08 December 20
We Have to Move the December Fundraiser to Center-stage
We have no chance of finishing the December fundraiser at this pace. Yes failure to meet the budget will derail the organization. This is the most important hurdle for our organization right now. Who out there can step up?
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Founder, Reader Supported News
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07 December 20
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Akela Lacy | Democratic Backlash to "Defund the Police" Jeopardizes Popular Reforms
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "One result of conflating 'defund the police' with modest police reforms that have broad bipartisan support, like ending or limiting qualified immunity, is that those modest reforms are now in jeopardy, several Democratic aides told The Intercept."
In June, Democrats passed a measure to limit qualified immunity, with support from moderates who’ve since spoken out against the “defund” message.
uring a now-infamous House Democrats call about the November election results, New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell said he had been forced to “walk the plank” on the issue of qualified immunity, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation. Pascrell had voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was passed by the House in June and included a provision to limit the use of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that effectively shields law enforcement from liability in civil cases where individuals allege violation of their constitutional rights.
Pascrell’s comment, which has not previously been reported, was part of a wider discussion in which several members complained that bending to calls for police reform had hurt them. Some members specifically blamed activists’ demand to “defund the police” for the disappointing election results; Democrats were expected to expand their majority but instead Republicans have flipped more than a dozen House seats.
One result of conflating “defund the police” with modest police reforms that have broad bipartisan support, like ending or limiting qualified immunity, is that those modest reforms are now in jeopardy, several Democratic aides told The Intercept, requesting anonymity to speak freely.
“Even without the defund debate, I know there are some moderate members who think that the George Floyd Act was a political liability and who may be loath to vote on it again next year if it’s DOA” — dead on arrival — “in the Senate,” one Democratic aide told The Intercept. “In the infamous Dem Caucus call, Bill Pascrell said that he was forced to ‘walk the plank’ on qualified immunity and that it pissed off the police unions in his district. So, there surely is some segment of the Dem Caucus that feels that way.”
Asked about the conversation, Pascrell told The Intercept that the need for the “landmark changes” in the Justice in Policing Act “remains urgent, but we must adequately explain to the voters and nation the nature of these reforms. It is what I did in my district. And while not every organization was behind me, I was re-elected with more votes than ever before. Not everyone was as successful.”
The state’s largest police union, the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association, withdrew its endorsement of Pascrell this summer over his vote for the bill. As of June, Pascrell was the largest recipient of police union money in Congress, OpenSecrets reported.
“This childish ‘defund’ whining has killed robust reform,” another Democratic congressional aide told The Intercept. “All the people that marched in July and that were so moved by George Floyd, they’ve now shifted their ire toward ‘defund.’ And it’s like, this is why Black people don’t trust people in the movement in the first place.”
House Democrats, who will have a slimmer majority next session, plan to reintroduce the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would bar local police and federal officers from using qualified immunity as a defense. It was passed by the House in late June, with support from moderate Democrats like Reps. Abigail Spanberger, Conor Lamb, Max Rose, and Anthony Brindisi, who are now vocally arguing against calls to radically reform the police — making it politically difficult to vote again for reforms they supported earlier this session.
Last month, a Democrat told Fox News that members were made to “walk the plank” on qualified immunity. “Having everybody walk the plank on qualified immunity with the cops,” said their Democratic source. “That just hurt a lot of members. No one’s taking responsibility for it.”
There is broad support across the ideological spectrum for narrowing qualified immunity as it currently stands. Libertarian groups like the Cato Institute and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, and even some law enforcement advocacy groups want to narrow the doctrine, which they say affords a level of immunity not given in any other profession.
“Folks that are in my movement see qualified immunity as the lowest hanging fruit, being able to hold police accountable for violating people’s civil rights,” said Dave Pringle, policy and campaign manager at the Center for Popular Democracy. The nonprofit progressive advocacy group supported the bill’s underlying aims but did not endorse it, saying it didn’t go far enough in pursuit of more transformational changes they want to see.
“If folks are saying now that they’re being made to walk the plank on qualified immunity, and yet would vote for the Justice in Policing Act, that makes me call into question the impetus: What was getting folks to actually get behind that bill over the summer as opposed to now?”
The bill was fueled by protests against police brutality this summer. It included incentivizing state and local government to ban law enforcement officers from using chokeholds, limiting transfer of military equipment to law enforcement, and requiring federal officers to use body cameras; the bill would also establish a national registry to track records of police misconduct and ban no-knock warrants in drug cases.
The bill would not defund the police, which Congress does not have the power to do. But moderate Democrats are still scapegoating the idea anyway and blaming the underlying goals of the Justice in Policing bill for putting them in difficult positions.
“You keep bringing up ‘defund.’ You keep whining and saying that that’s the reason you lost. Maybe you lost because we haven’t passed anything since the CARES package,” one of the Democratic aides said. Beyond that, police budgets are administered at the local, not congressional level, they added.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the progressive Squad, was a major proponent of the bill and intends to keep pushing policies to reform policing. “These policies, they’re populist,” Pressley said. “In terms of my approach, I feel more emboldened. There is a reckoning, and the movement of the most marginalized — many of them fueled by issue-based activism like police reform and accountability — made this Democratic victory possible,” she said, referring to Joe Biden’s election victory. “We should not be taking the bait about this being something that is third-rail or polarizing. These are really just contrived narratives that are pushed as some sort of intimidation and scare tactic.”
Pressley and Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich., introduced a bipartisan bill in early June to completely eliminate qualified immunity, including for state and local officials. They introduced the same measure as an amendment to the Justice in Policing Act. It was rejected, but Pressley lobbied successfully to strengthen the bill’s final language on qualified immunity, which included federal officers.
She’s planning to reintroduce the qualified immunity bill next year, she told The Intercept, along with the broader umbrella of the People’s Justice Guarantee to demilitarize police, redirect funding, and end the federal death penalty. Pressley also plans to renew a resolution she introduced in May with Reps. Ilhan Omar and Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass to condemn police brutality, racial profiling, and excessive use of force.
There has been a broad effort to get the Supreme Court to do away with qualified immunity. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom backed cases appealing the court to address qualified immunity in some way, Reuters reported.
The court declined to take up a batch of eight cases involving the doctrine in June, with even conservative Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting in a case petitioned by the ACLU. Thomas said he continued “to have strong doubts” about the application of the doctrine, and that there “may be no justification for a one-size-fits-all, subjective immunity based on good faith.” Last month, the court ruled that qualified immunity could not be applied in a case brought by a man in prison against guards who allegedly confined him naked in two cells filled with feces.
Two groups of former and current law enforcement officers asked Congress this summer to end qualified immunity as it currently stands. Testifying to the House Judiciary Committee in June, former DOJ Office of Community Oriented Policing Services director and retired East Palo Alto police chief Ronald Davis, who now chairs the legislative committee for the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, called on Congress to end qualified immunity. The Law Enforcement Action Partnership, or LEAP, a nonprofit of law enforcement officials pushing for reforms to criminal justice and drug policy, also issued recommendations that same month pushing Congress to pass a law “to ensure that the qualified immunity doctrine does not stop officers who break the law from being held legally accountable.”
The case law that has defined qualified immunity over time sets standards for behavior of law enforcement that are far too low, said Brandon del Pozo, the former chief of police for Burlington, Vermont. Del Pozo served in the New York City Police Department for 19 years; he now studies drug policy and public health and is a subject matter expert for LEAP. He helped edit and signed onto the group’s recommendations this summer. “The thing about qualified immunity is that it’s judge-made law. It was never legislated,” del Pozo said. “I think there’s a sense when you look at the prevailing case law that if the bars are reasonableness and incompetence … the bar for reasonableness has been set way too low and the bar for incompetence has been set way too high. Even if we believe in the idea that civil servants should have protection from frivolous lawsuits, what the case law of qualified immunity has in effect defined as ‘frivolous’ is way too low a bar.”
Despite the broad consensus against qualified immunity, the backlash to calls for reform has caused some Republicans to back away from early efforts to address it. Republican Sen. Mike Braun introduced a bill to reform qualified immunity in June — only to pull it back the next month following an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pushback from police unions. Braun released a statement on July 1 blaming Democrats for blocking attempts at police reform and saying he would not push the bill without further input from law enforcement. His office did not respond to a request for comment.
Qualified immunity is one area where the federal government could impact policing — and banning or limiting it would have immediate, widespread impact — but most other reforms would have to happen on the state and local level. That’s another piece of the puzzle that makes congressional hand-wringing over defunding the police so frustrating for the caucus.
In June, Colorado passed a bill ending qualified immunity. The idea that conversations on police reform are too toxic for either party to touch is confined to a small group of people, said Colorado State Rep. Leslie Herod, who wrote the bill. “This is, quite frankly, only polarizing inside of those circles — legislative circles and policing circles,” said Herod, whose father is a retired federal corrections officer. “But when you go outside of that, you find that there is broad based support.”
Although the conversation has become polarized, she added, 70 percent of Coloradans support her bill and additional reforms, including the measure ending qualified immunity. “And that is after all of the divisiveness rose to the top. I think that people are making this more divisive than it needs to be, and more divisive than it really is. It is a common value that the police are in our communities to serve and to protect. And when they break that oath, and they don’t serve and protect but instead do harm, they should be held to account. ”
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Trump Asks Pennsylvania House Speaker for Help Overturning Election Results, Personally Intervening in a Third State
Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey and Rachael Bade, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make an extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the president and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result."
The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s office, make Pennsylvania the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election to former vice president Joe Biden. He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, and on Saturday he pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to try to replace that state’s electors.
The president’s outreach to Pennsylvania’s Republican House leader came after his campaign and its allies decisively lost numerous legal challenges in the state in both state and federal court. Trump has continued to press his baseless claims of widespread voting irregularities both publicly and privately.
“The president said, ‘I’m hearing about all these issues in Philadelphia, and these issues with your law,’ ” said Cutler spokesman Michael Straub, describing the House speaker’s two conversations with Trump. “ ‘What can we do to fix it?’ ”
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the calls to Cutler, and a Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Cutler told the president that the legislature had no power to overturn the state’s chosen slate of electors, said Straub, who was not on the calls but was briefed about them afterward.
But late last week, the House speaker was among about 60 Republican state lawmakers who sent a letter to Pennsylvania’s congressional representatives urging them to object to the state’s electoral slate on Jan. 6, when Congress is set to formally accept the results.
Although such a move is highly unlikely to gain traction, at least one Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Scott Perry, said in an interview Monday that he will heed the request and dispute the state’s electors.
The embrace of Trump’s false claims by many Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers shows how the president’s baseless attacks on the integrity of the election have gained ground with his supporters. Protesters chanting “Stop the steal,” some with firearms, demonstrated over the weekend at the homes of Cutler in Pennsylvania and the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan.
Trump stoked those flames Saturday at a rally for two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia, where he ranted for an hour and 40 minutes almost exclusively about fraud.
“We will find that hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally cast in your state and all over the country, by the way, more than enough to give us a total historic victory,” Trump said. “This is our country . . . they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception and deceit.”
He added, “Hopefully, our legislatures and the United States Supreme Court will step forward and save our country.”
Trump’s continued embrace of such rhetoric has prompted fresh alarm among Democrats and some Republicans, who fear that the president is inciting violence. And while his efforts to overturn the result are widely viewed as fruitless, many officials said they are distressed at the lasting harm they believe he is doing to public faith in U.S. elections.
The false narrative “gets people to a place where they are now livid because they believe that their democracy has been ripped away from them and that the election has actually been stolen,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D). “And it causes them to commit these desperate acts.”
Dozens of protesters showed up late Saturday at the home of Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in Detroit, promoting more false accusations that fraud had tainted Biden’s victory in the state. Nessel noted that the protesters, some armed with bullhorns and some with guns, arrived shortly after the end of Trump’s rally in Georgia. She said neighbors came out to plead with the protesters to go home because they were scaring children — including Benson’s 4-year-old son.
“This should not be happening in a civil, polite, democratic society,” said Nessel, who spent much of her Saturday evening on the phone making sure Benson and her family were safe. “But here we are. And this would all come to an end tomorrow if the president would do what any decent person would do and say, ‘You know what, I concede the election.’ ”
In an interview on CNN on Monday night, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) warned that Trump’s rhetoric and the actions of some House Republicans may “incite people to do and say things they may not ordinarily do,” adding, “They’re really trying to invite insurrection.”
In Pennsylvania, the effort appears to have produced some political results.
In their Dec. 4 letter to the state’s congressional delegation, GOP state lawmakers claimed that the Democratic secretary of state’s easing of election restrictions to accommodate the coronavirus pandemic violated state law and “undermined the lawful certification” of Pennsylvania’s electors.
They asked the state’s congressional members to object to their own state’s electoral votes.
To succeed, such a challenge requires support from both a representative and a senator, and must survive a vote of both chambers. So far, no Republican senator has voiced support for such a maneuver, which in any event would fail in the Democratic-controlled House.
Still, Perry said Monday that he “will honor” the concerns of his state colleagues and is prepared to lodge an objection.
“My concerns are that we don’t know if this was a fair and free election and that we don’t know if fraud was committed,” he said.
Perry joins Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who last week announced plans to challenge the electoral college vote.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), an outspoken ally of the president, said Monday that he was “totally for that,” adding that millions of Americans who voted for Trump “think the election was stolen.”
Straub, the spokesman for Cutler, said the letter to the congressional delegation had been in the works before the calls he received from Trump. He said Trump wanted to know what the state legislature could do to overturn the result, and Cutler spent both calls explaining that the legislature has no power to intervene.
Under rules set out in the Pennsylvania Constitution, the General Assembly is not currently in session. Only Gov. Tom Wolf — a Democrat — or a court has the power to order a special session, Cutler explained to the president.
Cutler also made clear that any allegations of fraud would have to be proved in court, Straub said.
Straub said that the calls between Cutler and Trump were “amicable” and that the president did not “pressure” the lawmaker in a hostile way.
Yet Straub also acknowledged that the pressure on Cutler — who faces reelection as House speaker on Jan. 5 — has been intense. His office phone system, which has the capacity to store many thousands of voice mails, has been completely filled “several times” over the past week, Straub said.
Meanwhile, a group of 32 Republican state legislators joined a legal effort to try to nullify the certification of Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, claiming in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday that they may be empowered to step in “when a state has failed to choose its electors on election day.”
While Trump was seeking to make inroads with GOP leadership in Pennsylvania, he called Kemp on Saturday, berating the Georgia governor for not calling a special session to take up legislation that would change the way the state’s electors are chosen.
Kemp spokesman Cody Hall said that while the governor does have the power to call a session, he must give a reason for doing so. As in Pennsylvania, there is no legal recourse for the Georgia legislature to alter the election after the fact, and therefore no legitimate reason to call a session.
“Any attempt by the legislature to retroactively change that process for the Nov. 3rd election would be unconstitutional and immediately enjoined by the courts, resulting in a long legal dispute and no short-term resolution,” Kemp said in a joint statement issued Sunday with his lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan.
Several Republican strategists who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity said they believe that Trump has reserved a special level of anger for Kemp in part because Georgia is the most conservative state he lost and therefore his most embarrassing defeat.
Indeed, the president has told advisers that he would be interested in working against Kemp in his reelection bid in 2022, according to two aides, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
“I put this guy in office. He’s there because of me,” Trump said about Kemp, railing about his “disloyalty,” one of the advisers said.
At the rally Saturday in Valdosta, Ga., for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who face runoff elections Jan. 5, Trump praised Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the campaign’s effort to prove fraud in the state — and sent a shot at Kemp in the process. “Thank you, Doug. What a job he does. Thank you. Doug, you want to run for governor in two years?”
Trump is considering a second trip to Georgia before Christmas, and aides said they expect him to again rip into Kemp then.
The president has also publicly attacked Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), who signed the state’s results certification despite the president’s exhortations not to.
Ducey has described his relationship with the president as “tense and strained,” according to a person who has spoken to him. A spokesman for Ducey did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite the heightened effort to pressure public officials, there is little sense inside Trump’s campaign that the effort is working. The president has complained to several advisers that a string of events with state lawmakers and his own attorneys in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia did not get him any closer to victory.
One of those lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, is now hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus. And Dec. 14, the day when the electoral college will meet and vote in state capitals across the nation, is rapidly approaching.
“When it comes to lawsuits, we’re one for 33. All I can say is time is ticking,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally who has promoted the president’s false accusations of fraud, said in an interview last week. “I told the president to keep fighting, but time matters. You’ve got to have a very coherent theory of the law. The burden of the proof is on the plaintiff.”
The outlook is similar inside the White House, where administration officials have begun discussing who will stay until Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration to help with the transition and who will leave before that date, according to people familiar with the conversations.
The legal defeats, meanwhile, continued to mount Monday — as did the inevitability of Biden’s victory. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) recertified the state’s election results after a second statewide recount of presidential votes. The presidential ballots in Georgia have now been counted three times, each time delivering the state to Biden.
Also in Georgia, a Fulton County Superior Court judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign alleging widespread voter fraud because the team’s lawyers did not pay the proper filing fee or fill out their paperwork correctly, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
One official involved in the campaign said Trump spends almost all of his days obsessing over voter fraud and searching for ways to reverse his defeat. He has asked Giuliani and one of his campaign lawyers, Jenna Ellis, for more names of lawmakers he should be calling.
“He’s going to keep doing this until the 14th at the least,” one Republican involved in the operation said. “The president sees no advantage to stopping this.”
Lloyd Austin was involved in the Iraq war and the fight against ISIS. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Lloyd Austin: Biden to Nominate Recently Retired Army General to Be Defense Secretary
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Joe Biden will nominate Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star army general, to be secretary of defense, according to four people familiar with the decision. If confirmed by the Senate, Austin would be the first Black leader of the Pentagon."
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Rebekah Jones. (photo: CNN)
Florida State Police Raid Home of Rebekah Jones, Data Scientist Who Challenged DeSantis on Coronavirus Statistics
Alexander Nazaryan, Yahoo! News
Nazaryan writes: "Law enforcement authorities in Tallahassee, Fla., on Monday raided the home of a data scientist who had been fired by Gov. Ron DeSantis after refusing to manipulate numbers."
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Dr. Jane Orient. (photo: Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Senate Witness Leads Group That Has Long-Hyped Anti-Vaxx Cause
Erin Banco and Adam Rawnsley, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "She's a doctor, an anti-vaxxer, and, according to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a 'conspiracy theorist' who is trying to 'spread myths and falsehoods about Covid vaccines.'"
For decades, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has served as a resource for conservative lawmakers who want to pretend science is wrong.
Now, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has invited her to share her thoughts on a coronavirus vaccine with the Senate.
Dr. Jane Orient isn’t just any old anti-vaccine activist, though. She’s the head of the arch-conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), an organization that’s become the hard right’s go-to source for a conservative spin on everything from vaccines, masks, Obamacare, and hydroxychloroquine to whether Hillary Clinton was “neurologically disabled” during the 2016 campaign.
Orient is the only paid adviser listed on 2018 IRS filings for the American Health Legal Foundation, the nonprofit arm of AAPS which files advocacy lawsuits, and she is set to appear Tuesday in front of the Senate committee to talk about early outpatient treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Times was the first to report on her upcoming testimony.
Orient, who received her medical degree from Columbia University, spoke with The Daily Beast at length in a telephone interview Monday.
“The goal is to raise questions about the role of the government in suppressing or discouraging or forbidding long established approved drugs for early outpatient treatment of the virus,” Orient said of her testimony. “The media has been hyping and saying if you take that evil drug [hydroxychloroquine] you may die and go blind. And yet the evidence says it acts as a protective measure.”
She added, “The vaccine has unquestionably been rushed. The manufacturers, the government, just people… are very desperate.”
Her remarks come as states across the country scramble to contain increasingly dire infection, hospitalization, and death rates, and as the federal government tries to boost confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine which is set to begin to be distributed as early as next week.
“If we weren’t obstructing there would be so much less pressure on the vaccine and we wouldn’t need to cut corners on the testing of the vaccine,” Orient said.
Some of the government’s leading scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert who will become President-elect Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, have said previously that trials have “consistently” shown that hydroxychloroquine is “not effective” in treating coronavirus infections and that the drug can carry significant risk if prescribed in the wrong setting. Orient was adamant that those fears are overblown.
“One hundred thousand people may have died needlessly [during the pandemic],” Orient said. “There is all of this posturing that we need to be scientific. Well, there’s been about 70 years of safety information about hydroxychloroquine. And there have been large numbers of studies done that may not meet the high standard of high control trials but that show some benefit of hydroxychloroquine early in the disease along with zinc.”
Orient, without evidence, accused doctors of halting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat patients in part because of Trump’s promotion of the drug as a possible therapeutic in the treatment of the virus.
“[Trump] wasn’t exactly touting it… he was mentioning it as a possible game changer and people came out against it just because he said it,” Orient said. “So now doctors are telling patients ‘we don’t treat COVID. We will give you a test and if it is positive, lock yourself in a room and call the emergency room if you can’t breath.’” Patients are sick and dying unnecessarily.”
To be sure, health officials working on the federal government’s response to COVID-19 say many hospitals stopped using hydroxychloroquine because the drug wasn’t effective in the treatment of COVID-19 patients. But Orient was adamant that doctors’ widespread rebuke of the drug is tied to not only President Trump’s public remarks but also some larger conspiracy by opportunists in the medical industry, including some of those in the federal government.
“One could make the observation that there are huge financial interests involved here in selling the new drug Remdesivir or vaccines that are novel that are planned to be rushed into production,” Orient said. “Some of these companies hope to make $15 billion in profits. There are conflicts of interest in federal bureaucracies, too, with consultants, grants, new employment possibilities, stock options. The CDC makes a lot of money from vaccines. The CDC conflicts of interest go back a long way.”
AAPS has a long history of circulating dicey and downright dangerous theories, particularly on the issue of vaccines. The website claims it does not oppose vaccines but the site has consistently pushed anti-vaxxers’ false claims about a nonexistent link between vaccines and childhood autism.
In 2006, AAPS’ in-house journal, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, published a study from Dr. Mark Geier and his son, David, claiming to show that autism rates went down after pharmaceutical companies removed mercury preservatives from their products. At the time, Dr. Geier worked as a professional witness in vaccine-related lawsuits and had run afoul of judges and a court who criticized him for acting as a witness “in areas for which he has no training, expertise, and experience.”
In 2012, health authorities in Maryland revoked his medical license after an investigation by the Chicago Tribune found Geier and his son promoting a hormone inhibitor used for chemical castration in sex offenders as a treatment for autistic children.
But even as scientists and academic journals thoroughly debunked anti-vaccine studies claiming a link to autism, AAPS stuck with the discredited theory. In a 2016 piece on vaccination, AAPS claimed “there are hundreds of reports of children who stopped making eye contact and lost language skills soon after receiving MMR” and quoted Orient saying that it’s “not unreasonable to suspect that MMR is one” of the causes of increased rates of autism diagnosis in children.
In the months before a COVID-19 vaccine was announced, AAPS cast doubt on the value of masks—widely cited by public health authorities as crucial to mitigating the coronavirus.
In an October opinion piece, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, whose state has suffered one of the worst coronavirus death rates in the world, cited an AAPS “fact sheet” to raise questions about the effectiveness of masks against the virus. The “mask facts” page highlighted research that falsely claimed mask use “will not be effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission” and that it will make schools “a threatening and unsafe environment” which could produce “psychological damage in children.”
When President Trump began to champion the use of the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 miracle drug, AAPS, like many conservative organizations, took up the drug as a cause. The group filed a lawsuit against the FDA for restricting usage of the hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients and cheered on Republicans like Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz who criticized the agency’s restrictions.
Before the pandemic, AAPS reliably championed conservative health causes—fighting against the Affordable Care Act, tobacco taxes, Medicare, and Medicaid— nd criticized Democratic presidential candidates like former President Barack Obama (for using “neurolinguistic programming” in speeches) and Hillary Clinton (who Dr. Orient concluded could be “neurologically disabled” during the 2016 campaign, according to Breitbart).
Over the years AAPS has enjoyed close relationships with Republican members of Congress who have promoted its work and invited staff to testify in congressional hearings. Sen. Rand Paul, a member of the Homeland Security committee Orient will appear before, isn’t just a fan of AAPS, he’s been a member for decades.
The appreciation is not shared by Senate Democrats, including Schumer, who called the invitation for Orient to testify “downright dangerous and one of the last things Senate Republicans should be doing right now,” according to the Times.
Olimpia Coral Melo Cruz. (photo: RCN)
Olimpia Coral and the Movement to End Digital Violence in Mexico
Sonja Peteranderl, Spiegel
Peteranderl writes: "A sex video disseminated on the internet made Olimpia Coral's life a living hell."
A sex video disseminated on the internet made Olimpia Coral's life a living hell. Today, she is fighting to ensure that digital violence in Mexico is investigated as a crime and perpetrators are punished. With significant success.
limpia Coral always thought that she would become a "good woman," that she would get married and have children - and otherwise keep her "legs closed," as she says. But when she was just 18 years old, everyone suddenly knew what she looked like naked.
Her boyfriend at the time had passed along an intimate video of her – he can't be identified in the shot. The video quickly began spreading on Facebook and WhatsApp like a wildfire through the idyllic, conservative town of Huauchinango, in the Mexican state of Puebla, where Coral grew up.
Then, newspapers caught wind of the supposed sex scandal and wrote about the good student who was allegedly "used up" and printed lurid photos of her on the front page. Her name became a hashtag, social media users had their say and porno sites published copies of the video. And hundreds of thousands of people - both acquaintances and strangers alike – saved the video and shared it further. "It felt like being raped without your body being touched," Coral, now in her late 20s, says in a telephone interview. "Over and over again."
Machismo and all kinds of violence against women are day-to-day facts of life for women in Mexico. Every year, thousands of women are brutally murdered, with domestic violence and homicides having increased further during the pandemic. Mexican society often blames the victims – because they behaved improperly, because they were out by themselves, because they met up with men or because they were wearing indecent clothing.
Continuing Protests in the Pandemic
In an attempt to decry such misogyny and violence, a large women's movement has developed in Latin America in recent years, staging frequent demonstrations before the coronavirus put a stop to large gatherings. In Mexico, activists and victims have continued to protest during the pandemic, even occupying the offices of numerous human rights commissions in addition to other actions.
Still, too little attention is being paid worldwide to the relatively new phenomenon of digital violence, despite the fact that sexual assault on the web - in the form of harassment, threats of rape, the dissemination of personal information or naked photos, or even surveillance using spy software – can have brutal consequences.
Perpetrators can destroy a woman's reputation or feeling of self-worth, they stalk and threaten them online or they use their personal information to track them down in real life. Violent partners terrorize their girlfriends and wives, sometimes even using web-controlled household items like speakers or heating systems to harass them. Or they install spy apps on their phones or those of their children so the victims can even be found if they flee to a women's refuge.
The recently published report "Free to Be Online?" by Plan International found that more than half of the 14,000 girls and young women surveyed worldwide have experienced online harassment or abuse. They are unable to continue to be active on the internet without being attacked or watched. One in four victims report fearing for their physical safety as well.
This form of digital violence is apparently growing at the moment as well. Olimpia Coral and others are documenting such cases in Mexico and say that they receive five to eight reports each day, whereas they documented an average of three incidents a day prior to the corona crisis.
"During the crisis, we have shifted much of our lives and our intimacy to the internet," Coral says, and that has increased the potential for online abuse.
"The Virtual Is Real"
When the video of Coral went public, other students, co-workers and even perfect strangers on the street would make fun of her - and blamed her for the fact that such a video existed in the first place. She lost her job as an assistant for a local political party because she would allegedly have a bad influence. Men would ask her for sex and downloaded photos of her from her Facebook page. "People hypersexualized me, they didn't see me as a victim at all, nor did they view what happened as violence," Coral says. "But the virtual is real."
She shut herself up at home for months. She says she felt like a convict herself and thought about taking her own life. Only when it became clear to her that many girls and women had suffered through similar experiences – a realization that came from her discovery of more and more websites on which intimate photos of women were posted and rated – did she recognize that she was a victim and hadn't done anything wrong.
"As a girl from a poor, indigenous family in conservative surroundings, I didn't realize for quite some time that I have a right to intimacy," says Coral. "I needed someone at the time to tell me that I didn't have to be afraid and that it wasn't my fault - that it was a crime to share the video without my consent."
She sounds combative over the phone, open and energetic. She has a powerful voice and laughs frequently and loudly – indeed, as a girl she was repeatedly told to quiet down and that only "vulgar women" laughed that loud. In Huauchinango, it is considered unseemly for girls and young women to stand around on the street in front of school or their homes – like prostitutes.
Going to the Police
"You grow up with these clichés, and the thing you are most afraid of is belonging to the whores, the bad women and exhibitionists," Coral says. "I also thought that feminists were just women that men hated."
She was panicked by the idea that her family might see the video and tried to keep its existence secret. Her mother is illiterate and doesn't use the internet, but one Sunday, her 14-year-old brother outed her by laying his smartphone on the table and playing the video.
When her mother started crying, Olimpia Coral cried along with her, sank to her knees, apologized and asked her mother to help her die. The reaction came as a surprise: Her mother responded that everybody had sex. "The only difference is," her mother said, "that people can now watch you having sex." That doesn't make Olimpia a bad person, her mother continued.
"The women of my family were the first to offer their support instead of condemning me," Coral says.
Coral mustered the courage to go to the police. As she sat across from the officer at his desk, he watched the video and even brought over some other officers. Once again, her private life was on full display to complete strangers - just that this time she had to watch them watch.
The policeman then asked if she had taken any drugs or if she had been drunk. She replied in the negative. He asked her if it had been consensual sex. "I said yes, and again felt like a criminal," Coral recalls. He replied that there was nothing he could do since the sharing of videos wasn't against the law.
Her only option was to take the initiative.
A short time later, when she was in her early 20s, Coral left her hometown for the capital of Mexico City. She didn't have a job or money and initially stayed with friends, but for the first time in her life, she felt understood, while "everyone in Puebla denounced me." Together with other victims, lawyers and women who work with victims of violence, she founded the feminist collective Frente Nacional para la Sororidad.
Ley Olimpia
Coral and the others allied with local women's movements and examined the forms that digital violence could take before then pushing politicians to change the laws. The result was Ley Olimpia, a package of reforms bearing Olimpia's name. For the first time, digital violence was recognized as a crime, with punishments ranging from a fine to a multiyear prison sentence.
And it's not just the perpetrators themselves - but also those who produce intimate video or audio without permission or who pass along jointly produced material without permission – who will be held liable. Those who spread such material, reproduce it or seek to profit from it are as well.
In 2018, Puebla, the state that Coral left behind, became the first state in Mexico to implement Ley Olimpia. Since then, 27 of 31 Mexican states have adopted the reform and the Senate recently approved the introduction of the reform at the federal level. Beyond that, Coral says, there is a widespread lack of established procedures instructing police how to approach digital crimes and how to deal with the victims.
Olimpia Coral has become a full-time activist, earning her living with workshops and lectures on digital violence. She is difficult to reach and often works late into the night. Sometimes, she and her co-campaigners are verbally, and sometimes physically, abused and she had thought about giving up because of the amount of hate that comes her way, Coral says.
"In this country, people get angry when women decide for themselves how they want to live and assert themselves, that's why they threaten us with violence," Coral believes. "This video almost cost me my life. Now, it gives me incentive to keep living."
Coral has broken off contact with most of her old friends from Huauchinango and she hates going there because of all the bad memories it dredges up. She does, though, speak regularly with her family and says she misses her grandmother the most at the moment, since she hasn't been able to visit her recently due to the pandemic. "Sometimes, I think that my family doesn't truly understand what it is I am doing," she says. "But I know they are proud of me."
The Ley Olimpia legal reforms have already produced initial legal proceedings and guilty verdicts have been passed down in at least four states. In June 2020, for example, a 24-year-old was sentenced to three years in prison and required to pay a fine - in addition to having to pay damages to the victim. He had been selling naked photos over social media of students at his university.
For Olimpia Coral, though, the legal reforms are more than just a collection of laws, they amount to a movement that is both making digital violence visible and aims to change views of women and their intimacy. It is also a personal triumph – because even those who long thought Coral was crazy have been forced to see that she was right all along.
People protest in San Francisco in solidarity with the Standing Rock Lakota tribe's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. (photo: Pax Ahimsa Gethen)
Recognition of Native Treaty Rights Could Reshape the Environmental Landscape
Alex Brown, Stateline
Excerpt: "The U.S. has largely ignored the nearly 400 treaties signed with tribal nations, but that may be starting to change. And some think that could prevent, or even reverse, environmental degradation."
The U.S. has largely ignored the nearly 400 treaties signed with tribal nations, but that may be starting to change. And some think that could prevent, or even reverse, environmental degradation.
ast month, Michigan officials announced plans to shut down a controversial oil pipeline that runs below the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, cited several reasons for the decision, including one that got the attention of tribal leaders in Michigan who have been fighting the pipeline for years.
In the shutdown order, Whitmer referenced an 1836 treaty in which tribal nations ceded more than a third of the territory that would become Michigan in exchange for the right to hunt and fish on the land in perpetuity. An oil spill from the pipeline would destroy the state’s ability to honor that right, Whitmer said.
Federal and state officials signed nearly 400 treaties with tribal nations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Threatened by genocidal violence, the tribes signed away much of their land. But they secured promises that they could continue to hunt, fish and gather wild food on the territory they were giving up. Many treaties also include cash payments, mineral rights and promises of health care and education.
For the most part, the U.S. has ignored its obligations. Game wardens have targeted and arrested tribal members seeking to exercise their hunting and fishing rights. Governments and private interests have logged and developed on hunting grounds, blocked and polluted waterways with dams and destroyed vast beds of wild rice.
If Native treaty rights had been honored, the natural landscape of the U.S. might look very different today.
In recent years, some courts, political leaders and regulators have decided it’s time to start honoring those treaty obligations. Some legal experts think that asserting these rights could prevent — or even reverse — environmental degradation.
Bryan Newland, chair of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said Whitmer’s order was the first time he had seen political leaders cite treaty rights to support a decision instead of being forced to recognize those rights by a court.
“It is always a struggle to get state governments to recognize the existence of our treaties, our rights and their responsibilities to not impair those rights,” he said. “It’s not enough to recognize our right to harvest. State governments have a responsibility to stop harming and degrading this fishery. This was a big step in tribal-state relations.”
Attorney Bill Rastetter, who represents the Grand Taverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, another Michigan tribe, said tribal members invoking a treaty can make a stronger legal claim than non-Native citizens raising the same issue as an environmental complaint.
“With environmental claims, there is sometimes a balancing test that’s applied between the potential harm and potential good,” said Rastetter, who has been part of efforts opposing the pipeline in Michigan. “But when you’re dealing with the diminishment of a right reserved by tribes, there ought not to be that balancing test.”
Still, tribes have mostly used treaty rights claims to play defense against new infringements by developers and polluters. Some tribal members say new treaty violations are surfacing faster than old ones are being corrected. And it would be a painstaking process to use treaty rights to make a dent in centuries’ worth of construction, resource extraction and government practices conditioned to ignore those rights.
Some legal experts are also wary about making sweeping treaty assertions, for fear that coming up short could set a dangerous precedent.
“There’s been an effort to try to be careful about what you give a court the chance to decide,” Rastetter said. “If they decide against you, you might not get another bite at the apple. We have to not just have a claim, but we have to go through the pragmatic analysis of how it may work out.”
And many political leaders remain hostile to tribal sovereignty. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, has sought to prevent tribes in her state from setting up COVID-19 safety checkpoints on the roads entering their reservations.
Meanwhile, the wording of many treaties leaves the fulfillment of some rights open to interpretation, and with Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the U.S. Supreme Court, the recent spate of favorable judicial rulings could be in jeopardy.
‘Still at the Tail End’
The foundation for contemporary treaty claims is a landmark 1974 case known as the Boldt decision, a ruling issued in a federal district court and upheld by an appeals court. The case affirmed that tribes in Washington state have a right to fish for salmon in off-reservation waters. It forced the state to abandon its attempts to block Native fishing, making the tribes co-managers of Washington’s fisheries along with state wildlife officials.
“It started bringing to light the fact that these treaties aren’t ancient history,” said John Echohawk, founder and executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a tribal advocacy group that successfully litigated the case. “They’re the supreme law of the land. If the courts are going to be enforcing those rights, [political leaders] have got to pay attention.”
Treaty rights earned another milestone victory in 2018, with another case involving Washington tribes that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. That year, the court ordered the state to rip out and replace about 1,000 culverts that blocked the passage of migrating salmon, at a cost of billions of dollars. The ruling held that Washington couldn’t uphold its treaty obligations to the tribes simply by allowing access to waters where it had already destroyed the fishery.
Legal experts say that decision has changed the landscape — motivating political leaders in many states to consider whether their decisions could affect treaty-protected hunting, fishing or gathering rights.
“You can’t have a meaningful right to take fish without fish,” said Riyaz Kanji, a leading Indian law attorney based in Michigan, and a founding member of the firm that successfully argued the culvert case. “The notion that tribal treaty rights should be factored into government decision-making is gaining increasing currency.”
The strength of that argument was on display again last month, when leaders in Oregon and California announced plans to remove four dams on the Klamath River. The dam removal will reopen hundreds of miles of the Klamath and its tributaries to restore the river’s dwindling salmon runs. Amy Cordalis, general counsel and member of California’s Yurok Tribe, said tribal fishing rights played a pivotal role in forcing the states to act.
“We can’t continue our lifeway if that river dies, if the fish go extinct, and that’s what’s happening,” Cordalis said. “The last generation of Indian people’s fight was just for the right. My generation’s fight is to conserve the resource on which the right is based. If we don’t have any fish, what good is the right?”
Restorative justice was a “key reason” for the dam removal, Richard Whitman, director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said in a statement provided to Stateline. “These tribes have suffered repeated efforts to take their land, their waters, and their fisheries, and restoring a free-flowing river is a historic reversal that will begin to move the basin back to sustainability for all.”
Regulators at state and federal agencies — which make thousands of permitting decisions about development, resource use and environmental compliance — have begun taking notice as well.
In 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected a proposed coal export terminal in Washington state not far from the Canadian border. The port, just north of the Lummi Nation reservation, would have brought giant freighters into waters where Lummi people have fished for thousands of years and have rights to fish today. Those opposed to the terminal also worried about disturbances to archaeological sites and pollution from coal dust.
“The U.S. government — as an immigrant — came to us in 1855 and entered into a partnership,” said Jay Julius, a former chair of the Lummi Nation who was serving as a council member at the time of the coal terminal battle. “We’ve been faced with a failure to honor the contract, the treaty, the supreme law of the land. Catastrophic disruption to the natural world has taken place. The world would be a very different place if the treaties had been honored.
“We weren’t at the table as this pollution-based economy was being developed. What we’re witnessing right now is we’re actually at the table, but we’re still at the tail end.”
Regulators and courts don’t always give the same credence to treaty claims. The Army Corps approved construction of a controversial section of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 despite concerns it could jeopardize water, fishing and hunting rights for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.
Other Battles
While much of tribes’ recent progress has centered around environmental issues, treaty claims on several other fronts could reshape the U.S. government’s relationship with Native tribes.
Earlier this year, a judge ruled that federal agencies violated their treaty obligations when they shut down an emergency room on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The U.S. pledged to provide health care to the tribe in 1868 when tribal leaders signed a treaty surrendering much of their land.
“One of the great misconceptions is that these treaty rights were some sort of gift or act of kindness from the federal government,” said Brendan Johnson, a former U.S. attorney who represented the tribe in the case. “In reality, these were bargained rights given to tribes to cease military actions. The tribes paid dearly in blood and treasure by way of land. We do find ourselves in the midst of a time where treaty rights are being more respected — at least by the court system.”
Many tribes have similar health care provisions in their treaties, which the federal government largely tries to honor by funding the Indian Health Service. Advocates say the agency is severely underfunded, and it’s been plagued with scandals. For years, IHS hired dozens of doctors with a history of malpractice, leading to disastrous consequences. It has also come under fire for mishandling sex abuse allegations.
Johnson said the problems at IHS could represent a treaty violation, but tribes have been so overwhelmed with fighting the Covid-19 pandemic — which has had a devastating toll in Indian Country — that the issue has yet to come forward as a legal case.
“[Native] health care has been embarrassingly inadequate,” he said. “We need Congress to be aware of this and to take action to fully fund tribal health systems.”
Kanji, the Indian law expert, said he expects to see tribes pushing to reassert regulatory and jurisdictional authority on their own reservations, where many have seen key matters of sovereignty handed to outside authorities.
“The courts over time have chipped away at tribal powers on reservations,” he said. “There’s real tension between what the courts have done and what the courts are saying now. There will be a chance to revivify tribal authority within reservations.”
Some of that hope stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark McGirt Decision, issued earlier this year. The ruling recognized Native reservations across much of Oklahoma that had long been treated as defunct by state and federal authorities, a major win for those who argue that treaties aren’t just “ancient history.” In effect, the decision prevents Native defendants from being tried in state courts for crimes committed on reservations.
Looking Ahead
Some tribal leaders are hopeful that treaty rights could see even greater recognition when President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
“We would like to see an administrative process where they have to examine the impact of an action on our treaty rights so that we can avoid a [legal battle] like the [Washington state] culverts case,” said Newland, the Bay Mills chairman. “There’s absolutely nothing to stop an executive branch agency from adopting this as its own policy.”
Biden’s pledge to select a diverse cabinet has also drawn praise. Many are hopeful he will choose New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, to lead the Interior Department, which oversees government programs relating to Native Americans.
Treaty claims will still face significant obstacles, including a court system shaped by President Donald Trump’s record appointment of judges. Even in cases where the tribes have won, progress has been slow. Lawmakers in Washington have yet to provide adequate funding to replace the culverts as ordered by the courts. Courts may find that health care shortcomings violate treaty rights, but it’s difficult to make improvements without Congress providing more money to the Indian Health Service.
Undoing what’s already been done could prove difficult. It’s been 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. illegally stole South Dakota’s Black Hills from the Sioux Nation in violation of their treaty agreement. Instead of returning the land, the court ordered a payment of $100 million in reparations. The tribe has refused to accept the payment — saying it will settle for no less than the restoration of the land — but there are no signs the territory is close to changing hands.
Still, some Natives say they’ve been heartened by the focus on racial injustice spurred by the Black Lives Matter protests, and by the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which brought international attention to tribal sovereignty. And many find optimism when they envision what the landscape could look like if their rights were finally honored.
“What does the world look like if those treaty rights are protected?” asked Cordalis, the Yurok attorney. “We start healing our environment and start seeing things being put back together — healthy ecosystems, clean water, healthy forests and rivers. You would start seeing the planet regenerating itself. It’s one way we start pulling ourselves out of the climate crisis. We start asserting rights that protect nature.”
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