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Sidney Blumenthal | Lindsey Graham, Reverse Ferret: How John McCain's Spaniel Became Trump's Poodle
Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian UK
Blumenthal writes: "That Lindsey Graham would become Donald Trump's poodle was not a tale (or tail) foretold."
On Monday, the senator who praised Hillary and helped get the Steele dossier to the FBI will preside over a hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to tilt the supreme court right for years to come. His is a quintessential Washington tale
But it has landed him in the dogfight of his life for re-election to his Senate seat in South Carolina, challenged by a relentless and capable Democratic candidate, Jaime Harrison, who methodically chased Graham around the ring in their debate, repeatedly jabbing him as a hypocrite, until he struck him with a haymaker, ending the verbal fisticuffs with a TKO: “Be a man.”
Bruised and battered, Graham retreated to his corner, Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, to beg: “I’m getting overwhelmed … help me, they’re killing me money-wise. Help me.”
Graham has climbed the greasy pole within the Senate, to a position that historically has been rewarded by his state with a lifetime tenure. He succeeded to the seat that Strom Thurmond held for 48 years before he died at 100. From Graham’s chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee he has taken up the defense of Trump, to unmask the dastardly conspiracy of “Obamagate” and to handle the confirmation of a justice on the supreme court, to pack it with a conservative majority for a generation to come. But just at this consummate moment of his career, events have conspired to dissolve his facade and expose his flagrant hypocrisy. His presumed strength has turned into his vulnerability. Worse, in Washington, where the press has treated him for more than 20 years like the genial star of the comedy club, he has become an object of ridicule.
In British political discourse, a figure like Graham would be described with the seemingly enigmatic phrase of “reverse ferret”, applied to a politician who takes a dramatic and often contorted U-turn. According to the classic work Lying, by Sissela Bok, the word “hypocrisy” has its origins in Greek theater, as the slanted reply of an actor to the action on the stage. “Its present meaning is: the assumption of a false appearance of virtue or goodness, with dissimulation of real characters or inclinations.” The hypocrite deceives in order to be perceived as virtuous. His dishonesty is in the service of an image of honesty.
Unlike Trump, Graham is not a pathological liar, but his mendacity fits the category of “duping delight” as defined by Bok: “It evokes the excitement, allure, challenge that lying can involve.” For Graham, it’s the thrill of the illicit done in public, creating a suspension of disbelief, the skill of the actor. Graham has always been more than complicit with liars like Trump, not simply as an enabler. From the beginning, well before Trump, he has advanced his career through hypocrisy as his chief means of ambition, knowingly engaging in deceit, adopting a false attitude to win praise and applause as a truth-teller.
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The political tasks Trump has delegated to Graham, intended as rescue operations at the close of the presidential campaign, have become showcases for how Graham’s hypocrisy threatens his political life. He squirms in the spotlight he has sought.
On 30 September, Graham called former FBI director James Comey before the judiciary committee as a witness, to somehow prove the “Obamagate” conspiracy theory. According to that inverted theory, the intelligence community’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to assist Trump was really a plot against Trump. Graham sprayed out multiple falsehoods and distortions to create the impression of a vast conspiracy. One part had already been investigated by the intelligence community inspector general and almost all of it dismissed as untrue. Another piece of the theory, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign contrived the entire story about Trump and Russia to distract from her emails and somehow manipulated the intelligence community, had already been discredited as Russian disinformation.
Graham bore down on Comey, demanding answers about “Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server”. To which Comey replied, deadpan: “That doesn’t ring any bells with me.” Graham excitedly harassed him. “Let’s just end with this, you get this inquiry from the intelligence committee to look at the Clinton campaign basically trying to create a distraction, accusing Trump of being a Russian agent or a Russian stooge or whatever to distract from her email server problems …”
“I’m sorry, senator,” Comey replied. “Is there a question?”
Graham’s nonsense was not particularly helpful in laying the publicity groundwork for the potential October surprise of a report from John Durham, the US attorney from Connecticut, named by the attorney general, William Barr, as a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged anti-Trump plot. To Trump’s fury, Barr leaked that the report would not be forthcoming before the election. The planned explosion was a fizzle. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes,” Trump railed on 8 October, “the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go, because I won’t forget it.” That revenge might encompass Lindsey Graham, too, for failing to execute the smear.
On the matter of how the FBI obtained the notorious dossier on Trump’s Russian connections, written by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. Graham’s manufactured zealotry should have been more earnestly directed toward a cross-examination of himself. The facts are that in late 2016, after Trump’s election, John McCain, Graham’s mentor, disturbed at what he had heard about Trump’s Russian ties, sent an aide, David Kramer, a Russia expert, to London to retrieve the dossier from Steele. In March 2019, after McCain’s death, Trump trashed McCain, saying, “I’m not a fan” and explaining that McCain was the one who gave the dossier to the FBI for “very evil purposes”. But there was an additional subplot. McCain did not act alone.
He asked Graham what he should do with the damaging information. “And I told him,” Graham recounted to reporters, “the only thing I knew to do with it, it could be a bunch of garbage, it could be true, who knows? Turn it over to somebody whose job it is to find these things out, and John McCain acted appropriately.”
That bit of Graham’s own history was never mentioned at his own hearing. He seemed a caricature of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues:
Well, I fin’ly started thinkin’ straight
When I run outa things to investigate
Couldn’t imagine doin’ anything else
So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself!
Hope I don’t find out anything.
Graham’s risible hypocrisy on “Obamagate”, however, has been overshadowed by a more spectacular case. In 2016, Graham followed the lockstep order of Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, to deny Barack Obama’s nominee to the supreme court, federal judge Merrick Garland, a hearing and committee vote, on the invented doctrine that a president should not be permitted to propose a justice in his last year in office.
“He’s a very nice man,” said Graham about Garland, “… very honest, very capable judge.” But, no dice.
Graham elevated McConnell’s raw cynicism into a constitutional principle. “I want you to use my words against me,” he said. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey O Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’ And you could use my words against me, and you’d be absolutely right.”
In 2018, with Trump in office, Graham underscored his self-incriminating pledge. He chose his favored venue of the Aspen Ideas festival, where his transfixing hayseed act has been a perennial marquee attraction.
“Now, I’ll tell you this,” he said, pointing his finger. “This may make you feel better, but I really don’t care. If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election.”
“You’re on the record,” his interlocutor, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, reminded him.
“Hold the tape,” said Graham. Then, he blurted out a non-sequitur to suggest his next topic and broad expertise: “North Korea.” The audience burst into laughter. (Now, the Never Trumper Lincoln Project is running an ad featuring that tape in an endless feedback loop.)
Graham’s antic hypocrisy seems confounding to some who previously admired him when he was a camp follower of McCain’s anti-Putin foreign policy. “Why?” beseeches Anne Applebaum, a former neoconservative turned Never Trumper, about Graham’s transmogrification into complicit Trump enabler, comparing his turn to collaborators with Nazi and communist regimes.
“In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the second world war, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.”
But Graham did not set out to become a collaborator and traitor when he announced his candidacy in June 2015 for the Republican nomination for president. He pledged he would restore Ronald Reagan’s cold war approach of “Peace Through Strength” and excoriated “Obama/Clinton policies” for weakness against our “enemies”. He was running as a kind of proxy for McCain. Like nearly everything else in his political career, his pose wound up becoming a setup for hypocrisy.
By the fall of 2015, Graham told every reporter whose ear he could bend that he would lay his life on the line to prevent “nutjob” and “jackass” Donald Trump from seizing the nomination. Graham’s campaign had failed to spark the slightest interest. His poll ratings could not break 1%. In the early debates he was demoted to what he called “the kids’ table”, excluded from the big boys’ main stage, and after registering invisibility in a qualifying poll was dropped even from there. Humiliated and broke, he desperately needed to sustain his status in the capital. But he still had access to the social network of Washington journalists, his base constituency, always available to be entertained with his private animadversions of other politicians.
Graham quickly found a relevant role that allowed him to hold the attention he craved: the anti-Trump whisperer. He had learned the lesson long ago when he gained entrée to the Washington press corps as an inside dopester to feed the inside dopesters. With his round boyish face, short height and restless gestures he developed a comedic routine in which he portrayed himself as an innocent who had just stepped out of a brothel to tell us with bug-eyed astonishment about the scenes of debauchery he had somehow stumbled across. To perfect his Huckleberry Finn imitation, one off-kilter wisecrack after another, he always finishes with a trademark darting looking of complicit knowing and a smile to seal approval.
As reporters related, during Graham’s anti-Trump phase, his hilarious outtakes described Trump as the Beast threatening western civilization that he, Lindsey Graham, would single-handedly destroy, St George against the dragon. On and on he went, as usual, eliciting laughter, attention and nodding heads, though not votes.
Graham’s public denunciations of Trump went from grim to grimmer. “Go to hell,” he said in March 2016. “I think his campaign’s built on xenophobia, race-bating and religious bigotry.” He soon raised the stakes: “What I see is a demagogue, somebody that has solutions that will never work, that is playing on people’s prejudices and dark side of politics.” When Trump stated in April 2016 that he would deal with Putin as a reasonable partner, Graham was apoplectic. He called Trump’s statement “unnerving,” “pathetic” and “scary”. “Our enemies will enjoy this; our friends have got to be scared to death. It’s nonsensical, it makes no sense. He has no understanding of the world and the role we play.” In May, he tweeted: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” In June, after Trump had wrapped up the primaries, he said: “I would like to support our nominee, I just can’t.”
Graham’s close association with McCain was the critical event in his makeover. Graham was an air force lawyer who was never a top gun but McCain was the genuine article: a war hero, the preeminent voice of the Republican party for a hardline foreign policy, especially toward Putin’s Russia, and a presidential nominee.
Even before his tagging after McCain, Graham demonstrated a penchant for trailing strong men. In the House of Representatives, elected in the Republican wave of 1994, Graham first attached himself to Newt Gingrich, the radical reactionary speaker who early perfected the toxic politics of polarization. But Gingrich’s erratic character, a prefiguring of Trump, triggered an internal revolt. Graham was one of the rebels who conspired against Gingrich for the crime of being too moderate toward Bill Clinton. Toppling Gingrich, and doing the bidding of the ruthless and corrupt majority leader Tom DeLay, Graham advanced as a House manager in the impeachment, where he performed a histrionic role running up the scales to a high pitch.
“You know, where I come from, any man calling a woman at 2am is up to no good,” he said.
I encountered Graham in his impeachment phase when I was subpoenaed as a witness in the Senate trial. When I entered the Senate hearing room to be questioned, Graham shook my hand and said, “If there’s anyone here who wants to be here less than you, it’s me. That’s right, I’m, we’re, on the wrong side of history.” Graham’s shambolic performance irritated the Republican “judge”, Senator Arlen Spector, a former prosecutor, who repeatedly admonished him. Finally, Spector chided Graham: “We’re still looking for that laser.” Graham quickly ended and bounded over to me to shake hands and say: “Listen, when this is over, when you’re going to introduce a patients’ bill of rights, would you let me be the co-sponsor?” He shook the hand of my wife, Jackie, saying: “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to say.”
Sometime later, I ran into a friend of Graham’s, Representative Mary Bono, Sonny’s widow, a Republican from California, who cheerfully told me: “Lindsey sure had a good time making fun of your name.” Was Graham an anti-Semite, as she implied? Of course not. He was play-acting, all just in “fun”.
Graham’s impeachment frolics, however, left a residue of a future hypocrisy. In 1999, he argued: “In every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment, witnesses were called.” But in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Graham was in the forefront insisting that witnesses, especially former national security adviser John Bolton, not be called. “If we seek witnesses, then we’re going to throw the country into chaos,” he said. Graham’s contradiction was symmetrical to his reverse ferret on supreme court appointments. The running thread of his consistency is his hypocrisy from one side of the Capitol to another.
Elected to the Senate in 2002, in his quest for a more serious persona, Graham fastened himself to McCain. “Lindsey for some reason had sort of a man-crush on John McCain,” said his friend, Senator Steve Largent, Republican of Oklahoma. One southern senator confided to me that he and a number of his colleagues had dubbed Graham “Little Brother”. Graham trotted after the larger than life McCain like a spaniel. In McCain’s presence, “Little Brother” tried to puff himself up as big, too. But the senator I spoke with dismissively waved him away as a chronic self-aggrandizer and hypocrite, and flicked away Graham’s foreign policy talk as aspirational clichés.
Hillary Clinton was then a senator from New York, and at her initiative and to his initial surprise she approached Graham, and they wound up co-sponsoring healthcare legislation for members of the national guard. She was another bigger and stronger figure. He had a kind of crush on her, too. In 2006, he wrote an article for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People issue to praise her as a “smart, prepared, serious senator”, with whom he had found “common ground”.
Most importantly, Hillary was a friend of McCain, augmenting the looming shadow. Together they all traveled abroad on congressional trips, when Hillary and McCain famously closed down bars with shots of vodka. Graham, strictly the “Little Brother”, claimed he abjured the hard stuff. “I was drinking water, pretending it was vodka,” he said. “I had to go to the bathroom, before they stopped drinking.” But one of those present told me he would sometimes nurse a glass of white wine. His teetotaling was a little white lie – a sauvignon blanc lie.
When Hillary became secretary of state, Graham was effusive in his praise. In 2012, he stated she was “a good role model, one of the most effective secretary of states, greatest ambassadors for the American people that I have known in my lifetime” and “extremely well-respected throughout the world, handles herself in a very classy way, and has a work ethic second to none”.
But, preparing for his campaign for the Republican nomination, Graham blamed her for the killing of the US ambassador to Libya in a terrorist attack at Benghazi. “Hillary Clinton got away with murder in my view,” he said.
Graham’s brief presidential campaign in 2016 was like the proverbial tree in the forest that no one heard fall. Getting out, his endorsement of Jeb Bush was weightless. After Bush disappeared, Graham moved down the food chain to endorse Ted Cruz. After Cruz washed out, he was left face-to-face with the Beast. Graham gave Hillary a shout-out. “Hillary,” he said, about Middle East policy, “If you get to be president, I’ll help you where I can.” Still the jokester, he wished above all to be seen as a wise man. He was positioning himself to be Hillary’s “Little Brother”. But after Trump won he would befriend the Beast. Graham decided he was not a dragon slayer, after all.
“Little Brother” justified his Trump whispering as a grown-up offering his wisdom to guide the naïve newcomer. But it was more than half an excuse for being in the room where it supposedly happens, except in Trump’s room nobody but Trump matters. Trump enabled Graham to think of himself as one of the grown-ups, huddling with the other adults in the room, cheek by jowl with John Kelly and James Mattis, while they enabled Trump. “I think Lindsey feels a little bit like the adult in the room, speaking with the president,” Steve Largent explained. “[T]here’s something about, I’m not going to say innocence, but the president’s affability as well as his naïveté that Lindsey is drawn to.”
Graham’s relationship with Trump flourished from the date McCain was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Basking in Trump’s presence, Graham happily demeaned himself. Trump, he said, “beat me like a dog” in the 2016 primaries. Before a Republican gathering, he demanded unquestioning loyalty. “To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you,” he said. Graham argued that unstinting support for Trump extended beyond any policy issue but required embrace of Trump’s view of himself as a victim of his host of enemies. “It’s not just about a wall. It’s about him being treated different than any other president.”
Graham confessed to Mark Leibovich of the New York Times it has all been just an act. “This,” he said, “is to try to be relevant.” How could anyone blame a self-professed hypocrite for his hypocrisy? But he and Trump were also secret sharers as entertainers, playing on hypocrisy. “The point with Trump is,” Graham said, “he’s in on the joke.” But there was something even more alluring. “I have never been called this much by a president in my life. It’s weird, and it’s flattering, and it creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
The greatest pressure on Graham was that Trump hated McCain. “He lost, so I never liked him as much after that, because I don’t like losers,” Trump said. He went on to denigrate McCain’s captivity as a prisoner of war and torture by the North Vietnamese: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham shrugged. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.” He was moving on.
Graham has seemingly shed several skins, but that’s the illusion of the reflected light of the larger figures he has sought out. Contrary to those who measure his character only from his distance from McCain to Trump, he has evolved from hypocrisy to hypocrisy while remaining remarkably the same underlying person he was as an attention-seeking little boy. In 2015, he self-published a short memoir about his early life. He described spending much of his time in the bar his father owned, the Sanitary Café, trying to entertain the white working-class men who frequented it.
“But when the place started to fill in and liven up, I would get my act going,” he wrote. “I would strut around the place, sometimes dressed as a cowboy – hat, vest and plastic six shooters. I might get up on the bar and walk up and down it while talking to folks. When customers went to the restroom, I might steal their beer and chug it. I might smoke their cigarette, too, if they left it burning in the ashtray. Those were antics that earned me the nickname, ‘Stinkball’, which everyone in the bar except my parents called me.”
Graham’s autobiography movingly recounts the illnesses and deaths of his mother and father from cancer. He ends his book as a Republican candidate winning his seat in the South Carolina state legislature at the start of his political career. It makes him wish his parents could have seen his triumph.
On 28 July 2017, John McCain, in his last act of bravery, strode to the well of the Senate and turned his thumb down to cast the deciding vote against the Republican bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Graham voted the other way. He had crusaded for years to repeal Obamacare. Yet the ACA would have offered early detection and treatment of the kind of cancers that killed his parents. McCain died a year later.
Graham gave one of the eulogies at the memorial service at the National Cathedral. Trump did not attend. When McCain announced days before his death he was refusing further medical help, Trump alone among prominent officials in Washington had not sent well wishes. Out in the audience sat his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Graham had arranged to get them tickets to the funeral.
“Hold the tape. North Korea.” (Laughter)
A vote-by-mail election in Utah. (photo: Jeffrey D. Allred/AP)
Trump Appointed Judge Blocks Trump Campaign Attempt to Limit Use of Drop Boxes in Pennsylvania
Matthew S. Schwartz, NPR
Schwartz writes: "A federal judge in Pennsylvania has thrown out a lawsuit by the Trump campaign that tried to limit the swing state's use of drop boxes in the current presidential election."
The lawsuit also challenged the Pennsylvania secretary of state's guidance that mail-in ballots shouldn't be rejected if the voter's signature doesn't match the one on file, and a state restriction that poll watchers be residents of the county where they are assigned.
All of these claims turned on a common theme: the idea that without sufficient security measures, people might commit voter fraud. The campaign argued that that fraud would then "dilute" lawfully cast votes, in violation of the state and U.S. constitutions.
In reality, voter fraud is extremely rare, though President Trump has repeated baseless claims about it being widespread.
U.S. District Court Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who wrote the opinion, was reluctant to second-guess the judgment of the state legislature and election officials.
"Perhaps Plaintiffs are right that guards should be placed near drop boxes, signature-analysis experts should examine every mail-in ballot, poll watchers should be able to man any poll regardless of location, and other security improvements should be made," Ranjan wrote. "But the job of an unelected federal judge isn't to suggest election improvements, especially when those improvements contradict the reasoned judgment of democratically elected officials."
Ultimately the court found that the election regulations furthered important state interests without significantly burdening any right to vote, and were therefore constitutional.
In his 138-page ruling, the judge — a Trump appointee — also noted that the Trump campaign had offered no hard evidence that voter fraud would actually occur. Instead, Ranjan wrote, the campaign had simply provided a series of "speculative" assumptions: They assume that "potential fraudsters" might try to fill drop boxes with forged ballots, and that the election security measures in place won't work to prevent that fraud.
"All of these assumptions could end up being true and these events could theoretically happen," Ranjan wrote. "But so could many things." Speculation, Ranjan concluded, isn't enough to let the plaintiffs bring their case.
"Today is another loss for Republicans' effort to make voting more difficult and a victory for democracy and the millions of Pennsylvania voters who will vote by mail," Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer, told The New York Times. "This court joins a chorus of other courts in rejecting the false claims of fraud Trump and the Republicans continue to advance for cynical political reasons."
NPR member station WHYY explains that the drop boxes, first used in this year's primary, were deployed to keep up with unprecedented demand for mail-in voting. The Trump campaign sued the state and each county board of elections over the drop boxes and other election rules in June.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, called Saturday's ruling "a win for voters and our democracy."
The Trump campaign plans to appeal the decision.
"We've continued the fight against the Democrats' completely unmonitored, unsecure drop boxes in the federal courts," the campaign's general counsel, Matthew Morgan, told the Times. "Clearly, we disagree with the Western District's decision on unsecure drop boxes, and President Trump's team will immediately file an appeal."
The decision comes just a day after a federal judge in Texas blocked a plan to limit drop boxes to one per county. The Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said it was an election security measure to prevent fraud. Democrats accused him of trying to suppress the vote.
Two men yell at each other as another tries to break it up after a rally in Civic Center Park in Denver, Colorado, on Oct. 10, 2020. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
In Denver Another Deadly Protest Shooting
Sam Tabachnik and Saja Hindi, The Denver Post
Excerpt: "One person has died and another man, who 9News confirmed was a private security guard contracted by them, is in custody after a shooting during dueling protests Saturday in downtown Denver."
“Patriot rally” and “BLM-Antifa Soup Drive” both planned for Saturday
ne person has died and another man, who 9News confirmed was a private security guard contracted by them, is in custody after a shooting during dueling protests Saturday in downtown Denver.
9News reported that one of their employees and a contractor for the television station were taken into custody. It later confirmed the guard was contracted through Pinkerton and “that it has been the practice of 9NEWS for a number of months to hire private security to accompany staff at protests.”
Police initially said two people were taken into custody but later said one of them was not involved in the incident. They tweeted that the suspect was a private security guard with no affiliation with Antifa.
The incident occurred after a man participating in what was billed a “Patriot Rally” sprayed mace at another man. That man then shot the other individual with a handgun near the courtyard outside the Denver Art Museum, according to a Denver Post journalist who witnessed the incident.
In a news conference after the incident, division Chief Joe Montoya, said police could not confirm the shooter’s or the victim’s affiliations, but said the incident started as a verbal altercation. Two guns were found at the scene, he said, as well as a mace can.
When asked about the 9News report, Montoya said he could not confirm any connection, only saying that the department was still interviewing witnesses. One of those witnesses was a Denver Post photojournalist.
“We’re hopeful that as soon as possible we can get the factual information out as to what led to this — who the individuals involved were,” Montoya said. “We’re hopeful that that information will help kind of calm the waters a little bit.”
The rallies at Civic Center on Saturday came less than a month before a presidential election and amidst a global pandemic that has the nation on edge. Until the shooting, the protests mostly consisted of each group chanting and yelling at one another from across the amphitheater, which separated the two groups.
The right-wing protesters — led by John Tiegen, an El Paso County resident — gathered in the park’s amphitheater and occasionally chanted patriotic songs and held up banners.
Juan Quinones, a member of the biker gang Sons of Silence, decided to attend the right-wing rally after seeing Tiegan’s event posted online. He arrived after police had closed off the amphitheater but stayed with other right-leaning protesters.
Quinones said he wasn’t attending the event to start trouble, but he would defend himself if he was attacked. He blamed violence on the left.
“If you don’t come out and listen and talk and speak, then they win,” he said.
The left-wing group — which organizers called “BLM-Antifa Soup Drive” — held up flags and signs railing against Nazis and white supremacists as they gathered in the middle of the park, several hundred feet from the barricaded-off amphitheater.
An hour in, police had fired what appeared to be pepper balls after people from the leftist group started rattling a barrier headed into the amphitheater. One protester burned a thin-blue-line flag in front of the officers.
The soup drive idea appealed to Isabel Difrancesca, who said she came out because she liked the idea to help low-income folks. She brought pasta but said she was apprehensive about what’s she seen online in anticipation of events.
Richard Johnson and Amy Thompson were walking by the amphitheater when they passed by the rally.
“America, by and large, if you look at the media, thinks that most of America is for defunding the police and is the hard liberal left and wants to riot in the street, and I personally don’t believe the numbers bear that out,” Johnson said.
Barb Galinsky of Denver said she attended the counterprotest because “nobody is judge, jury and executioner and we need to go forward and not backwards.” She said white supremacist groups represent moving backward.
Galinsky said she expected violence at the event Saturday “because that’s what (the right-wing groups) want.”
James Rotten was manning the table of books about communism at the rally and the soup drive as a response to the original rally planned. He led chants such as, “No cops, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
“We think every far-right rally like this wants to be a dangerous race riot,” he said.
In anticipation of the heightened tensions, Denver police said the department “respects the right to peacefully assemble. Those who participate in protests, demonstrations, marches, or other gatherings, as protected by the First Amendment, are reminded to do so in a lawful manner. Individuals who choose to act outside of local, state and federal law, will be subject to citation or arrest.”
Residents of The Villages, Florida, participate in a golf cart parade on August 21, 2020, to celebrate the nomination of Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate and Kamala Harris as vice president. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Florida's Seniors, the State's Most Reliable Voters, Are Shifting Away From Trump
Mary Ellen Klas, Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau
Klas writes: "Stephen Staruch is exactly the kind of voter that gave Donald Trump a 17-point advantage over Hillary Clinton in exit polling among older voters in Florida four years ago."
The lifelong Republican who has retired to the state’s largest retirement community, The Villages, says he voted for Trump four years ago because it was “more of a vote against Clinton.” As a retired UPS executive, he had hope for Trump because his life experience taught him that people “often grow into the job and mature; if you surround them by the right team of people, they’re going to become a good leader, especially if they’re good business people.”
But Staruch’s high hopes were quickly dashed, he said this week. “Right around inauguration time when he started lying about the crowds, I had buyer’s remorse.”
Now, Staruch, 67, is voting for Biden “to get democracy back and the rule of law,” and he’s speaking out about it to anyone who will listen. “I feel that same sense of obligation that I did when I was 17 and joined the military during Vietnam. It’s like, that’s what people do because this is our country.”
Polls now show that because of voters like Staruch, Florida’s seniors who traditionally vote at higher rates than any other age group, have shifted in significant numbers away from President Donald Trump to former Vice President Joe Biden.
The University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab released a poll of likely voters on Oct. 6, and while Biden was leading Trump among likely Florida voters 51% to 45%, the margin among voters older than 65 was 50% for Trump and 47% for Biden. Those same people were asked how they voted years ago, and the margin was much larger, 14 points in Trump’s favor.
A Quinnipiac poll released Oct. 7 found even wider margins with voters age 65 and older. Biden was ahead of Trump 55% to 40% among Florida voters over age 65, the widest margin of any age group except 18- to 34-year-olds where Biden led with a margin of 23 percentage points. Older voters have a more favorable opinion of Biden over Trump by 20 percentage points, according to the survey conducted after the presidential debate.
The trend seems to be happening across the nation. In the last month, a CNN poll found Biden leading Trump by 21 points — 60% to 39% — among likely voters 65 and older. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported an even larger margin.
The Pew Research Center estimates that Trump beat Clinton by nine percentage points among voters 65 and older four years ago. By comparison, John McCain carried the senior vote by eight points in 2008, and George W. Bush had only a four-point advantage in 2004.
Shifting seniors
Why are these numbers notable?
Trump won Florida by just over 113,000 votes in 2016 but won senior voters by nearly 330,000. Because of the electoral map, Trump’s campaign considers Florida a must-win state for his reelection, so a significant drop in senior voting will require a requisite increase in another group.
“Nobody believes that seniors are going to come out and vote 70% for Biden,’’ said Michael Binder, who conducted the UNF poll and has done similar work for the New York Times and Sienna polls.
“But I certainly think it’s reasonable that those numbers will be different than they were in 2016. You have to believe there are people who voted for Donald Trump because they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and his name wasn’t Clinton, but Biden doesn’t have those heavy negatives.”
Mike Madrid, a pollster with the anti-Trump political committee, The Lincoln Project said that the shift in Florida could play out where Biden enjoys significant support among senior voters above the historical numbers while Trump receives support of more Hispanic voters than Republican presidential candidates have seen in the past.
“What’s happening is the Democrat is getting the base Republican vote, and the Republican is getting the base Democrat vote and the numbers are essentially the same number, which is going to put them both in the same range,’’ he said.
Republican and many independent voters 65 and older have been central to Trump’s base, as evidenced by the numerous trips to The Villages by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and other top surrogates for the president in the state. Vice President Mike Pence has scheduled a trip there for Saturday.
Poll doubters
Chris Stanley, the Democratic Party leader in the Villages, says she is reluctant to put much stock in the polls, which in 2016 undercounted white voters with no college education who overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
“I’m ignoring the polls this year because, yes, Florida is gonna be a 1% state. It’s always been a 1% state,’’ Stanley said.
But she, too, has watched the shift among her neighbors, most of whom are Republicans.
“We’ll get 50 to 100 people through the door, depending on what the outrageous tweet of the day was,’’ she said. “We have had a steady influx of Republicans, and they’re funny when they come in. They announce, ‘I am a Republican. I’m staying a Republican.’ And then they say, ‘What can I do to help you get rid of that, so and so, in the White House?’ ”
While she hears from many they are dissatisfied by Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, they are more concerned about the possibility that Trump will eliminate the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, after he issued an executive order in August that deferred paying the tax for businesses hurt by the pandemic.
“It’s kind of touching,’’ Stanley said. “It’s the danger to their kids and their fear their kids won’t have a retirement that’s driving people to my door.”
Michele Yergin, 70, a former Republican from Ponte Vedra Beach, said she voted for Trump in 2016 because “I thought that he was a great businessman,” but she increasingly became turned off by what she considers “his narcissistic behavior,’’ how he treated women, how he would “fire anybody who would stand up against him,” and “how he puts people at risk for COVID.”
“It was just one thing after another, and it still hasn’t stopped,’’ she said. She said she now has registered without a party affiliation and is supporting Biden “because he has good common sense and he will surround himself with people who can make good sound decisions.”
Nancy Detert, a longtime Republican state senator who is now serving on the Sarasota County Commission in a part of the state long known for its conservative politics, said that the senior voters she speaks to haven’t wavered from four years ago.
“Those voters are exactly the same as they were before, and Trump is just as controversial,’’ she said. “The more chaos and the more they are for Trump.” She also notes, these same voters, “don’t forget to show up on Election Day.”
She is skeptical that voters are being honest with pollsters, and she predicts the race in Florida is going to be as close as it was 20 years ago when Florida was forced to launch a recount to determine if George W. Bush or Al Gore won.
“We’re looking at the year 2000 all over again,’’ Detert said. “Anybody who thinks Florida is shifting, it’s not going to happen. It’s going to be tied.”
But Eleanor Sobel, another former state senator who represented Hollywood as a Democrat, said she has been spending hours each day making calls to senior voters as a member of the Florida Leadership Council for Biden, a phone bank effort led by Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, best known as part of the musical group, Sha-Na-Na.
Sobel said she has spoken to hundreds of seniors across the state who have received ballots “and I’ve had many of them tell me they voted for Trump and now they are voting for Biden,’’ she said. “They say they’re fed up.”
Bob White, a staunch Trump supporter from Merritt Island and former Liberty Party candidate for governor, also doesn’t believe the polls.
“To me the president’s doing better here among that age group than he was four years ago,’’ White said. “We have a Trump Victory headquarters opened on Merritt Island on a former car dealership and they’re constantly busy — registering people to vote, switching Democrats to Republican for the first time, organizing boat parades and rallies. I don’t trust any of these polls.”
He also assesses the race by the level of enthusiasm.
Measuring enthusiasm
“It’s one thing to tell a pollster where you’re at and it’s another thing to turn out on Election Day,’’ White said. “If this is a base election, Donald Trump’s base is clearly going to turn out. The enthusiasm for him is off the charts. Every time you turn around there’s another event with 300 trucks and motorcycles or 1,000 boats. I just don’t see it on the Biden side.”
Staruch and Stanley, however, said that in The Villages, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than a two-to-one margin, the energy among Democrats is higher than it’s ever been.
On Wednesday, The Villages Democratic Club organized a golf cart rally to drive vote-by-mail ballots to the Sumter County Supervisor of Elections office, and it grew to the largest parade of the year, with people lining the streets waving flags along the route.
“I thought we’d be about 100 golf carts and we had 400,’’ Stanley said. “We filled two drop boxes with our ballots.”
COVID handling
Pollsters told the Herald/Times a primary reason for the shift appears to be the pandemic and the president’s handling of it. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 150,000 of the 199,000 confirmed U.S. virus deaths through Oct. 3 have occurred among people 65 or older.
“Senior citizens are a very high-risk group,” Binder of UNF said. “They are some of the most vulnerable in our whole country. And when you have somebody not necessarily taking it as seriously as they should, flouting their own advice from their own CDC, it’s pretty clear, some of those folks that are concerned about this — maybe they’ve lost friends and loved ones and things of that nature.”
The UNF poll asked people what they say is a bigger concern: the pandemic, or the economic impact. Senior voters who said that public health is their top concern were 80% in support of Biden. Of the people UNF polled who said the economic impact was most important, 89% were for Trump.
“I mean these are like partisan registration numbers,’’ Binder said.
As for Staruch, he has taken his “sense of purpose” to speak out about his Trump defection so seriously he has been interviewed by CNN, the New York Times, and journalists from French and Danish news organizations, and he lets them know: “The party I knew doesn’t exist anymore,’’ he said. “Republicans like the John McCains of the world and others who came before him were the fiscal conservatives, but now we’re a country that’s $27 trillion in the hole. That’s not fiscal restraint.”
He compares it to getting his wheels realigned.
“I’ve got to do something fairly radical, where it’s not just pumping air into them, but I’ve got to take it into the shop,’’ Staruch said. “We have to get our democracy realigned. It is so out of balance that it’s going to require a pretty strong shift to the left in order to correct that. And that means for years to come.”
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Jaime Harrison, the Democrat challenging Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was once seen as a long shot in the race but is now polling competitively with Mr. Graham. (photo: Meg Kinnard/AP
Jaime Harrison Sets Senate Fundraising Record With $57 Million Haul to Unseat Graham
Max Greenwood, The Hill
Greenwood writes: "Democrat Jaime Harrison pulled in $57 million in the third quarter of 2020 for his bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), setting an all-time fundraising record for a U.S. Senate candidate."
Harrison’s staggering third-quarter haul smashed the previous record of $38.1 million set by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) in 2018.
Harrison’s third-quarter fundraising total was driven by contributions from 994,000 donors, with an average donation size of $37, his campaign said. Harrison has now raised some $86 million across the 2020 election cycle.
“This campaign is making history, because we’re focused on restoring hope back to South Carolina,” Guy King, a spokesperson for Harrison’s campaign, said in a statement.
Ousting Graham once appeared to be a long shot for Democrats. South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in more than two decades, and President Trump carried the state by 14 points in 2016.
But the Senate race between Graham and Harrison has emerged as one of the most competitive in the country. Recent public and internal polls show the two candidates running in a dead heat, and just last week, The Cook Political Report shifted its outlook for the race from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.”
Graham’s campaign has not yet said how much it raised in the third quarter of 2020. Harrison, however, outraised the incumbent in both the first and second quarters of the year, and Graham will need to set a record of his own if he hopes to exceed his challenger’s quarterly total.
Graham made a plea for contributions during an appearance on Fox News last month, saying that he was “getting overwhelmed” in the money race.
“Help me,” Graham said. “They’re killing me, moneywise. Help me. You helped me last week. Help me again.”
Protests erupted after a video showing the gang rape of a woman went viral in Bangladesh. (photo: Mahmud Hossain Opu/Al Jazeera)
Bangladesh Mulls Death Penalty for Rapists as Protests Rage
Faisal Mahmud, Al Jazeera
Mahmud writes: "As protests flare across Bangladesh over a series of rapes and sexual assaults, its government says it is considering the death penalty for the offenders."
s protests flare across Bangladesh over a series of rapes and sexual assaults, its government says it is considering the death penalty for the offenders.
Law Minister Anisul Huq told Al Jazeera that his ministry is set to place a proposal before the cabinet on Monday to make urgent amendments to the laws dealing with sexual assault.
“We are thinking of capital punishment instead of life imprisonment… This measure will be taken as per the direction of our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina,” said Huq.
In the past week, Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country of 170 million people, has seen unprecedented protests and rallies across the capital Dhaka and other cities as angry demonstrators demand justice and stricter punishments in rape cases.
Placards bearing messages such as “Hang the rapists” and “No mercy to rapists” were seen as tens of thousands of students and women marched this week.
One of those students, Saima Ajmeri, braved the scorching sun, intermittent rain, and the fear of COVID-19 infection as she hit the streets for five days straight.
“I was always shy and stayed away from protest rallies and processions as I am an introvert. But now I feel I can no longer stay silent. These rapes just can’t go on and the rapists can’t go scot-free. Something has to change,” the 21-year-old university student told Al Jazeera.
Protests led mainly by women erupted after a video emerged this month showing several men stripping and attacking a woman in the southern district of Noakhali.
In her statement, the woman said she was first raped by one of the accused at gunpoint last year. He assaulted her at gunpoint several times over the year, threatening her with gang rape if she resisted.
She was gang-raped by the man and a number of his associates on September 2, and a video of the assault was made to blackmail her for money and to agree to sexual encounters with the group. She refused, and the men released the video on social media.
Eight people have been arrested in connection with the case.
Days before the Noakhali video went viral, anger had already been brewing after several members of the Bangladesh Chhatra League – the student wing of the governing party – were arrested and charged with gang-raping a woman in the northern town of Sylhet last month.
The latest round of protests first began on social media as hundreds of users on Facebook and Twitter changed their profile photos to an empty black space, denoting anger.
Later, the same social media platforms were used by the protesters to organise human chains, rallies and demonstrations in different parts of the country.
This is the first time in Bangladesh that such large-scale protests against sexual violence have been organised for a prolonged period. In January this year, a large day-long protest was held after a student of Dhaka University was raped in the capital.
Following that incident, the country’s High Court ordered the law ministry to form a commission within 30 days to address a troubling rise in sexual assaults and submit its report by June. More than nine months after the court order, the commission is yet to be formed.
“We are protesting against this culture of impunity and nonchalance,” said Auroni Semonti Khan, a Dhaka University student who led one of the protests in the city’s Shahbagh area.
“Justice has to be ensured in any case of rape.”
Capital punishment as a deterrent
According to the human rights group Ain-o-Salish Kendra (ASK), gang rapes accounted for more than a fifth of the nearly 1,000 sexual assaults reported between January and September this year.
Between April and August, as the world reeled under the coronavirus pandemic, four women were raped every day in Bangladesh, the ASK data showed.
Sounding a note of caution, Taqbir Huda, research specialist at Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST), told Al Jazeera that legislating capital punishment for sexual crimes may result in lower convictions as research has shown that stricter punishments have an inverse correlation with conviction in criminal cases.
“So, the more severe the punishment, the lower the rate of conviction is likely to be.”
“The conviction rate for rape in Bangladesh is below 1 percent,” it said.
The rights group added that survivors of sexual assaults who go to the police in Bangladesh “often face a refusal to file a case, bias, victim-blaming, stigma, and humiliation”
A 2013 survey conducted by the United Nations found that, among men in Bangladesh who admitted to committing rape, 88 percent of rural respondents and 95 percent of urban respondents said they faced no legal consequences.
“It is rather the victims and witnesses of rape who face social stigmatisation and threat from the perpetrators,” said Sadeka Halim, professor of sociology at Dhaka University, adding that many accused even received political protection.
“When women come to the police, first the police don’t believe her,” the HRW statement quoted a women’s rights lawyer as saying. “They shame her. The case starts with non-belief.”
Dhaka-based activist Zefroon Afsary told Al Jazeera that women and children are systematically barred from accessing justice through a “thriving culture of impunity against rapists, backed by ineffective trial processes” which often “shift the blame from the perpetrator to victim”.
“We should protest the practice of victim-blaming in open courts which is allowed by use of character evidence in rape trials,” she said.
“This means a woman’s character is arbitrarily weighed to evaluate her ‘worth’ to decide how much justice she deserves, based on her clothing, whereabouts and lifestyle choices.”
Elisha Bouret says she and her family have been impacted by pollution from the Cross Bronx Expressway, Sept. 18, 2020. (photo: Hiram Alejandro Durán/THE CITY)
For Some Near the Cross Bronx Expressway, COVID-19 Is an Environmental Justice Issue, Too
Ese Olumhense, THE CITY
Olumhense writes: "Mounting preliminary research, including from a team at Harvard, suggests exposure to air pollution is associated with higher COVID-19 death rates."
lisha Bouret’s 3-year-old son Miguel asks for his asthma inhaler more often these days.
Over the previous few months, as fewer cars took to the roadways near the family’s west Bronx home during the city’s COVID-19 lockdown, he rarely needed the pump, she said.
And while Bouret cannot prove it, she suspects the return of constant motor vehicle emissions from local thoroughfares — including the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan Expressways — may be triggering her son’s symptoms.
“Once the pandemic started and there were less cars in the street, my son had not had an asthma attack,” Bouret, a mother of two, told THE CITY. “Ironically, now that the outside has opened again, my son has had to use his pump a little bit more.”
His symptoms have been severe enough to warrant hospitalization four times in his young life, said Bouret — he even spent his second birthday in the hospital.
Concern over her son’s health compounds an already taxing time for Bouret and her family. Like many in Morris Heights, where she lived until recently, Bouret tested positive for the virus, as did her two sons, she said. Only she and her older son, Jonathan, who is 7, showed symptoms.
Her grandmother-in-law, Joan Terrero, a mother of 10, died from the virus in early May on her 86th birthday.
Studies point to pollution link
Mounting preliminary research, including from a team at Harvard, suggests exposure to air pollution is associated with higher COVID-19 death rates.
Nationally, this link is most apparent in The Bronx, according to a new peer-reviewed study from researchers at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry and ProPublica, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data and local mortality figures, scientists found the Bronx ranked the worst for COVID-19 death rates and respiratory hazards of the more than 3,100 other counties in the country. Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens placed second, third, and sixth, respectively.
Like Terrero, many Bronx residents included in THE CITY’s “MISSING THEM” memorial lived in neighborhoods where they were consistently exposed to a major source of air pollution: the busy expressways nearby. For about 20 years, Terrero, who raised Bouret’s husband, lived in an apartment two blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Microscopic particles emitted from road traffic can penetrate lung tissue and cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. The city health department estimates that current levels of PM2.5, or fine particulate matter, contribute to more than 2,000 deaths and more than 6,000 emergency room visits and hospitalizations each year.
“Higher particulate matter is related — in the United States — to higher death rates from COVID-19,” said Michael Petroni, a doctoral candidate and the lead author on the SUNY ESF/ProPublica study. “Highways are a source of particulate matter, but we also know that they’re a source of all sorts of other air pollutants that affect people’s respiratory system.”
An outsized burden
Bronx neighborhoods like Morris Heights, which sits at the often-congested meeting point of the Cross Bronx and the Major Deegan Expressways, have shouldered an outsized burden of the city’s coronavirus-related death toll. As of late September, more than 4,000 had died from the virus in the borough, according to city health department data.
Census-tract-level highway air pollution data shows elevated air quality hazards concentrated around Morris Heights.
Bronx residents, at the peak of the pandemic, were twice as likely to die from the virus as their counterparts in the city’s other boroughs.
When THE CITY tracked down the home addresses of the nearly 1,800 people in the MISSING THEM database, using voter-registration data and other public records, it revealed clusters of deaths among people who lived near the Cross Bronx.
Two of the four Bronx ZIP codes where city health records show COVID-19 cases topped 2,000 and 25 percent or more residents tested positive well into July contain a stretch of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
One was Morris Heights, ZIP 10453; the other, Soundview’s 10472.
Morris Heights residents said the virus devastated the community.
“We lost quite a number of folks,” said Bola Omotosho, a doctor at Montefiore Medical Center who is also chair of Bronx Community Board 5. “There were many people that were sick in my district.”
He said he was one of them.
Like their neighbors elsewhere in the borough, Morris Heights residents experience chronic health conditions, like asthma and diabetes, that can exacerbate COVID-19 disease at levels far higher than much of the city and the country.
Many area residents were already struggling financially, even before pandemic-related job losses. The Bronx now has an unemployment rate in excess of 21 percent, the latest state Department of Labor statistics show.
And 58 percent of households living in Bronx Community District 5 spend more than 35 percent of their incomes on rent, the second-highest of any of the city’s 59 districts.
“We all know someone with asthma”
For decades, community members and environmental groups have complained about noise and traffic-related pollution from the Cross Bronx. The highway had been unpopular since infamous New York “master builder” Robert Moses proposed steamrolling swaths of neighborhoods to build the Cross Bronx in the 1940s.
Some five decades after its completion, some nearby residents say it is hard to imagine the noisy highway not being part of the neighborhood.
“It’s sad to say, but it becomes so much a part of your lived experience that you don’t pay it any mind,” said Dior St. Hilaire, who lives near the expressway in Tremont and runs GreenFeen, which trains community members on sustainable living and composting. “We all know someone with asthma, so that says a lot about the air quality.”
“It’s not until you leave that city that you realize that your air is sh—ty,” she added.
Levels of lung-aggravating PM2.5 have fallen in The Bronx and citywide in the last decade, the health department’s Community Air Survey has found. But higher levels of PM2.5 persist in places with high traffic emissions — including along the Cross Bronx.
“If you’re living next to a highway, you are exposed to higher levels of air pollution,” said Markus Hilpert, associate professor in the environmental health sciences department at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and one of the authors of a recent study on truck traffic and pollution in the South Bronx.
He also noted that living near a highway is usually, though not always, associated with lower economic status.
“Where the housing is cheapest is often where the exposures are greatest,” said Diana Hernández, an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Mailman who studies the impact poverty and place have on health.
“Lower-income people can’t necessarily escape multiple forms of disadvantage,” added Hernández, one of the co-authors of the traffic study.
Residents of these communities often contend with other polluting infrastructure, said Tok Oyewole, an organizer at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.
This can include “clustering of waste transfer stations, peaker power plants, food distribution, and associated heavy-duty truck traffic from industry, on top of proximity to highways,” she said.
Decades of opposition
Though the expressway was first proposed by the Regional Plan Association in 1929, it would not be started until the late 1940s, under Moses, then head of the City Planning Commission.
The Moses plan required builders to demolish parts of Tremont, displacing thousands. A coalition of residents — led mostly by local housewives and increasing numbers of Black and Puerto Rican families then moving to the area — fought the plan for years.
The group even proposed an alternate route through Crotona Park that they believed would avoid mass displacement, historians say — to no avail.
“There was the mayor’s New York City and then there was Robert Moses,’” Lloyd Ultan, Bronx borough historian, told THE CITY.
Ultimately, Tremont residents lost their bid, when officials “overrode vociferous and sustained efforts” from community members and approved the proposal to build the middle of three sections of the expressway as originally planned — right through the heart of The Bronx, The New York Times reported in December 1954.
“Their chief argument has been that they would be unable to obtain new homes and that the city would not assist them in getting replacement houses equal to the old ones,” the report said.
And while there were attempts to relocate families, Ultan said, some estimate 5,000 residents were displaced during the nearly 15 years it took to complete the Cross Bronx. Many did not return, and countless others left, their lives disrupted by relentless noise, dust, and fumes, journalist Robert Caro noted in The Power Broker, his book about Moses.
“One can sit next to the expressway for five days, observing it, and notice that by the fifth day the nausea and headache and dizziness one felt at first are gone,” Caro wrote in the 1974 book. “But no one knows what the inhalation of carbon monoxide — and assorted hydrocarbons emitted by automobile motors — in diluted form produces, for no study has been done on the effect of prolonged exposure to such gases.”
Today, far more is known about exposure to emissions, and researchers are beginning to link exposure to pollutants to increased death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For families near the Cross Bronx, these preliminary findings validate what they have suspected for years: that the highway is contributing to poor health outcomes in the community.
“I think it impacted us the most because of the air quality,” Bouret said of the coronavirus. “We were more susceptible to it.”
Her grandmother-in-law’s death has heightened Bouret’s commitment to understanding the impact of the environment on health, she said.
“Whenever anything comes up about COVID, I want to do the interviews, I want to speak out, I want to provide as much information as I can,” Bouret said. “‘Cause I know she would want me to.”
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