through conflict — not through war, but through politics.

Here in the frigid north, niceness can save your life, as when a stranger stops to dig your car out of a snowdrift in the middle of the night. It can also be tedious to the point of exasperation. What passes for a protest march is a quiet stroll to the statehouse lawn, where you stamp your cold feet and drink tea out of PFOA-free flasks. Speakers try to rouse the occasional desultory chant. People bring their dogs.

To a flatlander like me, Vermont niceness can be illegible. At the first local public meeting I attended, the issue — raising a bond to build a new school — was in hot dispute. But I later had to quiz my partner, a native Vermonter, about which side various speakers were on. That’s how restrained everybody was.

Over the decades, I’ve learned how important civility is to small town life. If you speak ill of your neighbor, word will get around, and it won’t be long before you run into her at the grocery store or are elected to serve on a town committee with her. What’s good about small communities is also what’s bad: Everyone knows you.

And if they don’t? After the shooting, a white recent transplant to Vermont wrote a New York Times op-ed exploring what it’s like to be Muslim, or Black or brown, in the Green Mountain State. Among the people he spoke to was Mia Schultz, the African American president of the Rutland area NAACP branch. To people of color, Schultz said, the shooting was horrific but not shocking. Sure, there’s overt racism in the state, she and other Vermonters of color told the writer, but mostly racism shows up by not showing its face. Life in Vermont can be like the film “Get Out.” The white people are really nice — until they aren’t.

“I know about people who go back to the South because, they say, at least I know what I’m encountering,” Schultz said. “I know how to navigate people who are outright hateful.”

To be different in a place where most everyone is the same is to be the object of both acute curiosity and invisibility, assiduous inclusion and institutional inequality. Vermont is proud of its four decades of refugee resettlement. The press frequently covers the state’s Somali, Kenyan, and other African immigrant communities; reporters like to include such exotic details as “women in kaleidoscopically patterned wrappas” and stores purveying “fufu flour.” The Association of Africans Living in Vermont — now AALV, which serves immigrants from everywhere — is so glutted with used furniture, clothes, and baby items that its website asks people to stop donating them. That’s a lot of attention paid to folks who comprise less than one-eighth of Vermont’s 8,000 resident refugees and even a smaller handful of Vermont immigrants overall. Among the 27,000-plus foreign-born Vermonters, almost half come from Europe and Canada; in 2021, 3.6 percent were African.

A friend told me that when her African-born Black son was little, he was in frequent demand for photo shoots and other public displays of Vermont “diversity.” Now that he’s big, he’s just another Black teenager. The African American children of Black African immigrants are arrested, detained, and transferred from juvenile to criminal courts at highly disproportionate rates compared to their white counterparts. And it’s not just the cops who exhibit racism. The shooting of those three brown men has scared the shit out of my friend’s kid.

Niceness is not always a cover for outright hatred; not every velvet glove has an iron fist inside it. But civility can work to deny or minimize bigotry, and paper over injustice. I once found myself sipping wine on a porch with a woman who had met the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist at a soiree on the lake where he summered. “Bill” was gracious and funny, she trilled, and “so brilliant!”  

I felt obliged to remind this woman of the judge’s career, dedicated to upholding America’s status quo, circa 1864: the minority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the expediting of death-row appeals and executions. Of course, institutional racism and lethal injection rarely come up over drinks at that lake — where, by the way, Rehnquist and other homeowners signed deeds containing a covenant that prohibited lease or sale to persons of “the Hebrew race.” All true, the woman finally said, perhaps taken aback by my Hebrew aggressiveness. “But he was nice.”

And of course, not everyone is nice all the time. One Fourth of July, a man painted a swastika on a store window on Main Street in our town. Later that day, somebody from something calling itself the Ethan Allen Coalition phoned The Associated Press and claimed responsibility. The coalition’s statement railed against “the welfare and the gays,” as well as “Hollywood Jews, [who] are to blame for everything wrong with law and order in society.” It declared: “We want Vermont for ourselves. We want it back.” The language presaged the “Take Back Vermont” campaign that slimed the state after the legalization of same-sex civil unions in 2006.

The swastika was not ignored. Over 15 complaints were called in to the police. The local paper ran a strong editorial. But the more common response was that of the police officer on duty, who ordered the symbol removed. Then he pronounced the swastika “in very bad taste” and “bizarre,” adding: “It’s important people realize this is not a reflection of the community.” Which community was he referring to? Was I a part of it?

I’m not suggesting that our town is a nest of secret racists. It’s not. Still, when I wrote an op-ed for the Times about the event and my experiences of antisemitism in Vermont, my suspicion was confirmed that that the cop’s “community” did not include me. The few other Jews in town were eager to discuss the piece, not always concurring, but thanking me for writing it. I heard other opinions only second and thirdhand. They boiled down to: Why did she have to publicize this unpleasantness? Or, less diplomatically, Who does she think she is? Niceness precluded conversation or, God forbid, confrontation. And that kept the insiders in and the outsiders out.

Civility cloaks bigotry, but it does not eliminate it. “Take Back Vermont” echoed off the mountains again during the 2010 gubernatorial race between Republican Brian Dubie and Democrat Peter Shumlin. Both were born and bred Vermonters, Dubie from Burlington and Shumlin from the crunchy berg of Brattleboro — neither, that is, from the small rural towns that dot the state’s landscape. Because Shumlin was running on the promise of single-payer health care, which had a chance of working, the GOP called in the pros to juice Dubie’s campaign with some disinformation and mild bigotry. The slogan they came up with was “Pure Vermont.”

Dubie bumbled dutifully through. He called the legislature’s health care consultant William Hsiao — a renowned expert and U.S. citizen born in mainland China — “a doctor from Taiwan” invading “a small little state in New England.” At one debate, Dubie waved around a list allegedly containing the names of child pornographers and drug dealers Shumlin would release under a plan to transfer nonviolent prisoners to community supervision. “Pure Vermont” was not meant to evoke maple syrup.

And if Dubie’s Vermont was pure, the large-nosed half-Jewish Shumlin was portrayed as ethically wily (code for Jewish) and “slick” (code for urban, which is code for Jewish or Black). When a Dubie supporter paraded in front of Democratic Party headquarters sporting a huge swastika, the campaign staff dismissed the man as “childish” and his acts as “theater and jokes and games.” Finally, Dubie clarified his position: “Well, first of all, I don’t support swastikas.”

The dog whistles were clear enough. Nevertheless, the press tiptoed around any intimations of racism. A prominent radio host even asked the candidates to pledge not to attack each other. Frustrated by reporters’ reluctance to get their shoes dirty covering what one of them called the “circus” of politics, a white-hat lobbyist wrote that “the media are acting like they don’t want to offend anybody.” He did not mention who else might be silenced by this disinclination to offend, or be offended, on someone else’s behalf.

In a small community, civility keeps the peace. But too much civility, when it comes at the expense of conflict, upholds injustice and fail to address violence.

Right now, in the U.S., our biggest worry is that violence is demolishing democracy. Former Sen. Mitt Romney told the journalist McKay Coppins that Congress members refrained from voting for Donald Trump’s impeachment in fear for their families’ safety. Election workers, relentlessly harassed and threatened by the MAGA hordes, are resigning. The common response is to call for more civility.

Vermont is thick with people working for racial, economic, and gender justice, and they’ve achieved legislation to make it concrete. As everywhere, there’s a distance to go. But civility will have nothing to do with getting there. The avoidance of conflict does not end conflict. Instead, it preempts politics before politics can begin, and that, paradoxically, makes violence more likely.

Correction: December 28, 2023
This piece incorrectly referenced a minority opinion by Judge Rehnquist in Brown v. Board of Education. He was not yet on the Court in 1954 for the Brown decision. This story has also been corrected to reflect that Jason Eaton grew up in Vermont and had just returned from living in Syracuse, New York.

The post Vermont Niceness Is Not the Answer to the Shooting of Three Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

“I think this is a ridiculous position to put us in,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. “Holding Israel aid and Ukraine aid hostage to solving a complicated domestic issue is really unfortunate.” 

The current negotiation has been the latest in a series of efforts by Democrats to placate Republican criticisms of Biden’s handling of the southern border, as well as an effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to win Ukraine funding and placate Republicans skeptical of the war.

The so-called Gang of Four negotiators includes Murphy, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds immigration operations at the Department of Homeland Security; Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., who have made themselves fixtures in migration policy negotiations during the current Congress; and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., an avowed immigration hawk with close ties to Donald Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Hispanic Caucus senators, historically included in bipartisan migrant policy talks, were not happy to be excluded from the negotiating room. “There are four Democratic members of the United States Senate who are Latino and it’s important that their ideas, their inclusion, their expertise to be included in this,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., when asked if Murphy should be negotiating migrant policy with GOP nativists on behalf of Senate Democrats. 

Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has been a nonfactor in the negotiations, despite having little to fear electorally having just won her reelection last year in Nevada. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., usually a vocal advocate for migrant rights, has been sidelined by criminal charges.

Murphy rejected the characterization of nativists versus migrant rights. “We’ve been engaged in serious talks and I’m not really sure they want to get ‘Yes,’” he said of Lankford and Tillis, implying that his GOP counterparts may be negotiating in bad faith. 

“I know Padilla would like to legalize 14 million people,” said Tillis. 

“No hay acuerdo,” Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, countered on Tuesday when I asked if asylum rights were on the chopping block, a Tillis priority. There’s still no deal. “If we’re going to continue to entertain these negotiations there has to be consideration for legalization,” he continued. 

On Wednesday, Padilla and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin issued a joint statement signed by nine other Senate Democrats demanding that any permanent changes to asylum rights include “a clear path to legalization for long-standing undocumented immigrants.”

Right-wing groups like Heritage Action on Tuesday came out against Ukrainian military funding, an ominous foreshadow for the House prospects of any Senate bill. “A group of senators is undermining Republican unity and effective policy solutions by negotiating with Democrats who support open border policy,” Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts wrote in a statement. “Worse, the proposal coming out of these ‘negotiations’ will likely be used as leverage to advance President Biden’s request for $106 billion in fiscally irresponsible spending, including an additional $60 billion for Ukraine that fails to meet conservative standards and $13.6 billion for fake ‘border security’ that would accelerate Biden’s open border operations.”

The right in Congress is deeply unhappy about being asked to trade a watered-down version of the party’s aspirational immigration crackdown bill for Ukraine funding. “It’s not about the border, it’s about a fig leaf for funding Ukraine,” as one Senate GOP aide told Emily Jashinsky of “Counter Points.”

A senior Democratic aide granted anonymity to discuss the bill conceded it “is going to make nobody happy.” 

At issue is whether Republicans will agree to fund the Ukrainian military in a war with Russia if Democrats agree to further gut migrant rights during Biden’s presidency while militarizing the border at taxpayers’ expense. The proposed change would sacrifice credible fear standards in asylum screening, severely narrowing the definition of who is eligible for safe haven in the U.S. Current standards require that migrants applying for asylum demonstrate to an immigration judge a “significant fear” of death, persecution, or torture if they’re returned to their country of origin. The president’s supplemental request also includes funding for 1,600 asylum officers and 1,300 Border Patrol agents to catch and expedite the processing of asylum-seekers.

GOP senators have also floated the idea of restricting the use of advance parole to limit migrant detention at the border, although Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican with influence over his party’s immigration outlook in the Senate, tells The Intercept that ending Biden’s special designation of parole for migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaraguans is a priority for GOP negotiators. 

This is especially true for migrant communities with no negotiator at the table as Tillis pushes to limit asylum rights and Lankford wants to limit the use of migrant parole. “It’s really about what to do with that 7,000 people that are currently released in the country,” said Tillis. 

Schumer’s office has taken the lead on writing a bill text with the tacit support of ailing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who has made funding Ukrainian military operations a top priority. Whether House Speaker Mike Johnson has the votes or the political will to pass a border-plus-Ukraine bill remain open questions. 

House Republicans have famously failed to pass even the most basic funding measures in the current Congress. A motion to vacate rule leftover from Kevin McCarthy’s doomed speakership remains in place that allows any member of Johnson’s majority party to demand a vote to remove him within 48 hours. 

Nevertheless, allies close to Schumer insist a bill text is imminent. Migrant rights advocates for Fwd.us and the American Immigration Council tell The Intercept that despite being cut out of negotiations by the Gang of Four, the senator’s office has been adamant about making themselves available for updates on the legislation which is expected to be introduced as early as this week.

The post Bipartisan Plan to Trade Immigrant Rights for Ukraine Money Is Sinking Fast appeared first on The Intercept.

She wasn’t planning to pursue legal action; she just wanted to warn others. Instead, it was the man she accused who sued her. Almost immediately after she put up her post, he sent her a letter threatening to sue her for defamation if she didn’t take it down. She refused. She hoped it was just an empty threat. But less than three weeks later, he filed a defamation lawsuit against her, according to court records, and demanded $25,000.

“I felt defeated,” she told The Intercept. She was making $11 an hour and had no resources to fight him off; he already had a lawyer. She scrambled to find one of her own, mining the comments on her Facebook post for people to talk to. When she contacted one, she asked what she could do with little to no money. “It was extremely stressful,” she said, not knowing if she would be able to come up with the funds to defend herself. “It’s really scary. And it just feels like a second attack.”

In the five years since the start of the #MeToo movement, a quiet but effective legal backlash has swept over those who spoke out about sexual harassment and abuse. The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.

This silencing is even more acute in the aftermath of the libel judgement in Johnny Depp’s case against Amber Heard, where a jury found that her allegations of abuse in an op-ed — an op-ed that didn’t actually name him — were false. Experts warned that anti-feminist groups were mobilizing to bring defamation suits and that it could make survivors of sexual violence and domestic abuse fearful to come forward. Heard’s own team said the outcome would have a “chilling effect.”

But most victims aren’t Hollywood actresses. These cases are mostly being brought against people with few resources, “who are much more ordinary folks: people who are low-paid workers, people who are young, people who are absolutely not in the spotlight,” said Jennifer Mondino, director of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which eventually supported Aubuchon with a grant for legal fees. “For those people it is all the more intimidating to be faced with the possibility of being sued.” Those without the resources to fight these lawsuits off may feel forced to recant their accusations, while the potential of being sued for defamation after speaking out is likely keeping others silent in the first place.

Since the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund was launched in 2018 to provide funding and legal support to low-wage and low-income people who have experienced sexual abuse at work, it has awarded 62 grants that directly deal with a victim who was sued for defamation, making up nearly 20 percent of its work over its existence, according to data shared with The Intercept.

That figure is certainly an undercount of how many people it has helped who have faced defamation lawsuits, because the thousands of cases where the defendants were connected to an attorney but not given funding aren’t included, nor are those who were sued for defamation after being awarded funding. Since its inception in January 2018, the fund has given over $13 million to victims of workplace harassment to cover attorneys’ fees and fund public relations support. An individual case can receive anywhere from a few thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands for ongoing litigation.

Retaliation is a common experience for people who speak up about sexual harassment. But “increasingly we are seeing defamation suits be a way that people are retaliated against,” Mondino said.

Kenneth White, a partner at law firm Brown White & Osborn, used to get only the occasional request for help with a defamation case after writing and speaking frequently about such cases. “Over the last, I would say, five years I really saw a significant increase in the number of these that had to do with women being threatened for speaking or writing about some form of abuse,” he said. Being labeled as a harasser or rapist carries more reputational damage than it used to, thanks to #MeToo. This is a way for abusers to try to claw back that lost status.

Stephanie Holt, deputy director of operations at the Victim Rights Law Center, has seen the same. Five years ago, it was “pretty rare” to even get a letter threatening defamation, she said. But now she’s getting many calls from people who have gotten a letter demanding that they take down a post or stop speaking about what happened to them, or face a lawsuit.

According to her legal complaint, which she filed in response to the defamation lawsuit, Aubuchon was raped at work only a few days on the job. At age 18, she had worked a number of low-paid positions — from preschool assistant teacher to hair salon receptionist — never making more than $11 an hour, so in the summer of 2018, she took a server job at a strip club to earn better pay. That day, a regular customer who frequently bought everyone drinks came into the club. Even though she was underage, she claimed her manager encouraged her to drink alcohol offered by customers, so she did. She quickly felt “really dizzy,” she said, and suspects that she may have been drugged. According to the complaint, that’s when her manager told her to come to a “secluded” room and penetrated her with his penis. 

The manager has said that the sex was consensual and denied the other allegations.

A co-worker gave Aubuchon a baby wipe to clean herself up and she went home, according to her complaint. She never returned to work, and she claimed that she wasn’t paid for any of the days she worked. The next day, she decided to report what had happened to her to the police and submitted to a rape kit. She was told the kit would come back in eight to 12 weeks, she told The Intercept. But she kept calling and kept being told it hadn’t come back. When she called back a year later, she was told it had come back negative for evidence of sexual activity and she says she was told there was nothing the police could do.

She went about her life, she said, until the detective on her case called a year later to ask if she wanted the clothes they had taken for evidence back. “In my head I was like, ‘No, I don’t want those,’” she said. “‘You guys didn’t help me, I don’t freaking want those.’” That was when she decided she had to speak out. “I really was just looking for his face to be out there and make sure that nobody else gets put in that situation, especially with him,” she said. “Because I don’t want that to happen to somebody else.”

When her former manager then sued her, Aubuchon was still “not financially stable,” she said. “I had nothing. It’s not like I had money, it’s not like I had things to use against him,” she said. Her accused rapist, on the other hand, had a lawyer and “all these things that I didn’t have. It was just really discouraging.”

It also meant she had to keep reliving what had happened to her, recounting the story over and over again to lawyers, after she had just started to get better at not thinking about it. She had to take time off of work: both to deal with all the meetings with lawyers and court dates, as well as to protect her mental health. She had to drive a half-hour each way just to meet with her own lawyer. It was like “being tortured,” she said. He had already “ruined” her life, she said. “He was just continuing to do it over and over again.” In September 2021, both her former manager’s and her case were dismissed “upon stipulation of the parties.”

Being sued is “mysterious and scary” as well as “incomprehensively expensive,” White noted. It takes a lot of time and resources to get an attorney and fight a defamation suit. The threats and suits often include demands for huge amounts of money.

“That is why people use it as a weapon — because it is so intimidating.”

The legal hell is a motivation for abusers to file defamation cases. “That is why people use it as a weapon — because it is so intimidating,” Mondino said. “It becomes one of the plays in the playbook.” Mark Goldowitz, a lawyer and founder of the California Anti-SLAPP Project, agreed, saying it fits into the DARVO pattern — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, a common reaction from perpetrators of sexual violence when they’re outed — by framing the accused as the actual victims.

Sexual harassment and assault are already about an abuser exerting power over his victim. Suing the victim for defamation, Mondino agreed, is “another exertion of power.”

A few months after Ashley Longhorn began working as a corrections officer at the Eastern Oregon Corrections Institution in early 2020, she alleges in a complaint that she filed against the Oregon Department of Corrections, a more senior officer lured her to his home under false pretenses. He had offered to make her a box to help her disbud her baby goats, but told her she had to pick it up at his house. Once there, he told her to sit on the bed with him and began kissing and touching her. He continued even after she told her to stop, then got on top of her and pressed his hand down on her throat. Trapping her under his body, her complaint alleges, he forced off her pants and penetrated her vagina with his fingers.

After she told a superior at the company about what happened, her assailant began stalking her at work, she alleges, barraging her with texts and calls, watching her at work, and asking co-workers about her. Her co-workers started to spread rumors about her, and she ended up forced to take unpaid leave for PTSD and anxiety and switching to a graveyard shift to avoid harassment.

Her assailant was indicted by a grand jury for her assault and arrested at work in December of that year. But after the case was transferred to a new prosecutor with no expertise in sex crimes, he declined to prosecute her assailant, telling her she should have fought him off, her complaint states. Five months later, her assailant sued her for defamation for telling co-workers and the authorities that he had assaulted her, seeking over $500,000 in damages and attorney’s fees, according to his filing. The case was voluntarily dismissed but not until January of this year, nearly two years after he sued her, according to the judge’s order. He didn’t have to pay her back for the fees she had paid to her attorney to fight off his suit.

When a defamation case is directed at people without means “sometimes” taking down the post or retracting their story is “the economically rational thing to do,” White said — even when the threat holds no legal weight.

People have called Holt, of the Victim Rights Law Center, after getting a letter threatening to sue them for defamation for speaking to the police — which is protected. “It is OK to report to police no matter your situation,” she said. But she worries that the people who don’t know to call her or another lawyer won’t know that: “Not everyone is going to make it to my office or another legal office to get advice.”

Goldowitz worked with a client who was sued by her rapist in retaliation for speaking out about what happened, but other women who could have bolstered her case didn’t want to get involved because they were afraid of being sued too. “It does ripple out,” he said.

As a lobbyist in California, Pamela Lopez was no stranger to inappropriate behavior. “Sexual harassment was endemic to the political environment,” she said. When she was first starting out in her career, an official at a state agency she needed to speak to on behalf of her clients sent her an email saying he had a foot fetish and would only meet with her if she had lunch with him while wearing open-toed sandals. “Everybody kind of ignored it and looked the other way,” she said.

Then in 2016, she says, Democratic Assembly Member Matt Dababneh followed her into the bathroom at a co-ed bachelor party and masturbated in front of her, demanding that she touch him. She refused. She alleges that he ejaculated into the toilet, and as he left the bathroom, he told her not to tell anyone. “It was just absolutely terrifying,” she said.

At first, Lopez didn’t want anyone to know what had happened to her because she assumed she would be the one who would be punished professionally. “Somehow I will be blamed for this,” she recalled thinking. “I will be slut-shamed, people will not believe me.” That changed as #MeToo started to take off. “There is strength in numbers,” she said. She “wanted to make sure that the person who had hurt me did not potentially go on to hurt others.” She eventually named him in a 2017 Los Angeles Times article and filed a formal complaint with the state Assembly. (An Assembly committee eventually found that he “more likely than not” exposed himself to her). She held a press conference around the same time to announce the complaint.

Nine months later, Dababneh sued her for defamation. He has always denied her allegations. His lawyers did not return a request for comment.

Lopez had already spent hours of valuable time helping the California legislature with an investigation into sexual harassment and supporting other women who came forward. “I was ready to be done. And then finding out the lawsuit had been filed and just thinking, ‘Jesus, this is going to be years,’” she recalled.

She spent 15 to 20 hours each week for a year and a half, she estimates, working on the case, time that would otherwise have been spent making money from clients. She didn’t have many resources to fight his lawsuit. “It was like making a bet with somebody where you don’t really have the money to back it up, so you hope you win,” she said. She kept $10,000 in cash hidden away in her house in case Dababneh was successful. She and her husband delayed buying a house or even setting up a college savings account for their young son, in case he tried to take those. “They were absolutely out for blood and I knew it,” she said. They even put off having a second child “because we didn’t know what the future was going to hold,” she said.

Her son was 7 months old when she first came forward. “He’s now almost completed his first year of kindergarten. His whole childhood this thing has been going on,” she said. Every milestone — his first Christmas, his first birthday, the first day of preschool — were clouded by having the case in the back of her mind.

Lopez eventually prevailed. A judge found in her favor in October 2021, throwing Dababneh’s defamation case out on grounds that her statements were protected speech and ordering him to pay her attorney fees. But she still worries that he’ll come after her, even after the victory. “As strong as I am, and as confident as I am, I’m still afraid,” she said.

Lopez had something on her side: California’s anti-SLAPP law, the strongest in the country. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and refers to lawsuits that are meant to silence speech that’s protected by the First Amendment, state constitutions, and other statutes.

State anti-SLAPP laws give people “an ability to fight back,” Goldowitz said. Defendants are able to ask courts to dismiss lawsuits earlier in the process. Unlike regular motions to dismiss or requests for summary judgment at the start of other kinds of lawsuits, people fighting SLAPP suits are allowed to offer evidence not contained in the complaint against them.

The burden shifts to the plaintiff, who has to show evidence that he is likely to win. Lawyers are more likely to take these cases on a pro bono basis given that most anti-SLAPP laws have a provision ensuring that, if a defendant prevails, the plaintiff will cover the attorney fees. Other provisions ensure a defendant won’t be forced to produce documents or other evidence at the same time that they’re trying to defend against a defamation lawsuit. Strong laws also allow for an immediate appeal if the defendant loses. “They’re immensely helpful,” Goldowitz said.

Anti-SLAPP laws have been proliferating across the country, in part spurred by the experience of sexual harassment victims. “That’s something that really came out of the #MeToo movement,” Mondino said. Twelve states have either passed new laws or strengthened their existing ones since 2017.

California, which already has a strong anti-SLAPP law, also has a pending bill that would clarify that a complaint of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination is protected from claims of libel or defamation. That would have been a huge help to Lopez, given that Dababneh sued her for talking about her complaint against him at a press conference. If this law had existed and the first judge on her case had found in her favor, “it would have shortened by years the amount of time I spent involved in this defamation fight,” she said.

But 18 states still don’t have anti-SLAPP on the books at all. A strong federal law would extend these protections to everyone. Last year Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced a bill that would create just such a law.

“People who speak out about anything from sexual harassment to toxic [environmental] contamination to corporate corruption have faced extremely expensive and overwhelming litigation costs when a deep pocketed adversary decides to go after them,” Raskin told The Intercept. “This is a more and more common situation.”

While he admitted his legislation is “not a panacea” and can’t prevent a defamation case from being filed against a victims of sexual harassment or assault, the bill would allow a court to “quickly move to dismiss it and also put the costs of defense on the person falsely claiming defamation.”

The bill has yet to get a hearing, let alone a vote. Democrats are “generally supportive,” he said, but may need to be educated about SLAPP suits; Republicans oppose it.

There are also limits to what these laws can accomplish. Because the legal terrain is so varied across the country — and this is a very specific area of the law — it’s hard to find lawyers who can represent people fending off defamation claims, Mondino said. Even her network of employment lawyers often “don’t know how to handle defamation suits,” she said. “We often have a difficult time finding lawyers who can consult about this because it is so specialized.”

And even in a state with a strong anti-SLAPP law, it can still cost tens of thousands of dollars to pay a lawyer to file an anti-SLAPP motion, White, the law firm partner, estimated. There are only so many willing to do it pro bono. “For the average person, it is really going to be cost-prohibitive,” Holt said.

“People always think, ‘If I’m telling the truth, this will all be OK for me,’” Holt said. “They underestimate how much time, effort, and emotional damage that a defamation suit can do.”

The post Years After #MeToo, Defamation Cases Increasingly Target Victims Who Can’t Afford to Speak Out appeared first on The Intercept.

Weapons and ammunition were being handed out to civilians in the streets of the capital. Lang, who had served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on Ukrainian front lines following Russia’s first incursion into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, realized that his combat skills would be useful. He thought to himself, “My country is under attack, I have to do something.” 

Born in North Carolina, Lang enlisted in the U.S. military at the age of 18. After his service, which ended under murky circumstances, he moved to Ukraine and lived there on and off since 2015. Between now and then, he has also been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, a double murder in the U.S., and has spent time inside a jail cell. The man is no stranger to violence.

On that March day in 2022, Lang woke up early to make a phone call, but before he could dial, his phone rang. The man at the other end of the line went by the call sign “Dragon.” He was an old contact from the Right Sector, an ultranationalist militia once loosely attached to the Ukrainian military.

“He’s like, ‘You want to come to Irpin with me and fuck the Russians?’” Lang told me in one of our many text and phone conversations over the last year and a half. “And I was like, ‘Absolutely.’”

The Right Sector largely formed in 2014 during the Maidan protests that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, sparking a Russian-backed invasion of the Donbas region and the annexation of Crimea. The Right Sector was part of a ragtag, emergency mobilization of Ukrainian troops that included groups like the infamous Azov Battalion. 

To many in Ukraine, the Right Sector and groups like it were a key part of helping the country fend off the initial 2014 invasion and establish the legitimacy of the nascent government, even if the group waved a red and black fascistic flag and counted among its ranks anarchists, soccer hooligans, and some neo-Nazis. 

With the war entering a new, even more violent phase in 2022, the Right Sector was rallying to join the national resistance. Five minutes after the call, according to Lang, Dragon pulled up to his home in Kyiv. Shortly after that, Lang says, he was asked by Dragon’s commander if he was familiar with a number of “Western weapons” systems and if he could help lead attacks.

“I looked over everything and I was like: ‘Yeah, I know how to use all of this.’ And it was like, ‘Awesome, take whatever you want.’”

The Right Sector commander, who Lang said was serving under a branch of the Ukrainian special forces, put him to work in a squad with other foreign vets who were skilled and could take on Russian regulars in the streets of Irpin, a strategically crucial city north of Kyiv and near Bucha, the site of eventual Russian war crimes.

“We would basically create small kill teams,” Lang explained. “So groups of 10 to 12 guys, and we would go out and we would ambush Russian convoys … basically hit, get away, and disappear.”

Opposing Russia was second nature to Lang. Fighting was too. But Lang had never before served in uniform while an international fugitive.

The story of Craig Lang is messy and ominous because it raises questions about who we ask to fight for us. 

Lang’s time in Ukraine is in some ways a microcosm of the muddy and convoluted foreign interventions peppered across the last nine years of warfare in the country. Whether it was the failure of diplomatic interventions by the Obama administration and the fumbling of Javelin rocket sales — or instrumental training missions that helped wean Ukraine off of Russian-styled warfare — Western intervention has both inhibited the Kyiv government’s power and undoubtedly helped it.

Lang was a trendsetting foreign volunteer years before some 20,000 foreign applicants responded to the February 2022 call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for NATO veterans and other able-bodied fighters to join his country’s International Legion against Russia. Lang had made his way to Ukraine not long after he left the U.S. Army with what he says was an “Other Than Honorable Discharge” in 2014 after an alleged armed altercation with his ex-wife and going AWOL from his base. (The Pentagon would not clarify the specifics of his exit.) Though Lang once claimed in court to have traumatic brain injuries from one of his tours in the Middle East, he has volunteered — or tried to volunteer — for at least three foreign conflicts (for example, one in South Sudan in 2017), not including his U.S. Army tours. That obsession with fighting, along with his connection to alleged war crimes, is backed up by court documents and yearslong reporting by multiple outlets.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Intercept about his history of fighting in Ukraine and his legal troubles, Lang was candid about his past. 

In his telling, it all started when a post-military job in the oil fields of North Dakota wasn’t enough. He saw the news clippings about what was happening in Donbas during 2015, a time of intensified trench fighting between Kremlin-backed separatists (plus covert Russian regulars) and Ukrainian forces. Lang decided to try to find a way over to the war. After a little bit of Facebook digging and some text message exchanges with contacts, he found himself on a flight to Ukraine. 

This coincided with my own foray into covering the conflict. In 2015 and 2016, I was investigating the NATO-backed training programs that countries like Canada and the U.S. were leading to bolster the Ukrainian military. The training goal was to quietly and cheaply transform a rusting and corrupt Soviet-era outfit into one capable of countering any future Russian attempts at total war, without triggering an open conflict between the alliance and Russia. 

It was a classic case of proxy war, and as time went on, the Western training and funding helped grow and professionalize the Ukrainian military.

But volunteer militias like the Right Sector that had overtly far-right and ultranationalist ideologies continued to play a role in key areas of Donbas. In 2017, I was embedded at a Right Sector base near the now-decimated town of Marinka. I observed a platoon of very capable militiamen engaging in regular firefights and artillery exchanges with Russian-backed forces across the no man’s land. On walls and shoulder patches, I also saw sonnenrads (the Black Sun symbol of the Third Reich) and various other neo-Nazi runes.

These units formed a tiny fraction of the Ukrainian forces, though some were trained by NATO. Right Sector soldiers fought to defend Kyiv last year and still do; Azov, whose fighters were seen dipping their bullets in pig fat as a taunt to their Chechen Muslim enemies, put up a relentless defense of Mariupol. (Azov was made an official regiment of the Ukrainian military that until recently used a neo-Nazi symbol in its emblem.)

Even in the U.S. military community, signs of far-right extremism linked to violence aren’t hard to find. According to a University of Maryland study from last year, since 1991 over 600 American active duty and veteran soldiers committed acts of extremist violence. The large majority of those were politically far right, including several of the January 6 attackers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a strict adherent of the neo-Nazi book “The Turner Diaries.”

The presence of groups like Right Sector and Azov is a complex feature of Ukraine’s war effort since 2014 but not a sign of widespread Nazism. The country, facing total annihilation, has needed everyone and anyone it could muster to fight back against a vastly superior Russian force. But even if your country is facing an existential battle, that choice comes with a price if the conflict entangles NATO and draws billions of dollars in weapons transfers from the Pentagon. Everyone from U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized on these connections to portray Kyiv as a modern-day Fourth Reich, although Ukraine’s president is openly and proudly Jewish. 

Then there’s the further complicating matter of the thousands of foreign volunteers who have fought on Kyiv’s side, who are sometimes painted as mercenaries in league with a Nazi regime. Not unlike the weapons transfers and NATO’s training efforts, waves of volunteer foot soldiers have been a Western and global export to the war since 2014.

“I went to the Right Sector because it was easier,” Lang told me. “Because back then, it was actually illegal for foreigners to serve in the [Ukrainian] army. It didn’t become legal for us to serve in the Armed Forces until 2016.”

The Right Sector was a well-known and popular landing spot for foreign fighters, some with links to American extremist organizations and the global neo-Nazi movement. Though Lang described himself as a “constitutionalist” in a 2016 Vice profile of his Right Sector unit, he fervently denies being a far-right extremist. The United Nations formally accused the Right Sector of human rights violations in a 2017 report before it was subsumed into the regular Ukrainian military after the war intensified last year.

“It was mostly like trench fighting in some places,” remembered Lang. “Sometimes the Russians would push on the positions and try to take it, and you could get into some sketchy situations.”

Like many American volunteers with combat tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where the enemy rarely has howitzers, Lang experienced incoming shelling for the first time in Donbas. 

“I’d been around the occasional mortar rocket in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said, “but this was the first time that I actually had force-on-force encounters with artillery.”

Lang told me the unit he first fought with in 2015 had several foreigners and English speakers, including “a group of Austrians” with military experience, some of whom “were literally AWOL from the Austrian army. They had illegally left their unit.”

That same Right Sector unit became known to authorities. In 2018, the FBI began investigating claims that Americans and other foreign fighters in Ukraine committed war crimes in 2015 and 2016, when Lang was serving. He was suspected of beating prisoners and possibly executing some of them before burying them in unmarked graves. The probe into the allegations came to light after a pro-Russian and ex-Ukrainian security services worker leaked documents about the war crimes allegations; the documents included correspondence between the U.S. Justice Department and Ukrainian authorities in 2018 and 2019, asking for information on Lang and others.

The FBI said it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation” into Lang. But last year, Austrian media reported that an Austrian who served in Lang’s Right Sector unit and with other Americans was convicted of war crimes in a regional court in Feldkirch. Lang has never been charged with any alleged crimes in a U.S. court for his service with the Right Sector. By 2016, he had left the group and joined up officially with the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He left the country sometime in 2017 and returned in late 2018, after which he met and married a Ukrainian woman and had two children.

Between July 2017 and late 2018, Lang’s story took a dramatic or sinister turn, depending on whether you believe his version of events or the lengthy one offered by the Justice Department in court records.

According to a series of Justice Department documents, Lang is accused of murdering Serafin and Deana Lorenzo in a Florida parking lot in April 2018 with the help of another U.S. Army veteran, Alex Zwiefelhofer, who is currently in jail awaiting trial for those murders. The Justice Department says the two men, who met in Ukraine while serving with the Right Sector, intended to rob the couple of $3,000 in a fake gun sale. Their plan, according to court documents, was to use the stolen cash to finance a trip to Venezuela, where they both wanted to join paramilitary forces resisting the government. The same filings note that in June 2017, the two came to the attention of U.S. authorities when Kenyan border guards detained and subsequently deported them for trying to join forces fighting in South Sudan.

Flight records show Lang flew into Colombia from Mexico City in September 2018 and then left in November of the same year, eventually landing in Spain on his way back to Ukraine. One NBC News report from 2019 cites an Arizona court document saying Lang got a fake passport in North Carolina and then traveled through the border state to Mexico on his way south to Colombia. He categorically denies any involvement in the Florida murders and says that after a brief stint in the Colombian jungles with an unnamed paramilitary unit that opposed the Venezuelan government across the border, he flew back to Ukraine.

Since 2019, Lang has resisted a U.S. extradition order over the alleged murder of the Lorenzos. He was first taken into custody at the Ukraine-Moldova border crossing, setting off a back-and-forth in Ukrainian courts, which involved time in jail. He was facing almost certain extradition in the waning days of 2021. But his lawyers appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to hear it over considerations that he could face a life sentence or the death penalty in Florida. Previously, the Ukrainian government had asked for assurances from the Justice Department that Lang wouldn’t face the death penalty, which a U.S. attorney reportedly agreed to in court. By February 2022, Ukrainian prosecutors confined Lang to Kyiv’s city limits as he awaited word from the European Court. 

Then Russia invaded, and Lang’s fate became intertwined with the region’s bloody geopolitics. In the chaos of that initial period, all seemed potentially lost for Ukraine. The CIA, the Pentagon, and even President Joe Biden, in private chats with Zelenskyy, predicted certain defeat for Ukraine within a matter of days. During that time, when it wasn’t clear whether Zelenskyy would be assassinated or imprisoned or continue as a head of state, Lang found his way back into the war effort. 

Once Lang linked up with Dragon and his Right Sector unit, he wasted no time getting into combat. He was quickly assigned to a team of foreigners, he said, including British citizens as well as “some Colombians, and some Argentinians.”

“We had one time where we’re sitting there engaging a BMD,” said Lang, using an acronym for a Soviet armored vehicle. He described firing a rocket propelled grenade at the vehicle in the streets of Irpin when he and his comrades suddenly came face to face with a Russian soldier. 

“We turn a corner and there’s a [Russian] machine gunner coming, running towards us,” Lang told me. “The two Ukrainians in the front, they pop the guy in the shoulder, he fucking runs behind a piece of cover and we call out to him, we’re like: ‘Hey, man, you surrender. Come on over.’ He won’t come so I prep a [fragmentation grenade], toss the fucking frag at him.”

The Russian tried to flee but, according to Lang, “He just gets lit up like it’s a fucking turkey shoot.”

While it can be difficult to confirm the accounts of foreign fighters, Lang provided a series of contract documents signed from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until the summer of 2022. One of the documents is a contract between Lang and the “Special Forces of the Marines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine from the aggressor — Russian Federation.” It was signed in March 2022 and has no end date. International Legion documents, signed by Lang with a blue pen, state that the legion is enlisting the “service of foreigners and persons without citizenship in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” Those documents are dated July 2022. In a Raw Story report from May, an FBI agent confirmed that Lang was “fighting with Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces against Russian forces” as late as August 2022. 

Kacper Rekawek, a nonresident research fellow at the Counter Extremism Project who is familiar with documents between the Ukrainian military and foreign fighters, said that the legion contract appears to be real.

The Right Sector declined to speak to The Intercept about Lang’s record fighting with the unit.

“We are active military personnel and are not authorized to provide any information,” a spokesperson said in a text message, citing a commander who wouldn’t authorize any comment on Lang. “At this stage communication on this matter is prohibited by the management.”

Did Ukrainian military authorities care about his status as a fugitive from the U.S. government when they enlisted Lang last year? 

“Oh, they were all aware of it,” Lang said, referring to Ukrainian military leaders and his ongoing extradition case for the Florida killings. “You know, everybody was aware of it. Nobody cared.”

Lang said he fought as far east as Kharkiv in the Donbas region until an order “came down from the top” demanding that he leave the front and return to Kyiv.

The Zelenskyy government is now determined to ship him back to the U.S. to face charges, which highlights questions about how foreign fighters and members of the International Legion have been used since the war began. Several foreign volunteers who signed contracts with the legion have denounced what they call the Ukrainian military’s double standards, particularly in the early stages of the war. They have complained of being treated as cannon fodder and given few weapons. Though some standards have risen in the last year, many foreign fighters have left and far fewer are joining up. 

Lang, meanwhile, faces possible extradition and has again been confined to Kyiv by Ukrainian prosecutors. Ukrainian prosecutors declined to comment, while the Ukrainian Armed Forces have yet to respond to requests for comment on Lang’s criminal case or his military service on behalf of Ukraine.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said they “cannot make any comments” regarding Lang’s status. But court records show that in July 2022 — around the time Lang claims he was booted from the Ukrainian military — his case was assigned to a new judge in the Middle District of Florida. On June 8, U.S. attorneys filed a notice of status acknowledging that Lang’s extradition “remains pending” as they await the outcome of the European Court appeal. 

Whether Lang will ever step into a U.S. courtroom remains to be seen. 

“I don’t want to go back [to the U.S.] because I don’t feel like I’d get a fair trial,” he told me. “When we find out that there’s a secret war crimes investigation against me, it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy that I’m going to have a fair trial.”

The post Wanted for Murder, an Army Vet Escaped to Ukraine — and Fought the Russians appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some three hours into the 14-hour inquisition of Dr. Caitlin Bernard before the Indiana physician’s licensing board, the assistant attorney general asked her an odd question: “Do you have a tattoo of a coat hanger that says, ‘Trust women,’ on your body?”

It was hard to tell which part offended him more: the coat hanger or “trust women.”

Bernard’s attorney objected to the question as irrelevant. And legally speaking, it was. For the record, Bernard does have such a tattoo, on her left foot, inked years ago to remind her of life in the bad old days. She is not ashamed of it.

But the question was certainly not an opening for the doctor to express pride in her profession and her advocacy of reproductive health care. It was not meant to seek information. Nor was the query a misstep. The interrogator, Cory Voight, was on a mission to prove this respected OB-GYN unfit to practice medicine. 

But, it seemed, even that was not enough. As the surrogate for his boss, the fiercely anti-abortion Indiana state Attorney General Todd Rokita, Voight wanted to tear the defendant down emotionally and in the eyes of the public. Asking a woman in a professional hearing about a mark on her body — using the word “body” — was part of a larger strategy, one long deployed by anti-abortion forces against abortion-seekers. Now they’re using it against providers and advocates as well. The strategy is humiliation.

Bernard’s trial, at the May 25 meeting of Indiana’s physician’s licensing board, was the latest chapter in Rokita’s yearlong smear campaign. In June 2022, just after the Dobbs decision triggered the misnamed “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban in Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from that state. She told a local reporter the girl’s age, gestational stage, and state of origin, not her name or any other identifying details. She spoke again at a reproductive rights rally, warning that thousands of Indianans, including children, would be subject to similar, unnecessary trauma should the state pass an abortion ban in an upcoming special session. The case became national news. Bernard was celebrated as a hero.

Rokita was apoplectic. First, he circulated the calumny that Bernard had invented the patient. When it turned out the patient existed and a suspected perpetrator was arrested, Rokita cast around for laws Bernard might have broken. He came up with another false allegation — that she’d violated patient privacy and reporting laws — and petitioned the board to revoke her license. To do the job, Rokita sent the slimy-mouthed Voight. During the trial, many of his questions began, “Isn’t it true that …”

In another volley of questions, attempting to show that Bernard used the rape victim as a political tool, Voight declared, “No physician has been as brazen in pursuit of their own agenda.” “Brazen” is another one of those words, evoking “brazen hussy.” “She is unfit to practice medicine.” Morally unfit, that is.

Bernard is tough. She has withstood years of harassment and threats of violence against both her and her family. But several times during the hours of insinuation about her allegedly selfish, rash, and illegal conduct, the doctor was reduced to tears.

The IndyStar called the trial “persecution not prosecution.” After leading questions from a board member about the mushrooming media attention, including national news in which the alleged rapist’s identity and address were revealed, Bernard allowed that it might have been wise to describe her patient more elliptically — a sort of forced confession that she’d inadvertently harmed the child.

In the end, the board did not defrock the doctor. It did, however, find Bernard in violation of patient privacy laws and fined her $3,000 — permanent stains on her record. Arguably, her ordeal burnished her esteem among physicians, who decried her censure. Rokita did not break her.

But the champions of forced motherhood scored a point. The principled, trusted, and nationally respected Bernard was humiliated.

In 2020, Alabama abortion doctor Leah Torres was also punished by that state’s medical board for speaking out. In a moment of frustration two years earlier, asked by yet another troll if she heard the fetuses screaming when she aborted them, Torres sent off an angry tweet. Fired from a job in Utah, she had been invited to join the staff at the West Alabama Women’s Center, the only abortion provider for hundreds of miles around. Not two weeks into her employment, the state board charged her with lying on her medical license application about everything from her mental health to her intention to treat Covid-19 patients. She was also accused of making “public statements related to the practice of medicine which violate the high standards of honesty, diligence, prudence, and ethical integrity demanded from physicians licensed to practice in Alabama” — most likely a reference to the 2018 tweet.

“I felt like a child being reprimanded.”

In an unusual move, the state suspended Torres’s license during the investigation and through the end of the hearing. Seven months of earning nothing while incurring thousands of dollars in legal debt.

The committee that reviewed the board’s allegations did not concur with them. Nevertheless, they found that parts of Torres’s application “were suggestive of deceptive answers and a lack of ethical integrity.” She was required to take an ethics course and pay $4,000 in administrative fees to the board. Like Bernard’s, Torres’s reputation was tarred.

Also like Bernard, Torres was publicly humiliated. When investigators first came to her office to deliver the charges, they left with her physical license. “I felt like a child being reprimanded,” Torres told The Guardian.

Sometimes it appears that people in power are making their petitioners grovel simply because they can. Such nastiness was on display in May at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, during oral arguments regarding the case in which federal District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruled that the Food and Drug Administration had wrongly approved mifepristone more than 20 years ago, raising the prospect of the abortion drug’s removal from the market nationally.

After a series of weird conjectures and uninformed queries, Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod set upon Jessica Ellsworth, attorney for drug distributor Danco Laboratories, for perceived rudeness in the company’s brief. Introducing the scolding session with her opinion that the filings contained “rather unusual remarks” that “we don’t normally see from very esteemed counsel,” Elrod proceeded to quote from the brief: “defied longstanding precedent,” “an unprecedented judicial assault,” “the court’s relentless one-sided narrative.” She went on. 

Might the authors have been “under a rush,” perhaps “exhausted from this whole process,” the judge asked in sweetly assaultive tones. Did counsel “want to say anything about that?”

Ellsworth defended the language as reflecting the extraordinarily politicized nature of the ruling. Elrod persisted, offering alternative, politer phrasing. “Do you think it’s appropriate to attack the district court personally?” she prompted. “I wanted to give you a chance to comment on that.”

It was not an attack on the judge, Ellsworth replied. It was a critique of the court, the decision. But Elrod would not let up, and finally, the lawyer submitted. “I certainly think with more time, we may have ratcheted down some of that,” she said.

Penitence extracted from the prideful child, Judge James Ho took over with his own recital of sins, this time the FDA’s.

As both the method and the goal of misogynists, racists, abusers, tyrants, torturers, and the systems that uphold their power, humiliation can be its own reward. But it is not merely a social tool, and it does not act alone. Humiliation, along with shame and fear, are produced by and in turn fortify the laws that intrude on intimate life, control bodies, and punish those who resist. Together, restrictive laws and destructive emotions create the disciplinary environment that the right’s culture warriors have prayed and labored toward for decades.

Laws abridging bodily autonomy — bathroom patrols and genital inspections of student athletes, compulsory sonograms and lectures intended to get abortion patients to change their minds — intentionally humiliate their subjects, and always have. People seeking legal abortions in pre-Roe America, for instance, were required to seek approval from a (usually all-male) hospital board. Often, the winning plea was one of mental instability or suicidality — that is, self-incriminating evidence of the pregnant woman’s unfitness to mother.

Now activist public servants like Rokita and the members of politically appointed medical boards can turn to legislators to give their personal vendettas the force of law. Abortion remains legal in Indiana while a near-total ban is enjoined pending legal resolution, but confusion and fear about the law have reduced the number of abortions there precipitously. Alabama defines abortion as a Class A felony, carrying penalties of up to 99 years. West Alabama Women’s Center now provides comprehensive reproductive care, minus abortion, to low-income clients. Its staff is demoralized, and the clinic is struggling to stay afloat.

How do you fight an emotion? One way is to turn it around on its evokers.

A group of abortion rights comedians called Abortion Access Front have been staging political theater aimed at puncturing the confidence of the men legislating things they know nothing about: notably, women’s bodies. Their “Send in the Gowns” campaign encourages women to leave voicemails with as many gynecological details as possible, addressing the lawmakers as what they pretend to be. “Hi. Hello. This message is for Dr. Nutt,” begins Beth Stelling, calling South Carolina state Republican Rep. Roger Nutt. “I am lucky enough to have a womb [but] I do need advice because I don’t want to go to prison!” Her voice is both cheerful and earnest. “So the person I was making out with can’t stay hard with a condom, and it’s like, if I consent to the raw-dog activity and I get pregnant — I’m not on birth control, by the way, because it gave me anxiety, depression, dark patches of skin on my face …” In Tennessee, Abortion Access Front activists showed up at statehouse offices for medical “appointments” in hospital gowns.

In Florida, defenders of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights have taken to tossing large, white, women’s panties emblazoned with political messages — “pantygrams” — at those responsible for the excrement issuing from the state’s legislative body. One such missive missile, launched by Bonnie Patterson-James at a May protest, landed near a county sheriff, who claimed it bounced and hit him on the leg. Patterson-James was arrested and charged with felony battery of a law enforcement officer. She was also among the protesters who panty-pelted legislators from the gallery of the Florida House while they debated the bill banning gender-affirming care. Weeks after the event, several participants were arrested; Guerdy Remy, a nurse who has run for local office, turned herself in and was cuffed, booked, and locked up in county jail before being released on $500 bail six hours later.

The arrests were part of Florida’s crackdown on dissent, particularly at the Capitol, which accounted for over 30 arrests during the 60-day legislative session. “They’re arresting them for tossing panties,” commented a spokesperson for the Florida Freedom to Read Project. “Seems Ron DeSantis and his administration are the ones who have gotten their panties in a twist.”

One of the demonstrators told the Orlando Sentinel that the arrests were payback for embarrassing the governor and the legislature — and a sign of the action’s success. Embarrassment may seem a weak rejoinder to systematic humiliation. But it’s a form of refusal to kneel — and that is the only way to pull the powerful down from on high.

The post A Year After Dobbs, the Anti-Abortion Right Is Grilling Doctors on Tattoos, Tweets, and Too-Strong Beliefs appeared first on The Intercept.

“I have to say, I’ve followed this story from afar and only moderately closely, but I remain mystified why Atlanta officials are just so so SO intent on building this thing,” he tweeted.

The city first accepted the proposal to build the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — Cop City in the vernacular, a $90 million, 85-acre campus just outside of the city proper — while crime was rising in 2021, but also while the wounds of the George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks protests were still healing. A multimillion-dollar police training center, in the middle of a forest, with little transparency or recourse for voters, felt like a slap in the face to people who had been marching Atlanta flat for democracy.

The plan calls for the city to pay about $33 million today and another $1.2 million a year for the next 30 years to cover debt for the entity building it, the Atlanta Police Foundation. That public cost is about twice as high as was reported in late 2021 when the proposal was first authorized and comes after nearly two years of strident opposition by residents and activists far and wide. City officials are quietly arguing that this was always the cost and that everyone has simply been mistaken, despite no real effort made to correct that mistake before local journalists at the Atlanta Community Press Collective dug closely through the figures.

But here’s the thing: The Atlanta City Council still voted to fund Cop City early Tuesday morning, by a vote of 11-4.

Anticipating a potential disruption, Mayor Andre Dickens closed City Hall for regular business on Monday and banned outside liquids in the building, airport security-style. Dozens of cops hovered at the edges of City Hall’s atrium as hundreds of people waited hours and hours for their turn to voice their opposition. Virtually everyone here stood against the proposal.

Moments after the vote, activists shouted threats at City Council members. At one point, an activist lunged over the railing between the crowd and the dais to shout, “I will fucking find your ass,” at council member Jason Winston, a ring of cops separating the two.

The short answer to Hayes’s question is that officials don’t think their practical alternatives to replace the city’s ad hoc, dilapidated, and unsuitable facilities are any better. And they believe that people aren’t angry because of a dispute over Cop City’s cost or the environmental challenges associated with the land, but because the city’s messaging was badly bungled. Critically, City Hall’s leaders believe that potential electoral blowback is limited.

In another city, a training facility might be a parochial argument. But like all things in Atlanta politics, state and national political forces come to bear. Georgia is all too often the center of the political universe, and conflict descends upon it like up-tempo cicadas in the summer.

Cop City is caught between four different groups with four very different political agendas.

On one side, police abolitionists have made opposition to Cop City their shibboleth, a sign of ideological fidelity to anti-authoritarian principles. They’re not negotiating. Police are pitching a mock city to train police how to enter buildings in an active shooting situation. Opponents asked the council to consider all the ways $90 million might be used to keep that shooting from happening in the first place, likening the training center to a medieval fort in an occupied city or the infamous School of the Americas at what we used to call Fort Benning.

Graffiti declaring that “Cop City will never be built” ornaments the famed Krog Street tunnel, and overpasses, and subway pylons, and street signs. The energy of youth and activism — a product of four years of hard-fought progressive politics in this state and this city — organically suffuses their messaging as both an appeal to Atlanta’s left-leaning public and as a national call to fight.

National observers might try to connect the Stop Cop City movement to political forces that elected two U.S. senators and denied Donald Trump a presidency, but that’s not quite it, because the protesters are just as pissed off at Democrats as anyone else. After all, the decision-makers for the city of Atlanta are almost all Democrats. The mayor is a Democrat. At least 12 of the city’s 15 council members are Democrats. And eight of those Democrats voted to pass the ordinance.

Directly opposite the abolitionists stands a decidedly Republican opponent: Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr. Carr is a politically ambitious prosecutor who will almost certainly run for higher office in 2026. He’s not exactly counting on the Atlanta vote to propel him to the governor’s mansion. To the degree that Cop City is a political question, Carr wants to show a statewide Republican primary audience that he is willing to confront “antifa” — antifascists — and “domestic terrorists” on terms Georgia’s conservative base would find acceptable.

As crime rose in Atlanta during the pandemic, Carr and the state have responded by stepping up enforcement while ignoring local sensibilities. The Georgia State Patrol began car chases in ways that the Atlanta Police Department wouldn’t consider, increasingly resulting in deadly crashes. It wasn’t an Atlanta police officer who shot the environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán dead in January near the Cop City site. An autopsy report laid responsibility on six Georgia State Patrol officers.

The killing set off a new wave of activism and media attention. Activists tied that death, and the city’s liberal leadership, to the same illiberal forces in state government and in corporate Georgia who would criminalize dissent. For Carr’s crowd, concerns raised by city leaders — read: Democrats — about using state police and terrorism statutes to constrain civil protest are unimportant at best to aspirational Republican leaders and a side benefit in practice.

“State Republicans are using this vote on this proposed project to launch themselves into office for the next cycle.”

“What is happening is state Republicans are using this vote on this proposed project to launch themselves into office for the next cycle,” said James Woodall, public policy advocate for the Southern Center for Human Rights. “The silence by Democrats to let that happen demonstrates why this state is not blue.”

Then, on Thursday, police raided a house near the facility which had been an activist staging ground for protests. Cops picked up three activists: Marlon Scott Kautz, 39, and Adele Maclean, 42, both of Atlanta, and Savannah Patterson, 30, of Savannah, Georgia. Each were charged with money laundering and charity fraud.

The arrests introduced yet another challenge to the progressive credentials of city leaders in Atlanta: an attack on the mechanisms of protest in a city historically defined by the civil rights struggle.

But while Atlanta police officers conducted the arrests, it was Carr’s office who drove them. Georgia Bureau of Investigation officers swore out the arrest warrants before a DeKalb County Superior Court judge, describing the three activists as part of “a group classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as Domestic Violent Extremists.”

The local district attorney, Sherry Boston, didn’t argue the state’s case against bond for the three in front of a magistrate’s court judge. Deputy Attorney General John Fowler from Carr’s office made that argument instead. The judge was unimpressed.

“I’m concerned about some of the same things that the defense attorney mentions about the line between legitimate free speech and crossing into illegal violent acts,” said DeKalb Magistrate Court Judge James Altman. “Paying for camping supplies and the like? I don’t find it very impressive. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones of the allegations that thousands of dollars are going to fund illegal activities.”

Altman actually wished the three arrestees good luck and wondered what the state was thinking.

The city and the Atlanta voting public are caught between these two forces.

Dickens won Atlanta’s mayoral election in 2021 with a mandate amid one of the fastest increases in violent crime in the city’s history. But the political machine Dickens inherited is built out of Bondo, duct tape, and bailing wire. City Hall’s relationship with both the public and its police department was ruined by neglect and the erosion of trust that began in 2020 with the police shooting of Brooks and continued with the soft “blue flu” sickout that police subsequently staged in protest of the charges laid on the two cops who shot him.

Dickens has been a one-man army repairing relationships across the board, meeting frenetically with neighborhood groups and civic organizations while fending off a spurious initiative to separate Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood into a new city. He’s also cleaved ever closer to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is funding Cop City with $30 million in donations collected from the city’s corporate sector, and to other organizations that Dickens believed could rebuild the frayed relationship to the police. The foundation administers the city’s ever-expansive camera network, helps fund housing in the city for police officers, operates the city’s gang youth diversion centers, and has helped run the analytics on the city’s targeted repeat offender enforcement plan.

And the city’s homicide rate, year to date, has fallen about 35 percent and is trending back to the pre-pandemic baseline. While Atlanta’s crime increase was fourth-fastest in America for large cities, its fall has been just as fast. One year ago, Atlanta had recorded about 167 homicides in the previous 365 days. The annual count is 134 at the week ending May 27, an annualized rate of about 26 per 100,000 residents. If the city holds at the current pace, it will record 107 homicides in 2023, only seven more than the 2019 low.

One can attribute the fall in homicides to many things, just as the sharp spike in 2020 had many causes. The administration points to evermore aggressive enforcement around gangs, guns, and drugs.

When it comes to Cop City, the city has never had a Plan B. The general consensus is that the current situation is untenable: The police department rents classroom space at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, with hands-on training in neighboring jurisdictions. The fire department has been training in a vacant elementary school which is now condemned. No credible alternative has been discussed in the six-year process of planning for a new police training facility. Ending this project would set the process back to square one.

In the absence of a training facility owned by the city, Atlanta will pay whatever the market demands, said Chata Spikes, a city spokesperson for the project. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is more than a recruiting tool or a facility for progressive police training: It’s necessary cost containment, she said.

“This morning’s vote approving the budget resolution for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center marks a major milestone for better preparing our fire, police and emergency responders to protect and serve our communities,” the mayor said in a statement. “We know there have been passionate feelings and opinions about the training center. … I know there is more work to be done and I am committed to building trust, and my administration looks forward to continuing the conversation in the weeks ahead.”

The last side is the Atlanta public, exerting whatever influence it can on the other three.

Most Atlanta residents are neither policing abolitionists nor cop cheerleaders. Many neighborhoods, including majority-Black, overwhelmingly Democratic communities on Atlanta’s Westside, measure the city by its responsiveness to neighborhood blight, traffic problems, and crime. Conceptually, a police training center isn’t inherently controversial to most Atlantans.

It also isn’t being built in any of their backyards. Rather than muddle through one of the city’s acrimonious planning fights, city leaders alighted on a plan to build Cop City on city-owned land that wasn’t actually in the city, but in a neighboring county. A quirk in state law allows them to sidestep the normal planning and zoning process that way.

The most vocal neighborhood-level opposition has come from the City Council district closest to the Cop City site: Atlanta’s 5th District, held by Liliana Bakhtiari. Four of the other nine districts show significant opposition, political observers say. When the Cop City budget proposal came up for discussion in Atlanta’s City Council two weeks ago, hundreds of opponents came in a line winding through the marble halls and onto the street. The chamber recorded seven hours of public comment, with not one single speaker in favor of the project.

“Your hands are not tied. You are the rope,” Rohit Malhotra, founder and executive director of the Center for Civic Innovation in Atlanta, said at 3:20 a.m., among the last speakers of the night, imploring the council to change its position.

But City Council members voting to fund the facility believe opposition is too diffuse in the remaining districts to create a political opening for a challenger. And City Council members believe there’s a distinction to be made between highly motivated activists enjoying the spectacle of free-wheeling public comment and the quiet masses who don’t attend hearings at City Hall.

All four of the “no” votes came from members elected in 2021. Three of Atlanta’s 15 City Council members are elected citywide. Among them, only Keisha Waites (who replaced Dickens on the council) voted against the funding, joining Bakhtiari from the well-gentrified East Atlanta, Jason Dozier who represents parts of downtown Atlanta and much of the Atlanta University Center area with the city’s famed historically Black colleges, and Antonio Lewis, whose district starts with the rapidly gentrifying Capitol View neighborhood and ends in some of South Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods.

Questions have been building about Cop City since its first hearing. How would the Atlanta Police Foundation raise its end of the cost? From which corporate donors? How would it administer the property? Who will get to train there? Would police really engage in military-style training? How can we tell the environmental remediation claims made by the city would be served? How does the facility connect with the city’s purported commitment to criminal justice reform and social justice? What about mental health training? Why does it cost so much?

The mayor’s office has wanted to manage the narrative. So it instructed the Atlanta Police Foundation to refer all public inquiries to City Hall and to clam up. The city appointed an advisory committee, which stopped having meetings once protests escalated. The mayor appointed a new advisory committee with some Cop City critics on the panel, then initially declared that its meetings would be held privately. Dickens quickly reversed himself, but by then, the damage had been done. The result has been a disaster as protest intensified and Atlanta’s political failure to register public discontent compounded on itself without credible answer. Meanwhile, Republicans at the state level have done, well, whatever they thought was necessary, without regard to the political challenges they created for Atlanta’s leaders.

Phone calls and emails made to the Atlanta Police Foundation from The Intercept and other publications were redirected to the city’s police department, which was not equipped to answer questions that are fundamentally political. The mayor’s office repeated its talking points.

The process has not met the expectations of a city that is continually engaged in biennial warfare in the name of preserving democracy. Cop City increasingly looked like a wall with no windows.

But last week’s arrests broke silences. Over the weekend, U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who had previously refrained from public criticism of the project, both made statements about the arrests.

Both Ossoff and Warnock upheld the virtues of nonviolent protest in their statements and made a distinction between that and violent opposition. Those statements were an acknowledgement that the fight over Cop City has a national audience and might give city leaders pause.

“It is imperative that the response of government to the violent few not intimidate or infringe on the Constitutional rights of those engaged in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience,” Ossoff said.

Warnock, who has a history of nonviolent protest in Atlanta and has recently been confronted by activists in public forums for his silence, sharply questioned the arrests. “These tactics, coupled with the limited public information provided so far, can have a chilling effect on nonviolent, constitutionally-protected free speech activities those of us in the fight for justice have been engaged in for years,” he said. “The work of bail funds and providing support and legal representation has been critical to moving our nation forward, including during the Civil Rights Movement and in the years since. … The images of the raid reinforce the very suspicions that help to animate the current conflict — namely, concerns Georgians have about over-policing, the quelling of dissent in a democracy, and the militarization of our police.”

The people who held down chairs in the hall for 16 hours awaiting the funding vote are, often, the same people who knock on doors and phone bank and raise money during election season. The impact of this vote isn’t likely to change much about the composition of the Atlanta City Council. But it could impact the 2024 presidential race in Georgia, and by extension in America, given Georgia’s newfound swing-state status.

In the absence of strong grassroots activism, Georgia Democrats look at results like Stacey Abrams’s 54-46 loss to Brian Kemp for governor last year. With it, they can squeeze out narrow victories that denied Trump this state’s 16 electors and denied Herschel Walker a Senate seat.

If the vote had failed, the right would have weaponized that failure as Atlanta “coddling criminals” and “defunding the police.” But they’ll do that anyway. The question is whether Democrats will lose more from the attacks than they gain from activist support. It is the Democratic Party’s job to make that calculation. But the comments by Ossoff and Warnock this weekend suggest they’re thinking about it.

Update: June 6, 2023, 10:05 p.m. ET
The piece has been updated to clarify the context of Rohit Malhotra’s comments.

The post No One Believes in Cop City. So Why Did Atlanta’s City Council Fund It? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Once a fetal heartbeat could be detected, typically around the sixth week of pregnancy … ”

When I read this phrase in the New Yorker, referring to Texas’s first abortion ban, I shot off a letter to the editor. “This is misleading,” I wrote. “There is no heartbeat at six weeks because the fetus does not yet have a heart. As San Francisco OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Kerns told NPR: ‘What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart.’” I noted that “a six-week fetus is about the size and shape of a baked bean.”

If the vaunted New Yorker copy desk could let this bit of anti-abortion bunk stand without comment, what was going on? I combed the media. Not just the National Review—which calls corrections like Dr. Kerns’s “mendacity”— or the Catholic press but also mainstream local and national news outlets including CNN, The Associated Press, Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, and PBS were parroting the same descriptor of the inaccurately — and of course strategically — named “fetal heartbeat” laws being debated or enacted in states from Idaho to Iowa, Georgia to New Hampshire.

The chorus resounded from websites, television, and radio from coast to coast: South Carolina was debating a law that “bans most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, which can commonly be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy”; in Georgia, a “law banning abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks”; Nebraska’s legislature made an “unconventional move … after conservatives failed to advance a bill that would have banned abortion once cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks of pregnancy.”

A number of the reports got it half right, adding that when the so-called heartbeat is first detected, many women do not even know they are pregnant.

Maybe it’s correction fatigue, brought on by Donald Trump’s 35,500-plus lies and the subsequent atrophy of truth in politics and media. In any case, there are signs of increasing credulity — or laziness. In May 2021, the AP published an in-depth piece headlined “‘Fetal heartbeat’ in abortion laws taps emotion, not science,” by staff reporters Julie Carr Smyth and Kimberlee Kruesi. A year later — the week the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson came down, upholding Mississippi’s 15-week ban and nullifying the constitutional right to abortion — Smyth was tasked with penning a Q&A explainer of current heartbeat laws.

Like the previous article, this one put “fetal heartbeat” between quotes every time. Unlike the first, however, the explainer toggled between truth and fiction. In the second paragraph, Smyth hit the “fetal heartbeat” shortcut key: “Such laws, often referred to as ‘fetal heartbeat bills,’ ban abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen around six weeks into pregnancy.” This deception by omission — there is no cardiac activity without a heart — is repeated at paragraph 8. At paragraph 12 comes the caveat that the widely used legislative language of unborn humans and beating hearts “does not easily translate to medical science” — there’s a link to the previous year’s piece — “because at the point where advanced technology can detect that first visual flutter … the embryo isn’t yet a fetus, and it doesn’t have a heart.” Paragraphs 16 and 22 refer again to “cardiac activity.”

But the other side also fiddles with the facts, notes Smyth. Abortion rights proponents often call these laws six-week abortion bans. “That, too, is misleading,” she writes, because the texts “make no mention of a particular gestational age after which abortion is illegal.” Ecce balance.

Always better at propaganda than its opponents and, also unlike its opponents, instinctively sentimental, the anti-abortion movement was quick to appropriate the heart as both the metaphor of love and compassion and the critical sign of life itself.

Even before Roe, the opponents of abortion had conflated science and religious morality through language, transforming a blob of disorganized embryonic cells into an “unborn child.” “To take the life of an unborn child, regardless of the number of days it has been forming, is murder,” read a 1967 pamphlet called “Abortion: Yes or No?” But it was in 1983, a decade after Roe, with virtually no anti-abortion victories to show — 88 of 96 abortion bills introduced in state legislatures and Congress were defeated, and public opinion stuck heavily in support of abortion rights — that a fortunate stroke of political instinct matured into strategy.

The anti-abortion movement was quick to appropriate the heart as both the metaphor of love and compassion and the critical sign of life itself.

That year, a banner headline in the National Right to Life News proclaimed: “Science: The Pro-Life Movement’s Emerging Ally.” The next year came “The Silent Scream,” a 28-minute film that the Right to Life Committee called the “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the pro-life movement,” and rightfully so: It is probably the most influential piece of propaganda in the history of the abortion debates. Narrated by the late abortion doctor turned anti-abortion spokesperson Bernard Nathanson, the film presents the sonographic record of a 12-week vacuum aspiration abortion as visible testimony to the alleged pain and distress of the “little person” at the moment of its destruction.

New technologies “have convinced us that beyond question, the unborn child is simply … another member of the human community,” intones Nathanson, “indistinguishable in every way from any of us.” Deftly moving between technical explanations of sonography and embryology, and emotionally charged descriptions of abortion and the alleged suffering of the preborn “child,” “The Silent Scream” epitomizes the movement’s dominant rhetorical strategy going forward: serving up scientific bullshit generously sweetened with sap.

In 1992, the strategy was refined: The heart became the synecdoche for the body and soul of the unborn. Right to Life launched a media campaign with the tagline “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.” The accompanying graphic, reproduced on flyers and political buttons, was an EKG zigzag flatlining across a red valentine-shaped heart.

Then in 2011, veteran antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activist Janet Folger Porter transformed rhetoric into legislation. The former legislative director of Ohio Right to Life and founder of Faith2Action (“formed to WIN the cultural war for life, liberty, and the family”) conceived and lobbied indefatigably for the first state “fetal heartbeat” law, which Ohio enacted in 2012. Porter fueled the campaign with heart-shaped balloons, teddy bears, and red roses. Its slogan fused science and sentiment: “If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.”

The idea spread quickly. National Right to Life released a one-minute video. Its images are intrauterine closeups; its opening soundtrack is a rumble resembling the background noise of a Weather Channel hurricane report, with a woman’s voice above it: “You are listening to the sound of the heartbeat of a living unborn baby.” Within a decade, more than a dozen states had adopted the language of Folger’s bill almost identically.

There are exceptions to the press’s rote adoption of right-to-life language, New York Times’ coverage among them. For its part, the reproductive justice movement is finally upping its rhetorical game, renaming the heartbeat legislation “forced pregnancy” or “forced motherhood” laws. But the forced motherhood movement is constantly, often quietly, escalating the discursive battle. The “unborn baby” has now been promoted in legislative texts to the “unborn human individual.” If babies in utero are at least dependent on their mothers for protection and sustenance, a “human individual” can be construed as a person separate from and equally deserving of rights as its mother.

Anti-abortion propaganda is making its way into the legal record. It was a triumph for the antis when Justice Samuel Alito, in the Dobbs opinion, repeated soundly disproven claims as “legitimate interests” justifying the revocation of the constitutional right: that abortion is unhealthy and unsafe (presumably more so than pregnancy, which it isn’t); that it is a “particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedure” (which it isn’t); and, the fantasy promulgated by “The Silent Scream,” that abortion causes fetuses pain.

In ruling for the plaintiffs and against the Food and Drug Administration in its approval of mifepristone, Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk further enshrined antiabortion rhetoric in legal precedent by calling a pharmaceutically induced pregnancy termination a “chemical” abortion. The antis’ derogative sounds more painful and harmful, and creepier, than the mainstream usage, “medication” abortion. 

Will the media fall in line? On the website of Wyoming Public Radio in March, a news item began this way: “Wyoming recently became the first state to explicitly ban the use of pills for abortion. The new law comes as chemical abortion is in the national spotlight due to a legal battle over a specific medication in Texas.” Throughout the text, “chemical abortion” is used interchangeably with “medication abortion,” without qualification or quotation marks.

The post The Press is Falling for Anti-Abortion “Fetal Heartbeat” Propaganda appeared first on The Intercept.

Lahey has had bladder cancer twice, 15 years apart; her husband is wracked with illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even though he never smoked. She believes that proximity to the river is to blame for their health problems, and she’s not alone: The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, warns that the river’s polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are likely to cause cancer in humans, and a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study on the cancer link is scheduled to be released this year.

“Why don’t we just move away?” Lahey asked. “Well, because he’s 85 and I’m 82, and we want to finish out our lives here.”

Lee is a working-class town in the heart of the Berkshires, a rural region near the New York border known for its scenic beauty. It’s also known, among locals, as a place polluted by PCBs, dangerous industrial chemicals manufactured by Monsanto and used by General Electric in the electric transformers the company manufactured and serviced. GE ran a plant in the county’s largest city, Pittsfield, and dumped PCBs into the local Housatonic River from 1932 to 1977, when Monsanto ceased production. In 1979, the EPA made PCBs illegal.

After decades of efforts by local and state leaders and federal agencies like the EPA, GE in 2000 began cleaning the river and nearby areas. But the latest round of dredging, expected to begin in the next few years, would put a dump site in Lee. Residents of the town as well as local leaders — including the Housatonic Environmental Action League and the Housatonic River Initiative, who are challenging the plan in the First Circuit Court of Appeals — are resisting the decision. 

The town has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto as part of an attempt to find an alternative site outside of the region. 

The lawsuit is asking for compensatory and natural resource damages and for a court order “that will require Monsanto to deposit funds awarded by a jury into an escrow account so that Lee has the funds to move the 2,000,000 tons of PCB soil and mud projected to be dumped in Lee to an out of state location.” Lee Select Board chair Bob Jones told The Intercept that the town doesn’t have a specific site in mind, “although there are certainly licensed sites in existence.”

“We’re hoping if we can show that Monsanto produced these toxic items, cancer-causing PCBs, that if we can come up with enough money to have that, we can then leverage GE taking the stuff out of the area and not having a waste dump in the town of Lee,” Jones said. “That’s really what we’re looking for.”

Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, rejects the lawsuit completely. The company’s director of U.S. external communications, Nicole Hayes, told The Intercept in an emailed comment that Bayer believes the lawsuit “is meritless.” 

“There is no legal basis for imposing liability on Monsanto for the lawful sale of PCBs into the stream of commerce more than four decades ago, over which Monsanto had no control,” Hayes said. “Furthermore, Monsanto ceased its lawful production of PCBs more than 45 years ago and never disposed of PCBs in or near the Town.” The lawsuit does not accuse Monsanto of dumping PCBs, only of manufacturing them, and makes clear that GE was the offending party for the chemical disposal.

Despite Monsanto’s claims, a memo published by the Poison Papers project in 2017 shows that the company was aware of the problems posed by PCBs at least as early as 1969, eight years before it stopped producing the chemicals. The memo shows that Monsanto knew that PCBs could have detrimental effects on people’s health and that the evidence for its persistence in the environment was “beyond questioning.” A series of potential solutions was offered, including immediate cessation of PCB production; the company, apparently, chose the “do nothing” option.

Lee isn’t the first municipality to take Monsanto to court over its production of PCBs that other companies later dumped. Similar efforts in Washington state, California, Missouri, and elsewhere have had varied levels of success: Some cases have been settled, some have resulted in the company being ordered to pay restitution, and others have been found in Monsanto’s favor. 

“I feel like we have a good chance of winning because this is so clearly unjust,” Lahey said.

In 2016, the EPA made an agreement with GE and other nearby towns that GE would dredge the river and remove the contaminated soil out of the county. No sooner was the agreement made, Jones said, than GE went to court to change the parameters. That led to a mediated agreement, done in private with representatives from the affected towns — Lee, Pittsfield, Lenox, Great Barrington, and Sheffield — the EPA, GE, and environmental groups including the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, or BEAT, that resulted in the dump site being placed in Lee. 

Jones and Lahey are among the Berkshire residents in and outside of Lee who feel that what they see as the secrecy of the process — former Select Board member Patricia Carlino was the town’s representative — did a disservice to the people of the town. 

“To mediate, negotiate, and seal a deal without any knowledge or input from the general public is a failure of representative government,” Jones told The Intercept. 

The agreement was signed by the Select Board after 18 months of closed-door sessions and without consulting the rest of the town, something that still angers anti-dump residents. Under the agreement with GE and the EPA, Lee will get $25 million from GE in exchange for the dump site. If the town rejects the site, the funding is off the table. 

“A PCB dump was imposed on a town of only about 5,500 people, plus or minus, without their knowledge,” Jones said.

Jane Winn, BEAT executive director, agrees that Monsanto should be held responsible for its role in producing PCBs. She remembers a time when the river and surrounding wetlands were in far worse shape than they are today, due to the chemical’s corrosive damage. The river used to change color and catch fire, she said.

Despite Winn’s support for the lawsuit, she doesn’t think it’s likely to succeed. Winn, as BEAT executive director, was a signatory to the consent decree putting the dump in Lee. She told The Intercept that while she’d like to see a more permanent remedial solution, “the site they’ve chosen, if it has to be in the Berkshires, is a reasonable site.” 

Winn said that the dump in Lee is a “downside” to the cleanup but that the trade-off of having low-level contaminant soil put in the town site is the compromise in order to get to that point. She understands that Lee feels it’s been treated unfairly but urged perspective: “They’re getting more sediment out of the river in Lee because of it.”

There’s some outright local opposition to Lee’s lawsuit. The Berkshire Eagle, in an opinion piece taking issue with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s written support for the Lee effort, questioned what the next move would be if the dump were stopped and endorsed the site as an imperfect but ultimately necessary solution to the river’s pollution. 

“While the dump disproportionately affects Lee (and Lenox Dale), the fate of a comprehensive Housatonic cleanup plan matters to a much broader part of the Berkshire community,” the paper’s editorial board wrote in the unsigned opinion piece. “Whatever the intensity of the understandable hard feelings in Lee, it’s reasonable to ask what the procedural limits of reflexive opposition are here.”

It’s not lost on Jones that the site is in the poorest town of the towns involved in the discussions. “It’s a working-class town,” Jones said. “It was a mill town, but the mills are gone.”

“We’re the ones who have to bear the burden of it,” he added.

The post A Massachusetts Town Is Suing Monsanto for Its Cancer-Causing PCBs appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2012, Crow and his family were granted passports for St. Kitts and Nevis, a tax haven known for impenetrable financial secrecy, through a cash-for-citizenship scheme. Documents provided to the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation by a whistleblower as part of its Passport Papers investigation and reviewed by the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, and The Intercept suggest Crow and his brother Trammell S. Crow paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the passports. Financial transparency experts say the island’s tax regime would make tracking Crow’s assets, including gifts to Supreme Court justices, extremely difficult.

The documents were leaked from Henley and Partners, a London-based firm known for assisting the ultra-wealthy in obtaining “golden passports,” which allow the holders to shield assets from their home country’s tax authorities. The firm advertises itself as “the global leader in residence and citizenship by investment” and has been shown to do business with controversial clients. An Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project investigation using the leaked documents reported that the firm was working with a rogues’ gallery of accused financial criminals from around the world. An investigative journalism collaboration, also based on the leaked trove of Henley documents, reported that oligarchs, fugitives, and sanctioned businesspeople were among the clients seeking foreign passports. The passports, granted in 2012, would expire after 10 years unless renewed. It’s unclear if the Crow family renewed them last year.

The revelation of Crow’s history as a dual citizen of a nation considered to be one of the world’s most secretive tax havens raises new questions about the lavish, undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, first revealed by ProPublica. On Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to Crow seeking evidence that Crow “complied with all relevant federal tax and ethics laws,” something his dual-citizen status is sure to complicate.

“The American public deserves a full accounting of the full extent of your largesse towards Justice Thomas, including whether these gifts complied with all relevant federal tax and ethics laws,” Wyden wrote to Crow, demanding answers to detailed questions about whether he complied with IRS gift tax rules by May 8. St. Kitts and Nevis passport holders are not subject to a gift tax.

Even among tax havens, St. Kitts and Nevis is considered high risk by regulators, once even appearing on a Financial Stability Forum list of countries that were “non-cooperative” with global efforts to fight money laundering and financial crime. In 2018, the European Union moved the nation to a list of “non-cooperative jurisdictions,” citing its “harmful preferential tax regime.” A 2018 investigation in The Guardian dubbed it “the world’s most secretive offshore haven.” Even when tens of thousands of St. Kitts and Nevis business documents appeared in the “Paradise Papers” leak, company ownership was still hidden because the jurisdiction keeps so little information filed.

“International business tycoons and politicians, who have looted the assets of their nations — and other high wealth individuals — have used the dubious network of offshore tax havens across the world, which includes St. Kitts and Nevis, to hide their assets and income,” said Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee overseeing courts.

Harlan Crow did not respond to questions about his citizenship arrangement.

There is no evidence that Crow’s dual citizenship is connected to any illegal activity. A review of Supreme Court cases involving dual citizenship and taxation do not show any obvious signs of influence by Crow or favorable decisions by Thomas. But the existence of the potential conflict of interest is alarming to ethics experts.

How Justice Clarence Thomas May Have Benefited

Thomas has enjoyed one of Crow’s overseas assets registered in another “tax efficient” jurisdiction. The billionaire’s 162-foot luxury yacht, the Michaela Rose, that Thomas and his family spent a nine-day trip on in Indonesia in 2019, is owned by Rochelle Marine Limited, a company domiciled in Guernsey, a British protectorate in the Channel Islands known for minimal taxation and maximum secrecy.

“If tax avoidance and secrecy are what Harlan Crow was seeking, it might be no coincidence that concurrently and for more than two decades Justice Thomas has been concealing the full extent of his financial relationship with Harlan Crow,” said Johnson, who recently introduced legislation in the House that would create ethics and transparency rules for Supreme Court justices. “The public interest requires that financial relationships between Supreme Court justices and people like Harlan Crow be publicly disclosed.”

According to NPR, the value of Thomas’s undisclosed gifts could total over a million dollars, and ProPublica’s investigation valued the Indonesia trip alone at $500,000. ProPublica later revealed that in 2014 one of Crow’s companies purchased and renovated Thomas’s mother’s home in addition to buying several lots on the street. CNN then reported that the Supreme Court justice’s mother does not pay rent and still resides in the home. Thomas didn’t disclose the sale on his ethics forms, despite co-owning the home prior to the sale.

Thomas has said that his failure to report gifts he accepted from Crow did not violate the law because he did not have business before the court. But in 2005, an architecture firm appealed the Supreme Court in a case alleging misuse of copyrighted designs and sought $25 million in damages from Trammell Crow Residential, a firm founded by Crow’s father and in which the Crow family was invested at the time, as Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The court, including Thomas, who did not recuse himself, voted to deny the petition.

Crow is not just a close friend to one of the most powerful judges in the country; he is also a prolific political donor, personally giving over $10 million by ProPublica’s estimates, largely to conservative causes, and that is only in publicly disclosed donations. ProPublica notes he also donates to groups not required to disclose their donors. While current law forbids political giving or expenditures by foreign nationals, it does not preclude dual citizens who hold a U.S. passport from doing so.

Crow’s Dual Citizenship

The financial secrecy afforded by dual citizenship could allow Crow’s accounts in third-party countries to remain invisible to regulators in the United States.

Crow oversees several financial entities in another small Caribbean island nation also known for its tax avoidance policies. Three investment funds belonging to Crow Holdings — the real estate conglomerate on which Crow serves as chair — are located in the Cayman Islands, according to the IRS’s foreign financial institution list. One of the entities is an offshore feeder fund, a type of foreign investment fund that shields investors from certain domestic taxes. (A company founded by Crow’s late father, Trammell Crow, also lists a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands.)

“Feeder funds generally refers to an offshore fund that then buys onshore funds — it’s a way for foreigners to buy U.S. investments without normal reporting requirements,” said Sarah Alexander, a partner at Constantine Cannon, whose practice focuses on international financial misconduct. “In practice, it’s also a way to shield assets, and there’s a lot of U.S. persons who shouldn’t be there.”

“A very small percentage of American citizens hold dual citizenship with another country, and a key question is why Mr. Crow acquired St. Kitts and Nevis passports for himself and his family,” said Elise Bean, former staff director and chief counsel at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “U.S. passports already enable U.S. citizens to visit a lot of countries without a visa, and there’s no indication Mr. Crow or his family plan to buy a house in St. Kitts and Nevis, so what is the purpose?”

For a U.S. citizen, gaining a St. Kitts and Nevis passport would allow less restricted access to only a few countries like Russia, Iran, and Belarus, according to data compiled by Passport Index.

Payments for Passports

To obtain golden passports in St. Kitts and Nevis, the Crow family paid into the Sugar Industry Diversification Fund, one of several options for the citizenship-by-investment program at the time, according to internal Henley and Partners documents. That program and the law firm that had the exclusive rights to sell citizenship through donation have faced questions of self-dealing. The fund, controlled in part by lawyers associated with firm, made several investments into companies connected with the chair of Henley and Partners, according to an Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project investigation, and the arrangement was eventually terminated.

Documents reviewed by POGO and The Intercept show payments of approximately half a million dollars for the Crow family’s passports, a small price to pay when considering the potential savings to be had by avoiding pesky estate, inheritance, income, or wealth taxes.

The prime minister of St. Kitts and Nevis criticized the investments of the fund, telling Parliament it was as if the money, intended to help residents of the islands’ transition from the sugar trade, had been “given away.”

In 2014, two years after the Crow family paid for St. Kitts passports, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network raised the alarm on the practice. The financial regulator was concerned about Iranian nationals using the system “to mask their identity and geographic background for the purpose of evading U.S. or international sanctions or engaging in other financial crime.”

That same year, Canada decided to require St. Kitts and Nevis citizens to obtain a visa to enter the country, “to properly determine the true identity of St. Kitts and Nevis passport holders,” citing “concerns about the issuance of passports and identity management practices within its Citizenship by Investment program” — the same program the Crow family bought into just two years prior.

In 2017, the State Department noted in a report on money laundering that St. Kitts and Nevis’s Citizenship by Investment Program was “afflicted by significant deficiencies in vetting candidates and conducting due diligence on passport and citizenship recipients after they receive citizenship,” and noted that the country was a “desirable location for criminals to conceal proceeds.” The country remains on the State Department’s 2021 list of high-risk jurisdictions due to the prevalence of money laundering.

In 2020, the Department of Justice indicted tech CEO Robert Brockman in what law enforcement officials called “the largest ever tax charge in the United States.” Prosecutors alleged that companies in Nevis that were key to the scheme were used to hide $2 billion of wealth from U.S. tax officials. Brockman died last year while still facing trial.

Last year, Armenia’s then-President Armen Sarkissian abruptly resigned after a news outlet learned that he had secretly retained citizenship to St. Kitts and Nevis. Sarkissian has said that he received the passport after he invested $500,000 in a luxury hotel in the island.

Last month, a Senate Finance Committee report singled out the risks of high-net-worth dual citizens avoiding taxes. According to the report, investigators found a trend of “complicit bankers” helping high-net-worth U.S. citizens hide the true ownership of bank accounts through citizenship-by-investment schemes, like the one Crow bought into. The report investigated several cases where Credit Suisse was facilitating these arrangements on behalf of wealthy Americans, finding hundreds of millions of dollars hidden offshore, sometimes using St. Kitts entities.

The committee report points to a 40 percent reduction in IRS revenue agents since 2010 as a contributor to the problem, and recommends fully funding the IRS. Doing so, according to the committee, is “the single most important factor in stemming offshore tax evasion by wealthy tax cheats.” The Inflation Reduction Act provides a historic investment in the IRS, and the agency has pledged to use that money to pursue any tax avoidance by high-net-worth individuals.

Several U.S. watchdog organizations, including POGO, have called for an investigation into the Supreme Court justice’s alleged violations of the Ethics in Government Act, which requires financial disclosures, and, if warranted, for civil monetary penalties.

“The Department of Justice has a duty to hold Justice Thomas accountable for this flagrant and repeated law breaking, unless an investigation reveals that the facts radically differ from what has been reported,” wrote POGO’s Walter Shaub and Sarah Turberville. “The department has enforced the disclosure law against other federal officials. There is no reason to treat Justice Thomas differently.”

The documents used to report this story were first provided to the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation as part of their Passport Papers investigation and were made available to reporters through the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s Aleph platform.

The post Clarence Thomas Billionaire Benefactor Harlan Crow Bought Citizenship in Island Tax Haven appeared first on The Intercept.

Since April 7, when Amarillo, Texas, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk nullified the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, reproductive rights advocates have been decrying (among other things) his ignorance, intentional or not, of science.

“It is clear that the judge disregarded the strong medical argument that we presented in our amicus brief,” declares the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in a statement typical of this line of argument. “Medication abortion has played a critical role in helping people continue to access needed abortion care. It also provides people with an alternative to an abortion procedure; in fact, more than half of people who receive abortion care choose medication abortion.”

Now it is true that abundant medical evidence is on the side of the defendant, the FDA. Mifepristone is safer than penicillin. Serious side effects occur in a fraction of a percent of medication abortions. Carrying a pregnancy to term is far riskier than ending one in abortion.

And it’s true that Kacsmaryk leapt miles outside his mandate and his expertise (if he has any). His 67-page opinion contains every scrap of junk science heaped up by the plaintiffs, the hastily assembled Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

But is anyone under the illusion that the judge believes any of these alternative facts?

He knows, we know, that it’s all politics. As for the actual facts — that mifepristone makes abortion more convenient, less painful, and more effective, that the medication has been used in five million U.S. abortions since its approval — these are precisely the data the forced motherhood movement uses against mifepristone, to show that it trivializes and maximizes the extermination of the unborn.

The pro-abortion discourse conjures an image of the robed, Marine-barbered ideologue struggling mano a mano with a lab-coated nerd brandishing “Gray’s Anatomy” — the evil politicized judiciary versus the pristinely impartial biotechnocrats. Reproductive rights advocates root for science to save abortion from right-wing politics.

History belies this distinction. At every regulatory agency — the FDA perhaps more than most — politics and science mix, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict. This is not a problem. In a democracy, it’s how it should work. And it’s how the left should think, not just to win back mifepristone, but also to achieve lasting reproductive justice.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which led to the creation of the agency now called the Food and Drug Administration, was the product of a quarter-century of muckraking journalism about snake oil and chickenless potted chicken, of crusading Christian women and Senate floor showdowns between straight-whiskey state senators and blended-whisky state senators. In short, of politics. And “since then,” reads the agency’s website, “the FDA has changed along with social, economic, political and legal changes in the United States.”

As the government’s guardian of almost everything that touches our bodies, from bottled water to blood plasma, the FDA is the chief agent of public health law and policy. Public health, by definition, is a hybrid of social priorities and persuasion (politics) and preventive health and medicine (science). Just like the courts, the regulatory agency is a place where activists, consumers, corporations, bureaucrats, scientists, and politicians duke it out over bodily autonomy, capitalist exigencies, and public good.

How is this power struggle refereed? “An ideal arrangement would ensure that the FDA’s decisions remain accountable to public values while limiting the extent to which inexpert or conflicted political actors can influence those decisions,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, Steven Joffe, and Matthew S. McCoy, ethicists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in Nature Medicine. The authors propose a “division of labor,” where the scientists “make decisions about particular product applications, [and] elected and appointed officials . . . have a role in setting broader policies to guide those staff decisions.”

Congress makes the laws that articulate the mission and purview of the agencies. The president appoints the commissioners and may issue executive orders. Both draw the outlines for the regulators to fill in with details as conditions change. The voters hold these elected officials accountable. The courts hold the system in check. But, Lynch told me, no judge is free to second-guess technical and scientific decisions, as Kacsmaryk did. Numerous federal cases have stressed the “deference” the courts must extend to regulators’ expertise.

This dividing line between science and politics is not straight or impermeable. “The scientists determine whether a drug is safe and effective. But how safe is safe enough? How effective? Reasonable people disagree,” Lynch continued. “You need data, but the data alone can’t tell you whether to approve a drug. They are normative decisions, policy decisions. We the American people should have a say.” Industry — agribusiness, coal lobbies, Big Pharma — tries to have its say too.

Plus, policy decisions often have to be made on the fly during health crises. In drug approval, a big trade-off is “speed versus caution,” Lynch told me.

We saw multiple pressure campaigns play out in the Covid-19 pandemic, on both sides. The Trump administration joined anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists in hyping hydroxychloroquine as a Covid remedy and then pushed for its reauthorization after the FDA revoked emergency clearance when data showed it was not just ineffective against the coronavirus, but potentially dangerous as well. The Trumpians also tried to rush approval of vaccines in advance of the 2020 presidential election, before they were fully vetted. In 2022, a House subcommittee reported that the White House had “deliberately and repeatedly sought to bend FDA’s scientific work on coronavirus treatments and vaccines to [its] political will,” according to its chair.

Public health is always political.

“I think we can all agree that the issue of hydroxychloroquine has become politicized,” Trump’s FDA commissioner, Stephen Hahn, told ABC News in July 2020. “And it’s a shame because … public health emergencies shouldn’t be about politics.” This statement was followed by a long justification of the agency’s actions. Public health is always political. It requires positive, consistent messaging; misinformation control; reinforcing alliances; and discrediting detractors.

Democrats, for their part, overplayed the effectiveness of vaccines and downplayed positive research on “natural immunity” to Covid, host Meghna Chakrabarti recently argued in public radio’s “On Point.” “When absolutist politics from both Republicans and Democrats met an evolving understanding of Covid and natural immunity, what the country was left with was a hot mess of botched leadership and public health communication,” she said.

One of Chakrabarti’s guests, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee under Joe Biden, pushed back on the term “natural immunity” and the implication of political malfeasance: “My particular phrase in 2020 [was] ‘survivor-induced immunity.’ I mean, we never say … natural immunity from polio … because if you were naturally immune to polio, you may have been paralyzed.” With vaccination rates already suppressed by disinformation, the Biden administration wasn’t keen on encouraging people to forgo the shot, get sick, and pray to come out alive and immune. Did Biden, like Trump, take his own and his party’s political interests into account? It would be crazy not to, since trust in the administration’s credibility and leadership were critical to managing the pandemic response.

Probably no public health issue drives people as crazy as sex. So it is impossible to remember a single sex- or reproduction-related medical substance, device, or procedure that has escaped pressure campaigns and political combat. First, the Catholic Church vigorously opposed the pill. Then, in the late 1980s, the anti-abortion movement began steering federal and state policy on embryonic stem cell research; it still does. But sex-aversive politics do not come only from the right.

Case in point: emergency contraception. The morning-after pill was approved, with a prescription, for adult women in 1999. The Center for Reproductive Rights, or CRR, sued to have it released over the counter without age restriction. George W. Bush’s FDA slow-walked the drug’s release. After five years of go-aheads and backtracks, the agency’s top women’s health official resigned in protest. In 2009, a federal judge found excessive political interference. In 2011, after reviewing a decade of data, the FDA recommended the sale of the medication over the counter for all girls and women. Then, Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, countermanded the FDA decision, citing concerns about the health of younger teens. Obama supported her decision “as a father of two daughters.”

Denouncements flew. Days later, the administration unveiled a “compromise”: Plan B One-Step would be available to women 15 and older with photo ID proving age — something not many teenagers possess. The manufacturer was peeved. CRR sued. Still, everyone figured the whole thing was just preelection politicking — Obama was running against the Mormon Mitt Romney — and that the court would rule for the plaintiffs. We thought Obama, if reelected, would defer, because that’s what he’d wanted to do all along. This did not happen. The same judge called the administration’s policy “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” and reinstated the FDA’s earlier recommendation. The administration appealed and lost again. And in June 2013, after 14 years of haggling, the morning-after pill was put on pharmacy shelves for anyone to carry to the cashier and purchase.

Another morning after — after Dobbs overruled Roe — women started stocking up on emergency contraception. The FDA relabeled the pills to clarify that are not abortifacients; they stop ovulation, not implantation of the egg in the womb. But the antis persist in calling it an abortion pill. The saga is not over.

Of course, politics aren’t just for politicians, and regulation isn’t just for regulators and the regulated. And when none of these parties will move, direct political action is the necessary, right response. While thousands dropped dead from AIDS, the FDA under Ronald Reagan and Bush did nothing. Drugmakers and the FDA moseyed forward at their usual, cautious pace. ACT UP fought back.

From its first meeting in 1987, it led marches and die-ins, worked the phones to the press, and created some of the century’s best political art and agitprop theater, all focused on forcing the government to pay attention, spend money, and get “drugs into bodies” — now. At the same time, ACT UP’s Treatment and Data group schooled itself in immunology and the complexities of the FDA’s drug-approval process, infiltrated the research elites, and designed programs and protocols that put patients first. The activists demanded accelerated approval and compassionate use of experimental drugs for people with serious or fatal, as-yet-incurable diseases; broadly inclusive clinical trials; and close consultation with affected communities, including poor people of color, IV drug users, and women.

The climactic 1988 action, Seize Control of the FDA, was a spectacle of official resistance to these aims and to the despised populations demanding them. Workers stood behind unopenable windows gazing down on demonstrators carrying signs reading “time is not the only thing the FDA is killing,” shouting “drugs into bodies,” and “do your job,” and being carried off by police.

But with astonishing speed, most of ACT UP’s demands were met. Today, many are standard FDA policies. These victories took more than persuading the regulators to do the right thing. ACT UP, a largely white, gay group, reached out to diverse constituencies — communities of color, harm reduction and patient advocates, human rights activists — to awaken public sympathy and shame political actors. The activists were armed with science. But it was unrelenting grassroots organizing; smart propaganda; public education; and noisy, fierce, nonviolent direct action — politics — that turned the ship of state.

Among abortion’s defenders, dueling strategies have emerged. One camp, which includes the mainstream advocates, the Department of Justice, and Department of Health and Human Services, is doing what the mainstream has done for 50 years: go to court. Another, smaller group, whose arguments have been advanced mostly by three Pennsylvania legal scholars, favor a more direct route: Pressure the FDA to exercise its enforcement discretion — that is, the statutory authority to use its limited resources to crack down on some unapproved drugs and leave others alone. The Supreme Court, after all, has ruled that the FDA’s enforcement discretion is not reviewable by the courts.

The first camp accuses the second of acting rashly, politicizing the issue, and threatening the rule of law. Jennifer Dalven, who directs the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project, “pooh-poohed” the other strategy, as MedPage Today put it. “Taking some sort of non-enforcement action or ignoring the decision, as some have called for, won’t answer all of the problems, both legal and otherwise, that this creates, including the dangerous precedent that this sets for all other drugs in the approval process,” she said. Kamara Jones, Health and Human Services’s acting assistant secretary for the public affairs, tweeted, “People are rightly frustrated about this decision — but as dangerous a precedent it sets for a court to disregard FDA’s expert judgment regarding a drug’s safety and efficacy, it would also set a dangerous precedent for the Administration to disregard a binding decision.” She did not mention that other binding decision, from Washington state.

Camp two reject the charges. “[Our proposal] is not radical,” Drexel University law professor David S. Cohen, one of the three lawyers, told Politico. “These are real strategies within the law.”

And politicization is not the problem, he told me. It’s the solution: “What we’re stressing is that there are political strategies available right now. Meaning we need to put pressure on political actors rather than just to let the lawyers file their briefs and sit back and see what happens.”

Like me, Cohen is not sanguine about seeing what happens when mifepristone meets Samuel Alito. But even if the Supremes uphold Kacsmaryk’s decision, a unique political alliance exists to be mobilized. Pharma is flipping out. More than 400 drug and biotech executives signed a letter condemning the Texas ruling as a mortal threat to the stability of their industry and thus its investment and innovation. This is one of the rare times in political or regulatory history that corporations and humans are on the same side. Danco, the manufacturer of the brand name mifepristone Mifeprex, could apply for fast-track approval, the FDA could review the 20 years of data it has on file, and the drug could be back on the shelves within the year. Danco has an economic incentive to act quickly. But regulators need pushing.

“Political pressure is a role for everyone,” Cohen said. “To me that’s a much more active and involved and hopeful strategy.” Science is critical to winning the day. But science won’t move anyone or anything if no one moves the scientists to act.

The post Politics, Not Science, Will Win the Battle for Mifepristone appeared first on The Intercept.

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Uber but for African Schools

In the early days of the era of Silicon Valley disruption, two Harvard University graduates dreamed up a bold experiment in education.

Shannon May, who studied education development in rural China, and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, an education software developer, spied an untapped opportunity for some of the moving-fast-and-breaking-things going on all around them.

“In 2007, we came to Africa,” May explained in a promotional video for the company they would go on to found: Bridge International Academies. “Due diligence had shown us that there were an incredibly high number of enrolled children who were still illiterate upon graduation — and was there a possible business model that could solve this? Was there something that could be done, even though people said there wasn’t anything that could be done?”

The couple did the math and found that parents of impoverished children around the globe were spending many billions a year on schooling. Kimmelman invited his former roommate, Phil Frei, a tech consultant, to join as a co-founder. “We all moved to Nairobi in 2008, and within six months, we had the first school up and running,” May said.

Bridge is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world.

Over the next decade, Bridge grew into a chain of schools providing a homogeneous curriculum developed by researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to hundreds of thousands of students in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Liberia, and India. Today, it is the largest for-profit primary education chain in the world.

As the company mushroomed, it found ready investors. “It was not social impact investors,” May said in a 2016 MIT video case study, “it was straight commercial capital who saw, like, wow, there are a couple billion people who don’t have anyone selling them what they want.”

But the social impact investment crew was behind Bridge, as well. The company is financed today by some of the highest-profile do-good donors in the game — or rather, the for-profit arms of their networks, including Chan Zuckerberg Education, LLC, linked to Mark Zuckerberg; Pearson Education; Gates Frontier LLC, tied to Bill Gates; Imaginable Futures, linked to eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, a major funder of The Intercept; and Pershing Square Foundation, tied to billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman. The United Kingdom’s development bank, the European Investment Bank, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank funded it too.

To become profitable, May and Kimmelman had to scale up quickly while keeping costs down. “Bridge International Academies was founded from day one on the premise of this massive market opportunity, knowing that to achieve success, we would need to achieve a scale never before seen in education, and at a speed that makes most people dizzy,” an early version of the company’s website boasted. To do well with small margins, thousands of classrooms would be needed, because each classroom could bring in a profit of just tens of dollars a month. “The urgency is because the only way you can have a price of $5 a month is if you have hundreds of thousands of customers. We need 500,000 pupils to break even,” May said in 2013.

Their idea of how to accomplish such scale was straightforward: The largest cost when it comes to education is teacher salaries. But if curricula can be centrally produced and distributed on tablets that teachers read to the class, word for word, then teacher pay can plummet.

“You can’t have a brilliant-teacher hypothesis and expect to change the education for hundreds of millions of children.”

That, May believed, would not hurt the quality of education children received. While the school reform movement in the United States at the time was fighting against what it called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — easier curricula for minority students that reflected racist assumptions about their learning capacity — May argued that in Africa, high expectations are bigoted. “‘Don’t you have to have brilliant teachers in every room in order to have a well-educated child?’ ’Cause honestly, that’s how a wealthy person would think of it,” May explained. “You can’t have a brilliant-teacher hypothesis and expect to change the education for hundreds of millions of children.”

It was also appropriate to pay those teachers less, she argued. “You have to be able to upscale the teachers that would be available within the same community as your child. How are you going to get tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, of teachers to be working with hundreds of millions of impoverished children? They need to be from the same community. They need to face similar challenges. But also economically, they need to be part of the same economy.” Hiring teachers who are “part of the same economy” meant paying them just a few dollars a day.

Bridge ran into difficulties staffing up quickly. “The operations still have lots of tweaks they need, but they’re working well enough that it makes sense to now blow the business out a little more,” May said at the time. She admitted it was “much more hard to hire” good teachers who could grow as quickly as the business, yet Bridge plowed ahead with its breakneck expansion, hiring less qualified teachers at significantly less cost than rival public schools.

In 2022, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer conducted a study in Kenya to assess the efficacy of standardized learning at Bridge schools. The resulting report, which Bridge heavily promotes, found that public school teachers in Kenya were paid between $235 to $392 per month plus generous benefits, while Bridge teachers worked longer hours but earned around $80 per month with considerably fewer benefits than their public school counterparts.

“By not requiring post-secondary credentials, which typically represent a smaller share of the labor force in lower-middle income countries, Bridge has been able to draw from a larger pool of secondary school graduates,” the study read.

Bridge told The Intercept that all the teachers it hires meet the changing requirements stipulated by the Kenyan government. According to Bridge’s 2017 administrative data, only 23 percent of its primary school teachers held recognized primary education certificates.

Bridge also whacked away at the second highest education costs: facilities. According to Kremer’s study, while public schools in Kenya were required to have stone, brick, or concrete walls, Bridge designed standardized schoolhouses largely out of wooden framing and mesh wire, enclosed by iron sheeting — derisively dubbed “chicken coops for kids.” “Bridge’s founders recognize that the model deprioritizes physical infrastructure and they have argued that this frees up resources for expenditure on other inputs that can improve school quality,” the Kremer study noted. “Bridge schools are not made of ‘mesh wire’; they have windows with mesh wire,” a Bridge spokesperson said.

“Our biggest challenge is that we need to ensure we standardize everything,” Kimmelman was quoted as saying in “Bridge International Academies: School in a Box,” a 2010 Harvard Business School case study. “If we want to be able to operate like McDonald’s we need to make sure that we systematize every process, every tool, everything we do.” They later revised it for branding purposes to “academy in a box,” May said, “when we realized everyone here calls a private school that’s good an academy.”

Investors were familiar with the model: The company would understandably lose money in the early years, but as long as growth was steady, profitability could ultimately be reached. And, with enough scale, it might eventually loosen regulatory obstacles in the same way that ride-hailing app companies become too big for a city or state to do anything but accept them and adapt.

And Bridge saw explosive growth, opening hundreds of schools across Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as India, sometimes without obtaining the bureaucratic approvals and permits required to do so legally.

“Technically, we’re breaking the law,” May said in a 2013 article in the education publication Tes — a quote that was reused in a mostly favorable 2017 New York Times profile of Bridge. “There would be more people and more organizations willing to try and push the envelope and get higher pupil outcomes if the regulatory and legal framework was less restrictive,” May went on. “You have to be extreme. You have to take real risks to work in those environments. Often there are [laws] preventing most companies from trying to figure out how to solve these problems.”

Bridge quickly became the darlings of the Davos world. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim lauded the firm publicly in a 2015 speech. Whitney Tilson, a New York-based Bridge investor and hedge-fund manager, called it “the Tesla of education companies” in 2017.

That year, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lavished nearly 1,000 words of praise on Bridge schools in the West African nation of Liberia, chastising teachers unions and other opponents of outsourcing public education abroad to for-profit companies. “So, a plea to my fellow progressives,” he concluded. “Let’s worry less about ideology and more about how to help kids learn.”

By 2022, the World Bank noted, Bridge was reaching some 750,000 kids. And the results were encouraging. The Kremer study found that underserved pre-primary and primary school children received more learning and had higher test scores at Bridge than in other Kenyan schools. The study also showed that “higher-order skills” and creativity did not appear to be affected by Bridge’s “highly-structured pedagogical approach” to teaching. And, for the last eight years, Bridge Kenya students have exceeded the national average examination score in their primary school exit exam, according to data compiled by Bridge. The numbers seemed so promising that Liberia even contracted out some of its struggling public schools to Bridge, as the company’s global expansion only accelerated. Had global investors honed in on a business model that could do well by doing good?

Then, in March 2022, the World Bank’s financing arm — the International Finance Corporation — quietly divested from NewGlobe, the parent company of Bridge International. No announcement was made. No reason was given. Just a short disclosure in small print at the bottom of a portal that reads, “Update: IFC has exited its investment in NewGlobe Schools, Inc.”

The World Bank’s financing arm quietly divested from the parent company of Bridge International. No reason was given.

Among locals and within the global network of civil society organizations that work on development projects, rumors swirled that the dark side of Bridge’s success may have played a role — specifically, a series of abuse and neglect allegations in Kenya that had caught the eye of a Nairobi-based human rights group, the East African Centre for Human Rights, or EACHRights, as well as the internal watchdog at the World Bank, known as the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, or CAO.

“I think you are referring to unsubstantiated allegations lodged several years ago,” Bridge spokesperson Philip Emase told The Intercept in February when we first inquired about the allegation of “abuse and neglect” the World Bank watchdog was probing. Emase pointed out that the CAO was duty-bound to assess all allegations pertaining to their investments, but suggested that these complaints lodged by EACHRights, “an organization with a longstanding opposition to the education provision Bridge Kenya provides,” stemmed from a vendetta against Bridge, rather than factual evidence. “EachRIGHTS [sic] has campaigned against Bridge Kenya for many years. Bridge Kenya has been fully cooperative with the ongoing CAO process over the years,” he said.

It’s true that EACHRights has campaigned against Bridge, but behind some of the allegations lodged with CAO was a haunting story of abuse.

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An Alarming Discovery

During lunch break on a school day in the spring of 2016, David Nanzai, an eighth-grade teacher at Bridge Kwa Reuben, a school in the Mukuru informal settlements in Nairobi, found an anonymous handwritten note between the pages of a Kiswahili textbook sitting on his desk.

The note, which Nanzai surmised had been left by a girl in the upper grades, described sexual abuse by another teacher. The man had touched her, the letter said, taken her hand and put it on his private parts, and asked her for oral sex and intercourse. Nanzai shared what he learned with a colleague, Andrew Omondi, and the two set out to investigate. They would soon discover that the student had been one of many.

Nanzai met privately with each of the female students in grades six through eight, and Omondi encouraged him to record the conversations so they’d have evidence. “I had developed my own rapport with the kids. They looked at me as a father figure,” Nanzai said.

Eventually, they figured out who had written the note, and as they investigated further, they found at least 11 girls, aged 10 to 14, had been assaulted. They suspected three other girls may have been too frightened to come forward.

Reporting by The Intercept — including interviews with parents, former Bridge teachers and staff, nonprofit workers, community leaders, education activists, and police officers — corroborated the scope and many of the details of the sexual abuse. Many of the sources asked for confidentiality, expressing fear of reprisal from Bridge and concern about a culture of secrecy.

The students’ stories were eerily similar, as relayed by parents and teachers to The Intercept. The accused teacher would instruct them to come to school as early as 6 a.m. for extra prep. He would call them into an office one by one and close the door. His alleged crimes ranged from unwanted touching to rape without a condom.

“We brought him on board. He came for an interview,” Omondi said. “He was a good friend, a close friend.”

Married and a devout church attendee, the abuser had styled himself as a man of God. “He was camouflaged in Christianity,” said Nanzai. “So, he won the trust.”

During an interview at a community center in the Mukuru settlements, Omondi said he received training on how to identify and handle cases of sexual abuse when he first started teaching at Bridge in 2012.

Bridge told The Intercept that it has been providing “safeguarding training” to teachers and school leaders since December 2008.

Nanzai reported his findings to Josephine Ouko, his school’s academy manager, similar to a principal. Ouko, whom The Intercept was unable to reach for comment, called a staff meeting in her office with the alleged perpetrator in attendance. The other teachers confronted him, seething. Initially, he denied the allegations, according to four Bridge teachers present, but the teachers played audio recordings of Nanzai’s conversations with the students and shared their written testimonies.

Conceptor Shisia, a former teacher at Bridge, dropped to the floor, hysterical, when she heard the recordings. “When you see the kids that were abused, they are very innocent. You feel like a parent,” she said. “These kids, actually, they were tortured.”

“We were questioning why, why, why? Our question was why was he leaving the wife at home and abusing the kids at school?” said Shisia. “And he was like, ‘I don’t know what Spirit is this.’”

The accused teacher eventually admitted his guilt to his infuriated colleagues at the meeting, the four teachers said. The Intercept identified the man but was unable to reach him.

After the meeting, the teachers expected Ouko, the academy manager, to notify Bridge and call the police. But Ouko told them to leave her office so she could speak to the teacher alone, the four teachers said. The next thing they knew, the man had disappeared into the maze of crowded dirt streets that make up the Mukuru informal settlements. He was gone.

The following day, Omondi got the parents involved. He called Daniel Wambua Ndinga, one of the survivor’s fathers who was on the school’s parents’ board, requesting that he come in immediately.

At the school, Omondi told him what happened. Ndinga called his daughter and several other students in, and they verified the story. Ndinga then mobilized the other parents and escorted them to the nearby police station to begin an investigation. The Intercept spoke with a police officer involved in the initial report who confirmed that the incident was reported to the police but did not provide further details.

The girls were taken by ambulance to a nearby Doctors Without Borders clinic for check-ups. One student’s medical records, provided to The Intercept by a parent, describe her testimony to the doctor: She had been forcibly violated by a teacher in the early morning hours before school started and was suffering from anxiety. The records show that she was prescribed prophylaxis for sexually transmitted infections, given vaccines for Hepatitis B and tetanus, and encouraged to attend counseling.

The effects of the serial assault on the students and parents involved has been severe. The aunt of one of the survivors at the Mukuru Kwa Reuben school in Nairobi, an illiterate laundress who was caring for her sister’s child when the incident occurred, said she has never spoken out until now.

Months of being raped by her teacher changed her niece in front of her eyes, she said, and the jovial child who wanted to become a teacher herself grew unhappy and withdrawn. Often, when she came home, the aunt saw that she had been crying.

“I saw that my niece had waited for a very long while before reporting, and the days had passed. I did not know what else I could do,” she said. “No one from the school has ever followed up on the matter. … No one else has come out to ask me about this issue.” Her niece declined to speak to The Intercept about the incident. Her aunt said she wanted to put it behind her and forget the whole thing ever happened.

The abuse could have been caught sooner. Sometime in 2015, a year before the serial assault came to light, two class eight girls had attempted to get help from another teacher, Jackline Anudo. The girls had approached her, she told The Intercept, alleging that the same teacher was sexually assaulting them. Anudo tried to speak with the accused teacher but said he initially denied any wrongdoing. Several days later, Anudo said three class six girls approached her with the same story. Anudo said she spoke with the teacher again, and this time, he admitted the assault, “so it forced me to go to the academy manager.” When Anudo raised the issue with Ouko, she said Ouko warned her not to tell the parents and refused to investigate the allegations.

“I kept quiet,” Anudo said. “I feel very, very bad because when we are there, we, as the teacher — I wanted to make the pupils’ future better, to better their future.”

“These girls, some of them were in class six, and they were very tender at that time,” she added. She said she was subsequently warned by another teacher that she should not talk further to reporters from The Intercept, as the reporters might have her arrested.

In the months following the incident, Ndinga and several Bridge teachers attempted to find the man in the depths of Nairobi’s informal settlements. Several times, they got word from their contacts that he was in a certain location, but by the time they arrived, he had disappeared.

Told that The Intercept had identified the alleged perpetrator by name, a Bridge spokesperson acknowledged the abuse had taken place and confirmed the former teacher’s identity. Asked why the company had previously dismissed our inquiry, the spokesperson said that the company thought we were referring to different allegations.

And, in a letter from Bridge’s attorneys, the company added the threat of a lawsuit against The Intercept, citing the “potential for legal action” if the story was published. “The rare and isolated misconduct of a few bad apples should not tarnish the incredible work that these educators are doing in their communities every day,” read a letter from Andrew Philips, an attorney with Clare Locke LLP, positing that the problem was simply endemic in Kenya. It was, he wrote, “important to acknowledge the sad reality that sexual abuse of students by teachers has historically been a serious problem in Kenyan schools.”

The legal threat was a glimpse into the aggressive posture Bridge had become known for, a reputation that was forged in the global press amid its battle in Uganda with a Canadian graduate student named Curtis Riep.

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“You Need to Come With Us”

On May 30, 2016, just weeks after the teachers and parents had reported the abusive teacher to the police in Nairobi, Curtis Riep sat down in a café in Kampala, Uganda. A Ph.D. candidate in educational policy studies at the University of Alberta, Riep was in the city compiling a report on Bridge schools for Education International, a global federation of teachers unions.

He had managed to schedule an interview with a Bridge national director and a regional manager. As the men began their conversation, Riep began recording, as he did for all such meetings, so that he could later transcribe the answers.

So Riep’s recorder was rolling when moments later, a plain-clothed police detective dressed in a suit — or, at least, a man identifying as one — and two self-proclaimed officers in militarized uniforms carrying assault-style weapons approached the table. Riep later transcribed the resulting exchange verbatim in his dissertation.

“I work with the police — the Uganda police,” the “detective” said to Riep after exchanging pleasantries with the executives. “I’m going to be taking you now.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need you on the case of trespassing.”

“Trespassing where?” Riep asked.

It would later emerge that Bridge officials in Uganda had accused Riep of gaining access to Bridge schools by impersonating a teacher.

“There’s a school where you went to,” the plain-clothed man claiming to be a police detective said, telling Riep he “must come with me now.”

“I’m sorry but could you explain why? Where did I trespass?”

“Bridge International schools,” the man said.

“Bridge International schools? I’m speaking with these gentlemen right now, they come from Bridge International schools,” Riep said, naively and momentarily believing the mix-up would quickly be resolved.

“Those ones I’m not concerned with,” the detective said, “but you, you need to come with us.”

Riep again suggested confirming with the Bridge men at the table that no crimes were being committed. “Maybe we can speak to these men as well because they are the directors of Bridge International,” Riep responded.

“We are moving to Kyengera police. The details you can know from there,” the man said.

Riep demurred, saying the detective had no right to take him. “I’m telling you. You trespassed at their school,” the detective repeated.

“I had permission to be there,” Riep insisted. “These are the directors of the schools, so maybe we could have a conversation here.”

The Bridge national director’s voice finally entered the recording. “I, umm, this has nothing to do with me. You have your issue here. As for me, I’m out of this,” the man said, who Riep referred to later in his dissertation under the name Mr. Snow but has elsewhere been identified as Bridge executive Andrew White, a U.K. expat and a top Bridge official in Uganda. White was also later part of the Bridge team that responded to the investigation into serial assault in Kenya.

“Did you make a complaint to them?” Riep asked. There was no answer from the national director. He asked again.

“I don’t know what you mean. This has nothing to do with me, personally. I don’t know what it is,” the Bridge national director said, sipping his coffee.

The detective suggested the Bridge director would come to the Kyengera station with them.

“Yes, no problem. We will follow you there,” he said.

“I feel very uneasy about this. I should make a call before I go anywhere,” Riep interjected. “Can I ride with you?” he asked the Bridge director. “Because I have a few questions.”

“You can go with them,” he said. “We’ll follow you guys.”

“This seems fishy.”

“Yeah well, we’ll follow you.”

Riep asked to be able to send a message first. “OK, I’m just going to send a quick email to my family in Canada so they know if anything happens,” Riep said.

“Let’s go now,” the detective said.

Riep asked to see his badge as he opened his laptop to send his family an email.

There was no response. He turned to the Bridge director as he typed. “So, my friend, what is going on here?”

“All I know is what I’m seeing in front of me. The police have come and they’re asking you to go and answer questions about the charges that have been raised against you.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“What I’m seeing is what I know.”

“So, you haven’t had any contact with the police?”

“Do I know these three people? No, I don’t know these people.”

“No, that’s not what I asked.”

“It’s my first time seeing them.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Riep tried a different version. “So, it was just a coincidence that we meet here and then just a few minutes after, the police are here too?”

“Can we go now?” the increasingly impatient detective asked.

“OK, just give me a moment to send this email.”

The Bridge director stood up. “I guess we’ll have to finish our conversation another time,” he said.

“I thought you were coming with us?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

Riep hit send, and the email to his fiancé went through. He reproduced it in his dissertation:

… being escorted by police for something related to my research, not sure what is happening. Think its an inside job. Dont freak out. everything will be fine. but just wanted to let u know. If you dont hear from me within 24 hrs than take action. BUT PLEASE I WILL BE FINE!! PROMISE!! LOVE U

None of the three men with guns would identify themselves, and Riep made one last bid to connect on a human level with the Bridge director. “Please, I don’t know if these are real police. I mean, I don’t want my life to be in jeopardy. So, if you feel like you really need to protect yourself and Bridge to this extent, I think it is a mistake. Let’s not make this more of an issue. You are the director of Bridge so obviously we can sort this out another way,” Riep pleaded. The director was silent.

“Can we get moving?” the detective asked.

“Sure, well it was nice to meet you and I think we will see each other again very soon,” Riep told the two Bridge executives, and then turned off his recorder.

He was escorted to an unmarked car, noting that the men bore a “striking resemblance” to the private security guards the Ugandan elite hire to protect their homes and businesses.

Inside the car was another man, who identified himself as an attorney for the government of Uganda, but whom Riep later told the press he learned was a lawyer working for Bridge. They passed the Kampala Central Police Station and kept driving for more than an hour and a half, arriving at a two-room, clapboard police station in Kyengera, home to a front office and a holding cell. Four media outlets waited outside, filming Riep’s arrival. Two Bridge officials held forth about the danger Riep represented to the community. Riep, in his dissertation, said that the station’s police were confused about why he was there, which raised further questions about who the men who had “arrested” Riep at the café were.

He was interrogated by the police for several hours and told that Bridge had taken out an advertisement in a major local paper a few days earlier, on May 24. The ad warned the public Riep was “wanted by the police,” underneath a photograph of his face.

Riep in his dissertation later described the ad as “a very risky proposition in a country with an upswing of violent mob justice happening in the streets of Kampala.”

After being released on bond, Riep was required to return the next day for more questioning. Fortunately for him, he had consistently signed into logbooks at schools under his own name and affiliation, according to reporting by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Bridge could produce no staff witnesses or other evidence to sufficiently back up the claim that he had impersonated Bridge personnel. The police dropped the charges, he later wrote, but they warned him that Bridge may “come after you again.”

“The police cautioned me not to go out at night, to move to a more secure hotel, not to interact with anyone I didn’t know, to restrict my movements, and to protect the research data I had collected,” he wrote. Two days later, he went to meet with the permanent secretary at the Ugandan Ministry of Education in Kampala, and coincidentally spent 20 minutes in the visitor’s lobby with White, who also had a meeting. He said White seemed less than pleased to see him as a free man. From there, he was escorted by Uganda teachers union colleagues to the airport and, cutting his visit short by two weeks, fled the country.

Riep’s arrest was covered by the Washington Post and CBC and led to the co-founder of Bridge, Shannon May, being questioned in the U.K. Parliament about the arrest.

The British version of the World Bank had invested several million dollars in Bridge, but it withdrew its support following this incident. Bridge has stuck by its claim that Riep impersonated a Bridge employee, but it offered scant evidence to back up that claim. It provided The Intercept with a screenshot of a handwritten note by a Bridge teacher in Uganda making that allegation, though the note did not include the name of the author and Bridge declined to name the person or put The Intercept in touch.

Riep’s subsequent report for Education International, the teachers union coalition, did not paint Bridge in a positive glow, but Bridge offered a confounding response: “It is important to mention that our Academy staff members were especially open with Curtis Riep when he visited the Academies because they were led to believe they were speaking to a colleague,” Bridge said in a statement at the time. “They freely discussed work-related grievances, as one usually does with co-workers.”

“It is also important to note,” Bridge said, “that our teachers voluntarily choose to work with Bridge and can resign if an opportunity more suited to their current needs and interests arises.”

The High Court in Uganda soon moved to shutter 63 Bridge schools on the basis that they were “operating illegally because they have no provisional or other licenses.” Bridge fought the order in court but lost, though it has continued fighting and has not closed its schools.

Bridge has deployed the story of Curtis Riep to build its image as an aggressive corporation that offers no quarter for critics.

Bridge has deployed the story of Curtis Riep to build its image as an aggressive corporation that offers no quarter for critics. One Kenyan man looking into Bridge recalled Anthony Mugodo, Bridge Kenya’s legal director, coming to his workplace and making a casual reference to what Bridge had done to Riep, leaving him with a clear implication of a threat. (A Bridge spokesperson denied Mugodo intimidated critics.)

Bridge wasn’t finished with Riep, however; in October 2016, it filed a complaint with the University of Alberta accusing him of violating the university’s Code of Student Behaviour by allegedly misrepresenting himself. Riep said that a two-month investigation resulted in the complaint being dismissed. A university spokesperson said privacy rules barred him from commenting, though he said Riep received his doctorate from the school in 2021.

Riep, reached by phone, said that the campaign against him by Bridge was that much more outrageous given what The Intercept uncovered was happening at the same time. “They basically tried to paint me out to look like some perpetrator, which I find obviously just full of irony, especially given this new news that they had a sexual perpetrator within their own ranks, sexually abusing their students at this point in time.”

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World Bank Watchdog

Bridge had been battling a growing coalition of opponents for years, establishing a reputation as a sharp-elbowed company that responded aggressively to any hint of criticism.

In 2014, a Kenyan court ordered Bridge schools closed in one county for not complying with the minimum safety and accountability standards for educational institutions. When the county education board moved to enforce the court’s decision two years later, Bridge responded by suing the board and its director on the grounds that they had not followed the required process.

The following year, in 2015, more than 100 national and international organizations across the world released a joint open statement addressed to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, expressing deep concerns about the bank’s support for the development of Bridge in Kenya and Uganda.

In March 2017, Bridge sued the Kenya National Teachers Union and its leader, Wilson Sossion, in response to a 2016 report the union released called “Bridge vs. Reality.” Bridge requested a temporary injunction against Sossion speaking out against the company that was dismissed the following year.

Also in 2017, over 170 unions and civil society organizations globally released a statement calling on investors to withdraw support for Bridge, and the following year, 88 groups wrote an open letter to discourage current and potential investors from doing business with Bridge.

“It is clear that Bridge is a contentious partner,” a House of Commons report concluded, recommending that the United Kingdom’s development bank divest from Bridge.

In 2018, the Kenyan nonprofit EACHRights filed a complaint with the World Bank’s watchdog about general noncompliance with country regulations, labor abuses, unfair fees, and unqualified teachers on behalf of current and former parents and teachers.

That complaint kicked off an investigation that quickly mushroomed and, five years later, is still ongoing.

The investigation of the Bridge investment has become the center of a controversy at the World Bank over investor responsibility when it comes to “negative externalities” — the euphemistic term for damage that results from investments — and the nature of the accountability process inside the IFC, the World Bank’s financing arm.

The IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman was created in 1999 amid pressure from the anti-globalization movement for accountability related to private sector projects financed by the World Bank Group. In 2014, the CAO produced a damning report linking IFC funding to the murder of Indigenous people in Honduras, a scandal that would captivate the globe after the murder of celebrated activist Berta Cáceres. Under the tenure of CAO head Osvaldo Gratacós, which began later in 2014, the ombudsman completed a litany of hard-hitting investigations, uncovering major scandals.

In February 2020, responding to EACHRights’ 2018 complaint, CAO staff and experts traveled to Nairobi, the ombudsman later reported. There, investigators found something worse than what had been alleged. “The investigation team spoke to community members who raised concerns regarding several instances of alleged child sexual abuse at Bridge schools by school teachers,” according to a preliminary report published almost three years after the initial complaint.

Around the same time, in 2020, African civil society groups brought their concerns to Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., one of the more outspoken congressional advocates of human rights in Africa and the Caribbean. Waters, as the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wielded enormous influence over U.S. policy on the World Bank, which was looking for new capital from Congress. Waters conditioned the new capital on a series of demands, including the bank divesting from Bridge. Her letter cited EACHRights, which worked directly with some of the victims. The pressure from Waters led to the IFC’s eventual divestment from Bridge. (The IFC maintains an indirect $200,000 holding in Bridge as a limited partner in Learn Capital Fund, which itself is invested in Bridge.)

Meanwhile, the sheer length of time the CAO was spending on the investigation began to capture the attention of the global civil society community. But CAO’s head, Gratacós, was dedicated to pursuing it. Typically, CAO investigates allegations when a complaint is filed by a third party, but given the stigma surrounding sexual assault, such complaints are rarely filed. In September 2020, the investigative outfit announced the extraordinarily unusual step of effectively filing its own child sexual abuse complaint involving Bridge under Gratacós’s own name.

The decision to move ahead with the sexual assault investigation at Bridge ratcheted up the tension between the bank and the CAO. It was the last major decision Gratacós made at the bank. In October of that year, the World Bank announced that Janine Ferretti would be taking over as CAO head. Reached by phone, Gratacós, now listed as a realtor in Northern Virginia, said that he was unable to comment.

Ferretti’s appointment was alarming to many observers. Gratacós had been inspector general at the Export-Import Bank and had experience leading independent investigations of complex and sensitive publicly backed investments. Ferretti had a very different background; she came from the management side, and spent most of her career as an executive at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she set environmental and social policy — precisely the type of management official she’d now be tasked with investigating.

Three U.S. senators had even sent a last-minute open letter to David Malpass, the Trump pick to head the World Bank. Sens. Patrick Leahy, Chris Coons, and Tom Udall all expressed “concern with the selection process” and urged Malpass “to ensure independence” in the appointment.

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Human rights and advocacy group leaders worried that the move to part ways with the head of the watchdog was connected to the fight over accountability for the IFC and other mission-driven investors.

“I find it deeply suspect that CAO uncovers explosive child sexual abuse allegations in the course of a compliance investigation and shortly thereafter, the World Bank president unexpectedly terminates the head of the CAO,” said one well-placed civil society representative whose clients have complaints before the CAO, asking for anonymity for fear of reprisal against those clients.

“He appoints a management insider without experience in accountability or oversight to head the office, a decision that many of us in civil society questioned at the time,” the source said. “Meanwhile, three years after the child sexual abuse allegations came to light, the CAO has still not produced an investigation report.”

“CAO uncovers explosive child sexual abuse allegations in the course of a compliance investigation and shortly thereafter, the World Bank president unexpectedly terminates the head of the CAO.”

Then, Ferretti unleashed a storm of protest when she tried to bring in a new head of compliance, Emmanuel Boulet. Boulet currently oversees the grievance process at IFC, meaning that he is the point person when it comes to defending the bank in the face of CAO investigations. Ferretti proposed moving him to the other side of the table.

Outside organizations protested to the World Bank, with the heads of eight civil society groups — Inclusive Development International, Accountability Counsel, Center for International Environmental Law, Center for Financial Accountability, Arab Watch Coalition, Bank Information Center, Recourse, and the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice — sending a starkly worded letter to Ferretti in September of last year, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept. It described “Mr. Boulet’s current role with IFC management, which is defensive of IFC’s positions and practices,” and which he had held for 15 years, as incompatible with a watchdog function.

“Our trust and confidence is now deeply shaken because we fear that the appointment of someone to the role of Head of Compliance who is so irredeemably conflicted will seriously erode CAO’s independence, impartiality and integrity.”

A different letter was sent to the World Bank’s chief ethics officer, urging the hiring be paused pending an investigation. “This is the third recent senior level appointment at CAO from the Director General’s former unit at [the Inter-American Development Bank],” that letter noted.

The appointment was ultimately blocked, and Boulet remains at the IFC. But civil society groups are increasingly encountering former management figures as they interact with the CAO. “The whole office is just stacked now with management people, people who’ve spent their careers defending financial institutions against allegations of impropriety and environmental and social harms,” said the civil society source. “It’s very sad, because the CAO has always been the kind of beacon of accountability of any kind of institution, public or private. No more.”

Margaux Day, policy director at Accountability Counsel, a nonprofit that works closely with impacted communities who’ve filed complaints against the IFC and other international financial institutions, said she was grateful Boulet was withdrawn and expressed support for his replacement, but said the trend was worrisome. “It is concerning to us to see additional hires with that type of bank background,” she said. “And if you have too many people who are IFC- or bank-minded, communities will start not trusting the mechanism and it will be seen as just an arm of the bank.”

On top of that, said Day, “The IFC’s track record for remedying findings of noncompliance is bleak.” Her organization looked closely at 41 cases where the CAO had found the IFC culpable, and in only nine of them did they commit to any type of remedy. In those cases, rather than offering meaningful compensation to victims, they often simply made promises of improvement.

After the CAO found that a company funded by the IFC in India had harmed a fishing community there, for example, the IFC fought a lawsuit from the affected fishermen, taking its claim of absolute immunity from liability all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it lost that shield.

Elana Berger, executive director of the Bank Information Center, an outside watchdog that monitors the World Bank and other international financial institutions, agreed. “The real problem is the management of the IFC has never been committed to providing a remedy to communities harmed by the projects they finance, and this is particularly evident in their response to the Bridge Academies case,” she said.

Originally, the CAO expected to finish its health and safety-related investigation of the Bridge investment in September 2020. The CAO’s most recent update in the Bridge investigations was published in January 2022, an extraordinarily long delay.

“Progress on the investigations has been slower than expected due to CAO’s heavy caseload and staff turnover. CAO expects to publish the results of both investigations in the fall of 2023,” CAO spokesperson Emily Horgan wrote in an email to The Intercept. “While the investigations are in process, however, we are not able to share specific details.”

Left/Top: A young boy sits in an alleyway in the Mukuru settlements in Nairobi on March 11, 2023. Right/Bottom: A signpost promoting Bridge International Academies stands on a street corner in Nairobi. Photos: Brian Otieno for The Intercept

Seven years after David Nanzai discovered the note on his desk, the case remains unresolved and officially unsolved, and the victims uncompensated. The teachers we spoke to for this story have all left Bridge schools. But the IFC is working on a new framework to deal with such “negative externalities.”

In late February, the IFC put forward a new draft proposal addressing what it calls its “Approach to Remedial Action”: its effort to respond to the ongoing pressure to take responsibility for any harmful outcomes associated with its investments. “If harm occurs, they are committed to facilitating and supporting clients’ and stakeholders’ remedial action to address the harm,” the report read.

Dozens of civil society organizations panned the new proposal. The IFC’s proposed approach “falls short of expectations and fails to provide a comprehensive plan for delivering remedy to affected communities,” read a statement from a coalition of civil society organizations in February. “If IFC and [the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency] cannot guarantee remedy for project-related harm, they should not be funding development projects in the first place.”

Margaux Day also noted that the proposal would only cover future investments begun in 2024, “which leaves people harmed by the Bridge investment, among others, out.” Day does not have clients impacted by Bridge but has been following the case as a proxy for the global investment community’s willingness to take responsibility for its role in the world.

“Getting accountability right is critical for IFC and our clients,” said a World Bank spokesperson, though they denied the Bridge divestment was due to outside pressure. “Feedback from stakeholders will be considered as IFC refines” its approach to remedying harm and also to how it responsibly exits from investments. (The public can offer feedback, as well, the spokesperson said.)

The IFC has not offered the survivors of the serial assault any compensation.

The Intercept also asked the IFC, Chan Zuckerberg, and the Gates and Omidyar funds what, if any, responsibility investors had to remedy the situation. “Any instance of harm to a child is unacceptable,” said a Chan Zuckerberg spokesperson. “We would refer you to the letter from Bridge Kenya on the practices it has in place to safeguard students and immediately investigate reports of any safety issues.”

A spokesperson for Omidyar’s Imaginable Futures said the fund owns a 2.7 percent stake in the company. “We refer you to the statement provided to you by Bridge Kenya,” the spokesperson said.

5

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The Fallout

Even the best schools can find themselves in a situation in which a teacher or other school employee has broken the law and violated the trust placed in them by students. The question is what safeguards the school had in place and how the school responds in the wake of an incident.

Bridge provided The Intercept with a bullet-point list of nine action items the company took in the wake of the revelations of the abuse.

The serial assault, a Bridge spokesperson said, sparked the creation of the Critical Incident Advisory Unit, which advises schools on how to respond, and led to additional training to “recognize ‘grooming’ behavior” and otherwise stop abuse before it occurs, or report it as quickly as possible. “Since 2020, all staff are asked to affirm their commitment to child safeguarding every year by re-signing the ‘Child champion promise,’” the spokesperson said.

Students now learn “magic number cheer,” which teaches them to remember a phone number — also posted on walls of classrooms, signposts, and fliers — they can use to report abuse. The company takes a hard line, the spokesperson said, on failures to report abuse: “If you do not report a safeguarding concern and that is subsequently discovered it is a gross misconduct offense for which you are dismissed.”

When Bridge learned its academy manager, Josephine Ouko, had not reported the crimes, the company said, she was suspended and then fired.

Bridge said Nanzai was terminated in 2020 for defrauding parents who needed birth certificates; Nanzai said he suspects he was retaliated against for beginning to cooperate with the CAO investigation into the sexual abuse, which began in February 2020.

The company commissioned an education consultancy, Tunza, to evaluate its practices and policies. The report, published in 2020, found that public schools faced far greater rates of abuse than Bridge schools, though the methodology betrays an extraordinary confidence in Bridge’s reporting systems. For public schools, the study relies on anonymous surveys of students. For Bridge schools, the report largely relies on actual cases that were reported to higher-ups and investigated. The report, funded by Bridge, gently suggests that Bridge ought to, at some point, also survey its student body to find out if its assumption about nearly universal reporting through official channels is accurate.

The Tunza report also pointed to a lack of sufficient training and education for academy managers like Ouko: “From the academy manager interviews, we discovered that the academy managers did not fully understand that there was expert support provided by the CIAU or that Bridge would provide them with additional resources during the investigative process such as legal advice when going to court as a witness or financial support to cover associated expenses such as medical tests or transport to health facilities for the children.”

Many of the other actions that Bridge claimed to have taken were carried out by Bridge teachers, and parents, including taking the girls to the clinic and reporting the case to the police. The bullets also claim, “Bridge partnered with local institutions to provide ongoing counseling.” That counseling continued for months, Bridge said, and “would have continued as long as it was needed.”

That message didn’t always get through. Ndinga said his daughter never received counseling from the Wangu Kanja Foundation, a Kenya-based nonprofit focused on gender-based violence; Hope Worldwide, another nonprofit; or Bridge. “They did not take these children to counseling for the betterment of their lives in the future,” he said.

Ndinga was one of the parents who encouraged the others not to pursue the case, legally or in the media, because he feared that the girls would be stigmatized and shamed if the incident became public. And after his daughter went back to Bridge to finish her schooling there, Ndinga said he felt scared. He used to “monitor” her, checking in and investigating when she went to school early in the morning or came home later at night.

Bridge Kenya provided a statement from its director of gender and child empowerment, Lillian Wamuyu: “Bridge Kenya is appalled by any safeguarding breach. We have always treated safeguarding as our number one priority. All Bridge teachers and school leaders have been continuously trained in safeguarding since Bridge Kenya opened its first school in 2009 and students are recognised as safer in our schools. If any safeguarding concern is reported, swift and decisive action is taken, including alerting the authorities and providing full support to students affected. It is horrifying if any indecent act takes place in a school and it is the duty of all those that work in education to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice as quickly as possible.”

Wamuyu’s statement pointed The Intercept to the Tunza report and the list of measures it claimed to have taken in the wake of the 2016 incident to improve child protection at Bridge schools. “In 2022, Bridge Kenya became a founding member of the Child Safeguarding Association of Kenya (CSAK). Bridge continually ensures that safeguarding policies and practices are reviewed and updated, so they remain best in sector.”

Despite its efforts to address these issues, there have been other troubling cases at Bridge Kenya, both before and after the 2016 incident at Mukuru Kwa Reuben.

Court records show that in 2017, several prepubescent female students were sexually harassed by a teacher at another Bridge school in Mukuru. The teacher was arrested, and the case is still being adjudicated in court.

In one particularly gruesome case, a Bridge teacher at a third school was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for cutting the genitals of a 7-year-old student with a razor. After publication, a Bridge spokesperson, in a request for a correction, insisted to The Intercept that the man was found “innocent” on appeal and his conviction was overturned. His conviction was indeed overturned, but the court did so, it ruled, because the child was too young to give sworn testimony and the testimony was not corroborated. Nothing in the opinion declared the teacher “innocent.” The case, despite its made-for-the-tabloid details, was hardly reported, nor did The Intercept find any announcement or statement by Bridge International Academies pertaining to the incident.

One morning in September 2019, the mother of a Bridge student at another Nairobi school was startled to find a crowd of her son’s classmates outside her home. They were there to deliver harrowing news.

After the school’s daily assembly, her son, a young student named Bernard, reached up to touch a wire that was dangling inside from an adjacent building into school property. It was a live wire, and he was electrocuted and killed.

Another 9-year-old boy was badly hurt and rushed to a nearby hospital. His mother, Halima Ali, is currently fighting to get monetary compensation, support for her son’s ongoing medical care, and an apology from Bridge. The financial burden of the incident was devastating to Ali’s family, she said, but, at the time of her interview, Bridge hadn’t budged an inch.

“To be honest, I have so much pain,” she said, crying during an interview in her family’s one-bedroom shanty house in the informal settlements. “I wish it happened to me and not my son.”

The case around Bernard’s death was settled through a mediation process, with CAO bringing Bridge and the student’s mother and her advocates together to agree on terms. Throughout the process Bridge was reluctant to give her even the most basic remuneration for her son’s death, according to people briefed on the talks who could not speak on the record because the negotiations were confidential. The mother wanted to know exactly what happened to her son and to get back the sweater he was wearing that day. She also wanted a public apology. But the company fought to keep from admitting liability.

Bridge and the mother ultimately agreed to an antiseptic public statement that acknowledged the child’s death. “This is a joint statement between Bridge International Academies Limited and the Complainants on disputed circumstances related to the death of their child, who while attending a Bridge School was electrocuted by a live connection from a building adjacent to the School,” the statement reads. There was no apology, no detailing of events.

“It is clearly stated — and agreed — on the CAO website that Bridge was not at fault,” a Bridge spokesperson said, adding that the confidentiality agreement barred the company from commenting on the talks. Bridge argued that the wire was dangling from an adjoining building, and therefore Bridge wasn’t responsible.

Emily Horgan, the CAO spokesperson, pushed back on the claim that anything CAO had produced exonerated Bridge. “It is not correct to say that CAO’s website states that Bridge was not at fault. Neither CAO’s site nor the documents on the site state that,” she said.

Bridge said that it was bound by confidentiality not to discuss what was shared during the mediation, though it did share what a company spokesperson said was a statement it provided to CAO. It meticulously avoids any suggestion of culpability:

The safety of Bridge’s pupils is its absolute priority and we are deeply saddened by the tragic accident. This was a unique and terrible accident that has been devastating to the family and to all members of our community. As educators, parents, and members of the greater school community, it is difficult to comprehend the suffering that such a tragic accident causes. We know that many staff, parents and wider community members remain devastated after their desperate efforts to save the child’s life were sadly unsuccessful.

Bernard’s mother never got his sweater back.

Correction: April 1, 2023
This story previously stated that the UK development bank divested from Bridge. In fact, the House of Commons recommended a divestment but the bank did not divest. It also previously said that Bridge filed a complaint with the University of Alberta in December 2016; the complaint was filed in October 2016. The story has been corrected.

The story has also been updated to add that the conviction of the teacher in the 2014 case of genital cutting was ultimately overturned because the testimony of the young victim was not corroborated. We also clarified that the wire that electrocuted Bernard was hanging from an adjacent property, though Bernard was on Bridge school property when the incident occurred.

The post Two Harvard Grads Saw Big Profits in African Education. Children Paid the Price. appeared first on The Intercept.

The conservative press leapt on Wyden. The National Review called the senator’s floor speech a “vile attack on the federal judiciary.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board denounced Wyden’s “Nullification Doctrine.” An elected official defying the rule of law! Imagine that! No mention of the judge himself giving the law — the six-year statute of limitations on challenges to FDA decisions; the plaintiffs’ lack of standing; the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson returning abortion law to the states — the finger.

Meanwhile, from Wyden’s pro-choice allies, nothing. No congressional Democrat amplified his demand. The White House did not respond. And where were the feminists?

Otherwise occupied.

Since Dobbs, the reproductive justice movement has been transformed into a massive disaster relief agency: delivering pills to pregnant people in red states; transporting, housing, providing child care, and paying medical bills for those who travel to blue states for surgical abortions; and raising charitable donations to fund it all.

Maybe the antis didn’t intend for this to happen. They may have honestly believed, despite a literal world of evidence to the contrary, that once abortion was outlawed it would disappear. Of course, it didn’t. Still, without really trying, the right pushed the enemy hors de combat. The abortion rights movement is consumed with scamming together in some degraded form the already degraded abortion access the U.S. had before June 24, 2022.

There is no time, money, or brainpower left for politics.

The job of keeping abortion alive is greatly complicated by being quasi-legal. Clandestine pill distribution networks are buying drugs overseas, raising and spending money in cash, and fortifying communications and websites with cybersecurity measures, while advising patients on how to erase their own tracks and avoid arrest — and simply trying to figure out what the hell the law is.

PlanC, one of the main online sources of information on obtaining abortion pills, speaks in increasingly gnomic language, trying to keep to the right side of the law while advising users to act legally and illegally at the same time. The newly launched Abortion Defense Network — a collaborative of “values-aligned” attorneys, nonprofits, and legal expense funds — offers and coordinates legal assistance to providers and patients menaced by criminalization.

Meanwhile, aboveground funds are in overdrive financing both self-managed and surgical abortions, which have risen radically in cost, thanks to additional travel expenses and delays pushing procedures later into pregnancy. Donations are pouring in. During the week after the court’s decision in June, the National Network of Abortion Funds, or NNAF, comprising almost 100 local funds around the country, received more than $10 million, compared with $1.9 million from individual donors in all of 2020. But the engine needs more and more fuel, and it can run down. New York’s fund, which has helped women finance late-term abortions in its state for 22 years, has committed over $400,000 in the first seven weeks of 2023 alone; it projects a need of $3 million this year. This past fall, NNAF and five collaborating mid-Atlantic state funds were forced to abandon an ambitious infrastructure expansion called Operation Scale Up when the primary donor pulled out.

At this point, it’s unclear what Kacsmaryk will do next — schedule a hearing, rule on the merits — or when he’ll do it. But, aside from a momentary reprieve, there’s nothing to be optimistic about. The judge is ferociously hostile to abortion, contraception, and LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights. If he decides in favor of the plaintiffs, the hyper-conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Texas’s six-week ban in 2021, is likely to do the same with this ruling, and the Supreme Court is not expected to overrule the Fifth Circuit. There’s no saying how long appeals will take or when, if ever, the Supreme Court will hear the case.

Some lawyers argue that the situation is less dire than the press presents it to be. The FDA is not legally required to enforce the judge’s ruling. If the FDA does comply, Danco Labs, the manufacturer of brand-name mifepristone Mifeprex, could reapply for FDA approval; a fast-track process could wrap up in 60 days. But during all that time, Mifeprex will be unavailable. Distribution will be illegal. And once Kacsmaryk whacks mifepristone, what’s to keep the antis from handing him another lawsuit to take out misoprostol, the other half of the abortion pill combo?

If that happens, feminist abortion networks — until now operating largely from the relative safety of blue states — will be outlaws throughout the U.S.

They will be outlaws in a legal landscape where the road signs point every which-way and the GPS reception is spotty. Justice Samuel Alito was either naïve or disingenuous when he claimed that removing abortion from federal constitutional protection and returning it to the “people and their elected officials” would douse debate and heal divisions. In fact, Dobbs instantly cast the states into a maelstrom of primitive federalism, with red states threatening to go after blue-state docs who write abortion prescriptions across state lines and blue states passing laws shielding providers from red-state prosecutors.

Dobbs instantly cast the states into a maelstrom of primitive federalism.

Maybe chaos is part of the plan — or at least an unexpected gift to the disruptors of the right. In opposing the Texas suit, pharma company Danco argued that it is not just an attack on the company’s own medication, but also “a direct challenge to the FDA approval process for all pharmaceutical products.” Yet isn’t destabilizing regulatory agencies — at the same time as they regulate personal life and privatize public institutions — at the heart of the far right’s agenda?

A peaceable kingdom of little local democracies was never the end game either. No sooner had the Supreme Court delivered control of every uterus-bearing resident of the U.S. to those elected-by-gerrymander state officials did conservative lawyers march to the courtroom of an unelected federal judge to demand action by an unelected federal agency to complete the mission of a shrinking minority: ban abortion nationwide.

Twelve state attorneys general have sued the FDA for imposing on mifepristone the “burdensome” prescribing and dispensing restrictions of the agency’s “risk evaluation and mitigation strategy,” or REMS — adding a drug less risky than Tylenol to a list of potential killers like oxycodone and fentanyl. The lawsuit may be a jab at the Biden administration, which in January showcased its commitment to promoting abortion access by allowing retail pharmacies to dispense the pill directly with a prescription, no longer requiring patients to procure and take it under a provider’s supervision. Then it quietly tacked on the REMS designation.

In May, after the draft of Dobbs was leaked and blue-state clinics anticipated hordes of new patients lining up at their doors, some legislatures loosened the rules to allow midwives, nurses, and other non-MDs to provide abortions. To reassure and keep serving patients, providers are preparing to prescribe misoprostol, an ulcer drug, alone, though it is less effective and has more side effects — including severe nausea, cramping, and bleeding — than the two-drug protocol.

As for the abortion advocacy mainstream, it is (as usual) waiting to react. “People are trying to think creatively based on potential scenarios,” Lorie Chaiten, an American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney, told the Washington Post. “They’re looking at ways to make that happen within the law. But again, without knowing what the ruling will be … it’s really hard to plan.”

All this decorous law-abiding is more than frustrating. It seems simply blind to reality.

All this decorous law-abiding is more than frustrating. It seems simply blind to reality. The Supreme Court’s precedent-shredding ruling in Dobbs didn’t only make potential felons of millions of people doing nothing more than minding their own bodies’ business. It also pushed us one step closer to a far-right vision of law and order: a country where teachers are fearful of breaking the law by teaching, doctors face imprisonment for practicing medicine, and voters are arrested for voting. Where order is kept by snitches and mercenaries and an increasingly powerful carceral state, overseen by judges who select the laws they want to enforce. Where, as judicial decrees lose public confidence, states both blue and red declare themselves sanctuaries from what they see as the resultant injustice. Some may shelter immigrants or welcome abortion-seekers. Others will flout public health edicts. If one Kentucky Republican has his way, his state will become a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” where all federal gun control laws are nullified.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, in this libertarianism-authoritarian climate, that the movement for reproductive justice would become a criminal operation.

As the lawmakers go rogue, feminists are beginning to see the advantages of lawlessness.

No surgical procedure but abortion is directly regulated by any U.S. state or federal agency. We’ll always want trained professionals for complex abortions. But if non-MDs can do the routine ones, why not nonprofessionals? From 1969 to 1973, the Jane Collective’s faux doc Mike and then the Janes themselves, all amateurs, performed over 11,000 abortions and didn’t lose a patient. In the 1970s, feminist self-help collectives taught women the “home-care” technique of “menstrual extraction”: an early pregnancy termination by vacuum aspirator just like you get at a clinic, but without the clinic or staff. The group figured that extracting a couple of unwanted pregnancies a year might do less harm than an IUD or the high-estrogen birth control pill.

You don’t need a doctor for a self-managed abortion. The drugs are safe, easy to use, nonaddictive, and effective. People in other countries take them without medical surveillance. Extralegal pill abortions are cheaper than those overseen by health care providers. The median U.S. medication abortion cost $560 in 2020. Underground networks can purchase generics made in India —a combo pack of mifepristone and misoprostol for $1 to $3 — and give them to patients for free.

Unlike the pre-Roe era, when abortion was often a shame-laden, lonely, and terrifying affair, younger organizers, raised in activist cultures of mutual aid, are training and certifying abortion doulas to “accompany” anyone who wants help while self-managing her abortion. Like the Janes, who charged on a sliding scale down to nothing and cultivated an ethos of egalitarian respect and compassion, today’s citizens abortionists preemptively freeze out any black marketeer who considers horning in.

Some activists are indicating that we won’t go back, not just to the days of the coat hanger, but also to the legal status quo ante-Dobbs. In announcing the demise of Operation Scale Up, NNAF put on a happyish face. “Building and designing the OSU pilot has been an opportunity to plan for an expansive future for abortion seekers,” its statement read. “Together, we are bold — even audacious — to work toward a reality where, even as we witness the evisceration of Roe v. Wade, abortion access could come with more ease for people.” Are they suggesting we give up on legalization?

No-law, after all, was the ideal from the start: not to legalize and regulate abortion but to free it from government interference altogether. An absence of interference is not the same as an absence of responsibility, however. A widely scattered thousand-points-of-light volunteer brigade serving those who can find it — and that is dogged by surveillance and threatened by criminal charges as serious as homicide — cannot replace what we need and deserve: a well-resourced welfare state that provides a full range of affordable, high-quality reproductive health care to everything. Nor should we get hooked on the adventure of rescue.

For now, we have a maze of volunteer services, under and aboveground. It can be confusing for activists and, for abortion-seekers in crisis, overwhelming. The systems will rationalize, as these things tend to do. And while we keep them operating, we also have to get back to the streets — to build power, mobilize the grassroots, and make a lot of loud, public noise. We’re busy but we are not paralyzed.

Times of reaction are never dormant, my late friend the feminist activist and intellectual Ann Snitow used to say. You’re never back to zero. You just have to find the place to enter and get to work there. It may not be the usual doorway.

Since Dobbs, veterans of the bad old days alongside women and girls brought up to assume that their bodies are their own have figured out how to deliver what 50 years of advocacy did not. These eight grief-stricken, desperate months have reminded us of what we want — and shown us that it is possible: free abortion on demand and without apology.

The post As Texas Judge Stalls, the Abortion Rights Movement Won’t Wait appeared first on The Intercept.