Frontlinjen i Donbas – ikke langt fra Sjeverodonetsk.
Ødelæggelser og konstant beskydning.
Og her en soldat der er blevet alt for vant til de høje brag: pic.twitter.com/IXoStEJAUm

— Matilde Kimer (@matildekimer) June 4, 2022

Scenes from the front line near Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine in June.

According to Kimer, an award-winning Moscow correspondent for Denmark’s public service broadcaster, DR, the proposal was presented to her by an officer from the Security Service of Ukraine, the intelligence agency known as the SBU, during a meeting this month in Kyiv that was also attended by two diplomats from the Danish Embassy.

The diplomats had brokered the meeting as part of an effort to help Kimer find out why Ukraine had suddenly canceled her accreditation in August, shortly after she made a reporting trip to the front lines around Mykolaiv, a strategically important Black Sea port where a Ukrainian counteroffensive had been playing out.

An interpreter who worked with Kimer in Mykolaiv told the Ukrainian news site Zaborona that after a misunderstanding at a checkpoint near the front line, which led to them being briefly detained for traveling without a military press officer, local officials had scoured the Danish journalist’s social media accounts.

Since Kimer had been based in Moscow for over a decade, her Instagram and Facebook pages are filled with images and video clips that show her reporting on everything from official addresses by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the 2018 World Cup in Russia to daily life in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including Donetsk and Crimea. That, apparently, was enough for some Ukrainian soldiers to suspect that Kimer might be a Russian sympathizer.

Still, Kimer was eventually assured by a senior military press officer that she was free to continue reporting and returned to Mykolaiv, where she filed two short dispatches from the front line.

On August 1, she traveled back to Moscow but was denied entry at the airport by Russian authorities, who informed her that she would be deported — in apparent retaliation for her reporting on the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine — and told her not to even try to enter Russia again for the next 10 years.

Three weeks later, Kimer received an email from the Ukrainian military that her press credential allowing her to work there had been canceled, without explanation, at “the request of the Security Service of Ukraine.”

Kimer, who had reported on the Russian aggression in Ukraine from its first days, and continued to bring Danish television viewers visceral scenes from the front lines year after year, spent the next three months trying to get an explanation for why she was suddenly barred from reporting.

Part of a 2017 Matilde Kimer report for Danish television on the 72nd Brigade of the Ukrainian army fighting north of Donetsk.

Eventually, her boss, Niels Kvale, the foreign editor of DR, enlisted help from Denmark’s foreign ministry, and Kimer was invited to the SBU headquarters in Kyiv.

Before the meeting, Kimer said in a Facebook post on Saturday, she had heard from three sources that “the security service considers me pro-Russian — and perhaps even a Russian agent.”

At the meeting, Kvale told me by phone from Copenhagen, “lots of different accusations were made against Matilde — a lot of talk of random photos from her social media profile, Facebook, primarily, photos that were taken by a photojournalist, her colleague, who went with her to Donetsk back in 2017.”

According to Kimer’s own account on Facebook, an intelligence officer named Oleg told her that photographs she posted on the social network from a May 9 Victory Day parade in occupied Donetsk was suspicious because it showed people and vehicles adorned in what the Ukrainians consider “illegal Soviet propaganda,” in the form of the orange and black Saint George ribbons that the Russians use to commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, which have transformed into a show of support for Russian troops in Ukraine today. He also said that the fact that Kimer had been allowed to report from occupied Donetsk more than once suggested that her reporting must not have angered the separatist officials, which was also suspicious.

The intelligence officer apparently also believed Kimer’s deportation from Russia in August was part of a covert Russian plan, to give her a cover story that would allow her to continue promoting “Russian narratives” about the war.

Kvale told me that when Kimer and the Danish diplomats asked how she could convince the intelligence service that she was not a Russian propagandist, the official suggested that Kimer would have to agree to produce a series of “good stories” about the war, based entirely on video and photographs provided to her by the SBU, and post them on her Facebook page to prove that she was not pro-Russian. “She was quite shocked about the suggestion,” Kvale told me. “I mean, for us of course, it’s outrageous to even — we would never do a thing like this.”

When Kimer told the intelligence officer that she couldn’t base her reports on someone else’s material and needed to meet with her sources in person, the meeting ended abruptly.

“That was the understanding she came out of the meeting with,” Kvale told me, “that if she showed that she was not a Russian propagandist — that she could use this material for it — then they might reconsider whether she could be accredited.”

That left Kimer in the awkward position of feeling compelled to report that the Ukrainian intelligence service had tried to coerce her into joining its propaganda effort even if that might make it impossible for her to ever get her accreditation back.

“One of the reasons that we decided to tell this story is that we feel that this is an attack on our independence and the freedom of the press,” Kvale told me. “We didn’t really feel like we had any choice but to say publicly that this situation arose and this happened at this meeting.”

Ukraine’s intelligence service and the office of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not replied to requests for comment since Kimer went public last week, and described the effort to coerce her into working as a propagandist to outraged Danish journalists.

“she has been offered one solution. She says that the security service will reassess her case if she agrees to write what they call "good stories" about ??. She has to use the material that the security service provides.
@matildekimer has refused that.”https://t.co/ulAnoayQNA

— Henrik Moltke (@moltke) December 19, 2022

Kimer, who has produced more than 230 television and radio reports on the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year alone, is also the author of a book, “The War Inside,” based on her reporting from Ukraine, starting with the protest movement in Kyiv’s main square that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014 and the first years of fierce, covert war in eastern Ukraine directed by Putin.

Last month, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark presented Kimer with the prestigious Ebbe Munck Prize.

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark handed out the Ebbe Munk Prize 2022 to journalist Matilde Kimer pic.twitter.com/PMYZ7Cw4XP

— Queen Maxima and Royal Ladies (@vaninaswchindt) November 9, 2022

Kimer is also a finalist for the 2022 Cavling Prize, Danish journalism’s equivalent of a Pulitzer, for her coverage of the Russian war on Ukraine. The nomination cites, in particular, a 24-minute documentary she produced in the city of Kharkiv in April about a young Ukrainian woman who was coordinating emergency relief for civilians, while simultaneously organizing her own wedding despite the Russian bombardment.

A trailer for Matilde Kimer’s documentary, “Wedding in a Warzone: A Glimmer of Hope in Kharkiv.”

The post Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist appeared first on The Intercept.

The deceptive clips of Porter’s remarks, accompanied by false claims that she had condoned pedophilia, were viewed more than 2.2 million times on Twitter after being shared by right-wing activist accounts, including Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and Jaimee Michell’s Gays Against Groomers.

Those video clips were created by Porter’s political enemies, who made it seem as if Porter, at a Congressional oversight hearing on Wednesday, had argued that pedophilia was not a crime but an identity.

Transcripts and video of Porter’s complete remarks make it clear that she was saying something entirely different — namely, that right-wing activists have inspired hatred of LGBTQ+ Americans in tweets falsely accusing them of being pedophiles, or so-called groomers.

A spokesperson for Porter also told the fact-checking service VERIFY, which works with local news stations in 29 states, that the representative “did not say that pedophilia is not a crime.”

In an irony that perfectly encapsulates the impossibility of reasoned discourse with far-right activists willing to lie, the video used to smear Porter was taken from her discussion of a report documenting how activist accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers use Twitter to falsely accuse LGBTQ+ liberals of pedophilia. The report was produced by the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign.

At the hearing, Porter prefaced a question for Kelley Robinson, the HRC president, by saying: “Your organization recently released a report analyzing the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ+ people as so-called groomers. The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids. And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”

Porter then asked Robinson if Twitter’s hateful conduct policy allows users to call LGBTQ+ people “groomers” on the platform.

After Robinson explained that those slurs are used in violation of Twitter’s poorly enforced community guidelines, she added that when people baselessly use words like “groomers” and “pedophiles” to describe LGBTQ+ people, “it is dangerous, and it’s got one purpose: It is to dehumanize us, and make us feel like we are not a part of this American society, and it has real-life consequences.”

Porter responded by saying that she agreed with Robinson that the use of such terms to smear members of LGBTQ+ communities whose politics differ from the far-right activists was intended to marginalize them.

“I think you’re absolutely right,” Porter said. “And it’s not, you know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and of ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow, and engaged in criminal acts, merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity. So this is clearly prohibited, under Twitter’s content, yet you found hundreds of these posts on the platform.”

In addition to Raichik and Michell, whose anti-LGBTQ+ activism has previously been amplified by America’s most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson, misleading clips of Porter were also shared by Greg Price, a former Republican operative and Daily Caller social media editor; Sebastian Gorka, who was fired by the Trump White House; and Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right Malaysian blogger Elon Musk frequently replies to and agrees with on Twitter.

While the tweets from Cheong and Raichik — who falsely asserted that “Rep Katie Porter (D) says pedophilia isn’t a crime- it’s an identity” — were eventually flagged as misleading by Twitter users, the 1.5 million people who follow Michell, Price, or Gorka encountered no such warning.

Although he did not share the video, Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, also lied about what Porter said on Twitter. “Katie Porter just said that pedophilia isn’t a crime, she said it’s an ‘identity,'” Jackson claimed, falsely. “The sad thing is that this woman isn’t the only VILE person pushing for pedophilia normalization. This is what progressives believe!”

While the HRC report Porter highlighted showed that right-wing activists had violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy repeatedly before Musk bought the platform, the previous ownership team did make some attempt to rein in Raichik, who was temporarily suspended several times.

Since Musk took control, however, “retweets of right-wing figures’ tweets that included the anti-LGBTQ ‘groomer’ slur increased substantially, as did mentions of right-wing figures in tweets containing the slur,” according to new data from LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD and Media Matters, a watchdog group that monitors right-wing misinformation.

Michell’s Gays Against Groomers account, the study found, “saw an increase of nearly 300% for retweets of tweets with the slur,” comparing the two months before and after Musk took control of the platform. Raichik’s Libs of TikTok “saw more than a 600% increase in its mentions,” over the same period for tweets using “groomer” slurs.

The post Emboldened Right-Wing Activists Spread Lies About Rep. Katie Porter on Twitter appeared first on The Intercept.

But the outpouring of support — which was also expressed on huge “Free Palestine” banners displayed in the stands, and by fans who intruded on Israeli television interviews to wave Palestinian flags and berate Israeli reporters — made it clear how badly Kushner had miscalculated, as his father-in-law Donald Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, when he convinced a handful of Arab autocrats to sign economic cooperation deals with Israel that did not respect the rights of Palestinians.

Hours after 5 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank, Arab fans at the World Cup in Qatar chanted (in Arabic) “With spirit and blood, we will redeem you, O Palestine” https://t.co/94S6fYrnxv

— Yumna (@yumna_patel) November 29, 2022

In his White House memoir, “Breaking History,” Kushner claims to have orchestrated “a true turning point in history” when “five Muslim-majority countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kosovo, Morocco and Sudan — signed peace agreements with Israel.”

According to Kushner, whose agenda seemed to be dictated from the start by his old family friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, the agreements he brokered with nations that were never central to the conflict “have the potential to bring about the complete end of the Arab-Israeli conflict that has existed ever since the founding of the State of Israel.”

Despite Kushner’s inflated claims, it was clear from the start that there was little public support in the Arab world for any nation to make peace with Israel while millions of Palestinians still live under Israeli military rule.

Survey data from 2020, when Morocco agreed to sign the deal — in exchange for the Trump administration recognizing the kingdom’s sovereignty over the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara — showed that 88 percent of Moroccans rejected diplomatic recognition of Israel. Polls conducted the same year showed that 89 percent of Tunisians and 88 percent of Qataris agreed that “the Palestinian cause concerns all Arabs.” Just 6 percent of Saudis surveyed said they would support recognition of Israel.

"To our beloved Palestine, the most beautiful of all countries"

Morocco World Cup fans sing in solidarity with Palestine in Qatar. The North African country went on to beat Belgium today in a historic 2-0 win, their first World Cup victory in 24 years pic.twitter.com/Ir2iEtZsp3

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) November 27, 2022

Broad support for a continued boycott of Israel was clear when the tournament kicked off, and social networks were flooded with video of fans from across the Arab world rejecting the emirate’s own tentative step toward normalizing relations with Israel: its decision to allow Israeli journalists to report on the tournament.

When approached by an Israeli channel covering the @FIFAWorldCup in Doha, this Qatari made his stance on normalisation very clear.

Qatar has refused to normalise with Israel as long as it continues its occupation of Palestine. pic.twitter.com/SIgrk3tl92

— Doha News (@dohanews) November 18, 2022

"It's Filisteen, FILISTEEN"

A Lebanese visitor to Qatar corrects Israeli journalist on his poor geography. #Qatar2022 #Lebanon #Palestine #FIFAWorldCup pic.twitter.com/anpb6DVGRh

— Robert Carter (@Bob_cart124) November 21, 2022

The fact that even fans of Morocco, one of the five nations that signed Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” were unwilling to appear on Israeli TV seemed to baffle one Israeli reporter. “But we have peace, huh?” the journalist yelled, as the Moroccan fans walked off and shouted support for Palestine. “You signed the peace agreement!”

A thread of World Cup fans refusing to engage with Isr@eli reporters:

1. Reporter: “BUT YOU SIGN PISS, YOU SIGN PISS, YOU SIGN PISS AGREEMENT” pic.twitter.com/QGQWnE1cDh

— Jennine (@jennineak) November 26, 2022

One of the most watched clips to come out of the World Cup’s opening round showed a Saudi fan telling a reporter for Israel’s public broadcaster, in English, “There is only Palestine! There is no Israel!”

???? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ???????? "??? ???? ??????? ???? ?????? ???" …. "??? ??? ???? ?? ???" pic.twitter.com/1fLzuhRGiM

— Haitham El-Tabei ??????? (@Haithamtabei) November 26, 2022

“Israeli reporters realizing that their country is despised by Arabs is hilarious and informative,” Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think tank based in Jerusalem, observed on Twitter. “They actually thought that if they normalize with Arab authoritarian regimes it means Arabs will forget Israeli oppression of Palestinians.”

Linah Alsaafin, a Palestinian journalist who has worked for Qatar’s state-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera, pointed out that Raz Shechnik of the Israeli news site Yedioth Ahronoth had shared a compilation of clips of his failed interviews with Arab fans — including the tense exchange with the Moroccan fans. (The interviews are almost all in English, even though Shechnik’s Twitter caption is in Hebrew.)

?? ?????, ??? ?????

?????, ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ????. ???? ????? ??? ?????, ?????????, ?? ??????. ??? ?? ????? ??? ???? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ???????????. ??? ???? ???? ???? ?????, ?? ???? ??? ????? ???? ?? ?? ????? ????? ???. ?? ???????? ??????. ????? ??????? ??????, ?????> pic.twitter.com/nMTApXtBWb

— Raz Shechnik (@RazShechnik) November 26, 2022

In one revealing exchange, as Shechnik suggests that the problem is between “only governments,” not people, a man holding a Palestinian flag says, “There’s nothing called Israel. It’s only Palestine. And you just took the land from them. … Bro, there is nothing called Israel. Israel does not exist.”

In an ensuing thread on his experiences in Qatar, Alsaafin wrote, Shechnik “demonstrated his delusion in thinking Arabs in particular would be welcoming just [because] some of their governments normalised relations with Israel.”

“Israeli journalists say they were surprised at the level of enmity that they faced in Qatar at the World Cup,” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, added. “I am surprised that they are surprised since what they are doing daily in Palestine is all over the world media (except in Israel maybe) but every action has a reaction.”

As the Reuters Qatar correspondent Andrew Mills reported, while Qatari authorities permitted displays of support for the Palestinians, they cracked down hard on other forms of protest — like refusing to allow fans to wear rainbow-colored hats, shirts, or even watch straps into matches (to prevent shows of support for LGBTQ+ rights in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalized), and tackling and arresting Iranians who wore T-shirts with the words, “Women Life Freedom,” to support women’s rights in Iran.

One of the oddest aspects of Kushner’s boast about the Abraham Accords as a Middle East peace deal was the fact that the non-Arab nation of Kosovo was included as a signatory. Kosovo, which is in the Balkans and not the Middle East, is a former province of Serbia where ethnic Albanian Muslims make up a majority. The republic did not strike a peace deal with Israel — for the very good reason that it had never been at war with Israel — but did agree to open an embassy in Jerusalem as part of an economic deal with Serbia brokered by the Trump White House and signed in Kushner’s presence.

Even though there was only a brief mention of Israel in the agreement signed by Kosovo’s prime minister in Washington in September 2020, and the economic cooperation with Serbia it enshrined was minor, Trump described it at a campaign event that month as a “major breakthrough” that — along with the deals between Israel, Bahrain, and the UAE — might help him win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump on ?? – ?? deal

"We are stopping MASS KILLINGS between Kosovo and Serbia. They have been killing each other for so many [years]."

"Stop Killing', I said 'fellas, let's get together."

"You know, they've been doing it for hundreds of years frankly under different names," pic.twitter.com/JSpicEGroz

— kos_data (@kos_data) September 20, 2020

“We’re stopping mass killings between Kosovo and Serbia,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina, inaccurately describing an economic agreement between two nations that stopped fighting more than 20 years earlier. “They are going to stop killing.”

While Kosovo did not qualify for the World Cup, tensions over the nation’s frozen conflict with Serbia — which still refuses to recognize its independence — were in evidence at a match between the Serbian national team and that of Switzerland, which features two stars whose families are refugees from Kosovo.

Before the match, a social media photograph of the Serbian dressing room showed a flag hanging above the lockers of the players with an old map of Serbia, showing Kosovo as part of their territory, and the slogan “No surrender!”

The @FFK_KS is a full member of @FIFAcom.

Serbia's chauvinistic rhetoric against the Rep.of Kosova through sport, and within official facilities is an aggressive act against human and sportsmanship values, and must be condemned.

Taking no measures is a loud act in itself. pic.twitter.com/XbFPxXTmGP

— Daulina (@DaulinaOsmani) November 25, 2022

During the match, which Switzerland won, with a goal from one of the Kosovan-Swiss players and a commanding performance by the other, ultranationalist Serb fans could be heard chanting death threats and slurs at ethnic Albanians.

Update: December 4, 2022, 9:20 pm ET
After this article was published, an English fan ended a live interview on Israeli television, in which he assured a reporter that England would bring the World Cup home, by saying, “But more importantly, Free Palestine!”

The post How Jared Kushner Lost at the World Cup in Qatar appeared first on The Intercept.

Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.

As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.

Twitter is silencing people who document extremism, alt-right violence & police abuse in LA.@chadloder and @vps_reports were suspended after alt-right requests — while Twitter is reinstating people who promote racism & incite anti-trans violence.

This is ugly and dangerous. pic.twitter.com/7cnhItUY8T

— Mike Bonin (@mikebonin) November 26, 2022

Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements has fueled the mass delusion that antifa is not just a handful of small antifascist groups that counter right-wing threats, which it is, but a shadow army of domestic terrorists, which it is not. Musk is apparently among those who have mistaken Ngo’s largely fictional reporting for fact. In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.

“Andy Ngo’s bizarre vision of ‘antifa’ seems to be the metric used to delete the accounts of journalists and publications, most of which engaged in verifiably good journalism and done so completely above board and TOS observant ways,” Shane Burley, editor of the anthology “¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis,” observed on Twitter. “Paranoid delusions about antifa are driving it.”

As The Intercept reported last year, Ngo had previously tried and failed to have Loder suspended from Twitter, and also joined a botched attempt to have a court order the researcher to stop tweeting about one of the Proud Boys who took part in the Capitol riot.

In a phone interview on Monday, Loder, a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert, told The Intercept that their @chadloder account was initially suspended last week about 90 minutes after Musk had replied to Ngo on Twitter. After briefly regaining access to the account, Loder was suspended again and accused by Twitter of having used another account to evade the ban.

Loder said that they do have access to another dormant account, @masksfordocs — which was set up in early 2020 as part of an effort by a group of activists to donate N95 masks to doctors during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic — but had not used it for ban evasion. (Ngo had drawn attention to the @masksfordocs account on Twitter, describing it as Loder’s “alt.”)

“What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder said. “What I suspect happened is that Twitter’s automatic systems flagged my account for some reason and no human being is reviewing these.”

Since Loder’s account was on a list being passed around by right-wing activists as part of a coordinated campaign to mass-report fabricated violations by left-wing Twitter users, it could have been suspended as a result of that activity. Loder shared screenshots with The Intercept showing that Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers, including QAnon adherents and Proud Boys, had coordinated a spate of complaints about Loder’s tweets and celebrated Loder’s suspension.

Although Twitter’s Trust and Safety team was made aware of the organized false-reporting campaign against Loder earlier this month — and such coordinated bulk reporting and false-flagging of accounts are violations of Twitter’s pre-Musk policy against “platform manipulation” — that team was subsequently depleted by mass resignations on November 17.

Still, in a post on the open-source social network Mastodon, Loder joked about the idea that Musk was simply doing Ngo’s bidding.

No Longer Viable

Whatever the reason for the suspension, Loder said it’s clear that Twitter is “no longer a viable platform” for antifascist and security researchers.

“If I get my account back,” Loder said, “it’s only a matter of time before I get mass reported again.”

Loder, who has shifted to Mastodon, said that for social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.” Now that Musk appears to be reworking content moderation to tilt the playing field in favor of far-right extremists, Loder added, Twitter “is going to turn into Gab with crypto scams.”

For social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.”

Loder also said that some of the right’s criticism of content moderation decisions made by pre-Musk Twitter was fair. “I also agree that Twitter shouldn’t have censored the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Loder said. “We just don’t want outright Nazis posting our home addresses.”

But, Loder said, the sweeping changes made by Musk, like the increased tolerance for far-right hate speech, mean that Twitter will probably keep functioning as a website and an app for some time, but be slowly hollowed out as a place to find varying views on matters of public importance, or a space for online organizing against far-right extremism.

“Twitter is communities of people who choose to organize online,” Loder said, noting how the site has been used by labor organizers and racial justice protesters in recent years to drive real-world change, and by the so-called sedition hunters who have used the platform to crowd-source visual investigations to identify rioters who took part in the failed coup at the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Twitter was a place where communities could gather, despite harassment, because the worst hate speech was banned through content moderation. “Musk has made it clear that’s no longer part of the product,” Loder said. “The entire Twitter information security community has moved to Mastodon.” Some activists who helped create Black Twitter are already talking about how to rebuild their community on that site too.

“Twitter was never a healthy ‘public square’ for most of us. Let’s not rewrite history while eulogizing the hellsite,” Loder wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “Twitter was a frightening battleground where we managed barely to claw out an uneasy existence amidst the worst violent neo-Nazi extremists who constantly published our home addresses, threatened our kids’ lives, and sent hordes of racist trolls into our mentions.”

On Mastodon, they added, “The same principles that allowed us to survive uneasily on Twitter will be required here. Community defense, thoughtful pressure on moderation policies, and eternal vigilance. There are no safe spaces but those we make safe through constant effort. We keep us safe.” Twitter, Loder says, will take a long time to die and disappear entirely, “like a rotting whale carcass.”

Broken Links

“I’ll have to repair nearly every article I’ve ever written since my tweets got wiped out,” journalist and videographer Vishal Singh wrote on Mastodon on Monday, after being banned from Twitter. “Hundreds of articles written by countless journalists used my tweets. From all sides of the political spectrum. Academic papers that cited my tweets. These links and embeds are now all broken.”

Days before Singh’s account was suspended, Ngo had posted screenshots of some of the journalist’s angry tweets along with this misleading, factually incorrect summary: “Vishal Singh, an #Antifa far-left violent extremist in Los Angeles who identifies as a journalist, is calling for deadly violence again.” Singh is a left-wing journalist but did not call for violence in the tweets shared by Ngo, and is not violent. Last year, after Singh was attacked twice by far-right anti-vaccine protesters and lashed out in self-defense, Ngo posted a misleadingly captioned video and falsely accused Singh of being the aggressor.

On Mastodon, Singh shared screenshots of emails from Twitter, showing that while reports had been filed against their account for the same tweets that Ngo had posted as screenshots, the company concluded that none of those tweets violated official policies.

On Monday, Singh was also suspended from Instagram. “The mass false report campaign by the far-right has not stopped against my social media accounts,” they wrote on Mastodon. “The goal is to suppress all of my journalism.”

Last Friday, Twitter also suspended the account of CrimethInc, an anarchist collective and publisher. The group takes its name from “thoughtcrime,” a term coined by George Orwell in the dystopian novel “1984.”

In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.

.@crimethinc, an Antifa collective, makes riot guides, texts to radicalize people into criminal militancy, & propaganda that is shared via Twitter for people to distribute. They've claimed a number of attacks & give instructions on how to form cells, what riot gear to bring, etc. pic.twitter.com/dlNouwlt5v

— Andy Ngô ???? (@MrAndyNgo) November 25, 2022

Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.

After the CrimethInc suspension, Ngo claimed, with typically wild and incorrect hyperbole, that the “group operates like ISIS: makes propaganda & training material to radicalize militants toward violence.” He also complained that a dozen affiliated accounts had not yet been suspended. Three days later, almost all of the additional accounts Ngo pointed to had also been suspended by Twitter.

“Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with ‘free speech’ — it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence,” CrimethInc said in a statement sent to The Intercept.

The collective also explained that, on the morning of the suspension, it received an email from Twitter saying the company had “received a complaint regarding your account,” but had “investigated the reported content and have found that it is not subject to removal under the Twitter Rules.”

The group said it had received no further emails from Twitter to explain or justify the ban. “This suggests that the decision to ban our account shortly thereafter was dictated by Musk himself, without regard for the Twitter Rules or any other protocol other than his own apparent allegiance to the far right.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

As the investigative journalist Steven Monacelli reported last week, two days after a gunman killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group in Texas that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ gatherings.

The John Brown Gun Club — named after the white abolitionist leader John Brown who, in 1859, led an armed anti-slavery revolt — assists marginalized communities in defending themselves against white supremacist violence. LGBTQ+ events in Texas, such as a family-friendly drag brunch Monacelli covered in August, frequently attract the attention of armed far-right protesters from the Proud Boys and neo-Nazi groups like Patriot Front and Aryan Freedom Network.

Twitter’s reason for suspending the account, according to the suspension report, was two tweets that supposably violated Twitter’s rules against “hateful conduct.” One was a reply to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweet with the text “@CBP Mugging at gun point,” and another was a joke about pronouns with the text “Every queer a riflethem.” Without being willfully misread or taken out of context, neither of those tweets constitute hateful conduct.

Since its Twitter account was suspended last week, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club has been tweeting from a separate account, @elmforkJBGC, which has not yet been suspended. The group has also started posting on Mastodon.

“The irony isn’t lost on us that our suspension coincides with a coordinated effort to reinstate the most vile antisemitic, transphobic hate accounts,” the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club said in a statement to The Intercept. “Whether this is an indication of the future of leadership of Elon Musk’s running of Twitter, we cannot say but we can say that the timing and reasoning is deliberate and targeted.”

Updated: November 29, 2022, 6:05 pm ET
This article was updated to add a quote from Chad Loder in which the antifascist researcher criticized Twitter for having blocked links to a report on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election. 

The post Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite pleas from Twitter users who objected to the anti-Jewish racism of the cartoon, the tweet remained where it was posted, on the official account of the Russian Embassy in London, without being deleted, contextualized, or restricted in any visible way.

Before Musk took control of the social network, tweets containing images that used racist tropes to attack individuals or groups based on their ethnic identity were routinely removed from the platform or made impossible to share.

Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the co-author of the book “Meme Wars,” posted a screenshot of the Russian embassy tweet and noted that the diplomats were using “open antisemitism” to drum up support for the Russian war on Ukraine.

Russian Embassy trying to win the meme war with open antisemitism. pic.twitter.com/vc9V7xrEdP

— Joan Donovan, PhD ? (@BostonJoan) November 22, 2022

The cartoon is a version of an old internet meme, in which an image of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard during after-school detention — from the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” — is reworked by inserting topical new text on the board. In the image shared by the Russian officials, the character of Bart was also replaced with a crude depiction of Zelenskyy in which his nose was altered to evoke Nazi imagery of Jews.

The text on the board, and the tweeted Russian caption for the cartoon, makes reference to speculation encouraged by Russia, but unsupported by evidence, that Ukraine had intentionally fired a defensive missile into Poland during a recent Russian attack as part of a false flag operation intended to draw NATO into the conflict.

Twitter’s failure to immediately remove the image or restrict the Russian government account that posted it appeared to be in keeping with Musk’s previously stated sympathy with Russia’s war aims and his active embrace of right-wing talking points about the need to make the social network a forum for “free speech,” even if that means allowing hate speech to flourish.

But Musk’s definition of who should be allowed to speak freely appears to be influenced by the right-wing ideologues and trolls he frequently echoes and agrees with on Twitter. The social network’s decision to allow the Russian government’s racist attack on Zelenskyy came at the same time that some antifascist accounts were being suspended and just after Musk reinstated the accounts of both Donald Trump — who used his tweets to foment the failed January 6, 2021, coup — and Kanye West, who recently tweeted a threat to unleash punishment on “Jewish people.”

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a news organization that began with collaborative, open-source investigations on Twitter, was among those who drew Musk’s attention to the image and asked if the social network’s new owner is “okay with state run Twitter accounts using anti-Semitic tropes?” Higgins suggested that Musk could even poll his followers on the platform to see if they “are cool with casual anti-Semitism.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think tank based in Jerusalem, noted that the tweet came from diplomats working for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who had defended Russia’s wild claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis by endorsing a conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler was Jewish.

“So what if Zelenskyy is Jewish?” Lavrov told Italian television in May, when he was asked about the Russian claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.” The foreign minister went on to claim that “wise Jewish people” have said that “some of the worst antisemites are Jews.”

In her comment on the cartoon posted on Twitter by Russian diplomats, Tsurkov wrote: “The people who brought you ‘Hitler was a Jew’ decided to depict Ukraine’s Jewish president this way.”

Lavrov’s remarks caused outrage and were condemned by his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, as “an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

Three days later, the hawkish Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov, who is himself Jewish, told viewers that it was perfectly possible for Zelenskyy to be both Jewish and a Nazi, at least according to the definition used by those around Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Nazism, Solovyov insisted, was a form of extreme nationalism that could target any national group, not just Jews. “Nazism doesn’t have to be antisemitic,” he said, “it can be anti-Slavic, anti-Russian.”

After Lavrov's hideous antisemitic Nazi remarks, for which Putin had to apologize to Israel, new directives apparently landed at the state TV studios. Now they claim that Nazism doesn't have to be antisemitic and in its new iteration it is [drumroll] anti-Slavic and anti-Russian. pic.twitter.com/BesGtjzjWm

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) May 6, 2022

The idea that Russians, not Jews, were the main victims of Nazi Germany has a long pedigree in Russia. As the historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “Bloodlands,” the official Soviet history of the nation’s “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany was written to downplay the suffering of the Jews — influenced by Josef Stalin’s antisemitism.

“If the Stalinist notion of the war was to prevail, the fact that the Jews were its main victims had to be forgotten,” Snyder wrote. “Also to be forgotten was that the Soviet Union had been allied to Nazi Germany when the war began in 1939, and that the Soviet Union had been unprepared for the German attack in 1941. The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”

“Putin’s Russian regime talks of ‘Nazis’ not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies,” Snyder wrote on Substack in April. “[T]he Russian policy of ‘denazification’ is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used,” Snyder added, but “operates within the special Russian definition of ‘Nazi’: a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian.”

“The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside,” Snyder observed. “This is perfectly consistent with Russian war fighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of ‘Nazi.’ This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that ‘Nazi’ means.”

The post Twitter Allows Russian Officials to Share Antisemitic Cartoon of Zelenskyy appeared first on The Intercept.

Mejia, the first Filipino American elected to citywide office in Los Angeles, ran an innovative campaign that made use of old and new media, including educational billboards with bar charts showing how the city’s spending on policing compares to other priorities, and TikTok videos featuring the candidate dancing with Gen Z volunteers or in a Pikachu costume. But the campaign was powered by harnessing the energy young activists usually pour into protests — and redirecting it into electoral politics.

WHAT?!?! Where did this billboard come from telling all of Los Angeles where our budget priorities are?!

It's like whoever put it up wants Angelenos to know where their taxes are being spent!

Olympic & Crenshaw pic.twitter.com/TjF4XzEM88

— Kenneth Mejia, CPA (@kennethmejiaLA) August 23, 2022

We are so much more than a campaign who was good at social media however, we were pretty dang good lol pic.twitter.com/qgYtTBVTFt

— dan ? (@dannie_doe) November 13, 2022

A longtime housing justice organizer with the LA Tenants Union, Mejia was first inspired to run for office by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which had also convinced some veterans of protest movements like Occupy Wall Street that it might be possible to bring about change through electoral politics.

After three unsuccessful races for Congress since then — first as a Sanders-aligned Democrat, and then as a Green Party candidate — Mejia set his sights on the city controller’s office and assembled a campaign team made up almost entirely of fellow organizers and activists. That included Nguyen, who got into local politics through homelessness advocacy in 2018, when she co-founded a group to campaign for a homeless shelter and services in her Koreatown neighborhood. She then did graphics work for the successful City Council campaign of Nithya Raman, who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in 2020.

In her election night speech to volunteers last week, Nguyen spoke of “the harm and the pain that some of you had to endure because you dared to volunteer for this campaign,” and accused Mejia’s opponent, outgoing LA City Councilmember Paul Koretz, of running “one of the dirtiest campaigns that I have ever seen.” (Koretz’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“It wasn’t enough, she said, “just to drag Kenneth’s name through the mud, they had to viciously attack some of the youngest members of our team for daring to speak out. We’ve been asked over and over again, ‘Do you denounce the actions of your volunteers?’ ‘Do you condemn them for protesting — for disrupting a meeting?’

“Here’s what I have to say about that,” Nguyen said. “I mean, fuck that!”

Kenneth Mejia’s campaign manager @theglowingstars has a message:

“it wasn’t enough that th they had to drag kenneth’s name through the mud, they attacked some of the youngest members of the campaign for daring to speak out. Here’s what I have to say about that: FUCK THAT!” pic.twitter.com/jtm0a5miqy

— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) November 9, 2022

“We will never apologize for confronting and challenging power,” Nguyen continued, after cheers and chants of “Fuck that” died down. “We will always stand by and fight alongside those demanding a better way of life from people in power. And when Kenneth is in office, I will hold him accountable to that.”

The Koretz campaign, in an email to his supporters, had indeed attacked Mejia, Nguyen, and their young volunteers for taking part in protests, and for what Koretz called “deeply disturbing behavior,” like disrupting a city council meeting, which he compared to “the January 6 Capitol insurrection.”

The homepage of Koretz’s campaign website also prominently featured an image of Mejia at a housing protest and a link to a separate website devoted to collecting opposition research about Mejia and his campaign volunteers, called TruthAboutMejia.com.

Along with screenshots of Mejia’s past online comments in support of defunding the police, and criticism of Democrats including Joe Biden, that site denounced activism by young Mejia campaign volunteers — like the climate activist Sim Bilal, who disrupted a mayoral forum in March by shouting insults at the subsequently disgraced Councilmember Kevin de León. The site also denounced the Mejia campaign for urging volunteers like Kyler Chin, an 18-year-old web designer and Sunrise Movement organizer, to attend protests aimed at stopping City Council from banning homeless encampments near schools this summer.

But Mejia and Nguyen, who first met at a housing protest in front of a councilmember’s home, were never likely to distance themselves from volunteers who share their faith in the importance of disrupting the status quo by taking to the streets.

https://twitter.com/theglowingstars/status/1590882345128976392

In fact, the candidate and his campaign manager even attended one of the raucous protests against the City Council’s anti-camping ordinance in August, and trolled Koretz by posting a photo of themselves inside the chamber during a public comment period before activists disrupted the meeting.

We’re at City Hall today to support our unhoused neighbors. pic.twitter.com/aAbnEVWbIn

— Kenneth Mejia, CPA (@kennethmejiaLA) August 9, 2022

“Almost all of our volunteers consist of activists and organizers,” Nguyen told me by phone from Los Angeles this week. “We don’t have consultants on our team, who are professionals. We have activists who are already on the ground doing the work of advocating for their community.”

“So what activists do is they protest and sometimes they engage in disruptive protest, including disrupting a mayoral forum or disrupting a City Council meeting or protesting at politicians’ houses,” Nguyen said. “One of our values is holding powerful people accountable, and so Kenneth has never disapproved or condemned our volunteers for their actions.”

“We are community organizers,” Mejia said on Wednesday in an interview with Spectrum News. “We had over 1,200 volunteer sign-ups; we knocked on over 110,000 doors; we were very good with social media, thanks to our Gen Z team members,” he added.

Appearing with one of his pet corgis, who played a prominent role in the campaign’s ads, Mejia explained that he had used the billboards, charting the city’s spending, to show that he was already effectively doing the work of the controller by auditing the city’s finances and educating the public about how their tax money was being spent.

NEW: LA's new city controller Kenneth Mejia threw out the playbook and recruited Gen-Z volunteers to help shape his campaign strategy with TikTok videos, Corgis and informative billboards.

"We are community organizers. We are professionals, too. And we like to have fun." pic.twitter.com/mqjwIoMoAb

— Kate Cagle (@KateCagle) November 16, 2022

Rather than distance himself from the city’s protest culture, as his opponent and several of the city’s Democratic clubs had demanded, Mejia’s campaign made his experience as a protest leader central to his argument that voters could trust him to keep an eye on the city government.

A biographical campaign video released in late 2020 started with an analysis of how much money the city spends policing peaceful protests, and featured images of Mejia marching with a placard at one protest, shouting through a bullhorn at another, and banging on a drum at a third.

Nguyen explained to me that the campaign’s first and most eye-catching billboard, a bar chart showing how massive the Los Angeles Police Department budget is compared to spending on other departments, came out of her work doing graphics for the People’s Budget LA, an alternative city budget produced in 2020 by a coalition of activists led by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

About two weeks before George Floyd’s murder, Nguyen said, as the City Council was getting ready to approve the city budget, Black Lives Matter LA brought activist groups together to prepare to fight for a reduced LAPD budget, in part by producing an analysis of what the city was spending.

“I was really interested in that because I saw that the LAPD budget took up half of the unrestricted revenue, and it left so very little for homelessness and housing,” Nguyen told me. While combing through the fine print, she noticed that the mayor only reported the LAPD’s operating budget, which was about $1.7 billion, obscuring that the real total, including pension payments and other costs, was more than $3 billion.

“I just found it mind-blowing that no one knew how big the LAPD budget was,” Nguyen recalled. So she set out to produce a bar chart comparing what the city spent on policing to housing, emergency management, and other departments. “That visualization really radicalized so many people, including myself, and it paved the way for a lot of our campaign on defunding the police,” Nguyen said.

https://twitter.com/theglowingstars/status/1266441552986963969

Essentially the same graphic, displayed on billboards around the city, brought a wave of attention, and helped secure the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times for Mejia’s campaign to convince voters that what the city controller’s office needed was an activist accountant.

In August, Mejia told Bolts magazine that one of his main goals as controller will be to audit the city’s sweeps of homeless camps and the criminalization of homelessness. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps — and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” Mejia said. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

Nguyen, who will be Mejia’s chief of staff when he takes office in December, told me that she doesn’t expect to keep protesting while working in government. “We’ll be able to hold elected officials and the city government accountable in a different way, and hopefully in a more powerful way,” Nguyen told me, “using the power of audits, and compelling departments and city officials to provide us with documentation.” Mejia, she added, will be “using his platform to publicize his audits and, as someone from an organizing background … mobilize people to pressure their elected officials to act.”

The post How Housing Activism Powered Kenneth Mejia’s Los Angeles Election Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, the New York Post devoted its first post-election front page to hailing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “DeFuture” of the Republican Party. On Thursday, the Post carpet-bombed Trump with criticism, portraying him on its front page as “Trumpty Dumpty” who “couldn’t build a wall” and “had a great fall,” leaving it to others to put the party’s pieces back together.

Hmmm. Seems Trump is dead to the Murdochs pic.twitter.com/H1qywrx2cy

— Tony Karon (@TonyKaron) November 10, 2022

Trump, the Post columnist John Podhoretz argued, “sabotaged the Republican midterms” by elevating a string of weak gubernatorial and Senate candidates who supported his lies about the 2020 election but repelled voters.

The Wall Street Journal editorial pages were equally scathing, describing the former president as “the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” alongside a column headlined “DeSantis Is a Winner. What Does That Mean for Trump in 2024?”

WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD: “.. a perfect record of electoral defeat. .. he has led Republicans into one political fiasco after another.”@WSJopinion #ElectionDay #midterms https://t.co/FLCkI3UQPC pic.twitter.com/q20jeK163l

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) November 10, 2022

On Murdoch’s most influential outlet, Fox News, two of Trump’s closest allies on the television channel he gets his opinions from, Laura Ingraham and Kayleigh McEnany, sounded like hostage negotiators, urging the former president to admit his time was up and let his supporters go.

After beginning her monologue Wednesday night by blaming “the media” for “obsessing over the losses of Trump-backed candidates in states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania,” Ingraham addressed Trump, without mentioning his name. “Going into 2024, the Republicans are going to be looking for candidates who are focused on winning, not just making a point or settling a score,” she said, as a graphic over her shoulder read “It’s About America, Not Grudges,” and the headline on the screen beneath her changed to “Focus on Ego and Grievance Turning Off Voters.”

Ingraham: we're going to have to win and we have to win over voters, outside of our traditional base. That means young people too. pic.twitter.com/OPp42WL6of

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 10, 2022

Appealing to younger voters, Ingraham added, has “got to be the goal for the next presidential election.” Looking directly into the camera and speaking slowly, as if addressing an audience of one sitting before a television in Mar-a-Lago, Ingraham continued: “The populist movement is about ideas. It is not about any one person. If the voters conclude that you’re putting your own ego or your own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country, they’re going to look elsewhere, period.”

McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary, seemed to be reading from the same script on Thursday when she told viewers that “there are 72 million people in this country that make up a movement. It is a conservative movement, it’s not tied to any one person.”

Kayleigh: It is a conservative movement. It is not tied to one person pic.twitter.com/6J3pMDzpVY

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 10, 2022

“In 2016, they decided, ‘Our home is in President Trump,’” McEnany said. “This time around, these 72 million people, they will decide where their home is, only they will decide. No pundit will say, ‘It’s Trump,’ ‘It’s DeSantis.’ They’re smart, they’re wise, they’re going to read the tea leaves, and I have all the trust in the world they’re going to pick where their home is.”

“Then why did the former president come up with the name ‘DeSanctimonious’ a couple of days before” the election, fellow Fox host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery broke in to ask. “Well, he shouldn’t have,” McEnany responded. “There is,” she added in a description of a future Republican Party that must exclude Trump, “no place for nicknames.”

Other Fox guests voiced more direct criticism of Trump, but the channel’s coverage largely ignored the former president and switched focus to DeSantis.

Fox News’ word of the day: DeSantis pic.twitter.com/aimFjWu33m

— The Recount (@therecount) November 9, 2022

Trump, it must be said, appears to have no interest in taking any of these hints to go away quietly — even from the television network that operated as a de facto arm of his two presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020, and served as something akin to state TV during his years in office. “Despite having picked so many winners, I have to put up with the Fake News,” he complained on Truth Social. “For me, Fox News was always gone, even in 2015-16 when I began my ‘journey,’ but now they’re really gone.”

“NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post,” Trump raged on Thursday evening, “is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious.” In the same rambling statement, Trump also tossed in a new conspiracy theory, claiming that he had dispatched the FBI to Florida in 2018 to shut down a Democratic plot to steal that year’s gubernatorial election from DeSantis. (In fact, Trump’s allegations of election fraud in Florida in 2018 were debunked by local law enforcement.)

It is far too early to say if Murdoch’s campaign to force Trump from the stage will be a success, but the effort to cast the former president as a loser by focusing on the cast of odd candidates he supported does have a precedent.

In the 2010 midterms, Republicans lost three winnable Senate races because of deeply flawed, pro-insurrection and racist candidates supported by Sarah Palin, the party’s former vice presidential nominee turned Fox News contributor. Palin eventually decided to pass on a run for the White House in 2012, but it was not until June 2015 that she finally lost her contract with Fox — the week after Trump announced that he was running for president.

The post Rupert Murdoch Is Having the Same Problem Dr. Frankenstein Once Faced With His Monster appeared first on The Intercept.

Leaders of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Pennsylvania have denounced the flood of digital ads and direct mail from Republican groups — which seek to blame Democrats for the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and cast efforts to combat anti-Black racism as a form of discrimination against white and Asian communities.

“Asian Americans, like many other communities of color and immigrant and refugee communities have had to fight through many barriers to vote — especially misinformation,” Wei Chen, an organizer in the Chinese American community in Philadelphia said in an interview on Friday. “The ads are new; the tricks are not.”

Chen, who co-founded the state’s Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance, or API PA, said that mailers from Miller’s group America First Legal, falsely claiming that the Biden administration discriminates against Asian Americans, have started appearing in the Philadelphia suburbs.

The flyers, which rely heavily on misleading headlines and text from right-wing news outlets, appeared after former Trump aides, who also work with Miller’s foundation, produced a deeply dishonest digital ad. That ad sought to blame President Joe Biden for the rise in racist attacks on Asian Americans, which first spiked in March 2020 when then-President Donald Trump started calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and “the kung flu.”

Hilarious piece of mail from @America1stLegal. There’s a lot to unpack but first, stop trying to lump Asian Americans with white Americans knowing our privileges are not the same, nor do you advocate for us. pic.twitter.com/FvUVbP89S1

— f a i t h (@faithtasticness) November 1, 2022

The flyers from Miller’s group have been mailed to Asian American households in other states too, but the effort seems particularly intense in Pennsylvania, where more than 250,000 Asian Americans are eligible to vote, and turnout among the heavily Democratic community spiked to over 75 percent in 2020. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States and make up 45 percent of newly naturalized citizens in Pennsylvania, according to data from Chen’s group.

@America1stLegal really wants to remove racial bias by implementing racial bias! And then sends the flyer to an Asian. How freaking high are you people? pic.twitter.com/rKTt5KGbu4

— Aldrin ? (@aldrinatanu) October 29, 2022

Chen told me that while watching Chinese dramas on YouTube recently, the ads blaming Democrats for attacks on Asians that Trump’s rhetoric seemed to incite started popping up on his channel. He took it as an insult to his intelligence and that of his community.

“This kind of ad, the political rhetoric has a real-world impact and our Chinese community and Asian community have to deal with the consequences of racist fear-mongering that Trump and the Republicans and Fox News are putting out,” Chen told me. “Exploiting the pain Republicans have caused our community by blaming Chinese people for Covid and stirring up violence, it’s such a loser’s move. It’s a miscalculation to think that Asian Americans won’t see through it,” he added.

Helen Gym, a member of the Philadelphia City Council whose parents who emigrated from Korea, sees “these horrendous, race-baiting mailers,” as part of a decadeslong effort to suppress the Asian American vote. “I think anything that does the race-baiting and the fear-mongering — ‘You’re not welcome, you don’t count’ — is always an attempt to dissuade, suppress, breed cynicism and fear,” she said in a phone interview.

Gym said that the best way to combat the misleading ads is through direct contact with voters from members of their community. “People need to operate by trust and faith. There’s no question that millions of dollars of mailers flooding into mailboxes can be countered by individuals who are on the ground working with the AAPI community,” Gym told me.

“What you are seeing in Philadelphia in particular over the last few years is an enormous investment in on-the-ground organizers, especially on civic engagement and community work that extends well beyond Election Day,” Gym said.

“Asian American voters have massive power in Pennsylvania, and that power has rattled Republicans so much that they’re lobbing race-baiting misinformation at our people, trying to deceive and manipulate Asian American voters,” Mohan Seshadri, the executive director of API PA, said in a statement.

Chen pointed out that API PA has the reach and credibility to help Asian American voters see through the ads he refers to as “dirty tricks.” “We are talking to tens of thousands of our voters, knocking hundreds of thousands of doors and making millions of calls in 15 different languages,” Chen said. At least 15,000 of those phone calls have been in languages other than English.

Speaking to people in their native languages is important, Chen told me, because Asian Americans who do not speak English at home are “more susceptible to misinformation” in ads that make outlandish claims unsupported by the facts.

Nikil Saval, a Pennsylvania state senator who represents part of Philadelphia, suggested in an interview that the barrage of ads from Miller and his allies seemed like “a kind desperate move,” inspired by the obvious success of Democratic organizing in Pennsylvania’s AAPI community in recent years. “This kind of targeting is in some sense a reaction to that work,” Saval said. It’s an effort, he added, “to kind of siphon off a segment of Asian American voters around issues of public safety or crime — specifically within this framework of white supremacy. It is a white and Asian coalition that they invoke.”

Because Asian American and Pacific Islander voters “are increasingly organized, vocal, and powerful,” Saval suggested, Republicans are trying to incite and weaponize anti-Black racism through the ads mailed out by Miller’s group. “There is this kind of hope that a different kind of white supremacist coalition could be fomented based on this kind of desperate appeal,” Saval told me. “I don’t think it’s going to work, because I think the effort on the other side is much stronger.”

The post Stephen Miller Mails “Race-Baiting Misinformation” to Asian American Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent on Wednesday to heads of state and climate envoys due to speak at the climate conference, the Nobel laureates urged them “to bring the voices of the unjustly imprisoned into the room,” by speaking their names and reading from Abd El Fattah’s writing.

Abd El Fattah, a jailed writer and activist whose calls for democratic change in Egypt have frightened four successive authoritarian governments into prosecuting him for just attending protests or posting critical comments online, has been on a “Gandhi-style” hunger strike since April, consuming only 100 calories a day. His activist sisters, Sanaa Seif and Mona Seif, revealed this week that he plans to stop drinking water on Sunday, when COP27 begins.

Alaa just drank his last cup of tea in prison. Starting today he's on zero calorie strike.
In 5 days, as #COP27 starts, he will cease consuming water as well.
Alaa is not bluffing, he's fueled by hope to be reunited with us & rage at the 9 years stolen from his life. #FreeAlaa pic.twitter.com/5j1f5r2nil

— Sanaa (@sana2) November 1, 2022

So for @alaa, my beautiful amazing brother, there is no choice to be made, he moves forward knowing he has already won his battle irrespective of what will be written on its last page#FreeAlaa #FreeThemAll #Cop27 #Egypt pic.twitter.com/fYKBz1gOHu

— Mona Seif (@Monasosh) November 1, 2022

Abd El Fattah, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as @alaa, rose to international prominence as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Although he has spent much of the past decade in jail, a collection of his writing, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” which includes reflections smuggled out of prison, was published last year.

“Alaa Abd El Fattah’s powerful voice for democracy is close to being extinguished, we ask you to breathe life into it by reading his words,” the Nobel laureates wrote to leaders, including President Joe Biden, who plan to attend the conference.

In response to a request from Abd El Fattah’s publishers, the letter was signed by Svetlana Alexievich, J. M. Coetzee, Annie Ernaux, Louise Gluck, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, Mario Vargas Llosa, Patrick Modiano, Herta Muller, Orhan Pamuk, Roger Penrose, George Smith, Wole Soyinka, and Olga Tokarczuk.

When Abd El Fattah, who comes from a family of Cairene rights activists, was first jailed in 2006, a campaign to demand the release of the activist blogger was launched online, including on a blog called, simply, “Free Alaa!”

That slogan, and an image of the young writer’s curly hair, was revived as a social media hashtag in 2011, when the military council that took power after Mubarak was toppled by the Tahrir Square uprising detained him for reporting on a subsequent massacre of Coptic Christian protesters by the army.

In the years since, Abd El Fattah’s family and supporters have been forced to defend him again and again from unjust prosecution and imprisonment by the authorities: first during the brief rule of the freely elected Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, and then after Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Morsi’s defense minister, seized power in a coup in 2013.

Abd El Fattah has been held in harsh conditions in Egyptian prisons for most of the past decade, after Sisi banned street protests and criminalized online dissent. Since he revealed plans to begin a full hunger strike, his family has intensified efforts to save his life by calling for supporters to press the British government to intervene. Because Abd El Fattah’s mother was born in London, he was able to obtain British citizenship last year.

For all our well-wishers who wish they could do something. Here it is: #FreeAlaa #FreeThemAll https://t.co/9gUfIwcUxx

— Ahdaf Soueif (@asoueif) November 1, 2022

In the buildup to COP27 in Egypt, climate activists have pointed out that their counterparts in the host country are still not free to even protest for change.

“The reality most of those participating in #Cop27 are choosing to ignore,” Abd El Fattah’s sister Mona Seif observed on Twitter last month, “is not just that Human Rights and Climate justice are interlinked, but in countries like #Egypt your true allies, the ones who actually give a damn about the planet’s future are those languishing in prisons.”

Swedish youth climate activists Greta Thunberg and Andreas Magnusson joined Abd El Fattah’s sisters at a protest outside the Foreign Office in London this week.

During the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged that he would condition $1.3 billion in U.S. security aid to Egypt on respect for human rights from Sisi, who had been coddled by President Donald Trump. “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists … or threatening their families is unacceptable,” Biden tweeted that year. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.’”

But last year, Biden administration officials reportedly told Sisi’s government that just $130 million of aid would be withheld until Egypt ended the prosecutions of a few nongovernmental organizations and dropped charges against or released just 16 of the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails. (A report released this year showed that nearly 6,000 Egyptians were jailed for political activities during Biden’s first year in office.)

In the days before the climate conference, Egypt’s government has made it quite clear that protesters are not welcome anywhere outside the strictly controlled “Climate Demonstrations Designated Zone,” in the conference’s “Green Zone.” According to Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, permission to access that zone appears to be impossible for activists to obtain.

We are 5 days away from #COP27 and I don’t know anyone who got their Green Zone access. Website has been a black hole of applications with all requests still “being reviewed”. Green Zone is only area theoretically “open to the public” but @COP27P still asks for prior registration pic.twitter.com/WH24AlwK3N

— hossam bahgat ???? ???? (@hossambahgat) October 31, 2022

At least 67 people were reportedly arrested this week in Egypt for speaking out about the inadequate response to climate change, including an Indian activist who set off on a protest march from Cairo and Egyptians who were detained on charges of “spreading false news” for sharing calls on Facebook for demonstrations.

“This type of awareness raising used to be celebrated in Egypt,” Bahgat noted. “Not in today’s carceral Egypt.”

This type of awareness raising used to be celebrated in Egypt, covered by media. The Indian activist would’ve made the talk shows a few years ago, environment minister would’ve received him for a photo. Not in today’s carceral Egypt. Ajit was arrested on day 1 of his march #COP27 pic.twitter.com/kzh5EHiRkl

— hossam bahgat ???? ???? (@hossambahgat) October 31, 2022

The post Nobel Laureates Press Egypt to Free Alaa Abd El Fattah, Writer on Hunger Strike, Before COP27 appeared first on The Intercept.

Reporting on the tax-exempt nonprofit’s first wave of ads — which filled the screens of baseball fans with unwelcome images of violence between innings of playoff games — revealed that the Republican operatives responsible for the attacks all work closely with Stephen Miller, the former president’s speechwriter, who has played a key role in promoting the anti-Democrat ad campaign on social media.

The group’s latest ad, posted online Saturday, seeks to rewrite history by blaming President Joe Biden for the sickening rise in racist attacks on Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic, which first spiked in March 2020 when then-President Donald Trump started calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and “the Kung flu.”

The ad, which is provocatively titled, “Why Don’t Asian Lives Matter to Joe Biden and His Left-Wing Allies?” seeks to exploit justifiable outrage over the violence by confronting viewers with distressing images of 17 attacks on Asian Americans since 2020, as a narrator insists that the blame lies with Biden and “left-wing prosecutors who won’t prosecute — liberals freeing predators.”

WATCH: Why Don't Asian Lives Matter to Joe Biden and his liberal allies? pic.twitter.com/C0Nu9LyfeK

— Citizens for Sanity (@citizens_sanity) October 22, 2022

That language, including the reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, seems to be carefully calibrated to stoke racial resentment between Black and Asian communities by implying that Democrats have enacted criminal justice policies that, according to narration scripted by the former Trump aides, “have allowed deranged criminals to roam free, putting Asians in grave danger.”

But what is missing from the ad is perhaps more revealing than what is in it.

None of the clips of violence are dated, which prevents viewers from knowing that almost all of the crimes were committed either during or shortly after Trump’s presidency. Using the video clips as clues, I was able to find news reports on 16 of the 17 incidents. One of the most shocking assaults, on an 84-year-old Chinese man who was kicked to the pavement from his seated walker in San Francisco, took place when Trump was president, on February 20, 2020. Six other attacks took place less than a month into Biden’s term. At least 12 of the victims shown in the ad were attacked before May 20, 2021, when Biden signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, federal legislation aimed at combatting the racist attacks, which was introduced by two Asian American Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Grace Meng of New York, and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii.

In at least one case, an assault on a 91-year-old man who was shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown on January 31, 2021, the ad makers appear to have zoomed in on the original surveillance camera video so that the part of the date stamp that clearly showed the month is cropped out.

All of the news reports on the violence featured in the ad have also been edited to remove mentions of bigotry triggered by the pandemic and Trump’s rhetoric.

Perhaps most importantly, the ad’s central claim, that criminals who attack Asian Americans are not punished for their crimes, is completely contradicted by news reports on the incidents, which make it clear that in case after case the suspected attackers were in fact arrested and charged, including with hate crimes.

At one point in the ad, as the narrator says “Joe Biden’s soft on crime,” viewers see video that was shared on Twitter by the actress Olivia Munn, who tweeted surveillance camera footage of a friend’s mother, Lee-Lee Chin-Yeung, being assaulted in Queens, New York, on February 16, 2021.

But the suspected attacker, Patrick Mateo, was arrested within three days and was later charged with a hate crime. The victim’s daughter, Maggie Cheng, was a virtual guest for Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address. “My mother was attacked because she is Asian and thanks to the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act that Rep. Meng wrote, the perpetrator will be held accountable for his crime,” Cheng told a local news site. “I am grateful to both President Biden and Congresswoman Meng for their continued support in protecting Asian Americans across the country and combating anti-Asian hate.”

Of the three attacks featured in the ad that took place in 2022, the most brutal was the beating of a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent in Yonkers, New York, in March. Last month, her attacker pleaded guilty to assault in the first degree as a hate crime. The Wall Street Journal reported that he “will be sentenced in November to 17.5 years in state prison and five years of supervised release as part of his plea agreement.”

Despite those arrests and prosecutions, the wave of racist harassment and attacks has yet to recede.

“Sadly the hate continues,” Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, told ABC News in March. “The hate’s been normalized, with President Trump’s rhetoric. He sort of opened Pandora’s box, that it’s OK to mock and then to attack Asians.”

Jeung launched the website Stop AAPI Hate on March 19, 2020 to track the alarming rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as the pandemic reached the United States. Three days earlier, Trump had referred to the harm caused to Americans by “the Chinese virus” for the first time on Twitter. Writing in the American Journal of Public Health this year, researchers reported evidence that Trump’s tweet had triggered an immediate spike in anti-Asian hate speech online.

On March 18, 2020, as reports of hatred directed at Chinese Americans circulated, Trump dismissed concerns about a White House official who made a racist joke to a Chinese American reporter, by referring to Covid-19 as “the Kung flu.” The next day, a Washington Post photographer captured an image of an alteration to Trump’s prepared remarks on the pandemic, written in Sharpie in what appeared to be Trump’s handwriting, showing that a reference to “the Corona Virus” had been altered to read “the CHINESE Virus.”

When Trump returned to the campaign trail in June 2020, he added the racist joke that Covid-19 was “the Kung flu” to his stump speech, which so pleased his fans that it quickly became an applause they cried out for.

“We had, about two years ago, leaders of our country using terms like, ‘China virus,’ ‘Kung flu,’ literally blaming people who look like me for bringing the virus to this country, and that’s not going to change overnight,” Meng told ABC News this March. “We have a lot of pain and damage to undo.”

According to a right-wing website’s report on the Citizens for Sanity ad, it is scheduled to air before the midterm elections in states where the votes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders could decide close races — including Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

The post Bizarre Republican Ad Blames Biden for Anti-Asian Violence Incited by Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Three weeks later, after the encounter was featured in local and national news reports, journalists who covered the event discovered that they had been duped by the Oz campaign into reporting as news a scene that had more in common with reality TV.

The woman, Sheila Armstrong, sat next to Oz at a September 19 event his campaign described as a “community discussion” in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Armstrong held a handmade sign which said that her lost relatives were “gone but not forgotten,” and her anguished tears were broadcast to the city that day by the local NBC News affiliate, and described in reports on the event by the Philadelphia Inquirer and KYW Newsradio.

Sheila Armstrong tells Oz about her nephew and brother who were shot and killed in Philly. She says she’s “fed up with the system that’s playing politics with the lives of people in this community.” That’s Democratic state Rep. Chris Rabb seated next to her. pic.twitter.com/WWFf4nGfXj

— Julia Terruso (@JuliaTerruso) September 19, 2022

The emotional encounter between the candidate and a victim of gun violence who had suffered so deeply was brought to national attention this week by The Associated Press, in a feature story on the competition over Black voters in the Pennsylvania Senate race between Oz and his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor. When the AP story was first published on Tuesday, it began this way:

As Sheila Armstrong grew emotional in recounting how her brother and nephew were killed in Philadelphia, Dr. Mehmet Oz — sitting next to her inside a Black church, their chairs arranged a bit like his former daytime TV show set — placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Later, he gave her a hug, and said, “How do you cope?”

That text account — in a piece looking at the Oz’s campaign’s effort to connect with Black voters as an allied Republican group worked to cast Fetterman as an anti-Black racist — was posted on the AP’s website, and distributed to the hundreds of news organizations that reprint AP reporting, accompanied by a photograph of Armstrong drying her tears as Oz leaned in to hug her.

As the text and photo accounts of the exchange between Oz and Armstrong were reproduced by news organizations across the country that subscribe to the AP’s wire service, Fetterman’s campaign manager, Brendan McPhillips, complained on Twitter that the AP had failed to share a pertinent fact with readers: that Armstrong is not an ordinary voter but a paid member of the Oz campaign staff.

As evidence, McPhillips posted a screenshot of a business card Armstrong had shared on her public Instagram account in June, identifying her as the Oz campaign’s “Philadelphia County Coordinator,” above a “doctorozforsenate.com” email address.

Armstrong’s Instagram feed also includes posts from June and July promoting other campaign events in Philadelphia, illustrated by a photo of her smiling with the candidate, and one from September, in which she invited anyone who wanted to attend the “Safer Streets Community Discussion” with Oz on September 19 to RSVP, by emailing her at her campaign account. The flyer for the event Armstrong posted on Instagram made it clear that the location of the event would not be made public to anyone who did not email her.

Records filed with the Federal Election Commission in June show that two payments to Armstrong that month from the Doctor Oz for Senate campaign were described as “payroll.”

None of the local news reports on the event that were published last month informed the public that Armstrong worked for the Oz campaign.

While Armstrong has clearly suffered greatly from the unchecked epidemic of gun violence in America, it appears that the Oz campaign misled reporters who attended the invitation-only discussion where she was a featured speaker by failing to disclose her affiliation with the campaign. None of the local news reports on the event that were published last month informed the public that Armstrong worked for the Oz campaign.

Although the AP updated the text of its report to add a reference to Armstrong’s employment, after the Fetterman campaign raised the issue, it seems clear that the news organization only became aware of her status after publication. “As soon as AP learned of Armstrong’s campaign affiliation and confirmed it, we updated our story,” a spokesperson for the news organization told me in an email.

In a phone interview on Thursday, Ryan Collerd, the freelance photojournalist who took the photograph of Oz comforting Armstrong on assignment for the AP, told me that he had no idea that she was affiliated with the campaign until I called him. “She was not presented, in my recollection, as anything other than a grieving family member,” Collerd said.

Armstrong and the Oz campaign’s communications director, Brittany Yanick, did not respond to questions about whether the campaign deliberately withheld her role with the campaign from journalists.

Chris Rabb — a Democratic state representative who said he forced his way into the event in his community without an invitation “in protest,” and took a seat next to Armstrong — shared a photograph on Twitter that seemed to show that reporters in the room nearly outnumbered the dozen invited guests who took part in the discussion.

Literally half of the dozen folks at this fake town hall were featured on #DocHollywood’s campaign pamphlet that I tore up in front of the cameras before I left.

Let’s see what news outlets will release that footage.

I was neither invited, nor welcomed to this #traumaporn. pic.twitter.com/2OEgHzhvi9

— Re-Elect RepRabb! (@Rabb4ThePeople) September 19, 2022

Rabb also claimed that some of the participants in the photo-op had previously been photographed by the Oz campaign for a flyer promoting his candidacy that was handed out at the event. While that flyer does not appear to be available online, a campaign commercial for Oz that was filmed that day and released two weeks later did feature video of him speaking to at least two of the participants in the Philadelphia event, including Armstrong, who was shown touring the neighborhood with him, arm in arm.

Cory Clark, a photojournalist and writer who covered the event for The Local, a Northwest Philadelphia newspaper, told me in an email that Armstrong’s affiliation with the campaign was not revealed to reporters who attended what he pointedly called “a closed-door community discussion.”

Clark’s report on the event also included video of a confrontation between Armstrong and pro-choice Fetterman supporters outside the storefront church where the event she organized for Oz took place.

“I invited Dr. Oz to come have this conversation with me and my community,” Armstrong told the Fetterman supporters. “So a conversation about safer streets? Every candidate should be having a conversation with us. But guess what? Oz, he took my invitation, so that’s why we’re doing it — and I invited Fetterman, Fetterman did not come.”

A Fetterman campaign official described Armstrong’s claim as false, telling me in an email, “we were never invited to this event.”

There is nothing new about a political campaign carefully stage-managing a public event to get good publicity or using the news media to broadcast a favorable message to the public. But by inviting reporters to cover a community discussion with Oz and not revealing that a featured speaker, Armstrong, was a paid staffer, the former TV host’s aides seem to have successfully tricked reporters into presenting a staged, reality TV scene as if it were news.

What’s more, despite Armstrong’s suggestion that the whole point of the event was to discuss gun violence, the four-part plan to “fight for Black communities” Oz unveiled during his visit to Philadelphia that day made no mention of any measures to take guns off the city’s streets.

In fact, the candidate’s campaign website boasts that Oz is “a proud gun-owner” and “a firm believer in the Second Amendment and our constitutional right to bear arms for protection.”

The text under a video that shows Oz firing a variety of weapons, and loading a rifle, states his position clearly: “He opposes anti-gun measures like red flag laws and liberal gun grabs.”

But when Lauren Mayk, a reporter for the local NBC News affiliate in Philadelphia, asked Oz if he would oppose any new restrictions on guns as a senator, the candidate — who had been photographed after his event giving Armstrong another warm hug — dodged the question and quickly changed the subject.

Oz held another campaign event on Thursday, also called a community discussion about safer streets, this time in South Philadelphia. Photographs of the event posted online by the candidate, and in the Getty archive, appear to show that at least three of the men who took part in the discussion with the community in Northwest Philadelphia last month were also present at the event on Thursday in a different part of the city.

I enjoyed our Safer Streets Community Discussion today in Philly with my friend @McSwainPA. These discussions are important because of the radical efforts by John Fetterman to decriminalize heroin and put heroin injection sites in our neighborhoods – and we can't let that happen. pic.twitter.com/LfN0hjEb8i

— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) October 13, 2022

Two of the men wore the same hats at both events. One man, who wore an orange camouflage cap, was also featured in the Oz campaign commercial filmed on September 19. The other man, in a red NASA cap, praised Oz at the first one as someone “who cares.” The third man, Isaac “Ikey Raw” Gardner, a North Philadelphia community activist, appeared in news photographs of both events, and posted comments and video on social media to document his presence.

Update: October 13, 2022

After this article was published, an editor’s note was added to the September 19 Philadelphia Inquirer report on the Oz campaign event that day, explaining that the report “has been updated to include Sheila Armstrong’s paid role in Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign.” Julia Terruso, the Inquirer reporter who was in the room for the event, reported that the Oz campaign told The Inquirer this week that Armstrong is Oz’s Philadelphia regional director, working on African American outreach.

The post Mehmet Oz Campaign Misled Reporters About His Emotional Encounter With a Black Voter appeared first on The Intercept.

DeSantis had been asked by Brendon Leslie, the founder of a conservative news site — and a Republican activist who told local news on January 6, 2021, that he was following President Donald Trump’s orders when he stormed the U.S. Capitol — if the media was at fault for storm forecasts that had stressed the danger to the city of Tampa instead of other areas that were badly hit.

I asked Governor DeSantis about media accountability and he absolutely demolished them

“They don’t care about the people of this state… they want to use destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda” pic.twitter.com/IErBHfwkuJ

— Brendon Leslie (@BrendonLeslie) October 4, 2022

Instead of blaming the weather forecasters, the governor pivoted to his claim that national news organizations had been rooting for maximum destruction from the storm because they hoped to “use it to pursue their political agenda.” DeSantis left unsaid which news organizations he was talking about, and what they hoped to gain politically by seeing Tampa devastated — but the governor’s words seemed to make perfect sense to Leslie, who nodded along.

That’s probably because Leslie, like DeSantis, is fluent in the language of the far-right media ecosystem. In fact, Leslie seems to draw no contradiction between reporting on Republican political candidates and also campaigning for them. In March, he organized a far-right rally featuring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. In August, Leslie spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference. A review of recent stories from Leslie’s news site, Florida’s Voice, shows that its coverage of DeSantis is so glowing — and reports about his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, are so uniformly negative — that it is almost indistinguishable from a campaign site.

On Tuesday, when Leslie interviewed the governor, he was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group. DeSantis, who does much of his campaigning on Fox News, had good reason to believe that he was speaking to someone with an audience steeped in the right-wing media trope that treats the Biden administration as akin to a dictatorship.

Fox News seems to have played a role in mainstreaming the language DeSantis used on Tuesday. On the cable channel, the Biden administration is regularly referred to as a repressive “regime.”

In recent months one of the channel’s most prominent hosts, Laura Ingraham, has repeatedly cast reports that are unflattering to Republicans — from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, Vox, the Daily Beast, and Politico — as the work of “regime media.”

In fact, in her opening monologue on Monday night — hours before DeSantis was interviewed by Leslie — Ingraham had claimed that reporters from “regime media” outlets who asked questions about Florida’s response to the storm were “working overtime to cast aspersions and sow distrust” and “rooting now against Florida’s governor in a time of crisis.”

As Ingraham spoke, a graphic behind her displayed the logos of the nonpartisan news organizations, and the headline in the lower third of the screen read: “Media Desperate to Make This DeSantis’ Katrina.”

Close observers of Fox News, which is clearly partisan and operates as a de facto arm of the Republican Party, and was in lockstep with the White House during the Trump administration, might see some irony in one of its hosts claiming that news organizations which aim to be nonpartisan are the ones acting like state-controlled media in autocracies like Russia or Syria.

While it seems likely that DeSantis, who has appeared on Fox dozens of times this year, was channeling Ingraham when he railed against the supposed “regime media” plot to make him look bad, the governor has been referring to the Biden administration as a totalitarian regime supported by media lackeys for more than a year.

“When you stand up for the right things, they will attack you,” DeSantis told Republicans in Nebraska in September 2021. “The left will come after you. The regime-controlled media will smear you.”

The following month, the governor suggested that federal officials were trying to intimidate Florida parents who objected to masks mandates in schools during the coronavirus pandemic. “As we continue to see the use of fear and intimidation to suppress opposition to the regime, we’re going to find new ways to be able to empower parents’ rights to decide what is best for their children,” DeSantis said.

When he announced that he would be “a candidate for reelection as governor of the free state of Florida,” last November, DeSantis listed among his accomplishments that he had “stood up to the Biden regime.” The same week, he appeared on “Fox and Friends” to denounce “the Biden regime failures from Afghanistan to the southern border.”

This August, when Mar-a-Lago was searched by federal agents to seize classified documents illegally taken from the White House by Trump, DeSantis called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.”

While many Americans who do not spend their time immersed in the right-wing media echo chamber might be surprised that this term is so commonly used to describe a democratically elected federal government in Washington, the effort to discredit all non-conservative media outlets as filled with undercover left-wing operatives is of course not new.

In 2009, the Republican nominee for vice president the previous year, Sarah Palin, surprised Fox host Sean Hannity by referring to mainstream media critics of her memoir as “that lamestream media.” “Did you say lamestream media?” Hannity asked. “Yeah, lamestream,” Palin answered.

Eight years later, Donald Trump went a step further by referring to any criticism of him or his administration as “fake news,” and calling reporters unwilling to accept his lies as truth “the enemy of the people.”

Over the past year, Republican politicians like DeSantis — who recently headlined campaign events for Republican candidates that effectively barred any journalists who were not willing to allow their reporting to be used in campaign commercials — have increasingly embraced the far more extreme claim that reporters who ask uncomfortable questions are “regime media.”

The post Ron DeSantis Claim That “Regime Media” Wanted Hurricane Ian to Hit Tampa Echoed Fox News Rant appeared first on The Intercept.

In a recorded address, Putin described the move as a “partial mobilization” of Russian citizens with some prior military training, but, as the Russian exile news site Meduza reported, a new law enacted this week appears to give the president the right to call for a wider, general mobilization. Most Russian men of military age are legally considered reservists following a mandatory year of military service in their youth.

Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian armed forces, observed that Putin’s order, which also indefinitely extends the contracts of soldiers who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, “might help Moscow stem the deteriorating quantity of the force, but not the deteriorating quality of the force [and] its morale.”

At least 1,386 protesters were arrested at demonstrations across the country, according to OVD-Info, a human rights group that monitors political persecution in Russia.

There were more than 500 arrests in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, where protesters chanted “No to war,” “Send Putin to the trenches,” and “Russia without Putin.”

Protests in Moscow and St Petersburg today have grown pretty large. People chanting “No to War!” Dozens of arrests reported pic.twitter.com/9F4E5VIy9E

— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) September 21, 2022

A crowd gathered this evening on Arbat, Moscow's main pedestrian street, shouts "Send Putin to the trenches!" pic.twitter.com/pkm8vynnxw

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

?????? ??? ?????? #???????? pic.twitter.com/C45wMLQQdn

— ?????? ?????? (@SobolLubov) September 21, 2022

Some protesters also used a play on words to refer to the mobilization — known in Russian as “mobilizatsiya” — as “mogilizatsiya,” an invented word that means something close to “burialization.”

Although the arrests were not featured on tightly controlled state television news broadcasts, video of protesters being dragged away by the police quickly filled Russian social media channels.

In #Moscow, #Russia, the police are detaining protesters against the mobilisation at an unauthorised #protest rally taking place tonight. The protester who is being detained is chanting “No to War!”.

pic.twitter.com/rvqGhJuqMl

— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) September 21, 2022

Many of those images showed casual brutality inflicted on the demonstrators by the police, including a clip recorded by someone sitting inside a bakery on the Old Arbat, a pedestrian street in central Moscow, as officers repeatedly bashed a young man’s head into a window directly in front of them.

A quiet dinner in Moscow pic.twitter.com/AmN1pVetCR

— Alec Luhn (@AlecLuhn) September 21, 2022

While many Russian dissidents in exile saluted the courage of the protesters, who risked lengthy prison terms to voice their dissent, some Ukrainians accused Russian protesters of being too passive, or failing to take to the streets until Putin’s mobilization order put them or their loved ones in imminent danger of being forced to join the assault on Ukraine that began in February.

No mass protests in ??Russia after Bucha. No mass protests after Izyum. After hundreds of ??Ukrainian children killed. Etc etc etc.

So forgive my remaining very much unimpressed by today's "No war" chantings after they got mobilization.

— Danylo Mokryk (@DMokryk) September 21, 2022

People are protesting in Moscow. (Other cities, too). They are traditionally grabbed one by one and showed into police vans.

Until Russians begin to fight for their own and resist instead of filming arrests and making selfies, they will be slaves. Their protest will be pointless pic.twitter.com/yibyfus1pZ

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) September 21, 2022

But, as OVD-Info reported last month, there were at least 16,437 arrests related to antiwar protests in Russia between February and August. Ahead of Wednesday’s protests, the prosecutor’s office in Moscow warned the public that anyone taking part in or encouraging protests could be punished with 15 years in prison.

In addition to risking arrest, many young Russian men who attended the protests also faced the prospect of being immediately pressed into military service by the authorities. Mediazona, a reader-supported news site focused on the Russian court system and prisons, reported that at least three of the men arrested for protesting in Moscow were handed summonses ordering them to report to enlistment offices.

There were also signs, however, that Russia’s criminal justice system was overwhelmed by the mass arrests. Video provided to OVD-Info by one detainee in St. Petersburg showed that dozens of protesters who were forced to wait all night at a police station passed the time by filming each other as one played the piano.

??????????? ????? ? ?????? ??????? ? 17 ?????-??????????. ???? ????????? ????? 50 ??????????? ?? ????? ?????? ???????????. ???? ?? ?????, ??????? ????? ?? ??? ?? ??? ???? ????????? ? ???????.

????? ??????? ??????????? pic.twitter.com/rrHFtoOaoK

— ???-???? (@OvdInfo) September 21, 2022

In the southern city of Krasnodar, near Ukraine, a police bus carrying at least 14 detainees broke down before reaching the station.

In the Russian city of Krasnodar a police van packed with anti-mobilisation protesters broke down this evening pic.twitter.com/EV2HX1aFuH

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

Francis Scarr, who monitors Russian television for the BBC, reported that among those arrested was a street musician in the city of Izhevsk who entertained protesters with a rendition of a sardonic Siberian punk song from the last days of the Soviet Union, “Everything Is Going According to Plan.”

Police in the Russian city of Izhevsk have reportedly detained a busker whose repertoire contained anti-war songs

The one being sung in this video is the highly ironic (and very apt) "Everything is going to plan" by Yegor Letov pic.twitter.com/DynDWjLpdg

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) September 21, 2022

The post Russians Return to Streets to Protest Widening of Putin’s War on Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.

I also thoroughly appreciate all of the constituents who took time to write to the Board on the freedom to read. Book bans have no place in Boise! pic.twitter.com/n9qjVEokhs

— Shiva Rajbhandari (@_Shiva_R) September 13, 2022

Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election, was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote.

Thank you, Boise. Now the real work starts. pic.twitter.com/j7zzLnylGy

— Shiva Rajbhandari (@_Shiva_R) September 7, 2022

In an interview, Rajbhandari told me that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.

The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.

I stand strongly against book bans. Free access to information is the cornerstone of a democratic civil society, and I refuse to back down to extremists. On the school board I will continue to advocate for student dignity and teacher freedom. https://t.co/K7mb1stEdU pic.twitter.com/SOrLRNMsJ0

— Shiva Rajbhandari (@_Shiva_R) August 5, 2022

But, Rajbhandari said, “that’s the least of what they’ve done. Last year, there was a kid who brought a gun to Boise High, which is my school, and he got suspended and they organized an armed protest outside our school.”

Rajbhandari, who started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was 15, is familiar with the group’s tactics. “We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

So when the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt — and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost — Rajbhandari told me he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

“This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari told me. “There’s a group, they’re called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and they actually control a lot of the political discourse in our legislature. Their primary goal is to get rid of public education and disburse the money to charter schools or get rid of that funding entirely.”

“Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education.”

“And the way they’ve done that, is with this very well-thought-out attack on teachers,” he added, promoting “baseless claims of ‘indoctrination’” in schools as well as “attacks on LGBTQ youth, with claims of ‘grooming.’”

Last year, when he was 16, Rajbhandari publicly confronted Idaho’s far-right lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, telling her that the task force she had set up to “Examine Indoctrination in Idaho Education” was investigating an entirely imaginary threat.

During in-person testimony to the task force, the young activist told McGeachin, who was running for governor at the time, and her running mate, state Rep. Priscilla Giddings, that Idaho teachers were not “indoctrinating students to hate America, as this committee purports.” He went on to accuse the two Republican officials of endorsing baseless conspiracy theories as a political stunt in support of their candidacies.

“You won’t succeed,” he told them. “You won’t succeed in silencing student voices. You won’t succeed at bringing Idaho back to the 1800s. You won’t succeed at abolishing public schools as the Freedom Foundation aspires. And you won’t succeed in being elected to the executive branch of state government, which I feel is the true purpose of this.”

“And you won’t succeed because despite all your efforts, we Idahoans are smart, we’re educated, and we can’t be fooled into believing that something exists when the opposite is true,” Rajbhandari added. “All across the state, there are young people like me who will vote in the Republican primary for the first time in 2022.”

McGeachin — who was, as Rajbhandari had predicted, ultimately defeated in the Republican primary for governor — had launched the task force by appealing for “information regarding problematic teachings on social justice, critical race theory, socialism, communism, or Marxism” in public schools. But the response from Idahoans was so overwhelmingly opposed to her claims of widespread indoctrination that she refused to make the comments submitted to the task force public until a court ordered her to do so.

A review of the records by the Idaho Capital Sun showed that about 90 percent of the public comments on the subject either denied that Idaho teachers were indoctrinating students or criticized McGeachin for wasting taxpayer dollars “chasing an illusion.”

The initial impetus for Rajbhandari’s run for office was a feeling of frustration that the Boise school board was simply ignoring pleas from student climate activists to make a clean energy commitment. Two years ago, he said, a group of high school and junior high students tried everything they could think of to urge the board to make a commitment to renewable energy. “We sent emails; we did a postcard drive and wrote like 300 postcards; we met with our local power company; we had a petition, we delivered the largest petition ever to our school district,” Rajbhandari said, but the board never responded. “Last year, I wrote a letter to our school board president, just asking for a meeting … and I never got anything back. But I know that he read my letter because about a week later, I was called to the principal’s office.”

“That’s when I knew I was going to run” for a seat on the board, Rajbhandari recalled. “Because that is indicative of a problem. Students are the primary stakeholders in our education, right? And yet our board wasn’t seeing us as constituents, and they weren’t willing to meet with us, and they weren’t taking our ideas seriously,” he said.

“That’s not to say that my run for the board comes from a place of animosity,” he added, “but it comes from a place of need, which is that we don’t have student representation on the Boise Schools board, and our board members aren’t boots-on-the-ground in the classroom.”

One of the most urgent priorities for action from the board, Rajbhandari says, is finding resources to address a mental health crisis in a state that has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country.

If all goes according to plan, Rajbhandari hopes to serve on the board for the whole school year, then hand over the seat to one of the high school juniors from the district who will shadow him for the year. The idea is to ensure student representation on the Boise school board going forward.

As for his own future, Rajbhandari told me that he is looking at colleges now but is not yet certain about what’s next. “I’m really passionate about climate justice, environmental issues — so maybe study law,” he said. “But I think that’s what school’s for, is figuring out who you want to be. And really, Boise Schools is what made me who I am, and so I can thank my teachers for that.”

The post Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

Asked by Matt Smith of WISN-TV Milwaukee if he would be willing to testify to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Johnson argued that he had spent only “a couple seconds” that day furthering a scheme to keep the defeated president, Donald Trump, in office by falsifying Electoral College results.

"What would they ask me to testify about?" Johnson said on UPFRONT when asked if he would testify before the Jan. 6th committee about Wisconsin's slate of false Republican electors. "My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds." pic.twitter.com/42jXN82YQh

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) August 22, 2022

As he struggled to minimize his role in the plot by Republican operatives in Wisconsin to submit a slate of electors who would ignore Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, Johnson appeared to contradict himself multiple times in the interview. Moments after telling Smith that he “had nothing to do with the alternate slate,” the senator admitted that he had, in fact, sent text messages on January 6 to connect his chief of staff with a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin who wanted Johnson to hand-deliver fabricated electoral votes for Trump to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

As text messages released by the January 6 committee in June showed, the scheme quickly fizzled because an aide to Pence told Johnson’s chief of staff that the vice president would not accept the fake electoral votes from the senator. Since then, whenever he has been asked why he agreed to facilitate the plot, Johnson has drawn attention to how quickly it failed, as if that somehow exonerated him.

“My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds. I got — I think I fielded three texts and sent two,” Johnson told Smith. “I had virtually no involvement. Literally, my involvement lasted seconds.”

Johnson refused to explain why he had agreed to act as a go-between with Pence for Jim Troupis, the Trump campaign lawyer in Wisconsin who wanted the fake electors for Trump from Wisconsin and Michigan to be counted instead of those for Biden, who had been elected by the popular vote in those two states.

Johnson’s frequently hapless efforts to evade direct questions about his role in the plot began with outright falsehoods in June, when the text exchange between his chief of staff and the Pence aide on January 6 was projected on a big screen during a hearing of the House select committee.

Jan. 6 Committee shows evidence that Sen. Ron Johnson attempted to deliver slates of "fake" Trump electors from Wisconsin and Michigan to then-Vice Pres. Mike Pence, according to text from Johnson staffer.

“Do not give that to him,” Pence aide responded. https://t.co/OO4aRea0h7 pic.twitter.com/SWOcQQ0i9D

— ABC News (@ABC) June 21, 2022

Pressed by reporters that day to explain what his role had been, Johnson tried to dodge questions by pretending to be on the phone and then falsely said that he had no idea who had passed the fake slates of electors on to his office.

New – Ron Johnson told us he has “no idea” who tried to get him to share fake electors from MI and WI to Pence on Jan. 6. Says he was aware of ask on Jan. 6 AM.

“I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver it so we reached out” to Pence’s office. pic.twitter.com/bjJswKb28n

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 21, 2022

Later the same day, the senator again lied to reporters by saying that “interns” were to blame for accepting the slates of fabricated electors and that he “had no idea” who had delivered them to his aides.

Does anybody seriously believe an intern dropped a mysterious envelope off at Ron Johnson's office and his Chief of Staff nearly had him hand-deliver it to the Vice President?

This is total nonsense. pic.twitter.com/urV76dI8wR

— Sarah Godlewski (@SarahforWI) June 22, 2022

Two days later, Johnson himself revealed that he knew all along that Troupis was the source of the fabricated electoral votes by providing more text messages to the conservative activist and columnist John Solomon. The texts published by Solomon, embedded in a column that accused the January 6 committee of making too much of the senator’s role in the plot, also showed that the senator had put Trump’s lawyer in touch with his chief of staff, Sean Riley, just six minutes after being asked to pass on the fake electoral votes.

A screenshot of a Jan. 6, 2021, text message to Sen. Ron Johnson from Jim Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin. The text was obtained by John Solomon, a conservative activist and columnist.

A screenshot of Jan. 6, 2021, text messages sent by Sen. Ron Johnson to Jim Troupis and Johnson’s chief of staff, Sean Riley. The texts were obtained by John Solomon.

Solomon also obtained and published a longer version of the text exchange between Riley and the Pence aide, Chris Hodgson — which was apparently copied from Riley’s phone.

A screenshot of a Jan. 6, 2021, text exchange between Sean Riley and Chris Hodgson, an aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence. The texts were obtained by John Solomon.

The longer version of the exchange shows that Pence’s aide explained that the fake Electoral College votes “were supposed to come in through the mail.” That text suggests that the vice president’s office was not taken by surprise by the effort to submit false electoral votes and was perhaps just sticking more rigorously to the letter of the law governing presidential elections, which states that the results of the Electoral College votes in each state are supposed to be sent to the vice president by registered mail, not hand-delivered.

In an interview with a sympathetic right-wing radio host in Wisconsin two days after the committee pointed to his role, Johnson stressed that the text messages showed that his documented role in the plot lasted just over an hour. “My office’s entire involvement in this thing lasted 70 minutes,” Johnson told radio host Vicki McKenna. “My involvement was probably seconds, maybe a minute or two,” he said.

By focusing so intently, in interview after interview, on the time stamps of the text messages about the fake electors plot he sent and received on January 6, Johnson seems to be drawing attention away from the question of why he instantly agreed to help Trump’s lawyer, Troupis, push the plot forward.

And when Johnson claims, as he did to the right-wing Wisconsin radio host, that he barely knew Troupis at the time, he is banking on listeners in McKenna’s ultraconservative audience not knowing that Troupis was a central figure in the effort to undermine the certification of the electoral vote and that Johnson had given Troupis a public platform to push his lies about election fraud just three weeks before January 6.

On December 16, 2020, Johnson chaired a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee dedicated to “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election,” which featured testimony from Troupis and Jesse Binnall, another Trump lawyer who had unsuccessfully filed suit to overturn the results of the presidential election in Nevada.

A week later, Johnson used his official Twitter feed to share false claims of electoral fraud in Wisconsin that Troupis had made at the hearing.

There is a lot more to the story of Wisconsin’s 2020 election and recount.

3 million people in our state voted properly.

But @JudgeTroupis testified that over 200,000 votes were not valid. pic.twitter.com/IBiiLiEY4s

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) December 22, 2020

Just one week before that hearing, on December 9, 2020, Troupis had received detailed written instructions about how to create a fake slate of electors for Trump from another lawyer working with the Trump campaign, Kenneth Chesebro, an ally of John Eastman, whose plan for halting congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021, had been embraced by Trump. As the New York Times reported last month, Troupis also wrote to a Trump adviser on December 7, 2020, that submitting alternate slates of electors in swing states was part of a plot to give Pence a reason to delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on January 6.

The post Playing Dumb: Sen. Ron Johnson’s Role in Jan. 6 Plot Is Hiding in Plain Sight appeared first on The Intercept.

That’s because Biden, who has done nothing to restart the long dormant peace talks, introduced the quote from Heaney by suggesting that Israelis and Palestinians were living through one of those moments when a just resolution to the conflict was close to being achieved.

Although Biden has quoted Heaney’s words dozens of times since 2005, in a dizzying array of contexts, the idea that peace can be achieved when “hope and history rhyme” had already been transformed into cliched political rhetoric by the time he started using it.

What was sobering and strange about hearing Biden recite those hopeful lines in Jerusalem now, is that Heaney’s phrase, in the hands of another American president, Bill Clinton, was once genuinely thrilling.

Heaney wrote the words in 1990, to be spoken by a chorus in “The Cure at Troy,” his adaptation of an ancient Greek play which was first performed that year in Derry, at a particularly bleak moment in the bloody and seemingly intractable conflict in his native Northern Ireland.

Heaney explained later that his uplifting verse — which became something like the motto for the peace process in Northern Ireland after Clinton quoted it in a speech in Derry in 1995 — was inspired by the seemingly miraculous transformations taking place at the time in Eastern Europe, where authoritarian states collapsed, and in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the apartheid regime began to crumble.

During the visit to Derry to encourage progress in a peace process that had already brought about an Irish Republican Army ceasefire, Clinton told the crowd that Heaney’s words “for me capture this moment.”

“‘History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave,’” Clinton recited. “But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.’”

“Well, my friends, I believe. I believe we live in a time of hope and history rhyming,” the American president added, in a speech that was recently featured in a “Derry Girls” episode about the hope that filled the city then. “Standing here in front of the Guildhall, looking out over these historic walls, I see a peaceful city, a safe city, a hopeful city, full of young people that should have a peaceful and prosperous future here where their roots and families are,” Clinton said to cheers.

The quote went over so well that Clinton used it again and again in the years that followed, beginning the next day in Dublin, where Heaney gave him a handwritten copy of the text as a present.

In 1996, when Clinton released a book on the eve of the Democratic convention, aides told Todd Purdum of the New York Times that the title, “Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century,” reflected how deeply struck the president was by Heaney’s phrase. “Mr. Clinton used the line to reflect his thoughts about America’s posture as it enters the next century,” Purdum reported.

The following year, as he accepted an award for brokering the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, Clinton described that framework for peace as, “one of those magic moments that the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, spoke of when he said that sometimes people just leave aside their cynicism and their bitterness, ‘and hope and history rhyme.’”

In 1998, Clinton quoted Heaney again in remarks welcoming the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, and mentioned that the poet’s handwritten stanzas were hanging in a frame on the wall of his White House office.

Heaney’s words were by then so closely associated with making peace that they were quoted by others involved in the process. When Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA’s former political wing Sinn Féin, flew to Bilbao in 1998 to encourage the Spanish government to open talks with Basque separatists, he quoted Heaney. (Adams later titled his memoir “Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland.”)

When Irish political leaders visited New York City in 1999, they were treated to a dramatic reading of that passage from “The Cure at Troy” by Gregory Peck at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

As she campaigned for the Senate in 2000, First Lady Hillary Clinton told a gathering of Irish Americans, “Many people in the room have worked for a lifetime to make hope and history rhyme.” That same week, the actor Roma Downey recited the lines at the Kennedy Center in Washington for the Irish leader, Bertie Ahern, and the British minister for Northern Ireland, Peter Mandelson.

Later that year, as he returned to Washington following a farewell trip to Ireland during the final month of his presidency, Bill Clinton treated reporters on Air Force One to a long, detailed analysis of Heaney’s play, explaining the plot of the original Greek drama, “Philoctetes” by Sophocles, and describing how Heaney had transformed it into a metaphor “for the peace process in Northern Ireland, and for people struggling with tribal wars in Africa or any of these conflicts.”

On a post-presidential trip to Johannesburg in 2006, Clinton recited the lines that Heaney wrote with Nelson Mandela in mind to Mandela himself.

So when Joe Biden started working the quotation from Heaney into his prepared remarks in 2005, and then made the stanza the centerpiece of the stump speech he delivered on the campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2007, during his unsuccessful run for the presidency, he was well aware that he was borrowing from Clinton’s rhetoric about resolving old conflicts.

But Biden turned the lines of poetry into a more general call for optimism in the face of difficulties. At the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner in late 2007, for instance, Biden introduced the quote by saying, “Folks, the sentiment that rests in the heart of, I think, almost every American can be best summarized, in my view, in one stanza of poetry.” He then paused to acknowledge to his rival, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, that the poem was also a favorite of her husband’s, before reciting the words and closing with an appeal to the voters. “Join me, join me, join me in making hope and history rhyme, because I promise you, I guarantee you, it’s fully within the capability of this great country to do it now, at this moment. We owe it to the American people.”

When Biden dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination after the Iowa caucus two months later, he signed off by telling his supporters: “We have the capacity to make hope and history rhyme, and you’ve given me great hope and great pride.”

Biden turned the lines of poetry into a more general call for optimism in the face of difficulties.

During his eight years as vice president, Biden worked the quotation from Heaney into remarks on many different subjects. In 2012, he recited what he called “a metaphoric thing about the Irish fighting against the British,” to a crowd on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Philadelphia.

“There’s a stanza in that poem that I think best defines the nature of the American spirit, whether you are a newly minted citizen or your family’s been here for eight generations,” Biden told mourners at a memorial service in 2013 for Sean Collier, an MIT campus police officer who was shot and killed by the Tsarnaev brothers following the Boston Marathon bombing. “I think that sentiment is stamped into the DNA of Americans, regardless of where they come from,” Biden told the mourners after reciting the lines. “It’s who we are. It’s who we’ve always been. Just look at the journey and the history of this country. For us Americans, we believe that hope and history can rhyme.”

When Nelson Mandela died in late 2013, Biden’s office released a statement that quoted Heaney and added: “In the hands of Nelson Mandela, hope and history rhymed.” The next day, Biden recited the verse during remarks on U.S.-Korea relations at Yonsei University in Seoul and told Korean students: “We have a chance to make hope and history rhyme so that your children and grandchildren will never live through a period like your grandparents and great-grandparents lived through.”

In 2014, Biden recited Heaney in Cyprus, to urge leaders of the Greek and Turkish communities to make peace — “For the sake of the boys and girls born on this island who deserve the possibility that only peace can bring, let’s finally make hope and history rhyme together” — in Washington, at a forum to encourage African business leaders to trade with the U.S. — “You have a chance in Africa to make hope and history rhyme in a way that has never occurred before” — and in Marrakech, at a summit for tech entrepreneurs — “We collectively have a chance to make hope and history rhyme like it hasn’t in a thousand years. The potential is immense, the intellect is available, and the technology accommodates it.”

Biden also suggested that year that the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, gathered for an Inter-American Development Bank conference, should be inspired by Heaney’s words to tackle security, judicial, and police reform.

In Central America, let’s make hope and history rhyme together. It’s within our power. Click here to learn how ? http://t.co/iw52aDvlJB

— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) November 14, 2014

In 2015, Biden told attendees at the Caribbean Energy Security Summit in Washington that they should be encouraged by Heaney’s words — “We’ve got a chance to make hope and history rhyme here, in terms of your economies, and the single biggest burden that could be lifted from you right now, economically, is the cost of energy ” — and urged European leaders at the Munich Security Conference to deliver of the promise of Heaney’s vision by taking collective action on threats posed by Russia, Iran and Islamic State. “All of us in this room are delivered to a moment that only happens every four or five generations. We have to rise to the moment,” Biden said. “So let’s take a shot at making hope and history rhyme.”

Let’s take a shot at making hope and history rhyme in the United States, Europe, and around the world. pic.twitter.com/GBqnonlJ1H

— VP Biden (Archived) (@VP44) February 7, 2015

Biden also leaned heavily on the same quotation in his campaign for the presidency in 2020, using it to close his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, then reciting a slightly altered version of the poem for a campaign commercial that laid Heaney’s words over images of the coronavirus pandemic and the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder.

"History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme."
– Seamus Heaney pic.twitter.com/7nB1ytYlvm

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 29, 2020

When Biden was finally declared the winner of the election, one of his fans in Kansas, a public health worker and painter named Dakota Driscoll, celebrated by putting a “Make Hope and History Rhyme” watercolor up for sale on Etsy, as part of her series of “daily motivation inspiration positivity wall art quotes.”

The day Biden was sworn in as president, his inaugural celebration included a reading of the poem by composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda — with a cameo from Biden himself at the end.

It's day one and we are not throwing away our shot at unifying the country and fighting for a better future for American families. Thank you @Lin_Manuel for your beautiful performance at #Inauguration2021. pic.twitter.com/VDgbTqjksd

— Biden Inaugural Committee (@BidenInaugural) January 21, 2021

Throughout his presidency, Biden has continued to treat Heaney’s words as an all-purpose plea for optimism, quoting the Irish poet in remarks on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, the 10th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the closing of a summit on democracy — “Democracy is what makes it possible for hope and history to rhyme” — political polarization, and, last week, to Israelis and then Palestinians, in separate addresses on consecutive days on opposite sides of Jerusalem.

Hearing Biden recite the once-powerful lines from Heaney, despite the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it was impossible not to notice how sharp the contrast was with the situation when Clinton used the same words in Derry, 27 years ago, at a point when there was real momentum for an end to that conflict.

In his comments to both communities, Biden all but ignored the failure of the preliminary peace agreement signed at the White House in 1993 by Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the collapse of talks. Instead, Biden acted as if a major breakthrough for peace was just around the corner.

Speaking at the residence of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog — whose father, the former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast — Biden quoted Heaney and claimed to be optimistic that an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was within reach. “I truly believe that we’re at one of those moments — if we get lucky and work hard — where we can make hope and history rhyme,” Biden said.

“Israel and the United States are both places built on hope, grit, and determination,” Biden continued. “And I believe, together, we will stay always true to our founding values and that we can help make hope and history rhyme once more.”

The following day, Biden tried to offer some encouragement to Palestinians whose hopes for a just resolution to the conflict have been ground down by the reality of enduring military occupation, nearly 30 years after the peace accords brokered by Clinton were signed.

“There’s an old expression: ‘Hope springs eternal,’” Biden began. Then, as a way of introducing the quote from “The Cure at Troy,” Biden mentioned that he had Irish roots.

“My background and the background of my family is Irish American, and we have a long history — not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people — with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years, for 400 years,” Biden said.

“There’s a great poem,” Biden added. “It goes like this — and it’s classically Irish, but it also could fit Palestinians.” Then, slightly misremembering the lines, Biden recited the words he has woven into remarks on dozens of subjects over the past two decades. “History teaches us not to hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, that longed-for tidal wave of justice rises up, and hope and history rhyme,” he said.

“Hope and history rhyme,” he repeated. “It is my prayer that we’re reaching one of those moments where hope and history rhyme.”

By the time he finished speaking in Jerusalem, Biden seemed to have completed the long process of degrading Heaney’s once-powerful lines into what another of his favorite Irish poets, W.B. Yeats, called “polite meaningless words.”

Although no one asked Biden, who has done little to revive the dormant peace talks, why he believed that a breakthrough was just beyond the horizon, his apparent suggestion that the Palestinians were, like the indigenous Irish, dispossessed and discriminated against caught the attention of Israeli nationalists and their supporters in Washington.

The fact that Biden had twice compared the plight of the Palestinians to what the Irish had endured during four centuries of colonization and oppression by the British was quickly blasted out on Twitter by Republican opposition researchers, and described by a columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s National Review as “a disgraceful smear of Israel.”

But Israelis who see the ongoing occupation as unjust and untenable, like Daniel Seidemann, the director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, agreed with Biden. “The comparison between the collective experience of the Irish and that of the Palestinians is,” Seidemann wrote on Twitter, “one of the peaks of the President’s visit.”

Biden’s reference to the parallels between the two conflicts seemed almost offhand, and there was no sign that he has thought deeply about why the peace process in Northern Ireland, halting and precarious as it might be, has been so much more successful than the one in Israel and Palestine. But there is a very obvious difference.

During his visit, Biden also reiterated his support for “a two-state solution,” with Israelis and Palestinians living on opposite sides of a partition along ethnic lines, calling that “a guarantee for a strong democratic state of Israel with a Jewish majority.”

Biden remains committed to that vision of the future despite the fact that, in the 29 years since the Oslo Accords were signed, it has led not to two states but a de facto single state which controls the lives of more than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

That single regime, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem concluded last year, functions only through the principle of apartheid.

“The common perception in public, political, legal and media discourse is that two separate regimes operate side by side in this area,” B’Tselem wrote in the report which concluded that Israel is practicing apartheid. “One regime, inside the borders of the sovereign State of Israel, is a permanent democracy with a population of about nine million, all Israeli citizens. The other regime, in the territories Israel took over in 1967, whose final status is supposed to be determined in future negotiations, is a temporary military occupation imposed on some five million Palestinian subjects.”

“Over time, the distinction between the two regimes has grown divorced from reality,” the Israeli rights group noted. “Hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers now reside in permanent settlements east of the Green Line, living as though they were west of it. East Jerusalem has been officially annexed to Israel’s sovereign territory, and the West Bank has been annexed in practice. Most importantly, the distinction obfuscates the fact that the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians. … There is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle.”

In Northern Ireland, by contrast, the peace agreement signed in 1998 is a one-state solution, based on power-sharing between the two communities. While the cross-community assembly created by the agreement has frequently ground to a halt in the years since, sectarian killings have come to an end. Speaking in 2008, Heaney told the New Yorker poetry editor and fellow Irish poet Paul Muldoon that the peace agreement was imperfect but had opened the way for ordinary if often disappointing and frustrating politics; it was still the foundation for reconciliation between the communities that had to share the territory. In the first 10 years after the agreement was ratified in a referendum, Heaney observed, “we had moved from the atrocious to the messy, which is an advance.”

In the same interview, Heaney also spoke of the complexity of resolving a conflict between two communities divided by centuries of historical pain and suffering. An Irish diplomat had once observed, Heaney said, that the struggle for a just peace was not just about granting full civil and political rights to the indigenous Catholic community in a region that was created to keep them in the minority. “This is not a matter of altering some electoral anomaly,” Heaney said. “This is a matter of changing the relationship between the victorious and the defeated.”

The victorious community, Heaney explained, were the descendants of the British, Protestant settlers who arrived in Ulster in the 1620s to displace and rule the defeated Irish Catholic indigenous community. Ireland was partitioned in 1921 by the retreating British forces to ensure that one section of the partitioned island would have a Protestant majority.

“It wasn’t just civil rights. It wasn’t just one man, one vote. It wasn’t just, you know … no discrimination, and so on,” Heaney said. “It was changing the relationship between that group who thought of themselves as Irish nationalists, and out of it, and the group in charge — the caste, if you like — the Northern unionist caste.”

The central challenge of that peace process, Heaney observed, was “the difficulty of reestablishing relationships” between the descendants of the winners and the losers of the colonial war of conquest that forced the communities to live side by side for centuries, and to consider the same territory their home.

That, clearly, is also what’s needed to finally bring about peace in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In Jerusalem last week, Biden seemed to almost stumble across and then retreat from the realization that the Irish and the Palestinians share a history of oppression, initiated in both cases under British colonial rule, and leading to conflicts made worse, not better, by an effort to divide contested territories through partition along ethnic lines.

The post Joe Biden’s Empty Rhetoric About Hope and History appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden, who said during his campaign for the presidency in 2019 that Khashoggi had been “murdered and dismembered … I believe on the order of the crown prince,” told reporters that he had confronted Crown Prince Mohammed over the killing of the dissident Saudi journalist at the start of their meeting this week.

But according to a Saudi official who spoke to the state broadcaster Al Arabiya, the prince contrasted Biden’s concern about the brutal murder of Khashoggi, a long-term resident of the U.S., with his failure to hold Israel’s government accountable for the killing of Abu Akleh, an American citizen who was shot — according to witnesses and visual investigations — from an Israeli military convoy.

Saudi official gives MBS's response to Biden when he asked about Khashoggi. "You can't impose your values on us by force. Remember Abu Ghraib? What have you done about Shireen Abu Akleh?". Yes MBS literally said that to Biden. https://t.co/9DQDrWVM2L

— ?yad el-Baghdadi | ???? ???????? (@iyad_elbaghdadi) July 16, 2022

Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC also reported that a Saudi official told him that Crown Prince Mohammed, known as MBS, denied that he had ordered the assassination, “the same way George Bush did not order the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” The crown prince then asked, according to Mohyeldin’s source, why, “with so many U.S. journalists killed, missing, or detained,” including Shireen Abu Akleh, “the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was being politicized.”

Saudi state television was also careful to keep viewers inside the repressive kingdom from hearing Biden reiterate the CIA conclusion that the crown prince had ordered the murder of Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey in 2018.

When Biden was asked during a news conference in Jeddah on Friday night how Crown Prince Mohammed had responded to his comments about Khashoggi, Al Arabiya’s sister station Al Hadath cut away from its live broadcast so abruptly that its studio anchor and control room seemed to be caught off guard. After viewers heard Biden begin, “He basically said that he was not personally resp—” the picture jumped back to a startled anchor who took four seconds to start speaking. Then when she did, her mic was not on.

Here's how abruptly the Saudi state broadcaster ?@AlHadath? cut away from Biden's live news conference on Friday when he was asked how Mohammed bin Salman had responded to his criticism of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – before their anchor or control room was ready: pic.twitter.com/3riRxDgI8B

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) July 17, 2022

A C-SPAN clip of the same moment from the news conference shows that what Saudi viewers nearly heard Biden say was: “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated that I thought he was.”

President Biden on #MBS and Jamal Khashoggi murder: "He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it. I indicated that I thought he was. He said he was not personally responsible for it and he took action against those who were responsible. pic.twitter.com/ABQSLQAEnV

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 15, 2022

Earlier on Friday, Biden was confronted with images of Shireen Abu Akleh at a news conference in Bethlehem, West Bank; her colleagues in the press corps had reserved a seat for a photograph of the renowned Palestinian American journalist, and several wore T-shirts with a drawing of her face above the words “Justice for Shireen.”

#ShireenAbuAkleh’s presence is strong, even when she’s absent. Colleagues at the Presidential HQ in Bethlehem demanding #JusticeForShireen during Biden visit. pic.twitter.com/FkQY904QY5

— Rania Zabaneh (@RZabaneh) July 15, 2022

In a letter to the White House last week, Abu Akleh’s family asked Biden to meet with them during his trip to the region and expressed their anguish that the U.S. seems unwilling to press Israel to open a credible criminal investigation into her killing. Instead, the family has been invited to Washington by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

At the news conference in Bethlehem, standing alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden called Abu Akleh’s death a loss for the U.S. as well and promised to “insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death.” His sincerity, in the eyes of many critics, was undermined, however, by his inability to pronounce Abu Akleh’s last name correctly.

Not only has the Biden administration done precious little to ensure that those in the Israeli occupation forces who murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, are held accountable, he also garbles her name.

A totally unedifying low point. #JusticeForShireen pic.twitter.com/pP6LsTP74Z

— Joseph Willits (@josephwillits) July 15, 2022

The post Saudi Prince Taunts Biden for Caring More About Khashoggi Than Shireen Abu Akleh appeared first on The Intercept.

A founder of Rise Up, Sunsara Taylor, pushed past an Ocasio-Cortez aide and got the New York representative to join her in chanting through a megaphone that the decision was “illegitimate” and needed to be contested by going “into the streets!”

AOC joined us in the streets to call out this decision for what it is ILLEGITIMATE

This court is Illegitimate and this decision must not stand. Legal, Nationwide abortion on demand!

Get in the streets NOW. AND TOMORROW and the next day! Post Roe? HELL NO! pic.twitter.com/w6qVAsRyoC

— Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (@riseup4abortion) June 24, 2022

Taylor, a longtime leader of the tiny, Harlem-based Revolutionary Communist Party — a group better known as the Revcoms, which is dedicated to spreading the ideas of the former ’60s radical Bob Avakian — then offered Ocasio-Cortez the mic. As the Democratic congresswoman spoke, Taylor also handed her a green bandana, a symbol of abortion rights in Latin America available for purchase on the Rise Up website.

After Ocasio-Cortez told the protesters that the effort to restore the right to an abortion nationwide would be “a generational fight,” a reporter asked what Congress could do. As Ocasio-Cortez gathered her thoughts, Taylor interjected: “Fill the streets.” Ocasio-Cortez agreed. “We have to fill the streets,” she said. “Right now, elections are not enough.”

Speaking outside the Supreme Court, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told protesters that "right now, elections are not enough" to reclaim abortion rights in America "we have to fill the streets." pic.twitter.com/dgfKo8FQFR

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) June 24, 2022

Before she left, Ocasio-Cortez took a moment to comfort one of the young Rise Up protesters, Julianne D’Eredita, a 21-year-old from Texas, who was in tears behind her. As Ocasio-Cortez hugged D’Eredita, Taylor started a chant of the slogan that is also the group’s name: “Rise up for abortion rights!”

As #RoevWade is overturned, @AOC charges into the crowd outside the Supreme Court demanding people “take to the streets”, hugging pro-choice protesters pic.twitter.com/mv55EOA1f1

— Sarah Gough (@sarahgoughy) June 24, 2022

Anyone watching news coverage of the protests at the court that day, and in the weeks since, would be forgiven for thinking that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights must be one of the nation’s leading reproductive rights organizations, since its activists, chants, placards, and the green bandanas and stickers sold on its website have been prominently featured in report after report.

The day after Roe v. Wade was overturned, for instance, an MSNBC interview with D’Eredita and another young member of the group, Zoe Warren, 19, went viral, as their frustration at Democrats for failing to codify Roe and fundraising off the decision was seconded by progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner.

She’s not wrong.?? pic.twitter.com/8mJDZIR2dZ

— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) June 25, 2022

But the flurry of attention in recent weeks is misleading, since Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January, when Taylor and a handful of other Revcom activists launched it with a protest outside the Supreme Court on the 49th, and final, anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has only existed since January.

The role played by Revcom members in the recent wave of abortion rights demonstrations has alarmed grassroots organizers for reproductive justice and experts on left-wing movements who liken the devotion of self-described “followers of Bob Avakian” to a cult.

“That viral clip of the woman in the green shirt (Zoe Warren)?” Imani Gandy, senior editor of law and policy for Rewire News Group, tweeted. “She is associated with RiseUp4Abortion rights which is yet another one of Bob Avakian’s many social justice fronts. He occupies space in order to get more people to join his weird cult.”

Talia Jane, an independent reporter who covers extremism and activism, has compared the Revcoms and their new offshoot to a multilevel marketing, or MLM, scam.

“RevCom showed up even though they’re not welcome, so I told people about how they’re a scam cult taking advantage of new people who want to get involved,” Jane reported on Twitter after a protest in New York in May. “If you took any pictures or flyers of RiseUp4AbortionRights (the girls with the white pants with blood in the crotch),” she added, “please know they are a scam front run by a MLM cult that thinks their dear leader will return to tell them how to revolution if everyone joins their cause.”

Sam Goldman, a Rise Up leader who has promoted Avakian’s teachings in the past, sent me an official statement from the group rejecting the criticism. Goldman, who also hosts a podcast for another offshoot of the Revcoms called Refuse Fascism, said that it was incorrect “to untruthfully conflate” Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and the Revcoms. But recent Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights protests in New York and Los Angeles have been led by Revcom activists wearing Revcom T-shirts.

Rise Up has also been criticized by veteran abortion rights activists for focusing, from January through June, on the quixotic strategy of trying to stop the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority from overturning Roe by calling on millions of Americans to take to the streets.

To that end, in June, Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights volunteers staged a series of small, theatrical protests which drew media attention but failed to either ignite a mass movement or keep five justices from signing Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which held that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

Grassroots reproductive rights organizers also claim that Rise Up’s own fundraising, which is boosted by media coverage, has only served to divert much-needed resources and attention away from organizations that do important work, like defending abortion clinics and providing funds to people who need to travel to obtain abortions.

In early June, for example, the Texas-based writer and reproductive justice activist Andrea Grimes criticized a protest in Houston at the televangelist Joel Osteen’s megachurch, in which D’Eredita and two other women stripped down to their underwear during a service and shouted, “It’s my body, my fucking choice!”

Disruption for Abortion Rights at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston TX.@riseup4abortion pic.twitter.com/5XFnHPDEn5

— TX4ABORTION (@tx4abortion) June 5, 2022

“I haven’t seen this gaining traction anywhere meaningful, but for reporters covering whatever these dipshits do next: these folks are part of a widely despised cult of personality not tied to any serious repro health, rights, or justice organization,” Grimes commented on Twitter. “They are not supported by folks here doing the work on the ground. Nobody knows them. Nobody likes them. They’re not a thing. They show up when the cameras come on.”

Grimes added that she, and other members of a group called Texans for Reproductive Justice, had previously denounced a prior Revcom abortion rights group led by Taylor, called Stop Patriarchy, when it staged a series of unwelcome marches there in 2014 in which activists wore chains and chanted, “Forced motherhood is female enslavement!” By equating restrictions on abortion to slavery, Grimes wrote at the time, Taylor and other followers of Avakian disrespected the suffering experienced by the ancestors of people of color.

When she led the protest outside the Supreme Court that Ocasio-Cortez joined last month, Taylor was wearing a Revcom T-shirt that read: “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement.”

In late June, Rise Up was similarly criticized for staging a protest outside Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, in which a 15-year-old girl and a half dozen others wore white pants with fake blood stains and carried dolls in their bound hands.

Watch: 15 yr old Ariana who organized a baby doll procession speaks powerfully in front Amy Coney Barrett’s house

“Children forced to give birth to children! Women will be inferior! ALL OF U WHO ARE PRO CHOICE. Come to DC & stay!”#RiseUp4AbortionRights pic.twitter.com/ARhwVoSyWL

— Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (@riseup4abortion) June 18, 2022

“Why do they have these kids out here doing this dumb shit?” Mary Drummer, an activist and digital strategist who has led advocacy campaigns for Planned Parenthood, Color of Change, and MoveOn, asked on Twitter. “What purpose does this serve? How is this strategic?”

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, Drummer argued, “is a front group of the Revolutionary Communist Party (also known as RCP or Revcom), which is basically a cult run by Bob Avakian and is known for co-opting social justice movements & protests.”

Drummer noted that Revcom activists had previously been accused of trying to amplify anger over racist policing to trigger the full-scale communist revolution mapped out in Avakian’s tracts. For instance, Revcom activists in T-shirts with Avakian quotes were greeted with suspicion when they appeared in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, when the police shooting of Michael Brown gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“RevComs is notorious for ‘swooping’ — descending on protests organized by other groups, positioning their banners and signs prominently where they’ll be photographed, but then leaving the event at the first sign of police or counter protesters,” one left-wing organizer, who asked to remain anonymous to comment on the group’s tactics, told me in an interview. “All they do is lead pointless marches designed for photo-ops.”

In the days after the viral video of Zoe Warren’s comments brought Rise Up national attention, a coalition of pro-abortion activists from nearly two dozen organizations, led by NYC for Abortion Rights, released a statement denouncing the group as “a cult and pyramid scheme.”

“Similar to its parent group RevCom, RiseUp’s only goal appears to be gaining more followers in order to raise more and more money,” the activists argued. “Both essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

They “essentially function as pyramid schemes that prey on social movements.”

“RevCom and its fronts — RiseUp and Refuse Fascism — are notorious for raising tens of thousands of dollars and using those funds to pay RevCom leadership, and to purchase marketing materials (to raise even more money),” the statement continued. “The RiseUp website, for instance, features urgent prompts to donate with no information about where this money goes. What we do know is that this money never goes to abortion funds (which they argue are not a strategy to defend abortion access), providers, practical support groups, or anyone actually working to increase abortion access.”

The activists also criticized Rise Up for “theatrical tactics” like “the wearing of white pants painted with fake blood, die-ins, and coat-hanger imagery,” which “further the extremely harmful idea that abortion is a violent procedure and safe self-managed abortion is not possible.”

Rise Up and the Revcoms have heard and rejected the criticism, as evidenced by a Rise Up protest last week in Los Angeles — led by a Revcom activist in a “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement” T-shirt — in which four women wearing white pants daubed with fake blood chained themselves to City Hall as the steps were drenched in red paint.

ACTIVISTS IN LOS ANGELES POUR “BLOOD” DOWN THE STEPS OF CITY HALL AFTER CHAINING THEMSELVES TO THE BUILDING IN PROTEST OF THE SUPREME COURTS OVERTURNING ROE V WADE. pic.twitter.com/yBwQ0Mi8P4

— Mike was here (@bellikemike) July 6, 2022

“Some so-called ‘leaders’ in the so-called ‘movement’ have decided that the fall of Roe — shutting down of abortion in 8 states immediately w more to follow quickly — is the time to attack the ONE org that consistently fought to mobilize people to prevent the fall of Roe,” Sunsara Taylor tweeted in response to Rise Up’s critics. “There is an unthinking fanatical pile-on to using the scary word ‘cult’ to try to tar and keep people away from uniting with followers of Bob Avakian or… heaven forbid… looking into what he is about for themselves,” she added.

The Rise Up statement sent to me by Sam Goldman also attacked the veteran organizers as people who “have done absolutely nothing to mobilize people to fight this decision when it was impending over the past 6 months.”

The statement, which was signed by Taylor and two other founders of the group who are not Revcoms, also said that “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights has never used any funds it has raised for any purposes other than exactly what the funds were raised for.”

Last week, Rise Up added an update to the statement which said that the group’s lawyer had “sent a letter to those who have accused us of financial wrongdoing instructing them to cease and desist in spreading these blatantly untrue, baseless, extremely dangerous allegations.”

A separate statement on the Revcom website also rejected the criticism that the group is a cult, but does so in a curious way: by lavishing praise on Bob Avakian to such an extent that it seems to reinforce the charge.

“Bob Avakian’s leadership, and the new communism he has brought forward is absolutely essential for making revolution and emancipating humanity,” the Revcom statement reads. “Any chance at all for not just avoiding the nightmare we are heading toward but bringing forward instead an emancipating future requires all of you who read this to engage what Bob Avakian has written in a serious way.”

Despite the group’s best efforts to sell Avakian as a revolutionary leader, skepticism of the Revcoms is deeply rooted among left-wing activists and commentators. For instance, when Hasan Piker, a popular progressive Twitch streamer, discovered that the two young Rise Up activists who criticized Democrats in the viral MSNBC clip were linked to Revcoms, he collapsed in despair during a live broadcast.

The moment that @hasanthehun found out that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights is actually a cult ??? but seriously they are a Rev Com cult group! Don’t support them! pic.twitter.com/6aNIRNWY0b

— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) June 27, 2022

In a phone interview, however, Warren told me that she had no idea that Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights was “associated with Revcoms” when she first volunteered for the group two months ago and does not share Sunsara Taylor’s belief in communism or devotion to Avakian’s leadership.

“I’m not a member of the Revcoms and I never have been and I don’t plan to be,” Warren said. “When I first got involved with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, I didn’t know that they were associated with Revcoms, and when I found that out, that was a little concerning for me,” she added.

Still, she said, the group’s efforts to pressure Democrats to pass a federal law legalizing abortion by protesting makes sense to her. “I believe that Rise Up is doing something that no other organization is really doing right now, and that is calling people into the streets to do something they might not have done before, which is demand more from their government than they are getting,” Warren said.

Because the excerpt from her MSNBC interview that was clipped and went viral online focused on her anger at Democrats, I asked her if she agreed with Taylor, who tweeted the day after Roe v. Wade was overturned that it was pointless to “Rely on voting and the fucking Democrats.” Warren told me that she did not think protesting instead of voting was a good idea.

“I believe that a combination of both is definitely necessary,” she said. “I think that to a certain point getting as many people in the streets as possible to demand that our current government make abortion legal nationwide now is an amazingly powerful thing to do. But, when November comes around, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. We most definitely need to vote, and we most definitely need to vote for Democrats because we do live in a two-party system and they’re our only option.”

The post Abortion Rights Activists Call New Group Leading Protests a Front for a Far-Left Cult appeared first on The Intercept.

“Dear Mr. President,” the family’s letter, sent to Biden on Friday morning, began, “We, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, write to express our grief, outrage and sense of betrayal concerning your administration’s abject response to the extrajudicial killing of our sister and aunt by Israeli forces on May 11, 2022, while on assignment in the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin in the West Bank.”

The letter, which was provided to The Intercept by the family, reminded the American president that Abu Akleh was not just “a prominent, beloved Palestinian journalist” and “a role model and a mentor” to women in her community. “She was also a United States citizen.”

The family, including Abu Akleh’s brother Anton and his children, demanded that Biden make time during his visit to the Middle East next week to meet with them, “and hear directly from us about our concerns and demands for justice.”

The U.S. “has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

They also described their anger and disappointment at a lack of support from the Biden administration, and suggested that instead of using its leverage over Israel to demand a credible investigation of the fatal shot that witnesses said was fired from an Israeli military convoy, “the United States has been skulking toward the erasure of any wrongdoing by Israeli forces.”

“In the days and weeks since an Israeli soldier killed Shireen, not only have we not been adequately consulted, informed, and supported by U.S. government officials, but your administration’s actions exhibit an apparent intent to undermine our efforts toward justice and accountability for Shireen’s death,” the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent’s relatives wrote.

The family provided links to a half-dozen painstaking examinations of the video and audio evidence of the killing — conducted by the Washington Post, CNN, The Associated Press, the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the United Nations Human Rights Office — which all concluded that the fatal shot had likely been fired from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, raiding party.

“All available evidence suggests that Shireen, a U.S. citizen, was the subject of an extrajudicial killing,” the Abu Akleh family told Biden, “yet your administration has thoroughly failed to meet the bare minimum expectation held by a grieving family — to ensure a prompt, thorough, credible, impartial, independent, effective and transparent investigation that leads to true justice and accountability for Shireen’s killing.”

The family urged Biden to direct the Department of Justice to use the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Bureau and the FBI to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh.

The letter was sent days after the State Department released an oddly vague statement, on the Fourth of July holiday, reporting that “an extremely detailed forensic analysis” of the bullet that killed the journalist, carried out in Israel by unnamed “independent, third-party examiners,” overseen by the regional U.S. security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, was unable to determine if the shot had been fired from an Israeli rifle.

According to the State Department, the American general’s review of other information gathered by Israeli and Palestinian officials led him to the conclusion “that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.” Fenzel, however, “found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances,” the statement added.

As the Abu Aklehs noted in their letter to Biden, the U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist, who was wearing a blue vest marked “PRESS,” but the statement seemed to exactly echo a claim the Israeli military has made repeatedly. “The IDF investigation conclusively determined that no IDF soldier deliberately fired at Ms. Abu Akleh,” Israel’s military said in a statement released the same day.

The U.S. has offered no explanation of how the American general determined that no Israeli soldier intended to fire at the journalist.

The journalist’s family also pointed out that just one day after State Department spokesperson Ned Price “announced that Shireen’s killing was likely unintentional,” he admitted, during questioning by reporters, that the U.S. security coordinator’s review of the evidence was “not a law enforcement investigation” and his conclusion about intent was simply “a judgment.”

“Nonetheless,” the family wrote to Biden, “your administration deemed it necessary to include and perpetuate the baseless and damaging conclusion that the killing was not intentional, seemingly choosing political expedience over actual accountability for a foreign government’s killing of a U.S. citizen.”

The Abu Aklehs went on to demand that the State Department retract the July 4 press statement and turn over to them any forensic report prepared by the ballistic experts, and reveal their identities. Price, the State Department spokesperson, told reporters that the forensic experts were not Americans but came from one of the seven other NATO countries that help train Palestinian Authority security forces.

While Price declined to say what country the experts came from, Israel’s military insisted in its own statement that “Israeli experts examined the bullet” in the presence of representatives of the U.S. security coordinator. The Israelis added that their ballistic examination was looking for evidence that the bullet had been fired from a specific weapon which was examined in the lab. That statement appears to indicate that Israel has identified the soldier from the Duvdevan commando unit who fired in Abu Akleh’s direction from the convoy during the raid.

The family also reminded Biden that 57 members of Congress and 24 senators had signed letters asking for the U.S. to be directly involved in investigating the killing of Abu Akleh, given that Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other to conduct a credible and independent investigation.

“We reaffirm these demands on behalf of our beloved Shireen as your administration’s actions to date have not only fallen woefully short of ‘full accountability’ but they amount to express acceptance for Shireen’s killing,” the family wrote. “Your administration’s actions can only be seen as an attempt to erase the extrajudicial killing of Shireen and further entrench the systemic impunity enjoyed by Israeli forces and officials for unlawfully killing Palestinians.”

The post In Letter to Biden, Shireen Abu Akleh’s Family Demands a Meeting and an End to Israeli Impunity appeared first on The Intercept.

#FreeAlaa #FreeThemAll pic.twitter.com/JjMzKzRiIb

— Ahdaf Soueif (@asoueif) May 27, 2022

Abd El Fattah, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as @alaa, rose to international prominence as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Washington, Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, demanded the immediate release of Abd El Fattah. The lawmakers also urged the Biden administration to make it clear to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former military leader who seized power in 2013, that “criminalizing peaceful dissent” from activists “jeopardizes the security partnership Egypt wants with its Western partners.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged that he would indeed condition $1.3 billion in U.S. security aid to Egypt on respect for human rights from el-Sisi, who had been coddled by President Donald Trump. “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists … or threatening their families is unacceptable,” Biden tweeted. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.’”

But in September, administration officials reportedly told Egypt that just $130 million of aid would be withheld until the country ended the prosecutions of one set of nongovernmental organizations and dropped charges against or released just 16 of the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails. (A new report released this week showed that nearly 6,000 Egyptians were jailed for political activities during Biden’s first year in office.)

While there are scant hopes that the U.S. will use its leverage to free Abd El Fattah, the dissident’s family has focused their efforts on urging British lawmakers to have their government intervene to save his life. Abd El Fattah recently acquired British citizenship through his mother, the mathematician and activist Laila Soueif, who was born in London.

During an interview in London on Tuesday, Abd El Fattah’s sister Mona Seif, who founded the group No Military Trials for Civilians, told the BBC’s main morning news show that the British government could demand his release during meetings with the Egyptian government over plans for the COP 27 climate change conference, which is scheduled to be held in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, in November. With a single phone call, Seif said, “Alaa will be on board a plane. Tomorrow, if they want it, he’ll be free here with us.”

"I don't think things are moving fast enough"

Alaa Abdel Fattah is a British-Egyptian activist imprisoned in Egypt, who has been on hunger strike for 53 days.

His sister Mona Seif tells @MishalHusain the UK government is best placed to help him. https://t.co/HeZvNCNmxE pic.twitter.com/G51zNf62VG

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) May 24, 2022

“I don’t think things are moving fast enough,” she added, given that her brother had decided to continue his hunger strike despite being moved to what el-Sisi has proudly called a new “American-style” prison. (A soft-focus promotional video for that prison, at Wadi el-Natrun, north of Cairo, was derided by Egyptians for offering a vision of a warm, nurturing environment that is totally at odds with reality for political prisoners like Abd El Fattah, who has been deprived of sunlight, books and a mattress for years on end, and not even permitted to know the time of day.)

At a subsequent appearance at the Frontline Club in London, Seif stressed that the situation is urgent. “We think Alaa has decided he wants an end to all of this,” she said. “He wants the end to be guided by him rather than just imposed on his body. We feel he has decided to take this hunger strike until the end. Either it pushes us enough and triggers enough pressure to get him out of this endless loop of Sisi’s prisons or it will end his life.”

At the same event, another of Abd El Fattah’s sisters, Sanaa Seif, a political activist who has also been jailed for violating Egypt’s repressive ban on protesting, read a passage from a book of her brother’s collected writings, “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” which includes reflections, smuggled out of prison, on the prospects for popular uprisings in other nations.

Beautiful moment last night with @andrewmarr9 : Alaa’s words: « I am in prison because they want to make an example of https://t.co/oONKU2l65l let us be an example of our own choosing..Nothing will constrain the strong..nor define the space of beauty & possibility but the weak » pic.twitter.com/qjpyRiuxPf

— Free Alaa (@FreedomForAlaa) May 25, 2022

“I’m in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us,” Abd El Fattah wrote from the maximum-security Tora prison in 2017. “So let us be an example, but of our own choosing. The war on meaning is not yet over in the rest of the world. Let us be an example, not a warning. Let’s communicate with the world again, not send distress signals nor to cry over ruins or spilled milk, but to draw lessons, summarize experiences, and deepen observations, may it help those struggling in the post-truth era.”

“We were,” he added, “then we were defeated, and meaning was defeated with us. But we have not perished yet, and meaning has not been killed. Perhaps our defeat was inevitable, but the current chaos that is sweeping the world will sooner or later give birth to a new world, a world that will — of course — be ruled and managed by the victors. But nothing will constrain the strong, nor shape the margins of freedom and justice, nor define spaces of beauty and possibilities for a common life except the weal, who clung to their defence of meaning, even after defeat.”

The post Egyptian Dissident Alaa Abd El Fattah’s Hunger Strike Reaches a Critical Phase. Will the U.S. and U.K. Let Him Die? appeared first on The Intercept.