25 October 20
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Frank Rich | Biden Makes the Strongest Case Yet for His Presidency
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "Almost 50 million people had voted before last night's face-off - more early voters than in the entire pre-Election Day balloting of 2016."
ast night was the final debate before Election Day. With polling continuing to indicate an advantage for Biden, did Donald Trump do anything that will boost his campaign?
As the first debate defined Trump indelibly as a childish bully and a boor while leaving Biden on the cutting-room floor, this one gave Biden the space to actually make his case at the moment when Americans are pouring into their polling places. He hit his points crisply, and for the most part cogently, lacing his pitch for competence and national unity with just the right dose of tranquilizing retro Senate-speak that many Americans are welcoming after four years of nonstop White House rage and bombast.
Meanwhile, on the matters of substance that theoretically might allow Trump to win over that tiny contingent of wavering voters, “suburban housewives” included, Trump still had done no homework and had no answers — just the usual smokescreen of evasions and lies. No health-care plan to rescue those who stand to lose their coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act. No explanation for his failure to negotiate a new stimulus package. No explanation for why he won’t release his tax returns. No defense of his undying love affair with Vladimir Putin. And most of all, still no plan to combat the coronavirus on a day when the number of new American cases, by some counts, hit an all-time high. He argued once again that we are “rounding the turn” and that a cure-all vaccine, like prosperity, was just around the corner.
Almost 50 million people had voted before last night’s face-off — more early voters than in the entire pre-Election Day balloting of 2016. There was nothing either candidate said that the remaining voters have not heard ad infinitum by now, with the possible exception of Trump’s defense for ripping away 545 children from parents who cannot be found: These orphans “are so well taken care of,” he explained with pride. There are still ways Trump can somehow cobble together an Electoral College victory, as FiveThirtyEight reminds us, but this debate won’t move that needle.
As my colleague Olivia Nuzzi pointed out, Trump’s one-off adherence to debate protocol prevented him from speaking in the “rambling and insane-sounding” manner of his superspreader rallies. But now those rallies are roaring back. And so will the insanity. Thanks to the White House’s self-immolating, unauthorized release of his 60 Minutes interview, we already know that on Sunday night a large viewership will see him snarl repeatedly at Lesley Stahl and whine like a crybaby when asked unsurprising questions comparable to those asked by last night’s moderator, Kristen Welker. And once again Trump will be seen in striking contrast to Biden, who presumably behaved himself in an interview conducted for the same broadcast and didn’t storm off in pique at his female questioner (Norah O’Donnell).
On the stump, it will be all Hunter Biden all the time — a conspiracy theory so impenetrable that last night Trump had to convey it in buzzwords and phrases (“the laptop,” “the horrible emails,” “10 percent to the big man,” “selling pillows and sheets”). This lingo could be decoded only by those already locked into the coverage by the acre pumped out by Murdoch outlets: Fox News, and compliant columnists like Michael Goodwin at the New York Post and Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal. The chances that any of this ostensible scandal will reach, let alone persuade, any voters not already voting for Trump are nil. What’s more, in an extraordinary development just minutes after the debate last night, the Journal’s news pages pulled the rug out from under its own editorial-page propagandists by posting an investigative report debunking the entire affair. Examining those “horrible emails” Trump had been fuming about, the paper found no evidence that Joe Biden had anything to do with an unconsummated business deal his son was trying to make in China in 2017 (when both Bidens, by the way, were private citizens).
But Trump will not let go of “Huntergate” any more than he did the equally inexplicable “Obamagate.” He will designate even Murdoch as a purveyor of Fake News rather than surrender it. And he will continue to go off on other loony and narcissistic tangents, tantrums, and personal vendettas that are irrelevant to Americans in the midst of public-health and economic crises — all the while speaking to closely packed, unmasked audiences (which he described to Stahl, hilariously, as “much bigger than we ever had”) in some of the most lethal current hot spots of the pandemic.
Many Republicans and conservatives — like Peggy Noonan, who judged Trump last night’s winner — are clinging to a single poll query as a sign of a possible upset: a Gallup finding that 56 percent of registered voters feel they are better off now than they were four years ago. Should that one data point prove to be determinative in the face of all the other polling on this race, 2020 will be the biggest debacle for American pollsters since 1936, when the Literary Digest predicted that Alf Landon would be the victor over FDR, whose landslide propelled him to victory in 46 out of 48 states.
Sorting ballots. (photo: Elaine Thompson/AP)
'Heaven and Earth' Being Moved to Deliver Election Mail
Brian Naylor, NPR
Naylor writes: "With Nov. 3, the last day of the presidential election season, rapidly approaching, officials with the U.S. Postal Service say they have already processed a record amount of election mail this year."
The coronavirus pandemic has pushed many more voters to send in their ballots by mail. USPS officials say 100 million ballots have already been sent to or from voters. And while there have been delays reported in a number of key states, experts say that voting by mail has gone relatively smoothly so far.
Postal Service officials say they have made election mail their No. 1 priority this election season and are delivering on that promise.
"The Postal Service will not leave anything on the playing field" when it comes to delivering the nation's election mail, says Kristin Seaver, the Postal Service's retail and delivery chief, speaking at a briefing for reporters Thursday.
Postal Service officials say that altogether, they have moved more than 500 million pieces of election mail so far, including ballots and flyers from various candidates. That figure represents a 162% increase from the 2016 election.
Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, says postal workers feel as if they're in the middle of a storm, but things do seem to be working.
"All the reports that we're hearing are generally positive that the election mail, both to and from the voter, is given great priority. All the mail is being treated as first class mail," Dimondstein says, adding that workers "have extra eyes on the mail, extra scrutiny, making sure it gets cleared every day and making sure that ballot gets to its final destination to make sure it's counted. So we are moving heaven and earth."
The Postal Service, in part because of court orders, has reversed some of the procedures instituted by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that critics say were slowing the mail. It has stopped removing sorting machines and blue sidewalk mailboxes, restricting overtime and leaving behind late-arriving mail from distribution centers — at least until after the election.
DeJoy has been a big-dollar donor to Republicans, including President Trump.
Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, however, say on-time, first-class mail deliveries in several districts, including in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan are still below 80%.
The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, sent a letter to DeJoy this week "to raise concern and demand you take all necessary actions to reverse mounting mail delivery delays."
Seaver says the Postal Service will be taking "extraordinary measures" in the week before the election, including making extra trips between post offices and boards of elections to ensure election mail is delivered on time.
"Election mail will not be delayed," she says. "The Postal Service is committing all available resources to ensure the timely movement of all election mail, and we have the methods and the mechanisms to do so.
Seaver says some facilities are operating at "COVID pandemic levels" because of staffing shortages. The Postal Service, she noted, continues "to work with our local communities, particularly those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that they have the resources and the assistance to affect continuous postal services throughout their community."
The interest and enthusiasm about this year's election has also led to record early in-person voting and use of drop-off boxes, taking some of the pressure off the post office.
Amber McReynolds, who heads the National Vote at Home Institute, says that as far as election mail is concerned, "so far, so good" and that she's not aware of mail-related problems.
"It seems to me that most people are getting through the backlogs. In some states, you can still request a ballot. So if people are going to do that, they should do that as soon as possible because the clock really is ticking."
Meanwhile, the Postal Service is reminding voters in states where their ballots must be postmarked by midnight on Election Day to make sure to drop them off before the last mail pickup.
Donald Trump. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Ariel Dorfman | Sending Trump to Hell
Ariel Dorfman, TomDispatch
Dorfman writes: "For some time now, I've wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech."
INTRODUCTION:
In case you hadn’t noticed, they wear masks in hell. I didn’t know that myself until this year. On the best evidence around, however, like most Americans, I’m now in a circle of hell. I feel it particularly when I’m out on streets that are starting to chill down, not heat up, as winter arrives (however slowly) and a pandemic spike in Covid-19 cases heads our way, as hospitals fill, panic grows, and the president from... well, hell... assures us that, by hook or crook (crook being perhaps the operative word here), in 2021 he plans to oversee the greatest economic comeback in history. And mind you, I’m thinking about this nightmare while out walking New York City’s streets half-blind as my glasses, just above that mask of mine, fog up with my own breath. I have no doubt that it’s the fog of hell as, at my advanced age, my friends are increasingly isolated and alone in a city, a country, a world under siege.
And bad as it might have been, it didn’t truly have to be this way, not if we had a president who cared for any of us even faintly, even microcosmically like the way he cares for himself. That’s why it gives me special pleasure today to post a piece by that wonderful Chilean writer, whose work I first began editing and publishing in book form back in the 1980s, my old friend (and TomDispatch regular) Ariel Dorfman. I read my first Dorfman piece in 1969 in another life entirely when I was still a printer at the New England Free Press. It was a critique of Walt Disney he had co-authored, years ahead of its time, called How to Read Donald Duck and I’ve never forgotten it. Today, he does what so many of us, myself included, would love to do. He ushers “our” president, Donald Trump, through the gates of Hell. Join him for a moment, even if your glasses fog over. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Before he was a teenager, Mac Phipps already had a record deal. At 24, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years in prison following the shooting death of a man at one of his concerts, a crime of which he maintains he did not commit. (photo: Sheila Phipps/APR)
The Mac Phipps Story, 'My Dream Was Being Used Against Me in Court'
Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael, NPR
Excerpt: "On February 20, 2000, Mac didn't want to get out of bed. As a well-known wordsmith within his home state of Louisiana who was just beginning to teeter on mainstream fame as an artist on No Limit Records, Mac was supposed to perform a show at Club Mercedes in Slidell, La. that night, but as his parents recall two decades later, he slept late and had a cloud over him all day."
Mac Phipps, Lyrics On Trial And A Legacy Of Injustice In Louisiana
"It was just weird," Mac remembers. "It's hard to even pinpoint what my exact feeling was but I just know I wasn't feeling it."
Mac, born McKinley Phipps Jr., was scheduled to head out on a six-month tour the next day. The biggest hit he'd ever record was in the can, to be released in a little over a month. But he didn't like the venue, in a small town in St. Tammany Parish across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, where Mac grew up. "Growing up," Mac says, "it was just understood in New Orleans you know that the Ku Klux Klan was in St. Tammany Parish."
"That's one of the places where I would have never went had we not had that show," recalls Mac's brother, Chad Phipps. "When you're Brown, you're not welcome. It's sort of a racist area — get stopped a lot and, uh, harassed a lot in that area."
Mac's career was a family business. His dad, McKinley Phipps Sr., managed him and his mom, Sheila Phipps, booked him in local venues and took tickets at the door. Chad would occasionally run security. On that night, the whole family headed to Slidell and Mac, who couldn't set aside his bad feelings, carried a gun for protection.
The crowd at Club Mercedes that night was rowdy, and soon a fight broke out on the floor. "My brother, at some point, saw me in the middle of this ruckus that looked like it was about to happen," Chad says. "So he started walking up and I can see him walking up over my shoulder. Now, I'm still holding off two guys from fighting each other as my brother's walking up over my shoulder to see what was going on, and the next thing you know, it was like, a POW!"
In an interview years later, Mac described the confusion of the scene that followed. "I guess part of my brain was trying to process whether this pop was on the song or whether it was from a gunshot, but to take precautionary measures, I got low and looked around," he said.
When Chad looked up, he saw what several other people in the club would later say they saw: Mac holding a gun.
"He ... had it pointed at the ceiling and he was kinda ducking," Chad says. "Once people started running toward the exit, I was like, 'Oh, that must have been a gunshot.'"
When he got to the exit, Chad didn't see his brother, who had stayed in the club to find their parents. On their way out of the club, Chad and Mac's father, noticed a man on the ground with a woman standing over him. The woman, a first-year nursing student named Yulon James, began administering CPR on the spot. Mac Senior recalls that when he asked whether the man was hurt, she said he was okay but had been shot in the arm.
The family piled into two cars and drove the 90 miles back home to Baton Rouge. After they arrived home, in the wee hours of the morning, Mac got a phone call from detectives in St. Tammany saying he's wanted in connection with the shooting in the club. When they arrived at the house soon after, the police were in full force.
"I had like four policemen — three with pistols, one with a shotgun — come charging and running at me, telling me, 'Get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground,'" Mac's father says. The police told him that Mac was wanted for murder. "I told him, I said, 'Wasn't nobody dead when I left."
But the shooting victim that Mac's father saw lying on the ground — a 19-year-old man named Barron Victor, Jr. — had died from a single gunshot wound that went through his arm and struck his heart. Police searched the house, took guns belonging to Mac and his father, who was a Vietnam vet, and handcuffed Mac.
At the time, Mac thought, "'I'm gonna go down here — they're going to question me, they're going to run checks on my hands and then they're going to let me go."
At the St. Tammany Parish sheriff's office, Mac agreed to an interrogation without a lawyer present. The two detectives who questioned him asked about one of his nicknames, The Camouflage Assassin, and told him that they had witnesses who put him at the scene with a gun in his hand. Even though his gun was registered, Mac, who knows that carrying a concealed weapon in a club is illegal in Louisiana, denies it. "Nah, a witness couldn't put a gun in my hand," you can hear him say on a recording of the interview.
"You need to tell us the truth," one of the detectives says.
"I'm telling you the honest truth," Mac says. "When I was in that club, I did not have a gun."
"Somebody got murdered, man," one of the detectives says. "So everybody in Slidell is just gonna bum rap you, huh? They just going to pick you out because you're a superstar and say, 'Mac's the one that shot this dude?'"
Mac was arrested that night, but sat in jail for a month before being charged with second degree murder. A month after that, he finally got a bail hearing, where his bail was denied.
Then, a ray of hope: Days after Mac's arrest, a man named Thomas Williams walked into the St. Tammany Sheriff's office with his pastor beside him. He had something to tell the police about the shooting. Something that had been keeping him up at night.
Williams was part of Mac's entourage, and was working as a security guard at Club Mercedes that night. He told the St. Tammany's police that at some point, someone in the crowd had charged at him with a beer bottle, and he'd panicked and pulled out his gun. Williams confessed that he, not Mac, was the one who shot Barron Victor, Jr.
Mac heard about Thomas's confession from jail. Years later, when the journalist David Lohr was reporting on the case, Mac told Lohr, "I was like, 'OK. I'm going home.'"
For more than a year, NPR has tried to get an interview with Mac, who is currently incarcerated at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, a Louisiana State Penitentiary in St. Gabriel, outside Baton Rouge. Our requests were repeatedly denied by the prison's warden, with no explanation. In 2015 and 2016, Lohr and the documentary filmmaker Michael Shahin were able to interview Mac. All quotes by Mac in this story were provided to NPR by Lohr or Shahin.
Mac was wrong. The police sent Thomas Williams home. Mac stayed in jail. Two decades later, he still hasn't been home.
In 2000, when he went to jail, Mac — just 22 years old — was already a veteran rapper in the third phase of an evolving career. Ten years earlier, he'd released his debut, The Lyrical Midget, as Lil Mac. He was ahead of the curve. A couple of years before Kris Kross jumped to the top of the charts, he was releasing songs like "I Need Wheels" — in which he confesses his desires not for puppy love, but for a car, so he wouldn't have to rely on his parents to drive him around town to see all his girlfriends.
The young rap phenom came up in New Orleans in the '80s, back when the Big Easy was the murder capital of America. His father, a Vietnam vet, worked at the VA hospital, while his mom, a visual artist, stayed home raising Mac and his five younger siblings. They struggled financially and moved around, "from apartment to apartment to apartment," Mac's father, McKinley Phipps Sr. remembers. "We lived in certain neighborhoods where we stayed on every block in that neighborhood. You know, if you say General Taylor Street, we stayed on [the] 31, 32 and 3300 block of General Taylor, you know, because it was like a constant struggle.
His parents encouraged his pursuit of music as long as he maintained his grades and stayed out of trouble, Mac Senior says. And his promise was paying off. After winning a city-wide talent show, Lil Mac had landed a record deal with Yo Records, the New Orleans label that sparked the careers of two other local legends in the making, rapper Gregory D and DJ Mannie Fresh, who would produce Mac's first album before going on to become the in-house producer behind Cash Money stars Lil Wayne, Juvenile and the rest of the Hot Boys.
Not all his peers were fans — not right away, at least. The New Orleans DJ and producer Raj Smoove, who became one of Mac's closest collaborators, remembers making diss records about the up-and-coming local star before they met. But Raj remembers being knocked out after finding out Mac could do more than "I Need Wheels."
"Mac was kind of like New Orleans' version of Nas," says Raj. "Just his flow, the intelligence that he had behind his rhymes ... Every time he had a verse on the song, like you always need, like, his verse was going to be that verse that was going to be everybody's favorite verse."
The pair's tastes cut against the grain of the bounce music that was rising in the early 1990s, giving New Orleans its hip-hop identity. Bounce's roots go deep into New Orleans history, back to enslavement and The Congo Square, the birthplace of American music, as music historian and journalist Charlie Braxton explains.
"The French believed that the slaves could practice their own music, practice their own religion, which is why New Orleans is one of the more Africanized cities in the United States," Braxton says. "And because they were able to retain those African rhythms, those rhythms eventually transferred into jazz drumming, R&B drumming, and eventually found its way into hip-hop."
In the mid-80s, one song from a short-lived Queens group called The Showboys helped ignite a new phase of the New Orleans sound. "Drag Rap" got its name from the '60s TV show Dragnet whose theme the song lifts, but after it made its way south through Memphis on its way to New Orleans, it became known by a new name: "Triggerman."
It hit the South hard. Raj calls it as "one of the greatest songs that ever touched New Orleans. ... "I think it was like one high school dance [where] they played 'Triggerman' like seven times and we never got tired of it."
Embedded in the song were elements that the Big Easy recognized. Charlie Braxton says that not only is the breakdown on "Triggerman" "closely akin to the rhythm that people in New Orleans are accustomed to," the song's call and response linked it to African chants. All these elements came together in early bounce songs like DJ Jimi's "Where They At," which is built on the "Triggerman" instrumental.
But as bounce was taking hold of New Orleans, Mac and Raj were looking to New York.
"We were the guys that was listening to Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy," Raj says. "We had the little sock hats and the Cross Colours and all that stuff."
Still in high school, they branded themselves The Psychoward, and began opening for national acts touring through New Orleans. His verbal agility and stage presence earned him the nickname The Camouflage Assassin. But in the mid-'90s, Mac was beginning to hit a ceiling in New Orleans. Luckily for him, another hometown movement was rising.
Master P, born Percy Miller, grew up in the same world as Mac, another native of New Orleans's Third Ward. But he took a detour out west to found No Limit Records before returning home in 1995. Back in Louisiana, he built his label into a powerhouse by emulating J. Prince's groundbreaking — and defiantly Southern — Houston-based Rap-A-Lot Records and exercising a savvy approach to the business of selling records that included holding onto ownership of his masters and flooding the market with albums that looked — thanks to iconic Pen & Pixel cover art — and sounded like what New Orleans rap fans wanted.
"If you were around during the No Limit days and you were in the hood, you know about how cats was standing in line at 12 o'clock midnight waiting for that new No Limit," Braxton says.
In 1996, Master P had his first platinum album, and as an independent label owner in the era before MP3s and streaming, he was raking in cash. And he had plans to expand his empire by growing his army.
"The only way I could show my success [is] if I create other millionaires ... with people that look like me, come from the hood," Master P says now. "Like I said, the more millionaires I create, the most successful I would be."
Mac was ready to level up. In the summer of '96, he caught the attention of Def Jam Records, but didn't want to move to New York. Then he met Master P, and quickly signed to No Limit.
Raj says that Mac's affiliation with the label marked a new chapter in his artistic development.
"No Limit was really kind of doing, like, you know, just New Orleans gangster music. It was a bit of an odd peg for Mac," he says. "A lot of the intellectual stuff and the, you know, the deep, multi-tiered level creativity and lyricism that he was able to do, he kind of had to pull a lot of that back. ... Because he had to represent for the tank, like he was a soldier now."
Mac leaned into one of his earlier aliases — the Camouflage Assassin — and titled his first album Shell Shocked, featuring songs like "Murda, Murda, Kill, Kill." When it came out in 1998 — a year in which nearly half of the albums No Limit released went platinum — Shell Shocked broke the top 20 on the Billboard album chart.
"I remember the first album he came out with, he did not want me to hear it," says Mac's mother, Sheila Phipps. "Because he was used to me hearing his other music... He said, 'Mom, it's a lot of cursing in that,' 'Cause you know he don't like to curse in front of me. ... But I knew it was all about, you know, him wanting to get paid and help his family out of the struggles that we were having."
Around this time, in an effort to put some distance between their massive success and the streets of New Orleans, Master P relocated No Limit's headquarters to Baton Rouge, buying half a dozen houses in The Country Club of Louisiana, an exclusive gated community into which he could install his family and artists. P recalls that the community tried to stop him from moving in, but only succeeded in barring him from the golf course.
"They just was shocked," he says. "They didn't understand how a young person like me could afford to be in a neighborhood like that, especially be black and have just as much as they have or more."
Southern music historian Charlie Braxton puts things more starkly: "Baton Rouge is not New Orleans. They're not used to seeing young black men with a lot of money living in areas reserved for wealthy white people, and they're not trying to fit in. That makes them nervous. Keep this in mind: Rap music is becoming popular with their children and their grandchildren. So now you got authentic rap stars, people that they see on MTV and BET ... living in their neighborhood, living next to their daughters and their sons."
Mac also moved with his family to Baton Rouge, got a house and two nice cars, according to his mother, Sheila Phipps. "It really changed," she says. "Mac was on a roll so much with No Limit. ... It got a lot better. It was, it was pretty good, you know, for a while."
Despite the success he'd found with No Limit, Mac was feeling ready for something new.
"The No Limit brand was so big ... they had so much going on, you know, it was constant work," Mac says. "We were recording or we were going here, we were performing here, we were flying here. We were doing movies. ... You neer really got a moment to be like, 'Yo, man. I've really made it.'"
Mac felt he'd learned enough from watching Master P to go out on his own. He named his new company Camouflage Entertainment, and the show at Club Mercedes in Slidell on February 20, 2000, was part of that plan.
Mac's trial for the murder of Barron Victor, Jr. began on Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, in the St. Tammany Parish courthouse. Mac's entire family — uncles and aunts and grandparents — filled rows in the dingy, wood-paneled courtroom. Bruce Dearing, the prosecutor representing the state, made his approach clear from his opening argument.
"'Murder, Murder, Kill, Kill.' 'Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head,'" Dearing said to the all-white jury. "Those are some of the lyrics that this defendant chooses to rap when he performs. This is the self-proclaimed 'Camouflaged Assassin.'"
Mac couldn't believe what was happening. "I have lived my whole life trying to ... stay out of jail so I can pursue my dreams," he said later. "And here it is — my dream was being used against me in court."
The idea that his ability to shape-shift artistically was being portrayed as evidence of his guilt was especially crushing. "I used to rap about trying to save the world," Mac would say. "I used to rap about all types of stuff growing up, you know, conscious stuff. That's what I was known for before I signed with No Limit ... But here I started making the type of music that [was] selling and all of a sudden, this music, it was being used against me in court and it's like, God damn."
The prosecutor, Bruce Dearing, told the jury about the confession of Thomas Williams, who told police he'd shot Barron Victor, Jr. after Mac had been arrested. He said Williams was unreliable, a career criminal. And he called two eyewitnesses who testified to seeing Mac fire a gun in the club. The first, Barron Victor's cousin Nathaniel Tillison, said he'd "looked dead in [Mac's] eyes." The second was Yulon James, the nursing student who Mac's father saw giving Barron CPR after he'd been shot. James, who was pregnant when she testified, said Mac had been holding a gun, and she'd seen "sparks" coming out of it.
The state had no murder weapon or physical evidence, and Mac had no criminal record, so the crux of its argument was his lyrics. Aaron Zachmeier, then a young reporter covering the trial for the Slidell Sentry News, says that Dearing leaned heavily on Mac's stage name, the Camouflage Assassin. "I imagine they thought that it was an easy way to scare the jury," Zachmeier says. "To turn a person into a monster. He did a good job."
Mac's lawyer decided not to call a single witness. He explained to Mac that their strongest piece of evidence was Thomas Williams's videotaped confession, which Dearing had presented. He argued for a mistrial following the state's use of Mac's lyrics, but was denied. In his closing argument, he insisted that it was absurd to imagine a musician could shoot and kill an audience member at their show, particularly with his own mother in attendance.
The jury deliberated until close to midnight, then returned with a guilty verdict on a lesser charge, manslaughter, for a crime "committed in sudden passion or of blood." Because Louisiana was one of two states in the country where jury verdicts did not have to be unanimous, he was convicted despite two members of his jury voting not guilty.
Sheila Phipps remembers shouting out in disbelief at the verdict. Mac says he felt numb, and cried like never before in his life. The judge sentenced him to 30 years hard labor. Mac was 24 years old.
"I went back to the jail when they brought me back and I was angry. I was angry with God more than anything," Mac says. "And I think that night I didn't believe in anything. I didn't believe in people no more. I didn't believe in the system any more. I didn't believe in nothing. Everything was just dark."
Mac's lyrics were used against him to seal his fate that day in Slidell. To Mac, it was their only way to depict him as a killer.
"I didn't have any criminal history for them to look into," he says. "I guess they was like, well, [we] have to find some indication that this person has a dark side. So that's when they turned to the music."
This wasn't the first time a rapper's music had been used against them in a criminal case and it wouldn't be the last. The lineage of rap lyrics being used to assign guilt is a tactic that goes back decades. In 1998, Sacramento rapper C-Bo was arrested on a parole violation after officers cited that one of his songs advocated gang activity. In 2001, Memphis' Project Pat was convicted on a gun possession charge but filed an appeal, claiming that his lyrics were used out of context in court which led the judge to sentence him more harshly. As recently as 2019, L.A. rhymer Drakeo The Ruler's lyrics were used to bolster an argument of conspiracy to commit murder, a charge he still sits in jail awaiting trial on.
As Professor Erik Nielson of the University of Richmond explains, the strategic use of rap lyrics in court relies on a prosecutor's ability to make a jury believe the words are facts — used for building up the person's character, their motive or even a confession — not creative fiction.
"Many people have a difficult time believing that these young men are capable of learning and mastering a highly sophisticated, complex art form," Nielson says. "And so if you don't see them as artists, then it's difficult to read their lyrics and hear figurative language."
Nielson is the co-author of Rap On Trial: Race, Lyrics and Guilt In America along with Professor Andrea L. Dennis. Together, the scholars have researched over 500 cases to show the scope of how often this tactic is used. "In the vast majority of these cases, it's your average ordinary, a young Black or Latino man. There are a number of cases involving celebrities or high profile artists but the vast majority are just ordinary citizens," Dennis says.
No matter if the defendant is a big name or not, no other genre is policed in this way. Stories of killings abound in folk and country music, but psychological studies have shown that simply labeling a set of lyrics "rap" rather than "country" will prompt an audience to say it poses a danger to listeners. The racial undertones of this tactic disregard rappers as creative thinkers and discounts the music they make as being worthy free speech.
"This is not a First Amendment issue with racial implications. It is a racial issue with First Amendment implications," Nielson says. "It's a new permutation on a very old dynamic. The tactic of introducing lyrics as autobiography in order to put somebody in prison, that's a new tactic. But the fact that we see rap being targeted in black expression, being targeted, that is nothing new. Black expression sends shivers through white America still."
The legacy of Black music being fetishized and vilified reaches back farther than hip-hop. The archetype of the Black American outlaw in popular music dates at least far back as the Legend of Stagolee. As the story goes, Stagger Lee Shelton was a St. Louis scallywag who murdered a man in 1895 for snatching his Stetson hat. Though he died in prison, he became the stuff of folklore, mythologized in song for centuries to come. The tune "Stagger Lee" has been recorded over 400 times by blues, folk, soul and rock artists. "It's told in rhymed form from the first person. It's violent. It's funny at times. It's hypersexual," Nielson says. "It reads like gangster rap, but it's over a hundred years old." Pull in more inspiration from the Black arts movement, Blaxploitation films and blue comedy legends from Dolemite to Blowfly and you have the tradition that Mac stepped into on No Limit. Even as he leaned into those gangsta tropes, there was still a spirit of resistance.
On songs like "Battle Cry (Tomorrow)," from his LP World War III, Mac's inner city blues spill all over the track:
And as the blood of my n***** flood the streets
I refuse to speak
The cracks and concrete could misguide ya feet
And tears fall at the sight of these white sheets
The streetlight heats the cold secrets that midnight keeps
"In any moment that you have, particularly, a young Black man not only embracing stereotypes and taboos, but doubling down on them, which is really what gangsta rap often is," Nielson says. "Even if you have that in the most sort of trite recycled form — I would argue flaunting wealth — I think that at some level that is still performing a kind of resistance."
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the institutional response to this resistance was a tightening grip. In the late '90s and early 2000s, hip-hop labels around the country increasingly became targets of federal investigations. J Prince, the founder of Houston's Rap-A-Lot Records and an inspiration to No Limit's Master P, recalls that success brought attention from law enforcement.
"We didn't bite our tongue when, you know, subject matter such as [exposing] crooked officers ... where they were concerned," J Prince says. "We were speaking for our people."
The artists on Rap-A-Lot were constantly stopped by police. One night, J himself was pulled over, and after police searched his car, he discovered that a bullet was missing from the clip of one of the two legal guns he had in the car. He soon found out that the DEA was investigating Rap-A-Lot for drug trafficking.
Law enforcement clearly had its sights trained on No Limit as well. Two of the label's biggest stars, Kane and Abel, were indicted for drug trafficking. Master P's brother Corey Miller, who rapped as C-Murder, was convicted in 2002 of murder in a case that's eerily similar to Mac's.
Asked what the special attention paid to No Limit says about police, Master P himself is measured. "When you come out together and you make the type of money that No Limit made, they you will be stereotyped," he says. But as he goes on, you can hear how he understands law enforcement as a trap waiting to be sprung if you step out of line.
"My goals, my dreams, was bigger than them projects, and that's how I was able to survive," he continues. "And you have to show people that you're not like everybody else, but when you start hanging around the wrong people, then you become a bigger target. And I just think that's what Mac got caught up [in]. That's where my brother got caught up at. ... Everybody wants to hang out with, you know, good and bad people. So you have to be able to cut those people off. That's what I was able to do. I don't want to have to look over my shoulder. I don't want to do nothing wrong. I'm just gonna keep moving and doing right."
Fundamentally, P is saying, as long as I stay focused enough on my future, I can keep law enforcement off my back, stay safe within this crooked system. And if you get locked up, that's because you stepped off the path, didn't play by the rules that would keep you safe. But Mac trusted the system to believe him, too — enough to go with police, to speak to detectives without a lawyer, to argue his case in front of a jury. It's just that the system was always stacked against him.
"I know that his music got him incarcerated, but they got the wrong guy. I mean, when you talk about 'assassin,' we talking about verbal assassin," P says. "And I think the system mixed that up — with what he is as an entertainer and as a person. He's probably one of the nicest people that you'll ever meet."
While Mac has been incarcerated at Elayn Hunt, the apparatus of evidence and law enforcement that put him there has steadily crumbled.
In 2013, Yulon James, the pregnant nursing student who testified that she'd seen sparks fly out of Mac's gun inside Club Mercedes, officially recanted her testimony. At the time, she told the journalist David Lohr, who was investigating the case against Mac, that she had no idea what had happened in the club. But they kept pressuring her right up until the trial.
"They threatened to charge her if she didn't testify," Lohr says. "They said, 'We'll file an obstruction charge, you know, against you if you don't get up on the stand and, and say, well, we want you to say. And at the time she was pregnant as it was going to trial and she claims the DA told her at that time, 'You know, if you don't get up there and testify, you're going to have that baby behind bars.'"
We contacted Yulon James ourselves, and she said she's scared to say more than she already has. The baby she had after Mac's trial is now a young adult, and she worries about what can happen to people who speak out in Slidell.
The state's other eyewitness presented a different set of problems. The version of events provided by Nathaniel Tillison, the cousin of the victim, kept changing from statement to statement, pointing more definitively at Mac's guilt.
David Lohr says that as he investigated more, he heard more stories of witnesses being pressured to cooperate. "You know taking these individually, you don't think a lot of them, because, you know, a lot of people will claim something," Lohr says. "But when you look at this many people telling you the exact same thing — people [who] don't know each other, who don't even communicate with each other anymore. There's something to it."
At the same time, there were at least two eyewitnesses claiming to be at Club Mercedes on the night of the shooting who say they experienced a different kind of pressure. Monique Hart and Jamie Wilson didn't know each other, but were both at the show, and both insist that they saw Mac in the crowd — "within arm's reach," Hart says — at the moment that the gunshots rang out in a different part of the club.
Both Hart and Wilson also say they contacted the police in Slidell to set the record straight. Hart never heard back. Wilson's mother insisted she drive to the station to make a statement, but the detective who spoke with her accused her of lying until she finally left. She didn't give up — she reached out to Mac's lawyer and said she would be willing to testify. Soon after, she started getting pulled over constantly by the police.
"They used to search my car and stuff," Wilson says. One officer stayed on her. "It wasn't until he pulled me over for what is now about the fourth, fifth or maybe sixth time, and when he was letting me go, he said, 'You wouldn't be getting pulled over if you would just mind your business.' And I was like, 'What are you talking about?' He was like, 'Aren't you a witness for... you know?'"
As Lohr investigated the case against Mac, he began to question Mac's guilt. Mac had no criminal history. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. The guns presented at the trial — including the one Mac said he was carrying at the club and lied to investigators about — were not the murder weapon. The stories of the witnesses seemed less and less reliable. But there was one thing he discovered was working the way it was intended to: the prosecution of poor or black defendants in St. Tammany Parish.
At the time, St. Tammany was known for locking up more people than any other parish in Louisiana, which for years was the state with the highest incarceration rate in America — the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. That's how the place earned the nickname St. Slammany.
Two of the men who kept St. Slammany well-oiled were its district attorney Walter Reed, and its sheriff, Jack Strain. Reed once presented a "St. Slammany Award" to a member of his team for being the year's most eager prosecutor. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, Strain went public warning New Orleans residents to stay away from his parish. "I don't want to see temporary housing because of Katrina turn into long-term housing for a bunch of thugs and trash that don't need to be in St. Tammany Parish," he told a TV crew.
Eventually, by way of a thoroughly unlikely series of events, Reed and Strain made an enemy they couldn't shake and couldn't put away. Before Terry King ever tangled with Reed, he was just another private citizen, an auditor by training. King moved to St. Tammany in 2002, when his wife got a job with the coroner, who was a friend of Walter Reed. In the course of her job, she uncovered ethics violations in that office, and when Laura and Terry King went public, Terry was charged with an obscure law that said you can't talk about ethics complaints.
Terry King felt the heat on him from Reed, and retaliated the way he knew how — by investigating Reed for corruption. He worked with a community organizer named Belinda Parker Brown to find out what the community could tell them about the ways in which their civil rights had been violated by the DA. And within the stream of stories of being beaten by cops on the side of the road or having possessions stolen by the government, they uncovered hints of a work release program operating out of the parish jail.
Programs like this one are intended to give prisoners a chance to start earning an honest living before they're officially released. The jail is allowed to take a percentage of the pay to account for overhead, but King and Brown learned that St. Tammany's work release program was bringing the jail about $3 million per year by taking three quarters of what its inmates earned. The majority of the money passed from the prisoners' hands to the sheriff's office in cash, leaving inmates no money to pay taxes or child support on the money they were supposedly earning. Meanwhile, Jack Strain and deputies from the sheriff's office were allegedly using stolen money for family vacations, hunting trips, jewelry and a new truck.
While under investigation in 2014, Reed declined to run for office. In 2017 he was convicted on 18 counts of various forms of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to a (notably lenient) four years in prison. In 2019, Strain was charged in two separate indictments — a federal corruption case built around the worker release scheme and an unrelated state case for charges of sex crimes dating back to 1979. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
There's even an element of the law itself that helped put Mac in jail that is now under scrutiny. For more than a century, Louisiana has had a law on the books that allows a person to be convicted by a jury that cannot come to a unanimous decision. The law dates back to the aftermath of reconstruction, when new laws allowed Black people to vote and serve on juries. During Louisiana's constitutional convention of 1898, new laws were passed with the stated purpose of "establishing the supremacy of the white race." Along with a poll tax and a literacy test for voting, a constitutional provision allowed a jury to convict even if up to three out of 12 jurors voted not guilty.
Mac's current attorney, Stanton Jones, says that particular provision was "deliberately designed to eliminate the influence and power of Black jurors ... based on a sort of understanding of the racial demographics in the jury pool in Louisiana. At the time, it was fairly predictable that there wouldn't often be more than two Black jurors on a jury of 12 people.... You could just convince the 10 white jurors.... So when I say that this is grounded in white supremacy, those aren't my words. Those are the words of the people who wrote the Louisiana law."
That law stayed on the books in Louisiana until 2018, when voters made unanimous convictions the rule. And earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous convictions like Mac's violate the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That should be good news for Mac, and it may yet help him in future petitions to the courts in Louisiana. But it doesn't automatically mean he or any of the other inmates serving time for non-unanimous convictions — possibly upwards of 2,000, according to Jones — will get out.
In 2000, before he went to jail, Mac was already thinking about making a change. He was working on an album that he knew was going to be his last on No Limit, one that he felt would build a bridge between his past self and his future self, between No-Limit Mac — a uniform he says he had to find a way to fit into — and the artist he'd been before the tank. He was going to call it One Love.
"It was just my way of bringing things back full circle," he says. It was going to be a chance to show his audience a little of who he really was.
During the time he's been in prison, Mac and his family have continued to maintain his innocence and work for his release. But everyone who knows Mac says the same thing: He's made the most of his life despite being in prison. He's never been written up for any kind of infraction. He's a mentor to other prisoners. He runs a music program and plays keys for multiple prison bands. His mother, Sheila Phipps, says that keeping music in his life has helped to keep Mac sane.
It has helped him make a mark outside the prison as well. The New Orleans rapper and activist Dee-1 was a huge fan of Mac before he met him while performing as part of a prison ministry service. Mac was already a decade into his 30-year sentence, and each man saw himself in the other. That initial meeting turned into a mentorship, with Mac writing letters from prison that included diagrams of keyboard notes and scales. And the mentorship turned into a close friendship.
Dee says Mac told him not to try to fit himself into other people's ideas of success. "I wanted to be a rapper, but I was not a rapper. You know, I had a nine to five," he recalls. "All these people in my ear telling me if I change and if I conform and if I start being a little more street, a little more gangster," he might make it. "But Mac was always like, 'No, you got it already. You have it. Don't change. Just get better at what you already do. I met him right in that season of my life."
For Mac's ability to maintain a positive outlook, Dee says one lesson he's learned from his friend is that you can't outsmart the devil. "He had this plan that, 'Look, I could fit in with this brand and push out this style of hip-hop that's riddled with a lot of violence and just a lot of aggression.... It's not reflective of me but this is easy. ... I could do this if it's going to lead to this almighty dollar,'" he says. "Mac constantly reminds me, like, ultimately, you behave in a manner that's not befitting the person you are [and] eventually it's all going to catch up with you. I'm what he was before he saw a need to try to outsmart the devil."
Though all of our interview requests have continued to be denied by his warden, in recent weeks Mac got a message directly to NPR. It reads:
"Make no mistake about it. There's but one true victim in this tragedy, and that is Barron Victor jr. While Louisiana's criminal justice system did indeed fail me, I failed this young man and his family. It was my failure to adequately provide a safe environment for the patrons of this event that ultimately led to his death. I can only hope that Barron's family will someday forgive me as I forgiven those who wrongfully accused me of killing him."
Even when the system took what he loved — his art, his career, his freedom, 20 years of his life — even though he maintains his innocence, Mac still holds himself accountable for what happened that night. Dee-1 says we can't forget that Mac is also a victim. "The person who pulled the trigger caused Barron Victor to be a victim," he says. "The people who metaphorically pulled the trigger on getting Mac convicted and locked up, those are the perpetrators of this crime against McKinley Phipps. So, it's like, who pays for that?"
In 2014, after more than a decade in prison, Mac met a woman named Angelique. She knew his family and they started talking. She says her first impression of Mac was that he was a thinker, and that meeting him was less like getting to know a new person than having them walk back into her life. Soon they were a serious couple, and even though dating wasn't easy, they started discussing marriage. They wed in 2018, inside Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. Mac's best friend from time at No Limit, Master P's younger brother Corey Miller — better known as C-Murder — served as his best man.
Angelique Phipps has become Mac's confidante and advocate. She wants him home, and says that the efforts to free him have led to a fair share of frustration, and a feeling that despite all the changes in his case over the years, he is somehow more valuable to the system behind bars than he would be as a free man. "These moments where we have hope for his freedom, just over and over and over again, seeing him disappointed" hurts, she says, "understanding how much he craves a normal life."
"I've heard people say this before, but it's really true, is when someone is locked up in prison, it seemed like the whole family is locked up," says Sheila Phipps. "All of us are never free until he's out, until that person is out of prison. Especially with someone that's in there for a crime he didn't commit, you know?"
Mac's mom is a painter, and she says that like her son with his music, her art has helped her stay sane through the years Mac has been locked up. One of her projects is a series of portraits of people in prison for crimes they claim they didn't commit, which that began with a painting of her son. The denied appeals have been painful, she says, but even harder are the holidays and birthdays she's spent without him. Still, she allows herself to imagine that day when he walks out of the prison gates.
"I know I'm going to be ecstatic," she says, emotion filling her voice. "Oh yeah, I'm already knowing. Oh Lord, yes indeed. I'll be so happy. I'll be so happy."
Armed protesters provide security for a protest demanding reopening in Lansing, Michigan, on 30 April. Members of the 'boogaloo' movement wear Hawaiian shirts paired with body armor and a military-style rifle. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Feds Say Far-Right Group Coordinated Attack on Minneapolis Police Precinct During Protest
Celine Castronuovo, The Hill
Castronuovo writes: "The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota on Friday announced that the FBI brought charges against a member of the far-right 'Boogaloo Bois' group for organizing and participating in an effort to 'incite a riot' outside a Minneapolis police precinct in May amid protests against the police killing of George Floyd."
According to the legal complaint filed Monday, Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, who claims to be a member of the Boogaloo Bois, communicated with fellow members in late May ahead of a planned trip to Minneapolis as police had already started clashing with protesters in the city.
The documents claim that federal agents obtained a video from the evening of May 28 showing an individual walking up to the door of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis and firing 13 rounds from “what appears to be an AK-47 style semiautomatic rifle.”
Federal officials said the shooter can be seen in the footage walking up to the camera and high-fiving other individuals before shouting “Justice for Floyd!”
In the hours that followed, the police building was overrun by demonstrators and severely damaged by fire.
The federal affidavit includes screenshots from the referenced footage, in which the individual can be seen wearing a skull mask covering the lower half of his face, glasses, a baseball cap and tactical gear.
Federal officials wrote in the complaint that another individual charged in connection with the incident who is cooperating with authorities said Hunter was the one who fired shots outside the precinct, which authorities later corroborated with several social media posts.
Upon returning to Texas, Hunter made several posts about the event and on May 30, Hunter reportedly sent a message to another individual stating, "I set fire to that precinct with the black community," followed by "Minneapolis third precinct,” according to the legal documents.
On May 31, Hunter sent a message to another individual, saying, "My mom would call the fbi if she knew what I do and at the level I'm at w[ith] it."
Federal authorities launched investigations into the Boogaloo Bois in late May, and in early June the Austin Police Department conducted a traffic stop and Hunter, who was in the vehicle, had six loaded magazines for an AK-47 style assault rifle affixed to a tactical vest he was wearing.
Days later, federal authorities were made aware of Hunter’s affiliation with Boogaloo Bois member Steven Carrillo, who had been charged in the Northern District of California with the May 29 murder of a Federal Protective Service Officer in Oakland, Calif.
According to the press release from the U.S. attorney’s office, Hunter was arrested on Oct. 21 in San Antonio, Texas, and made his initial court appearance Thursday.
The charges come amid increased scrutiny of militia groups suspected of inciting chaos at recent protests calling for racial justice.
Several instances of violence, including the fire that broke out at the Minneapolis police precinct, prompted calls from President Trump and his allies to send in federal agents to cities to quell the protests.
Sunday Song: R.E.M. | Man on the Moon
R.E.M., YouTube
Excerpt: "If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon. If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve. Then nothing is cool."
Mott the Hoople and the game of Life yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Monopoly, Twenty one, checkers, and chess yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Mister Fred Blassie in a breakfast mess yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Let's play Twister, let's play Risk yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
I'll see you in heaven if you make the list yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Now, Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby
Are we losing touch?
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
Moses went walking with the staff of wood yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Newton got beaned by the apple good yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Egypt was troubled by the horrible asp yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Mister Charles Darwin had the gall to ask yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Now, Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby
Are you having fun?
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
Here's a little agit for the never-believer yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Here's a little ghost for the offering yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Mister Andy Kaufman's gone wrestling yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Now, Andy did you hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby
Are we losing touch?
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
If you believed they put a man on the moon
Man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve
Then nothing is cool
READ MORE
Exxon Mobil's Baytown complex. (photo: Houston Chronicle)
Exxon Turns to Academia to Try to Discredit Harvard Research
Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News
Kusnetz writes: "ExxonMobil is not known for its acquiescence - tenacious litigation and well-funded advertising are the oil giant's favored methods for trying to swat away opponents."
In the latest go-round in a continuing dispute, the oil giant’s efforts to tear down the work may do the company more harm than good.
xxonMobil is not known for its acquiescence—tenacious litigation and well-funded advertising are the oil giant's favored methods for trying to swat away opponents. And in the latest flare-up in an ongoing battle between the company and two Harvard researchers, Exxon has now turned to the pages of an academic journal to continue its relentless self-defense.
Three years ago, Geoffrey Supran, a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard University, and Naomi Oreskes, a professor at the school, published a peer-reviewed article that examined nearly four decades of internal documents, including documents obtained by InsideClimate News, and public statements by Exxon and its predecessors. They found "a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil's scientists and executives discussed about climate change privately and in academic circles and what it presented to the general public."
The authors concluded that the company had misled the public about climate science, a finding that lent academic weight to the reporting InsideClimate News had published two years earlier. Exxon has tried to discredit the authors and their research, and last week, that effort reached the pages of the journal that published the original work.
On Friday, Environmental Research Letters published a comment by Vijay Swarup, Exxon's vice president of research and development, that seeks to rebut the 2017 research, saying it has "at least two methodological flaws."
Swarup argues that Supran and Oreskes misleadingly attributed public statements made by Mobil before the two companies merged in 1999, including advertorials published in the New York Times, to Exxon. And, he asserts, the researchers then used those statements to demonstrate inconsistency with Exxon's internal documents and published research.
Swarup also claims that the researchers erred by examining only a tiny percentage of the advertorials that Mobil published in The New York Times, a selection that Swarup says was "cherry-picked by another entity, Greenpeace, an activist group engaged in a long running anti-ExxonMobil campaign." In the 2017 paper, Supran and Oreskes said they had sourced the advertorials "from a collection compiled by" Greenpeace.
Finally, Swarup cites a review that Exxon commissioned of the 2017 article, which questioned the method that Supran and Oreskes used to analyze the documents. All these together, Swarup writes, "call into question the publication's conclusions."
But the journal also published a reply by Supran and Oreskes.
In their reply, Supran and Oreskes call Swarup's claims "misleading and incorrect," and draw on newly-available documents that they say only reinforce their original conclusion and further undermine Swarup's claims.
Supran and Oreskes say that only 4 percent of the advertorials Mobil published addressed climate change and so only this small subset was relevant to their research. And they reject Swarup's assertion that they conflated statements by Mobil with documents attributed to Exxon—in their study, they write, they "explicitly attributed each individual advertorial to one of Exxon, Mobil, or ExxonMobil Corp."
But Supran and Oreskes also cite an addendum to their original research that draws on additional materials they say underscore the fact that executives and scientists at Mobil, as well as those at Exxon, were well aware of the state of climate science. The addendum has been accepted by a journal but has not yet been published. One of those documents is a 1983 "Status Report" on global warming by Mobil that, the authors write, "cautioned that if 'urgent national concern' about the greenhouse effect emerged, 'restrictions on fossil fuel and land use might be established.'"
Supran declined to comment, saying he is waiting to discuss the new findings until the addendum is published, which he expects will be within a few weeks. Exxon did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The company has alleged that Supran and Oreskes—along with other organizations, including InsideClimate News, and some state attorneys general that have sued or investigated the company—are part of a conspiracy to tarnish its image, and has sought to discredit their work. Those efforts have included, among other things, a Twitter campaign; a letter to European Parliamentarians; and filings in some lawsuits against the company.
Exxon's attack rests in part on charges that a group of philanthropies are funding the work: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund supported Supran's and Oreskes' 2017 research, and is also among the funders of InsideClimate News. But their case against the researchers is also based on research that Exxon paid for, which was not peer reviewed. These charges have not gained much traction in the courts, where Exxon has used them to try to have cases against the company dismissed.
Instead, the latest back-and-forth may only draw attention to the type of behavior for which Exxon has drawn scrutiny from journalists, advocates and, increasingly, lawsuits from state and local governments. The legal claims have cited news reports by InsideClimate News and others, as well as Supran and Oreskes' research, to argue that Exxon misled the public about climate change and fought efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and should therefore help pay the costs those governments face as more severe wildfires, storms and rising seas batter their residents and infrastructure.
Supran and Oreskes, in their response, point out that Swarup does not explicitly reject their original conclusion that the company and its predecessors misled the public, an assertion they say is clearly backed by the evidence.
"Faced with this," they write, "Swarup resorts to the familiar tactic of trying to create doubt about scientific conclusions by questioning the research methodologies used or the motivations of the researchers. He continues ExxonMobil's established pattern of attempting to discredit—rather than disprove—scientific findings that cannot, in fact, be disproved, because all available evidence supports them. ExxonMobil Corp's reaction is predictable and ironic, because it is a case in point of what we described in our original study."
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