28 January 21
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28 January 21
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Bill McKibben | Can Green Energy Power the Cannabis Boom?
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "To see the Biden Administration starting to move on the climate challenge is invigorating, but it's worth remembering how far behind we are."
ast week’s newsletter was about the need to stop burning things, but there’s at least one area where I know that this advice is a lost cause. That’s at the small blaze at the end of a joint: marijuana stocks are booming in the wake of the U.S. Senate wins in Georgia, which gave the Democrats a majority in that chamber, since investors reckon that Democrats are likely to continue along the steady path toward legalization.
The amount of carbon produced by burning pot is not actually a concern. But it turns out that producing the crop, at least the way that it’s grown by large-scale entrepreneurs, requires huge amounts of electricity. As early as 2012, it was estimated that one per cent of the country’s electricity was used for raising pot. In California, the leading state in production, it was three per cent. An indoor growing facility can have the lighting intensity of a hospital operating room, which is five hundred times recommended reading levels; researchers from the National Coalition of State Legislatures found that a five-thousand-square-foot indoor farm in Boulder County, Colorado, was using 41,808 kilowatt hours per month, while an average household used about 630 kilowatt hours. Many growers apparently pair their bright lights with high-powered air-conditioning in order to “shorten a plant’s growing cycle.” The researchers added—and here I must confess my own preference—that “the energy used to produce one marijuana cigarette would also produce 18 pints of beer.”
Those numbers really are large and mean that, right at the moment when we need to be desperately reducing the amount of energy we use, we’ve found a huge new electricity hog. Yes, that energy can be produced by the sun, but for the foreseeable future the best use of new solar panels and wind turbines is to displace existing uses, not underwrite new ones. One of the first people to write me about the issue was a small-scale solar operator named Naoto Inoue, the C.E.O. of Solar Market, who began building arrays in New England about fifteen years ago. “So many people’s efforts to reduce the carbon footprint is going down the drain because of indoor-grow greed,” he said.
It’s an especially ironic use of power because of marijuana’s history in the otherwise green counterculture and because you can grow it outdoors—in the sunlight. In Vermont, where I live, each resident is allowed to grow six plants, and, although I haven’t taken advantage of the law, I know that six plants turns out to be a lot. Here, pot is the new zucchini, and if you leave your car unlocked when you go shopping you may return to find a sack of the stuff on the back seat. If any commodity could be left as a part of a local gift economy, it seems like it might be marijuana; but here, as in other places, we’re quickly commercializing the trade, in order to reap state-tax revenue. In which case, laws governing its cultivation will be required: Massachusetts is making larger growers use no more than thirty-six watts of electricity per square foot, down from a typical forty to forty-five watts; in Maine, growers can apply for state grants to make their operations more energy-efficient. Perhaps sun-grown pot, like shade-grown coffee, will catch on: last week, a prospective grower in the Berkshires sought local approval for a farm with promises about outdoor, artisanal cultivation.
Inoue’s solution is a heavy carbon tax for growers—with a high enough tariff, the advantage will switch back to outdoor growers. Barring that, new installations should come with their own renewable-energy construction. Barring that, I.P.A.s.
Passing the Mic
About half of all products on grocery shelves contain palm oil, and production has doubled in the past decade. The James Beard Award-winning food journalist Jocelyn Zuckerman has travelled from Indonesia and Malaysia to Brazil and India looking at the vast plantations where the oil palms are grown. Her forthcoming book, “Planet Palm,” is a compelling look at just how much trouble it’s possible to cause with a single plant. (Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
Palm oil seems to cause more havoc per ounce than almost any commodity, and yet we’ve barely heard of it. Why is it so bad?
The main problem is its effect on the environment. The oil palm plant grows best at ten degrees to the north and south of the equator. Unfortunately, that swathe also corresponds with the planet’s tropical rain forests. Not only are these ecosystems important for sequestering carbon but they support more than half the world’s plant and animal species. We now know that global biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history, with far-reaching consequences in terms of pollination and pest control, among other things. The demise of a single species can lead to the collapse of an entire ecosystem, affecting local communities and ultimately destabilizing economies and governments. The region targeted for oil-palm development also overlaps with much of the earth’s peatlands—soils formed over thousands of years through the accumulation of organic matter—and draining and burning this terrain to make way for plantations sends massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Finally, we’re flirting with pandemic disaster. Some seventy-five per cent of today’s emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, and sixty per cent of those can spread directly from them. Over the past few decades the number of such animal-to-human, or “zoonotic,” transmissions has skyrocketed. A third of these new diseases can be linked directly to deforestation and agricultural intensification, most of it involving tropical rain forests. Mowing down these natural treasures doesn’t just push iconic animals like the orangutan to the brink of extinction; it also sends virus-carrying wildlife like bats in search of new habitat, forcing them into closer contact with humans.
Do we really need this stuff to keep our economies functioning—and what about the economies of the countries it comes from?
I guess I’d start by asking whether our economies are “functioning” in the first place. The Labor Department just announced that 1.15 million workers filed for unemployment in the first week of 2021. The World Food Programme says that it will need to feed a hundred and thirty-eight million people this year—more than at any time in its sixty-year history. Meanwhile, the world’s richest one per cent owns forty-four per cent of the global wealth. Let’s also consider where the oil ends up. Some two-thirds of global production finds its way into food, most of it fried and/or ultra-processed. In recent years, rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes have shot dramatically up, particularly in the low-income countries where Big Food is now focussed on dumping its industrial-palm-oil-enabled junk. What is the cost to those countries’ economies of treating the diseases resulting from these unhealthy new diets? How about the lost income of those sidelined laborers? Yes, the economies of Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for some eighty-five per cent of the world’s palm-oil production, are deeply reliant on the commodity. But they are also facing public-health crises related to shifting diets. Palm-oil laborers in Southeast Asia, meanwhile, make around seven dollars a day, and studies have found that diets in communities where the palm-oil industry has moved in are far less healthy than those of traditional communities living in the same region. We won’t get into the agrochemicals that poison workers and local waterways.
What are the effective pressure points on the governments that allow this, and the corporations that encourage it? Are there some hopeful signs?
Unfortunately, as in Trump’s America and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the governments in Southeast Asia tend to be a part of the problem, more concerned about cozying up to industry than protecting the health of their citizens or the planet. The Indonesian President recently signed an omnibus bill that will eliminate critical protections for workers and the environment. Next door in Malaysia, the government routinely spreads disinformation about the palm-oil industry’s environmental and social impacts, and has paid a D.C. lobbying firm some million dollars to counter opposition to it. Here as elsewhere, it’s been civil society and the private sector leading the way. Consumers and N.G.O.s have pushed traders and other companies to sign no-deforestation agreements and have raised awareness about institutional investors linked to palm-oil-related deforestation. Local communities from Cameroon to Guatemala and Papua New Guinea are stepping forward to sound the alarm about illegal oil-palm concessions, are demanding indigenous land rights, and are speaking out about labor and human-rights abuses. It’s a tough climb—there are massive interests at stake, and these people do not play pretty—but I think that, as more folks come to understand what this industry is all about and exactly what’s at stake, there may be room for some cautious optimism.
Climate School
To see the Biden Administration starting to move on the climate challenge is invigorating, but it’s worth remembering how far behind we are. As the Washington Post reports, new data from the journal Nature Communications on the Antarctic show that the Southern Ocean is warming “faster than predicted,” threatening to erode glaciers from below where they stretch out over the sea. “Like removing a doorstop, the collapse of these ice shelves can free up inland ice to move into the ocean, raising global sea levels and harming coastal communities.”
With the Keystone XL pipeline dead, indigenous campaigners are pushing the Biden Administration to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline, too, and stop construction on Minnesota’s Line 3. Dallas Goldtooth, a member of the Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine nations and the Keep It in the Ground campaign organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, said that the KXL decision “is a vindication of ten years defending our waters and treaty rights from this tar-sands carbon bomb. I applaud President Biden for recognizing how dangerous KXL is for our communities and climate, and I look forward to similar executive action to stop DAPL and Line 3 based on those very same dangers.” The Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek also wrote an eloquent letter to the President. Meanwhile, a United Nations commission chastised the Canadian government for not getting buy-in from First Nations on various pipeline and energy-development plans.
Oil executives talking to Bloomberg said that the KXL cancellation may end the era of “mega-pipelines.” “I can’t imagine going to my board and saying, ‘we want to build a new greenfield pipeline,’ ” the Williams Companies’ C.E.O., Alan Armstrong, said in an interview, noting that his company has seen pipeline projects shut down by regulators. “I do not think there will be any funding of any big cross-country greenfield pipelines, and I say that because of the amount of money that’s been wasted.”
Scoreboard
Columbia University has joined Cornell and Brown as the third Ivy to move toward full divestiture from fossil fuels. “There is an undeniable obligation binding upon Columbia and other universities to confront the climate crisis across every dimension of our institutions,” Lee C. Bollinger, the president of the university, said. “The effort to achieve net zero emissions must be sustained over time, employing all the tools available to us and engaging all who are at Columbia today and those who will follow us in the years ahead. This announcement reaffirms that commitment and reflects the urgent need for action.”
An Israeli company announced new batteries for electric cars that can be recharged in just five minutes. “The number one barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles is no longer cost, it is range anxiety,” Doron Myersdorf, the C.E.O. of StoreDot, the company that made the breakthrough, said. “You’re either afraid that you’re going to get stuck on the highway or you’re going to need to sit in a charging station for two hours. But if the experience of the driver is exactly like fuelling [a petrol car], this whole anxiety goes away.”
The Saudi oil giant Aramco misreported its carbon emissions—by half.
The Bank of France moved toward the head of the line of central banks greening their portfolios. It’s out of the coal business and, according to Reuters, the bank said in a statement that by 2024 it “would also exclude companies with more than 10% of revenue coming from oil or 50% from gas, which could potentially mean the central bank would have to shun groups like French energy major Total.”
The Times reports that, on Tuesday, Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of Blackrock, in his annual letter to investors, told the boards of companies in which it invests “to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net-zero economy,” which he defined as limiting global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages and eliminating net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.” On the same morning, New York City announced that its pension funds had divested four billion dollars from fossil-fuel companies. And the evening before, Senator Chuck Schumer, known in Washington as a champion of Wall Street, used far stronger language than he has in the past to demand climate action. “If there ever was an emergency, climate is one. So I would suggest that [the Biden Administration] explore looking at climate as an emergency, which would give them more flexibility,” he told Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC.
Warming Up
I find, in the absence of the ex-President’s tweets, that I’m able to let my guard down a little more these days. The musician Elori Saxl has produced an album perfect for decompressing, “a meditation on the effect of technology on our relationship with land/nature/place that ultimately evolved to be more of a reflection on longing and memory.” It combines digitally processed recordings of wind and water with electronic synthesizers and chamber orchestra. Half of the piece was written “in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York in summer surrounded by lakes, rivers, and moss-covered forest floors, and the other half on a frozen island in Lake Superior in deep winter.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: AP)
Facebook Made $32 Billion Wrecking Democracy in 2020
David Gilbert, VICE
Gilbert writes: "Having spent the last 12 months helping to fuel conspiracy theories, undermine public health, and weaken democracy, all while pocketing $86 billion in revenue, Facebook's CEO said on Wednesday night that he now just wants his platform to be 'fun.'"
“We’re going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” said the CEO of a platform where the Capitol riots were organized.
2020 certainly was a big year for Facebook. It helped promote QAnon from a fringe conspiracy movement to a mainstream extremist group; it helped anti-vaxxers spread misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine; it allowed pro-Trump groups to try to deter millions of Black Americans from voting; it gave Donald Trump a platform to spread election fraud disinformation; it helped the “Stop the Steal” movement recruit and organize online; and it helped incite the Capitol riot — despite Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s insistence otherwise.
Despite all that—or maybe because of it—Facebook also raked in a record $86 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, the company announced Wednesday evening.
But now that he’s created or exacerbated many of society’s problems, and gotten rich doing it, Mark Zuckerberg wants things to change and wants Facebook to be a place where people “just have fun.”
To do that, Zuckerberg says he’ll get rid of the thing that makes Facebook a not-fun place to be: politics.
“We’re going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” Zuckerberg told investors on an earnings call Wednesday evening.
He continued: “One of the top pieces of feedback that we're hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”
For some reason, the Facebook CEO failed to mention that the company’s algorithm, and its entire business model, incentivizes the type of hyper-partisan political content that currently dominates the platform.
To transform Facebook from the toxic swamp it is today into a magical paradise of bliss, wonder, and photos of your second cousin’s third baby, Zuckerberg said Facebook’s algorithm would no longer suggest any groups that mention politics or other societal subjects.
“We plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and expand this globally,” Zuckerberg told investors. “To be clear, this is a continuation of work we've been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations and communities.”
But Zuckerberg has made promises like this before. In fact, in October, under oath in front of Congress, Zuckerberg said Facebook had already stopped recommending all “political content or social issue groups.”
That decision came after Facebook’s own internal research found that promoting these groups helps steer users toward divisive and extremist content.
But Zuckerberg and Facebook didn’t follow through: An investigation by the Markup published last week found Facebook continued to recommend political groups to its users throughout December.
The investigation “found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups recommended to the more than 1,900 Facebook users in our Citizen Browser project, which tracks links and group recommendations served to a nationwide panel of Facebook users.”
But Zuckerberg made an even more controversial promise during Wednesday’s investor call, indicating that hyper-partisan political sites could also be hit by Facebook’s move away from political speech.
“We're also currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well,” Zuckerberg said. ”We're still working through exactly the best way to do this.”
Zuckerberg didn’t say how Facebook was going to do this, but it’s likely to have a major impact on right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, who have built massive media empires almost entirely based on their Facebook pages.
In the final quarter of 2020, as Trump’s Facebook account posted rants about baseless QAnon-inspired election fraud conspiracies, and Facebook groups across the country planned “Stop the Steal” marches and then the Capitol riots, the company just continued to earn money in record amounts.
In the three months to the end of December, the company earned $10.14 for every one of its 2.8 billion monthly active users, a record-high total. Its profits for the quarter—over $11 billion—were 50% higher than the same period in 2019.
That’s because Facebook is extremely good at understanding exactly what excites its users, and even better at delivering more of that content to them so they stay on the platform longer.
And yet, Facebook’s CEO can’t seem to put his finger on just why the world seems to be so addicted to this type of content. On Wednesday evening, without a hint of irony, he told investors, “there has been a trend across society that a lot of things have become politicized and politics have had a way of creeping into everything.”
President Biden. (photo: Getty)
New Biden Health Care Orders Begin to Unspool Trump Policies
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press
Alonso-Zaldivar writes: "President Joe Biden will act Thursday to get more people health insurance in the middle of the raging coronavirus pandemic, a down payment on his pledge to push the U.S. toward coverage for all."
The White House said he would sign an executive order reopening the HealthCare.gov insurance markets, something the Trump administration refused to do. He'll also move to start reversing other Trump administration policies, including curbs on abortion counseling and work requirements for low-income people getting Medicaid.
Biden has promised to build on former President Barack Obama’s health law to achieve his goal of health insurance coverage for all Americans, while rejecting the single government-run system that Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed for in his “Medicare for All” proposal. But Biden will need congressional approval for his more centrist approach, and opposition to “Obamacare” still runs deep among Republicans.
The most concrete short-term impact of Biden's orders will come from reopening HealthCare.gov insurance markets as coverage has shrunk in the economic turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. That new “special enrollment period” will begin Feb. 15 and run through May 15, the White House said. It will be coupled with a promotional campaign and a call for states that run their own insurance markets to match the federal sign-up opportunity.
Created under the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, the marketplaces offer taxpayer-subsidized coverage regardless of a person’s medical history, or preexisting conditions, including COVID-19.
Biden will also immediately reverse a federal policy that bars taxpayer funding for international health care nonprofits offering abortion counseling or referrals. Known as the Mexico City Policy, it can get switched on and off depending on whether Democrats or Republicans control the White House.
Other instructions Biden plans to issue Thursday could take months to carry out. He's directing the Department of Health and Human Services to:
— Formally consider whether to rescind Trump regulations that bar federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions. The ban on referrals led to Planned Parenthood clinics leaving the program. Rescinding a federal regulation requires a new regulation, which has to follow an established legal process to deter court challenges.
— Reexamine a Trump administration policy that allows states to impose work requirements as a condition for low-income people to get Medicaid health insurance. Work requirements have been blocked by federal judges, who found that they led to thousands of people losing coverage and violated Medicaid's legal charge to provide medical services. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the issue.
— Review policies that could undermine protections for people with health problems, such as a Trump administration rule that facilitated the sale of short-term health insurance plans that don't have to cover preexisting medical conditions.
— Explore ways to make health insurance more affordable, including by fixing what's called the ACA's “family glitch.” Under that clunky provision, an entire family can be denied subsidized premiums if the head of household has access to employee-only coverage at work that's deemed to be affordable. Fixing it would probably require legislation.
The abortion-related actions will bring Biden immediate praise from women's rights groups, as well as condemnation from social and religious conservatives. Under President Donald Trump, abortion opponents got free rein to try to rewrite federal policy, and now the political pendulum is swinging back.
Biden also campaigned on repealing longstanding federal prohibitions against taxpayer funding for abortion, but a change of that magnitude to a group of laws known as the Hyde Amendment would require congressional approval.
Many of the regulatory and policy changes Biden is asking health officials to undertake aren't likely to happen overnight because hastily written policies can be more easily overturned in court, as the Trump administration found out. Time and again, federal judges ruled that Trump officials ran roughshod over legal requirements for regulators, such as demonstrating they've considered different sides of an issue.
Biden's nominee for health secretary, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, but the White House said that will not stop health agencies from immediately going to work on the president's directives.
The idea of reopening Obamacare's health insurance markets in the pandemic has had broad support, including from consumer groups, professional medical associations, insurers and business organizations.
Although the number of uninsured Americans has grown because of job losses in the coronavirus economy, the Trump administration resisted calls to reopen HealthCare.gov. Failure to repeal and replace Obamacare as he repeatedly vowed to do was one of the former president's most bitter disappointments. His administration continued trying to find ways to limit the program or unravel it entirely. A Supreme Court decision on Trump’s final legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act is expected this year.
The Obama-era health care law covers more than 23 million people through a mix of subsidized private insurance sold in all states, and expanded Medicaid adopted by 38 states, with Southern states being the major exception. Coverage is available to people who don’t have job-based health insurance, with the Medicaid expansion geared to those with low incomes.
Of some 28 million uninsured Americans before the pandemic, the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation has estimated that more than 16 million were eligible for some form of subsidized coverage through the health law. Because of the ACA's financial assistance, many are eligible for zero-premium coverage, and that's expected to be a major selling point in the Biden administration's promotional pitch.
Experts agree that number of uninsured people has risen because of layoffs in the coronavirus economy, perhaps by 5 million to 10 million, but authoritative estimates await government studies due later this year.
Chats from a private Telegram group obtained by ProPublica show how a suspect tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection tried to organize a self-styled militia. (photo: Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica)
"This Is War": Inside the Secret Chat Where Far-Right Extremists Devised Their Post-Capitol Plans
Logan Jaffe and Jack Gillum, ProPublica
Excerpt: "When the FBI arrested Edward 'Jake' Lang on Jan. 16 for his alleged role in the U.S. Capitol attack, court documents show agents had followed a seemingly straightforward trail from his public social media to collect evidence."
Chats from a private Telegram group obtained by ProPublica show how a suspect tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection tried to organize a self-styled militia. The hidden proliferation of such groups worries experts.
hen the FBI arrested Edward “Jake” Lang on Jan. 16 for his alleged role in the U.S. Capitol attack, court documents show agents had followed a seemingly straightforward trail from his public social media to collect evidence. “THIS IS ME,” Lang wrote over one video that showed an angry mob confronting police officers outside the Capitol. The same post showed him trashing a police riot shield.
The government charged Lang with committing assault and other crimes, but the account of his activities spelled out in court papers doesn’t mention how the 25-year-old spent the 10 days between the riots and his capture: recruiting militia members to take up arms against the incoming Biden administration by way of an invitation-only group on the messaging app Telegram.
“Everyone needs to get 5 patriots in this group tonight that’s the goal ,” Lang wrote in a chat on Jan. 9, one of more than 2,500 messages obtained by ProPublica. “We need each person to go out and fight for new members of this Militia like our lives depend on it.”
ProPublica gained access to the group after Lang sent an invitation to a reporter’s social media account. It’s unclear whether Lang knew he had invited a reporter, and the reporter joined but did not participate in the chats.
The group, created two days after the Jan. 6 attack, grew from a few dozen members to nearly 200 in just a week. There, safe from the deplatforming spree of mainstream social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, Lang set out to recruit “normies” and radicalize them to the point that they joined regional militia groups.
Lang’s conversations offer a window into how some of President Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters — still simmering over baseless allegations of election fraud — are finding new connections on messaging platforms that are largely hidden from public scrutiny. Unlike sites such as Facebook, Telegram is a messaging app where users can create large, invitation-only and encrypted chat groups, and it allows users to remain anonymous by hiding their phone numbers from one another. Within days of the riots, more than 25 million users globally joined Telegram, the company’s CEO said, although the U.S. accounts for a fraction of its user base. A company spokesman did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
The chats also make clear that at least some of those involved in the Capitol insurrection, despite a sweeping crackdown by U.S. law enforcement that has resulted in more than 160 cases, appear dedicated to planning and participating in further violence.
“This has been one of my concerns shorter-term: That folks who are more fervent are seeking each other out in a way that can lead to some short-term, violent outbursts,” said Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer of sociology at Vanderbilt University who has studied militia activity for more than a decade. Homeland Security officials on Wednesday warned of heightened threats of violence across the country from domestic extremists who felt emboldened by the Jan. 6 attack.
The FBI referred questions of whether the government was aware of Lang’s activities to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which did not immediately return an inquiry seeking comment Wednesday.
A lawyer for Lang, Steven Metcalf, said he was not aware of his client’s private social media messages, including the Telegram group. Metcalf said he planned to enter a not-guilty plea and to contend that Lang was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech on Jan. 6.
After Lang’s arrest, his father, Ned Lang, told the local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York, that his son had struggled with substance abuse. “As a result, he has had numerous issues with law enforcement over the past 11 years and it has only gotten worse, as is evidenced by his most recent arrest and actions at our nation’s Capitol!” Ned Lang said in an emailed statement to the newspaper. “We are praying for my son that he conquers his addictions and finds a new path forward in his life!” Ned Lang did not respond to messages from ProPublica seeking comment.
Jake Lang’s public social media accounts depict him as an internet-savvy serial entrepreneur, with one now-defunct Instagram account, @jakevape, chronicling hashtagged trips to Coachella, California, and to Art Basel in Miami. Public records show he had moved through various business ventures, from one selling vaporizers to another selling custom baseball hats. For a time, he ran Social Model Management, which promised to help prospective models get “social media famous” by unlocking “industry secrets” that would triple their Instagram followers.
More recent social media posts by Lang acknowledged his struggle to stay sober and a deepening interest in religion. In an Instagram post from last year, tagged “#ChristEnergy,” Lang set goals for himself to memorize the Hebrew alphabet and stay kosher.
After his participation in the Capitol insurrection, Lang seemingly turned his online audience-building skills to a new mission: On the evening of Jan. 8, he turned to Instagram to send a round of invitations to join his private Telegram group, appealing to “patriots” willing to act locally and nationally as an armed paramilitary.
When new members joined the group, he emphasized they should remain anonymous by hiding their phone numbers and changing their usernames to “@Patriot[name].” He urged members to avoid chitchat and any specifics about future actions. Some floated gatherings on Inauguration Day or a few days before in state capitals, although others warned that protests on those days could be a trap. Participants were told they’d be vetted “to make sure they are who they claim to be,” wrote user Silence DoGood, before they were added to their local group chats by regional leaders.
Lang repeatedly used photos and videos of himself from the Capitol insurrection to stress the importance of military-style organization in future attacks.
“A woman just died in this video being trampled by DC police because we aren’t organized as patriots,” Lang posted on Jan. 10, an apparent reference to Rosanne Boyland, who died in a stampede at the Capitol. “This was my carnal cry for the real men to step up and help.”
Replied one member, who went by the username Tony Bologna: “Damn brother! Amen.”
“It was the first battle of the Second American Revolution- make no mistakes,” Lang continued. “This is WAR.” He posted a code of conduct in the group, as well as a set of meme-like instructions for members to prepare for a national “blackout,” buying long-range walkie-talkies and stocking up on guns, ammo and food.
“It’s really happening huh?” asked another user, Alastair. Lang replied with a video attachment, again of himself outside of the Capitol: “Do not be afraid of these tyrants.”
Some of the chat’s new recruits referred to Lang in language borrowed from the military. When one new member asked who the group’s leader was, another replied: “GENERAL JAKE Your soldiers are reporting for duty.”
One user, dubbed Nomad, appointed himself a regional organizer in western Michigan, while another volunteered to boost the group’s ranks in central Florida.
“This is grass roots,” wrote Patriot Captain RedorDead, who claimed to invite 20 prospective recruits from a local gym. “This is real.” Lang also encouraged recruiting at local gun shops.
He chastised members who veered into more social territory. “Guys please this is a MILITIA group to defend our country from communism - private message each other if you want to flirt. Only warning.”
While the idea was to organize a coherent strategy ahead of Jan. 20, when President Joe Biden would be sworn in, the group didn’t appear to coalesce around one. Lang offered few details: “The plan for now is to Martin Luther king style March on 17th and 20th, exercising our Rights (that means armed),” he wrote on Jan. 13. “Peace and God be the forefront of all of what we do. But we cannot not show up and appear weak! That is not an option.”
There’s no sign those in the chats took action on those days, but experts like Cooter warn against writing off their intentions as chatroom bluster. While most new online militia groups “are probably keyboard warriors and nothing more,” she cautioned, “we don't know that for sure, and I don’t think we can be complacent about a real risk from even a small minority of such groups.”
Experts have warned about the dangers of online echo chambers for years, but deplatforming may bring other risks, said Josh Pasek, a political science and communication and media professor at the University of Michigan. “The concern is much larger if the selection of which platforms people are using in the first place is itself more polarized. The chance that they make themselves far more extreme is high.”
He added: “The Capitol riot isn’t the end of much. What happens online can move offline. We’ve seen way too many examples of that to ignore it at this point.”
By Jan. 18, word of Lang’s arrest reached the Telegram group users.
“Seems as though the FEDs aren’t fucking around…” wrote one member.
“Omg @patriotjake !!!” Patriot Jetaime wrote.
Some members left, but others vowed to stick around. “I’m still going to stay in the group in case he comes back, which is unlikely, but we may have to continue where he left off,” Patriot Zoomer said.
“The group is still here,” added PatriotLos. “Being patriotic is a lifestyle. Everyone has the capability to lead so don’t get lost.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Getty)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on House GOP: 'There Are Legitimate White Supremacist Sympathizers'
Stephen Proctor, Yahoo! News
Proctor writes: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined All In With Chris Hayes Wednesday night and she tore into the new House Republican Caucus when asked how it differs from the previous one. Ocasio-Cortez believes new members are much more extreme."
ep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined All In With Chris Hayes Wednesday night and she tore into the new House Republican Caucus when asked how it differs from the previous one. Ocasio-Cortez believes new members are much more extreme.
“There are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Among the new Republican members is Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who adheres to QAnon conspiracy theories. In the past, she has advocated violence against prominent Democrats, harassed Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg and attempted to force Muslim representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to be sworn in on the Bible.
Then there’s Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a gun enthusiast who clashed with Capitol police after she set off a metal detector, and is reportedly QAnon friendly. Many of her colleagues in the House also suspect her of aiding those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Ocasio-Cortez believes that the House Republican Caucus moved on from acting in the best interest of former President Donald Trump to acting in the best interest of something much more extreme, and that members act without fear of consequence.
“There are no consequences in the Republican Caucus for violence. There's no consequence for racism. No consequence for misogyny. No consequence for insurrection. And no consequence means that they condone it. It means that that silence is acceptance,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “and they want it because they know that it is a core animating political energy for them. And this is extremely dangerous. An extremely dangerous threshold that we have crossed. Because we are now away from acting out of fealty to their president that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool.”
The Oregon Republican Party recently claimed that the insurrection at the Capitol was carried out by leftists in an effort to harm Trump, and the Arizona Republican Party censured several members for not properly supporting Trump, including the governor for not supporting the efforts to overturn the state’s results in the presidential election. As state Republican Parties such as these become more extreme, Ocasio-Cortez believes that the Party as a whole is headed in the wrong direction.
“For Republicans that are in that Caucus that are unwilling to hold that accountable or to distance themselves from it, we really, really need to ask ourselves what they are evolving into,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Because this is no longer about a party of limited government, this is about something much more nefarious.”
Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk about ‘a considerable amount’ of lawmakers who ‘still don’t feel safe around other members of Congress’
Abortion rights protesters march through Warsaw, Poland, January 27, 2021. (photo: Beata Zawrzel/Getty)
Massive Protests as Poland Implements Near-Total Ban on Abortions
Anna Noryskiewicz, CBS News
Noryskiewicz writes: "Poland's government implemented a constitutional court ruling on Thursday banning virtually all abortions in the country. The move drew a fierce reaction from activists and sparked huge street protests across the country of almost 38 million."
Poland already had some of the most restrictive abortions laws in Europe, permitting the procedure only in cases of rape or incest, if the mother's life is in danger or if the baby has severe congenital damage. The law put into practice on Thursday removed that last condition, making it illegal to abort even severely defective fetuses in Poland.
Human rights organizations have called the tightening of the laws tantamount to a total ban on abortions, and the anger on the streets over the move was visceral.
In Warsaw people took to the streets on Wednesday with burning torches and rainbow flags and held up banners reading "This Means War," "I Think, I Feel, I Decide," and "Hell for Women."
Protesters marched from the Constitutional Court to the headquarters of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, whose members had pushed hard for the more restrictive laws. Protests were also held in other Polish cities including Łódź and Szczecin, despite a ban on assemblies due to the pandemic.
On Thursday, as protest marches continued around the country, Poland's Health Ministry issued a specific warning that the demonstrations were a risk of spreading the coronavirus.
Last October the country's Constitutional Court ruled that aborting severely disabled fetuses was "incompatible" with the Polish constitution, after a petition by more than 100 PiS deputies seeking the change in the law. The PiS party is closely allied with Poland's Catholic church, and bishops had earlier called for a total ban on abortions and praised the court's ruling.
It was on Wednesday that the government officially declared the law change legally valid, drawing tens of thousands of people into the streets, but the legislation came into effect on Thursday.
"We took to the streets really spontaneously as the anti-abortion law was published late in the evening, so we had little time to prepare and protests were organized only in a few places," activist Aleksandra Musil told CBS News on Thursday. "Today, they take place all over the country. I am organizing one myself in my town."
Warsaw's liberal Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski accused the government in a Facebook post of deliberately harming the state by publishing what he called the "pseudo-court's verdict against the majority of Polish women and Poles."
"It's not just women who are taking to the streets, it's the whole nation that has had enough," the former presidential candidate, who narrowly lost a July 2020 vote, declared.
"No law-abiding government should follow this verdict," Borys Budka, head of Poland's largest opposition party, the Civic Platform, said Wednesday.
The demonstrations were initially called on Wednesday night by the Strajk Kobiet (Women's Strike) movement and women's rights activist Marta Lempart, who urged Poles to: "Vent your anger today any way you can."
The group's Facebook page showed more protests being planned across the country at least through the end of the month.
Official figures suggest that there have been fewer than 2,000 abortions performed legally in Poland per year in recent years, but women's rights organizations estimate that about 200,000 Polish women terminate their pregnancies illegally every year, or go abroad to do so.
Activists fear the even tighter restrictions will drive more women to seek potentially dangerous illegal abortions, or force them to travel abroad for the procedure.
A border wall construction site is seen mostly abandoned after Joe Biden signed an executive order halting construction in Sunland Park, New Mexico, on 22 January. (photo: Paul Ratje/Reuters)
Biden Faces Call to Heal Environmental and Cultural Scars of Trump Border Wall
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "Border communities and environmentalists are urging Joe Biden to take immediate steps to remediate the environmental and cultural destruction caused by construction of the border wall during the previous administration."
Border communities, Native Americans and experts want the president to reverse damage done by construction under Trump
Donald Trump sequestered $15bn – most of it from military funds – to partially fulfill an anti-immigration campaign promise to build a “big beautiful wall” along the southern border with Mexico.
As a result, hundreds of miles of the borderlands – including sacred Native American sites and protected public lands – have been bulldozed, blasted and parched over the past four years, with little environmental assessment or oversight thanks to waivers suspending dozens of federal laws in order to expedite construction.
Biden ordered construction to pause on his first day in office, but community leaders and experts consulted by the Guardian warned that urgent action is needed to stop the damage to fragile biodiverse landscapes and scarce water sources getting worse. They are urging Biden to:
- Cancel the outstanding contracts, most of which the army corps of engineers awarded to a handful of firms with little transparency. Top officials at these firms are regular donors to the Republican party. The Government Accountability Office will soon publish its audit of the army corps’ role in the wall including the contracts and status of construction.
- Deploy a team of experts including hydrologists, ecologists, zoologists and botanists, community and tribal advocates to assess the damage, and formulate a plan to restore critical habitat, waterways, wildlife migration corridors and tribal cultural sites.
- Tearing down the wall where safe to do so, and allocate federal funds for the clean-up to ensure hundreds of tonnes of metal, concrete and barbed wire are safely disposed of.
- Rescind the waivers which suspended 84 federal laws that mandate protections relating to clean air and water, endangered species, public lands, contracts and the rights of Native Americans.
- Withdraw scores of lawsuits against private landowners on the border that seek to strip them of their land through eminent domain.
“We need coordinated rapid assessments to figure out what can be restored, and identify the most critical areas in order to contain the spread of the damage to waterways, soils, wildlife and native species caused by the largest experiment in American history. It’s a ticking clock,” said Gary Nabhan, a Franciscan brother and ecologist with the Healing the Border project.
“It’s a disaster, a mess, the suspended laws must be put back on the books to give border communities equal protection, and every section looked at carefully so that it can be torn down in a coordinated and responsible way, and the damage addressed immediately,” said Dan Mills, the Sierra Club’s borderlands program manager.
About 455 miles of the 30ft metal wall (out of the promised 738 miles) was completed by the time Biden took office, mostly paid for by tax dollars earmarked for defense and counter-drug programs which Trump diverted by declaring a national emergency in early 2019.
An estimated $11.5bn of contracts were signed and construction forged ahead despite multiple ongoing lawsuits challenging the constitutional basis of Trump’s executive orders. The supreme court will next month consider a case brought by the Sierra Club, ACLU and the Southern Border Communities Commission which claims diverting billions of dollars from the Department of Defense against the will of Congress was illegal.
The impact has been disastrous.
The barrier has restricted access to floodplains that dozens of small, impoverished desert communities dotted along the Rio Grande, south-east of El Paso, relied upon for drinking, sanitation and livestock. Local people are struggling to find enough water as extreme heat events rise in frequency and intensity as a result of global heating.
In addition, tens of millions of gallons of groundwater was pumped out to mix concrete, draining springs, rivers and wetlands in fragile ecological areas already blighted by prolonged drought linked to the climate crisis.
At Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe Cactus national park in Pima county, Arizona, 40 species of migratory birds, including the glossy ibis, sandpipers and shorebirds that were registered every year between 2016 and 2019, did not return last year.
Rescuing ground water sources – a rare and precious commodity in the desert – must be the priority as global heating means droughts and extreme temperatures are expected to continue, according to the experts consulted by the Guardian.
In Mission, Texas, a historic church and cemeteries – the final resting place for Native Americans, war veterans, freed slaves and Christian abolitionists who shaped the cultural, spiritual and racial history of the Rio Grande Valley – have been marooned in between the 30ft barrier and the international border.
“It was a complete waste of money and poorly thought out, and is a constant unsightly reminder of Trump’s ugly approach to Latin America. The wall should never have gone up, we tried to fight it, and now it will be very difficult to undo,” said Sylvia Ramirez, 73, a retired professor, whose ancestors are buried in the cemeteries.
“We have an obligation to borderland communities, tribal nations and wildlife to assess the harm and remedy and restore what we can. The federal government at the very least owes us that,“ said Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not respond to questions about how it planned to assess and remediate the damage caused to habitat, endangered wildlife and border communities.
Biden’s executive proclamation on inauguration day ordered construction of the wall to pause as soon as possible, and no later than seven days. The legality of the funding and contracts is being reviewed.
CBP and the army corps told the Guardian that construction had been suspended in compliance with the president’s order. “[The army corps] has suspended work on all border infrastructure projects for DoD and DHS until further notice. Under this suspension, contractors are still required by the terms of their contracts to maintain a safe and secure job site, but all work in furtherance of construction has been suspended.”
Yet last weekend, advocates and photographers found crews working as usual at multiple sites in Arizona, including inside national parks and monuments.
“It’s a lie, I saw huge bulldozers digging up dirt on mountainsides, the crews were carving out new sections in some places and moving steel bollards closer to installation sites in others,” said John Kurc, a film-maker and photographer who has been documenting the building of the wall from California to Texas.
Native Americans are accustomed to broken promises by the federal government.
The Tohono O’odham have resided in what is now southern and central Arizona and northern Mexico since time immemorial. The 1853 Gadsden Purchase divided the Tohono O’odham’s traditional lands and separated their communities. Today, their reservation includes 62 miles of international border, with 2,000 of its 34,000 members in Mexico.
While the wall does not traverse the reservation, construction destroyed ancient spiritual trails and multiple sacred burial sites, as well as vegetation such as centuries-old cacti, which are revered by tribal members. .
Just as at Organ Pipe, at least 50 water courses have been blocked by the wall and about 10,000 sacred mature cacti were culled; only a fraction were successfully transplanted as promised.
Last year, peaceful protesters were teargassed and fired on with rubber bullets and detained while trying to halt the destruction of sacred sites.
“As caretakers of this land, the plants and our four-legged brothers and sisters, the damage caused by the stroke of a pen in the name of border security feels like a razor-sharp knife across our hearts, it’s irreparable and hurts more than you could ever imagine,” said Verlon Jose, governor of the traditional leaders of the O’odham in Mexico and former vice-chair of the Tohono O’odham Nation.
“We have a glimmer of hope with the Biden administration but this needs to be followed by action, cancel the contracts and consult with environmentalists and tribal folks, as the law requires the federal government to do, so that we can start to heal the border.”
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