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The Boogaloo Bois Have Guns, Criminal Records and Military Training. Now They Want to Overthrow the Government.
A.C. Thompson, Lila Hassan and Karim Hajj, ProPublica and FRONTLINE
Excerpt: "ProPublica and FRONTLINE have identified more than twenty members with ties to the armed forces."
ours after the attack on the Capitol ended, a group calling itself the Last Sons of Liberty posted a brief video to Parler, the social media platform, that appeared to show members of the organization directly participating in the uprising. Footage showed someone with a shaky smartphone charging past the metal barricades surrounding the building. Other clips show rioters physically battling with baton-wielding police on the white marble steps just outside the Capitol.
Before Parler went offline — its operations halted at least temporarily when Amazon refused to continue to host the network — the Last Sons posted numerous statements indicating that group members had joined the mob that swarmed the Capitol and had no regrets about the chaos and violence that unfolded on Jan. 6. The Last Sons also did some quick math: The government had suffered only one fatality, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, 42, who was reportedly bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher. But the rioters had lost four people, including Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer as she tried to storm the building.
In a series of posts, the Last Sons said her death should be “avenged” and appeared to call for the murder of three more cops.
The group is part of the Boogaloo movement — a decentralized, very online successor to the militia movement of the ’80s and ’90s — whose adherents are fixated on attacking law enforcement and violently toppling the U.S. government. Researchers say the movement began coalescing online in 2019 as people — mostly young men — angry with what they perceived to be increasing government repression, found each other on Facebook groups and in private chats. In movement vernacular, Boogaloo refers to an inevitable and imminent armed revolt, and members often call themselves Boogaloo Bois, boogs or goons.
In the weeks since Jan. 6, an array of extremist groups have been named as participants in the Capitol invasion. The Proud Boys. QAnon believers. White nationalists. The Oath Keepers. But the Boogaloo Bois are notable for the depth of their commitment to the overthrow of the U.S. government and the jaw-dropping criminal histories of many members.
Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old from a small town on Virginia’s rural southern edge, is the commander of the Last Sons. “I really feel we’re looking at the possibility — stronger than any time since, say, the 1860s — of armed insurrection,” Dunn said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE a few days after the assault on the Capitol. Although Dunn didn’t directly participate, he said members of his Boogaloo faction helped fire up the crowd and “may” have penetrated the building.
“It was a chance to mess with the federal government again,” he said. “They weren’t there for MAGA. They weren’t there for Trump.”
Dunn added that he’s “willing to die in the streets” while battling law enforcement or security forces.
In its short existence, the Boogaloo movement has proven to be a magnet for current or former military service members who have used their combat skills and firearms expertise to advance the Boogaloo cause. Before becoming one of the faces of the movement, Dunn did a brief stint in the U.S. Marines, a career he says was cut short by a heart condition, and worked as a Virginia state prison guard.
Through interviews, extensive study of social media and a review of court records, some previously unreported, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified more than 20 Boogaloo Bois or sympathizers who’ve served in the armed forces. Over the past 18 months, 13 of them have been arrested on charges ranging from the possession of illegal automatic weapons to the manufacture of explosives to murder.
Most of the individuals identified by the news organizations became involved with the movement after leaving the military. At least four are accused of committing Boogaloo-related crimes while employed by one of the military branches.
Examples of the nexus between the group and the military abound.
Last year, an FBI task force in San Francisco opened a domestic terror investigation into Aaron Horrocks, a 39-year-old former Marine Corps reservist. Horrocks spent eight years in the Reserve before leaving the Corps in 2017.
The bureau became alarmed in September 2020, when agents received a tip that Horrocks, who lives in Pleasanton, California, was “planning an imminent violent attack on government or law enforcement,” according to a petition to seize the man’s firearms, which was filed in state court in October. The investigation, which has not previously been reported, links Horrocks to the Boogaloo movement. He has not been charged.
Horrocks did not respond to a request for comment, though he has uploaded a video to YouTube that appears to show federal law enforcement agents, in plainclothes, searching his storage unit. “Go fuck yourselves,” he tells them.
In June 2020 in Texas, police briefly detained Taylor Bechtol, a 29-year-old former Air Force staff sergeant and munitions loader with the 90th Aircraft Maintenance Unit. While in the service, Bechtol handled 1,000-pound precision-guided bombs.
The former airman was riding in a pickup truck with two other alleged Boogaloo Bois when the vehicle was stopped by Austin police, according to an intelligence report generated by the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, a multi-agency fusion center. Officers found five guns, several hundred rounds of ammunition and gas masks in the truck. The men expressed “sympathetic views toward the Boogaloo Bois” and should be treated with “extreme caution” by law enforcement, noted the report, which was obtained by ProPublica and FRONTLINE after it was leaked by hackers.
One of the men in the vehicle, Ivan Hunter, 23, has since been indicted for allegedly using an assault rifle to shoot up a police precinct in Minneapolis and helping to set the building ablaze. No trial date has been set for Hunter, who has pleaded not guilty.
Bechtol, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the traffic stop, did not respond to a request for comment.
Linda Card, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which deals with the service’s most complex and serious criminal matters, said Bechtol left the service in December 2018 and was never investigated while in the Air Force.
In perhaps the highest-profile incident involving the group, several Boogaloo Bois were arrested in October in connection with the widely reported plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. One of those men was Joseph Morrison, a Marine Corps reservist who was serving in the 4th Marine Logistics Group at the time of his arrest and arraignment. Morrison, who is facing terrorism charges, went by the name Boogaloo Bunyan on social media. He also kept a sticker of the Boogaloo flag — it features a Hawaiian floral pattern and an igloo — on the rear window of his pickup truck. Two other men charged in the plot had spent time in the military.
The Marine Corps is working to root out extremists from its ranks, a spokesman said.
“Association or participation with hate or extremist groups of any kind is directly contradictory to the core values of honor, courage and commitment that we stand for as Marines and isn’t tolerated,” Capt. Joseph Butterfield said.
No reliable numbers exist about how many current or former military members are part of the movement.
However, military officials at the Pentagon told ProPublica and FRONTLINE that they have been concerned by a surge in extremist activity. “We are seeing an increase in concerning behavior,” said one official, stressing that military leaders are “very actively” responding to tips and are thoroughly investigating service members linked to anti-government groups.
Experts worry about people with military training joining extremist groups.
Boogaloo Bois with military experience are likely to share their expertise with members who’ve never served in the armed forces, building a more effective, more lethal movement. “These are folks who can bring discipline to a movement. These are folks that can bring skills to a movement,” said Jason Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Though some Boogaloo groups have made spectacular blunders — among them, sharing information with undercover FBI agents and using unencrypted messaging services to communicate — the movement’s familiarity with weapons and basic infantry techniques clearly poses serious challenges for law enforcement.
“We have the upper hand,” Dunn said. “A lot of the guys have knowledge that your normal civilians do not have. Police officers are not used to combating that kind of knowledge.”
“It Wasn’t Talk”
The marriage of extremist ideology and military skill was apparent in an alleged plot last year to attack police officers at a racial justice protest.
On a hot spring evening last May, an FBI SWAT team swarmed on three alleged Boogaloo Bois as they met in the parking lot of a 24 Hour Fitness club on the east side of Las Vegas. Agents found a small arsenal in the trio’s vehicles: a shotgun, a handgun, two rifles, plenty of ammunition, body armor and materials that could be used to make Molotov cocktails — glass bottles, gasoline and rags torn into small pieces.
All three men had military experience. One had served in the Air Force. Another the Navy. The third, 24-year-old Andrew Lynam, was in the U.S. Army Reserve at the time of the arrests. During his teenage years Lynam attended the New Mexico Military Institute, a public academy that prepares high school and junior college students for careers in the armed forces.
In court, federal prosecutor Nicholas Dickinson portrayed Lynam as the leader of the group, a Nevada-based Boogaloo cell called Battle Born Igloo. “The defendant associated with the Boogaloo movement; i.e., he referred to himself as a Boogaloo Boi,” the prosecutor told the court during a June detention hearing, according to a transcript. Lynam, continued Dickinson, “corresponded with other Boogaloo groups, especially in California, Denver and Arizona. Essentially, the defendant was radicalized to the point where he wanted to act out, it wasn’t talk.”
According to the prosecutor, the men intended to join a protest over the death of George Floyd and hurl firebombs at police, and they had made plans to bomb an electric power substation and a federal building, actions they hoped would spark a wider anti-government uprising.
“They wanted to damage or destroy some sort of government building or infrastructure to get the response of law enforcement and, hopefully, the overreaction of the federal government,” Dickinson told the court.
The prosecutor said he found it particularly “troubling” that Lynam was serving in the military while at the same time plotting to attack government infrastructure.
During the June hearing, defense lawyer Sylvia Irvin pushed back, criticizing the “clear weaknesses” in the government’s case, challenging the credibility of an FBI informant and suggesting Lynam was really a minor player in the group.
Lynam, who has pleaded not guilty, is now represented by attorney Thomas Pitaro, who did not respond to requests for comment. Lynam and his co-defendants, Stephen Parshall and William Loomis, are also facing a parallel slate of charges brought by local prosecutors in state court. Parshall and Loomis have pleaded not guilty.
A spokesman for the Army Reserve said Lynam, a medical specialist who joined in 2016, currently holds the rank of private first class in the service. He has never deployed to a combat zone. “Extremist ideologies and activities directly oppose our values and beliefs, and those who subscribe to extremism have no place in our ranks,” said Lt. Col. Simon Flake, noting that Lynam is facing disciplinary action by the Army when his criminal cases conclude.
“An Insider Threat”
The body of criminal law that governs the armed forces, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, doesn’t include an explicit prohibition on joining extremist groups.
But participation in criminal gangs, white supremacist organizations and anti-government militias is barred by a 2009 Pentagon directive that covers all military branches. Service members who violate that ban can face court-martial for disobeying a lawful order or regulation, or for other offenses related to their extremist activity, such as making false statements to superiors. Military prosecutors can also use a catchall provision of the military code called Article 134 — or the general article — to charge service members who’ve engaged in conduct that brings “discredit” to the armed forces or harms the “good order and discipline” of the military, said Geoffrey Corn, a retired Army officer who served as a military attorney and who now teaches national security law at South Texas College of Law Houston.
Pointing to the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who enlisted in the Army and served in the first Gulf War, Corn said it’s no secret that the military has been a “breeding ground” for extremism to some extent for decades. McVeigh’s devastating 1995 attack on that city’s Alfred P. Murrah federal building killed 168 people, many of them children.
Military officials have acknowledged an uptick in extremist activity and domestic terrorism cases in recent years.
Addressing a congressional committee last year, Joe Ethridge, intelligence chief for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, said his staff had opened seven investigations into allegations of extremist activity in 2019, up from an average of 2.4 per year during the previous half decade. “During the same time period, the Federal Bureau of Investigation notified CID of an increase in domestic terrorism investigations with soldiers or former soldiers as suspects,” he told members of the House Armed Services Committee.
Ethridge also noted that most soldiers who are flagged for extremist behavior face administrative sanctions — including counseling or retraining — rather than criminal prosecution.
In the aftermath of the Capitol attack and a flurry of news reports documenting the involvement of service members in the chaos, the Department of Defense announced a comprehensive review of its policies on extremist and white supremacist activity to be conducted by the Pentagon’s inspector general.
“We in the Department of Defense are doing everything we can to eliminate extremism” within the military, Garry Reid, a director for defense intelligence at the Pentagon, told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “All military personnel, including members of the National Guard, have undergone a background investigation, are subject to continuous evaluation and are enrolled in an insider threat program.”
The “Kill House”
The military is clearly worried about Boogaloo Bois training up civilians. Last year, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the law enforcement agency that investigates felony-level crimes involving sailors and members of the Marine Corps, circulated an intelligence bulletin.
Called a threat awareness message, the bulletin detailed the arrests of Lynam and the other men in Las Vegas and noted that Boogaloo followers have engaged in discussions about “recruiting military or former military members for their perceived knowledge of combat training.”
NCIS concluded the bulletin with a warning: The agency couldn’t ignore the possibility that individuals involved with the Boogaloo movement were serving throughout the military. “NCIS continues to emphasize the importance of reporting suspected boogaloo activity through the chain of command.”
The subject came up during a court hearing in Michigan involving Paul Bellar, one of the men arrested on state charges in connection with the plot to kidnap Whitmer. “It’s my understanding Mr. Bellar used his military training to teach combat procedures to members of this terrorist group,” said Magistrate Frederick Bishop, explaining his reluctance to lower Bellar’s bail during the October hearing. Bellar, who has since been released from jail on bond, has pleaded not guilty.
In another instance, an ex-Marine gathered at least six men at a wooded property in McLoud, Oklahoma, a small town outside of Oklahoma City, and taught them how to storm a building. In a video posted to YouTube last year, the former Marine, Christopher Ledbetter, shows the group how to enter a house and kill any enemy combatants inside. Filmed with a GoPro camera, the video concludes with Ledbetter, who served in the Marine Corps from 2011 to 2015, blasting a wooden target with a barrage of bullets from a fully automatic AK-47-type carbine.
Ledbetter called his training facility the “kill house,” according to court records.
A series of Facebook Messenger conversations obtained by the FBI show that Ledbetter, 30, identified with the Boogaloo movement and was preparing for the coming armed insurrection, which he thought would be a “blast.” In an interview, Ledbetter told agents that he had been manufacturing hand grenades and admitted that he had modified his AK-47 so that it would fire automatically.
Ledbetter pleaded guilty in December to illegal possession of a machine gun. He is currently serving a 57-month sentence in federal custody.
On an hourlong podcast posted in May 2020, two Boogaloo Bois discussed, in detail, how to do battle with the government.
One of the men, who dispenses combat advice online using the handle Guerrilla Instructor, said he had enlisted in the Army but had eventually grown disenchanted and left the service. The other man, who called himself Jake, said he was currently serving as a military police officer in the Army National Guard.
Traditional infantry tactics wouldn’t be particularly useful during the coming civil war, opined Guerrilla Instructor, arguing that sabotage and assassination would be more helpful for the anti-government insurgents. It was simple, he said: A Boogaloo Boi could just walk up to a government figure or law enforcement officer on the street and “shoot them in the face” before fleeing.
But there was another assassination technique that held special appeal for Guerrilla Instructor. “I believe honestly that drive-bys will be our greatest tool,” he said, sketching out a scenario in which three Boogs would hop in an SUV, spray a target with gunfire, “kill some dudes” and speed off.
“That’s some real gangster shit right there,” enthused Jake.
“Boog”
About three weeks after the podcast was uploaded to Apple and other podcast distributors, a security camera tracked a white Ford van as it moved through the darkened streets of downtown Oakland, California. It was 9:43 p.m.
Inside the vehicle, prosecutors say, were Boogaloo Bois Steven Carrillo, who was armed with an automatic short-barreled rifle, and Robert Justus, Jr., who was driving. As the van rolled along Jefferson Street, Carrillo allegedly flung open the sliding door and unleashed a burst of gunfire, hitting two federal protective services officers posted outside the Ronald V. Dellums federal building and courthouse. The barrage killed David Patrick Underwood, 53, and wounded Sombat Mifkovic, whose age has not been released.
At this point, there's no evidence Carrillo — a 32-year-old Air Force staff sergeant stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California — ever heard the podcast or communicated with the men who recorded it. But, obviously, his alleged crime closely resembles the assassination strategies discussed on the show, which is still available online. He is facing murder and attempted murder charges in federal court, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
According to the FBI, Carrillo used an exotic and highly illegal weapon to carry out the shooting: an automatic rifle with an extremely short barrel and a silencer. The weapon, which fires 9 mm ammunition, is a so-called ghost gun — it lacks any serial numbers, making it difficult to trace.
Built from machined aluminum, heavy-duty polymers or even 3D printed plastic, ghost guns have been embraced by Boogaloo movement members, many of whom take an absolutist position on the Second Amendment, arguing that the government lacks any authority to restrict gun ownership.
Last year police in New York state arrested an Army drone operator and alleged Boogaloo Boi on charges that he owned an illegal ghost gun. Noah Latham, a private based at Fort Drum, did a tour of Iraq as a drone operator, according to an Army spokesperson. Latham was discharged from the service after he was arrested by police in Troy in June 2020.
The shootings at the courthouse in Oakland were only the first chapter in Carrillo’s alleged rampage. In the days after, he headed about 80 miles south, to a tiny town nestled in the Santa Cruz mountains. There he allegedly got into a gun battle with Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputies and state police, a shootout that killed deputy Damon Gutzwiller, 38, and injured two other law enforcement officers. According to prosecutors, who have charged Carrillo with premeditated murder and a host of other felonies in state court, Carrillo also hurled homemade bombs at the cops and deputies and carjacked a Toyota Camry in a bid to escape.
Before ditching the car, Carrillo apparently used his own blood — he was hit in the hip during the skirmish — to write the word “Boog” on the hood of the car.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, has monitored the links between the military and extremist groups for years, tracking each policy tweak, every criminal case. In her view, Carrillo’s grisly narrative is a product of the military’s refusal to adequately address the issue of radicalization within the ranks. She said, “The failure to deal with this problem on the part of the armed forces” has “unleashed people who are highly trained in how to kill” on the public.
Joe Biden. (photo: Getty Images)
Tom Engelhardt | The Imperial Presidency Comes Home to Roost
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "Joe Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has."
Note for TomDispatch Readers: As ever, I simply can’t thank all of you enough for your generosity to TD (and the kind notes you’ve sent about both the new look of our website and how much easier it is to read on the latest gadgets). You’re what keeps us going, so if you happen to be in the mood, after you’ve read your fill today, do check out our donation page one more time. As always, I’m eternally appreciative!
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
oe Biden’s got a problem — and so do I. And so, in fact, do we.
At 76 years old, you’d think I’d experienced it all when it comes to this country and its presidencies. Or most of it, anyway. I’ve been around since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Born on July 20, 1944, I’m a little “young” to remember him, though I was a war baby in an era when Congress still sometimes declared war before America made it.
As a boy, in my liberal Democratic household in New York, I can certainly remember singing (to the tune of “Whistle While You Work”) our version of the election-year ditty of 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced off against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. The pro-Republican kicker to it went this way: “Eisenhower has the power, Stevenson’s a jerk.” We, however, sang, “Eisenhower has no power, Stevenson will work!” As it happened, we never found out if that was faintly true, since the former Illinois governor got clobbered in that election (just as he had in 1952).
I certainly watched at least some of the 1960 televised debates between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy — I was 16 then — that helped make JFK, at 43, the youngest president ever to enter the Oval Office. I can also remember his ringing Inaugural Address. We youngsters had never heard anything like it:
“[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world… Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
While a college freshman at Yale, I saw him give a graduation speech in New Haven, Connecticut. From where I was standing, he was as small as one of the tiny toy soldiers I played with on the floor of my room in childhood. It was, nonetheless, a thrill. Yes, he was deeply involved in ramping up the war in Vietnam and America’s global imperial presence in a fiercely contested “Cold War.” Most of us teens, however, were paying little attention to that, at least until October 1962, in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he addressed us on the radio, telling us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” As a generation that grew up ducking-and-covering under our school desks in nuclear-attack drills, young Americans everywhere, my 18-year-old-self included, imagined that the moment might finally have arrived for the nuclear confrontation that could have left our country in ruins and us possibly obliterated. (I can also remember sitting in a tiny New Haven hamburger joint eating a 10-cent — no kidding! — burger just over a year later when someone suddenly stuck his head through the door and said, “The president’s been assassinated!”)
And I can recall, in the summer of 1964, hitchhiking with a friend across parts of Europe and trying, rather defensively, to explain to puzzled and quizzical French, Italian, and German drivers the candidacy of right-wing Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who was running against Kennedy’s vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was the Trump of his moment and, had I been in the U.S., I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Still, as an American in Europe I felt strangely responsible for the weirder political aspects of my country and so found myself doing my damnedest to explain them away — perhaps to myself as much as to anyone else. In fact, maybe that was the secret starting point for TomDispatch, the website I would launch (or perhaps that would launch me) just after the 9/11 attacks so many years later.
The Coming of a “Presidential Dictatorship”
Although I never saw Lyndon Johnson in person, I did march through clouds of tear gas in Washington, D.C., to protest the bloody and disastrous conflict — the original “quagmire war” — that he continued to fight in Vietnam to the last Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. By then, as I was growing up, presidencies already seemed to be growing down and starting to look ever grimmer to me. And of course, as we all now know, there was far worse to come. After all, Johnson at least had reasonably forward-looking domestic policies in an age in which economic inequality was so much less rampant and the president and Congress could still accomplish things that mattered domestically — and not just for the staggeringly richest of Americans.
On the other hand, Richard Nixon, like Goldwater, a “southern strategy” guy who actually won the presidency on his second try, only ramped the Vietnam War up further. He also plunged his presidency into a corrupt and criminal netherworld so infamously linked to Watergate. And I once saw him, too, in person, campaigning in San Francisco when I was a young journalist. I sat just rows away from the stage on which he spoke and found myself eerily awed by the almost unimaginable awkwardness of his gestures, including his bizarrely unnatural version of a triumphant V-for-what-would-indeed-prove-to-be-victory against antiwar Democratic candidate George McGovern.
For Nixon, the V-for-defeat would come a little later and I would spend endless hours watching it — that is, the Watergate hearings — on an old black-and-white TV, or rather watching his imperial presidency come down around his ears. Those were the years when the Pentagon Papers, that secret trove of internal government documents on Vietnam war-making by successive White Houses, were released to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg. (His psychiatrist’s office would later be burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” and he would play a key role in the fall of the house of Nixon.)
It was in those same years that former Kennedy aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book he classically titled The Imperial Presidency. And it was then, too, that Senator William Fulbright described the same phenomenon in his book The Crippled Giant, this way:
“Out of a well-intended but misconceived notion of what patriotism and responsibility require in a time of world crisis, Congress has permitted the president to take over the two vital foreign policy powers which the Constitution vested in Congress: the power to initiate war and the Senate’s power to consent or withhold consent from significant foreign commitments. So completely have these two powers been taken over by the president that it is no exaggeration to say that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, the United States has joined the global mainstream; we have become, for purposes of foreign policy — and especially for purposes of making war — a presidential dictatorship.”
Amen. And so it largely remains.
The Executive Order
Keep in mind that those were still the good-old days before George W. Bush launched his own imperial war on significant parts of the planet with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, based only on an open-ended, post-9/11 congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force. That first AUMF and a second one passed a year later would then be cited by the presidents to follow, whether to “surge” in Afghanistan or drone assassinate an Iranian leader at Baghdad International Airport. Congress declare war? You mean Congress have anything (other than endlessly funding the Pentagon) to do with the mess that an American world of warfare has created?
So, before Donald Trump ever left The Apprentice, the presidency had already become an imperial one on the world stage. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could still work together domestically, but just in Republican (or in the case of Bill Clinton, Republican-style) administrations largely to further the yawning gap between the 1% of wealthy Americans and everyone else.
Otherwise, especially in the Obama years (when Mitch McConnell took control of the Senate in all his oppositional splendor), the imperial presidency began to gain a new domestic face thanks to executive orders. What little Barack Obama could do once the Republicans controlled Congress would largely be done through those executive orders, a habit that would be inherited big time by Donald Trump. On entering office, he and his crew would promptly begin trying to wipe out Obama’s legacy (such as it was) by executive orders and similar actions.
Trump’s presidency would certainly be the most bizarrely “imperial” of our time, as he and his team worked, executive act by executive act, to essentially burn the planet down, destroy the environment, lock Americans in and everyone else out, and dismantle the country’s global economic role. And in the end, in the most imperially incoherent way imaginable, with Republican congressional help, Trump would come at least reasonably close to rather literally destroying the American democratic system (“fake election“!) in the name of his own reelection.
It couldn’t have been more bizarre. Today, in a country experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic like no other and with a Congress so evenly split that you can almost guarantee it will get next to nothing done, any president who wanted to accomplish anything would have little choice but to be imperial. So who could be surprised that Joe Biden launched his presidency with a flurry of executive actions (30 of them in his first three days), mainly in the Trumpian style — that is, taken to reverse the previous executive actions of The Donald).
Grandpa Joe
I doubt it’s happenstantial that the vibrantly imperial, yet still domestically democratic, country that elected the young John F. Kennedy would, 60 years later, elect a 78-year-old to replace a 74-year-old in the White House. Joe Biden will, in turn, join forces with the 80-year-old Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, while butting heads with the 78-year-old Minority Leader of the Senate to “run” a country that hasn’t been able to win a war since 1945, a pandemic nation of such staggering inequality as to be nothing short of historic.
As a senator who arrived in Washington just as Watergate was unfolding, Joe Biden presented himself as the opposite of the corrupt Nixon and so an opponent of an imperial presidency. And as he recently claimed in a phone conversation with the PBS News Hour‘s David Brooks, he’s still evidently not a fan of it. And yet in a Congress unlikely to do much of anything, including convicting the previous president of incitement to insurrection, what choice does he have? The way has been paved and he’s already on that ever-wider imperial road to… well, history suggests that it’s probably hell.
Joe Biden may not believe in the imperial presidency, but it could be all he has. Congress is in disarray; the courts, stacked with Mitch McConnell conservatives, will be against much of whatever he does; and those wars launched by George W. Bush and now spread disastrously across significant parts of the Greater Middle East and Africa are anything but over.
Yes, Donald Trump was a nightmare. Still, as I wrote years ago, he was always the mosquito, not the virus. I think it tells you something, thinking back to the vibrant 43-year-old John Kennedy in 1960, that Americans, with the worst outbreak of Covid-19 on the planet, would choose to elect a former vice president who was an exceedingly familiar old man. In our moment of crisis, we have grandpa in the White House.
And yet what could be more striking than a country, not so long ago considered the planet’s “lone superpower,” its “indispensable nation,” that simply can’t stop fighting distant and disastrous wars, while supporting its military financially in a way that it supports nothing else? As it happens, of course, the “costs” of those wars have indeed come home and not just in terms of a “Green Zone” in Washington or veterans assaulting the Capitol. It’s come home imperially, believe it or not, in the very form of Grandpa Joe.
Joe Biden is a decent man, acting in the early days of his presidency in decent ways. He’s anything but Donald Trump. Yet that may matter less than we imagine. The odds are, hesitant as I am to say it, that what we face may not prove to be an imperial presidency but an imperial-disaster presidency, something that could leave Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and crew in the shade.
At 76 — almost as old, that is, as our new president — I fear that Donald Trump was just our (particularly bizarre) introduction to imperial disaster. We now live on a distinctly misused planet in a country that looks like it could be going to the dogs.
As I said when I began this piece, Joe Biden has a problem (what a problem!) and so do I. So do we all. We could be heading into American territory where no one of any age has been before.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is
Sen. Mitt Romney heads to the floor of the Senate on January 26, 2021 in Washington, DC. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Republicans Are Trying to Gut the Next Round of COVID-19 Relief Checks
Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Republican senators are offering a new COVID-19 relief framework that would limit survival checks to $1,000 and cut off aid to millions more Americans."
Republican senators are offering a new COVID-19 relief framework that would limit survival checks to $1,000 and cut off aid to millions more Americans — and President Joe Biden seems open to some of the GOP’s restrictions.
group of Republican senators is pushing to cut the size of the next round of COVID-19 relief checks and significantly limit who’s eligible to receive the payments, as the Biden administration continues to indicate that it would be open to further restricting who’s eligible for survival checks.
Last month, President Joe Biden promised that $2,000 checks would “go out the door immediately” if Democrats managed to win the two Georgia senate runoff races and claim control of the Senate. After Democrats pulled off two miracle victories in Georgia, Biden quickly narrowed his pledge to new $1,400 checks, asserting that the $600 checks authorized by Congress in December were a down payment on his plan.
On Sunday, ten moderate Republicans proposed new $1,000 checks instead as part of their own scaled-down coronavirus relief package. Under their proposal, survival checks would go to far fewer Americans than in previous relief bills — only to “families who need assistance the most,” according to a letter they sent to the White House.
While the details haven’t been released yet, one Republican involved in the effort, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, told CNN on Sunday that direct payments should only go to individuals earning less than $50,000 and families earning less than $100,000.
In previous COVID-19 relief bills, full rounds of survival checks have gone to individuals earning up to $75,000 and couples earning up to $150,000. Limiting assistance the way Portman described would cut off relief to millions of Americans who have previously received economic impact payments.
“We’re Open”
Republicans’ insistence that relief checks go only to poorer Americans is a relatively recent objection.
At least two Republicans involved in the new effort, Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, cosponsored a standalone bill last summer that would have sent out $1,000 checks using the same income thresholds as the COVID-19 relief legislation passed by Congress in December.
Just a few years ago, Senate Republicans passed a tax overhaul specifically designed to benefit the wealthy and slash the corporate tax rate.
While early reporting suggests that Democrats are unlikely to go along with the new proposal from moderate Republicans, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia helped kick off the push for limiting payment eligibility, repeatedly insisting that new rounds of relief checks be more targeted even though the payments have been means-tested all along.
Biden, meanwhile, indicated last week that he would be open to setting new income limits for the checks, and National Economic Council director Brian Deese reiterated on Sunday that the White House is open to changing the income caps.
When CNN host Dana Bash pressed Deese to say whether the administration will “target those $1,400 checks,” Deese responded: “Yes, on the $1,400 checks, we are open to looking at how to make the entire package effective at achieving its objective, including providing support to families with children, providing direct child tax credits to families that have children and who have been hit the hardest in this crisis.”
After Bash again asked whether the White House wants checks to see checks be “more targeted to the people who need them most and not go to people who aren’t going to spend them,” Deese replied: “We’re open to that idea. We’re open to ideas across the board.”
Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein has publicly pushed back against the idea of further means testing the checks. Bernstein said last week that the checks are “better targeted than I think most people realize” and explained — because this somehow has to be said — that “it’s not just people at the bottom who need the money.”
Elite Media Preaching Austerity
The push to limit eligibility for COVID-19 survival checks was initially sparked by discredited austerity economist Larry Summers and the editorial boards employed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg.
Their campaign was boosted by a questionable economic analysis released last week suggesting that middle-income Americans don’t need money because they didn’t immediately spend the $600 checks that Congress sent out in December.
The study by economists at Opportunity Insights — a Harvard think tank funded by the family foundations of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Bloomberg — found that higher-income households will only spend about $45 of the $600 checks within the first month of receiving them.
The economists suggested that new COVID-19 relief payments should be limited to individuals earning less than $50,000 and couples earning less than $75,000 — a proposal that would make about half of all US households ineligible for survival checks, according to census data.
The study was favorably cited in a series of purportedly objective news articles and opinion columns arguing that survival checks should be more limited.
“Cutting off stimulus checks to Americans earning over $75,000 could be wise, new data suggests,” one Washington Post headline read. “It’s not progressive to give money to the rich,” Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote. Of course, Post owner Bezos is one of the richest men in the world and has seen his net worth nearly double during the pandemic.
Bloomberg News warned that “Biden’s stimulus risks giving money to people who won’t spend it.” The piece failed to note the organizational and financial ties between Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropy and Opportunity Insights.
Bloomberg money manager Steven Rattner, who agreed to pay $10 million a decade ago to resolve claims he paid bribes to score state pension business, wrote a New York Times column arguing that the Biden stimulus plan isn’t “well targeted to help the neediest.”
Despite data showing that the survival checks are distributed more fairly than other popular programs, Rattner cautioned that “some” of the spending in Biden’s plan “will go to workers in the top 10 percent — hardly a struggling group of Americans.”
A memorial for victims of the Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019. (photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
Outrage After Survivor of El Paso Mass Shooting Deported to Mexico
Kenya Evelyn, Guardian UK
Evelyn writes: "A survivor of a Walmart mass shooting that killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas, and targeted Latino people has been deported to Mexico, triggering widespread outrage among activists and local politicians."
Police reportedly stopped the woman – who was not named in full – due to a non-functioning brake light, then took her to a local jail. She was then placed into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), where she was soon deported to Mexico.
The legal defense team working on her behalf confirmed to local KVIA that city police arrested the woman, identified as just Rosa. She was booked into the El Paso county jail annex.
Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services told local KTSM that on Wednesday, the survivor was pulled over and, during the traffic stop, found to have two, five-year-old citations still outstanding.
By Friday morning, Rosa had been deported to Cuidad Juárez where she has remained ever since.
On a Saturday morning in early August 2019, a 21-year-old man walked into the El Paso Walmart Super Center and opened fire, first into the parking lot before taking aim at the store’s entryway. The attack killed 13 Americans, eight Mexicans and one German.
According to KTSM, Rosa and her sister witnessed the shooter attack the first victim outside the store. She relayed her account to the FBI and local authorities, and is reported to be one of a number of witnesses the local district attorney has tapped for the upcoming trial.
While the FBI continues to investigate the shooting as a potential hate crime or domestic terror incident, it is considered the deadliest anti-Latino attack in American history.
“Rosa is a survivor of one of the most horrific events to ever take place in El Paso,” Anna Hey, an attorney who leads the legal aid clinic, told KTSM. “She came forward and presented herself to both El Paso police and FBI officials to give a statement of what she saw on that fateful day”.
Hey argued the deportation amounted “to a re-victimization of this young lady, who only came forward to help build the case against the shooter in the racist attack”.
Activists and lawmakers from across the state have spoken out against the deportation, demanding that state and federal officials back efforts to have Rosa returned to the US.
“I’m supporting [Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services] efforts and will do everything I can to bring Rosa home and fight to protect victims and witnesses from deportation,” the Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas tweeted on Saturday.
According to Rosa, her “whole life” has been spent in El Paso. “I got there when I was little – I don’t remember anything about Juárez,” she told local reporters, noting that she had graduated high school there as well.
According to Hey, information Rosa provided to law enforcement in the aftermath of the horrific massacre was deemed helpful in the district attorney’s office investigation, enough to issue her a certification recognizing this contribution.
“Despite having told this to the Ice officials who made the decision to deport her based on a years old deportation order, Ice officials in El Paso chose to remove her from the US, leaving her unsupported in Juárez,” Hey said.
Three medical assistants conduct Covid-19 drive-by tests in the parking lot of UNLV Medicine in Las Vegas in April 2020. (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The Pandemic's Lasting Effects on Young Medical Workers
Terry Nguyen, Vox
Excerpt: "From lost job prospects to delayed licensing exams, many young people feel that their careers have been stymied by Covid-19."
arisa Reynolds spent months anticipating the pandemic’s effects on her final year of medical school. Her clinical clerkship was delayed, and her research stint at the National Institutes of Health was canceled. So were parts of the fourth-year board exam Reynolds expected to take and the option to participate in an out-of-state clerkship — crucial opportunities students are typically afforded before applying for post-graduate residency programs.
“The pandemic is not something in our control, but it’s frustrating, to put it lightly, that it will have these long-term effects on our careers and lives for years to come,” said Reynolds, a Michigan State medical student seeking out internal medicine residencies. It’s a high-stakes process, and despite the logistical challenges that affected the quality of Reynolds’s and her peers’ application — such as late test scores and a shortened residency interview timeline — there is no option to try again next year.
She is also worried that the pandemic has made the process less equitable: Some students didn’t receive as many interviews as others, and there was limited time to make a strong impression on their program of choice.
“You’re basically entering a career marriage for the next however many years of your life,” she told Vox. “My internal medicine residency is about three years long, but for someone in neurosurgery, it could be seven years.”
For many young people, the pandemic has solidified their commitment to working in health care, even as it adversely impacts their career progression. The ongoing public health crisis might seem to benefit hospitals, or at the very least, job prospects for those in the medical industry. That couldn’t be further from the current reality, and young, entry-level workers are often the first to witness that.
The coronavirus has led many to reassess the risks and sacrifices that come with the job, and how consequential health care will be in a post-pandemic world. Simultaneously, people are recognizing the longstanding weaknesses and inequalities of America’s medical system. Prospective and current medical school students, too, have become concerned about issues of access and equality, in their field of study and their programs.
They’ve also had to confront the paradoxes emerging in medicine: Health care workers are more necessary than ever, but working nurses and doctors are on the verge of burnout amid the months-long third surge of infections. As of late January, more than 100,000 patients are currently hospitalized across the country with Covid-19. Hospitals, especially those in major metropolitan areas, are overcrowded and short-staffed.
Despite the deluge of patients, medical workers have had to contend with hiring freezes, layoffs, contract negotiations, and shortage of personal protective equipment. About 1.4 million health care jobs were lost in April 2020, and while employment has recovered as states opened back up, the pandemic placed enduring strain on how the US health care system operates.
Young adults in the health care industry — or those preparing to enter it — are aware they’re at the foot of the ladder. Many college graduates take on low-paying or volunteer roles in clinics and hospitals, and might not even receive priority for vaccines. (At Stanford, nearly all of its medical residents and fellows, who regularly treat Covid-19 patients, did not receive vaccine priority.) On the other hand, medical students eager for patient experience have lost out on clinical opportunities. Medical school applicants, residents, clinic assistants, and nursing graduates recognize how entry-level jobs are harder to come by across the board, and for many, the lesson of the pandemic is learning to settle for less-than-ideal positions to guarantee employment.
Briana, a former medical assistant from Phoenix, Arizona, felt that the pandemic was a sudden but necessary “reality check” for her career. Briana, who asked to not publish her last name out of privacy concerns, is immunocompromised and works for a clinic that primarily serves the Native American population in Arizona. However, her transition from a patient-facing position to a departmental role took two months, and she felt pressured to be in the office or risk losing her job.
“I felt that [my managers] didn’t really care that I had an autoimmune disorder,” Briana told Vox. “They obviously should care more about the patients, but if they don’t have any healthy employees, then they’re not going to be able to treat them.”
For Jasmine Wong, a recent graduate and working nurse in the Bay Area, risk was top-of-mind while she was interviewing for openings. “I asked during my interviews with different hospitals if there was enough PPE provided,” she said. “Navigating the job hunt during Covid was already very difficult because hospitals were on hiring freezes, and many just didn’t have a budget to train new nursing grads.”
While most job interviews were conducted over Zoom, a departure from traditional norms, Wong felt that the roles were competitive, especially for nursing positions in adult ICUs. In pre-pandemic times, cinching a job after nursing school depended on a person’s professional network — relationships at hospitals they’ve previously volunteered at. Despite Wong’s volunteer work at UCLA Medical Center, the hospital wasn’t hiring, and she eventually accepted an offer in a pediatrics ICU elsewhere.
“I feel like about 75 percent of people I know from our program have found jobs, but I don’t think people got positions they necessarily wanted,” she said. “Most of us didn’t have ICU experience, so it was difficult to compete with those who do.” Some of her peers are in non-hospital settings, and some are swabbing at local Covid-19 testing sites.
Funding from Congress has provided some relief for hospital systems across the country, but many are losing money as a result of halting elective surgeries. According to the Washington Post, monthly patient revenue has declined by tens of millions of dollars, and many were already losing money on patient care prior to the pandemic. “There is this conception that nurses are needed, but many want experienced nurses and not new graduates,” Wong said.
Meanwhile, medical school admissions officers are boasting record-level increases in applicants. They are attributing renewed national attention toward health care to the coronavirus pandemic, dubbing the phenomenon “the Fauci effect.” (The Association of American Medical Colleges did not share specific figures with Vox, but said that applications are 18 percent higher than they were at this time last year.)
Some applicants, however, say the pandemic has thrown a wrench in a time-intensive and financially draining process. They are challenging the premise that it had any significant effect on present-day admissions, and that it’s highly improbable for people to apply to medical school on short-term notice.
“I spent two years saving up money to take three months off work and to afford the application fees,” said Erica Crittendon, who received an offer from the University of Washington. She applied to 28 schools and invested thousands of dollars into the process, which she described as “one of the most grueling periods” of her life. Crittendon was simultaneously reeling from several Covid-19 losses in her family, and as a Black applicant, felt affected by the summer’s protests over police brutality.
“A person needs to be incredibly privileged to pull off a last-minute application,” she told Vox. “The pandemic narrative is just highlighting privileges that are detrimental to medicine and health equity.”
Rachel Lutz, a University of Oregon graduate who is awaiting an offer, said that her MCAT exam was rescheduled and canceled several times between March and August, which delayed her application. Schools weren’t consistent about dropping the MCAT exam requirement, which meant most applicants needed to still take the exam to apply to a range of programs.
Lutz’s clinical opportunities were canceled, and she moved in with her parents to save money. “Applying was very stressful and upsetting at times, but I was privileged in that I didn’t have to seriously consider not going through with it,” she told me. “I don’t think taking another gap year would outweigh future earnings for me, but I know people had to make that tough decision.”
Some say the circumstances of the pandemic — and the lack of leniency from admissions officers and schools — have excluded hundreds of prospective applicants. According to the advocacy group Students for Ethical Admissions, only those with significant amounts of financial privilege and economic support can manage to apply amid the many changes in the process.
“There are many students who are now lost to the application process,” a spokesperson for SEA told Vox. “That’s a loss of diversity, of competent and capable individuals, just because the application process was so woefully mismanaged.” The Association of American Medical Colleges published a response addressing applicants’ concerns in July, but students felt that the acknowledgment changed little about the process. “The pipeline in medicine is already very leaky,” said the SEA spokesperson. “It’s disappointing that this year, the academic medicine community seems to have shrugged its shoulders.”
The applicants and health care workers who spoke with Vox firmly believe that medicine is their vocation. Yet, the coronavirus has stymied their pursuits at almost every level, from delaying licensing exams and required tests to eliminating opportunities for key clinical work that would aid their job search. The pandemic’s lasting effects on their careers and livelihoods won’t easily be forgotten.
Women march in Tegucigalpa on January 25, 2021 to protest against Congress strengthening the constitutionally mandated ban on abortion. (photo: CNN)
Honduras: How Lawmakers Made It Nearly Impossible to Legalize Abortion
Tatiana Arias, CNN
Arias writes: "This week, lawmakers in Honduras changed the country's constitution to make it virtually impossible to legalize abortion in the future - an extreme election-year move that critics warn will further endanger women's health."
On Thursday, the country's Congress ratified a January 21 amendment to constitutional Article 67, which now specifically prohibits any "interruption of life" to a fetus, "whose life must be respected from the moment of conception."
Honduras was already one of few countries worldwide with a complete ban on abortion, meaning the operation can't be performed even in cases of rape or incest, when the fetus is gravely deformed, and if the pregnancy endangers the mother's life. The use, sale, distribution and purchase of emergency contraception is also prohibited.
The new reform, known as "Shield Against Abortion in Honduras" and promoted by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez's ruling National Party, also now creates a legal "shield" against future changes to the ban.
The changes raise the Congressional voting threshold to modify abortion law from two-thirds majority to three-quarters. Since Honduras's unicameral Congress has 128 deputies, the new rules would require at least 96 to vote for future changes to these articles -- an unlikely scenario at the moment, since 86 voted for the amendments.
The reform also blocks any future attempts to repeal or modify the change. "Legal provisions created after the effective date of this Article that establish otherwise, will be null and void," states the ruling from the Congressional commission appointed to the matter.
"As a woman and a mother, I am in favor of life and against abortion, I want to speak on behalf of those who are in the mother's womb and cannot be opposed," said Gloria Bonilla, a Deputy for the Liberal Party who voted for the change.
Women's rights advocates have fiercely condemned the change. Merly Eguigure, an activist with the Honduran rights organization Movimiento de Mujeres por La Paz "Visitación Padilla" told CNN it would only reinforce dangerous conditions for Honduran women.
"The shield law will continue to condemn poor women to practice abortion in unsafe conditions, which could lead to death on the one hand or to prison on the other," Eguigure said.
According to September 2020 report by the World Health Organization, unsafe abortions account for between 4.7% and 13.2% of maternal deaths globally, each year. The report also notes that "restrictive laws are not effective in reducing the rate of abortion."
An epidemic of sexual violence
While it is hard to know how many women and underaged girls have clandestine abortions in Honduras, the Honduran NGO Women's Rights Center estimates that between 50,000 and 80,000 such abortions occur in the country each year.
The country has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world -- often a significant factor in unwanted pregnancies. Nearly one in three Honduran women over the age of 15 has experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner, data from the United Nations' 2020 Human Development Reports shows.
In 2018, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) carried out a health campaign aimed at providing medical and mental health care to survivors of sexual violence in Mexico and Honduras. In the Honduran capital city of Tegucigalpa, 90% of all pregnancy cases attended by the MSF mission were due to sexual assault.
Nineteen percent of those cases were teenage mothers under 18 years old. "We know that a teenage pregnancy has a major risk of complications, putting both mother and baby at risk," said Tania Marin, MSF Regional Medical Coordinator for Mexico and Honduras.
The adolescent birth rate in Honduras is higher than the region's average and more than twice the global average, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
The minimum age for legal sexual consent in Honduras is 14. But in 2017 alone, 820 girls aged between 10 to 14 gave birth in Honduras, according to data from the health secretary cited by HRW.
Political pressures in a major election year
Nevertheless, for over 30 years the Honduran government has clung to a system that penalizes women with up to six years of prison for obtaining an abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.
In February 1997, Honduras's penal code was modified to establish a penalty from three to six years in prison for women who obtain an abortion and for the medical staff who are involved in the process. In April 2009, the country's Congress passed a bill banning emergency contraception -- a move upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012.
Pressure from Honduran religious groups is widely seen as the dominant political force in maintaining such strict laws on abortion.
"It's impossible to understand how abortion is viewed in Honduras without considering the outsized role religion plays," write researchers Amy Braunschweiger and Margaret Wurth in a June 2019 report for Human Rights Watch. "Conservative Christian churches, both Catholic and evangelical Protestant, are extremely influential and the vast majority of Hondurans belong to one or the other."
And experts from a United Nations working group that visited Honduras in November 2018 reported that "both Catholic and evangelical churches have significant influence over political decision-making bodies and public opinion, including in the discussion of the decriminalization of abortion in three circumstances and lifting the prohibition on emergency contraception."
Eguigure, the women's rights activist, put it more bluntly. "The country is coopted by religious fanatics."
2021 is a major election year in Honduras, with both the presidency and all 128 seats of Congress up for grabs. Though abortion is not a historically decisive voting issue for Hondurans, the topic may have been particularly sensitive amid the recent wave of pro-choice rulings in the region.
"Abortion is murder, it is taking the life of those who want to be born," Pastor Oswaldo Canales, President of the Evangelical Confraternity of Honduras told members of Congress during a January 19 discussion session on abortion with other religious leaders, including a priest from the Catholic Church.
Honduras is one of six countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Suriname to prohibit abortion altogether, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute.
But Neesa Medina, a member of feminist collective Somos Muchas, told CNN she believes its extreme anti-abortion stance cannot endure forever. The shield law reveals a real fear of Latin America's growing pro-choice movement, she believes.
"They don't realize that it's impossible to stop the future," said Medina.
President Joe Biden signs an executive order in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. (photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
New Biden Executive Order Makes Science, Evidence Central to Policy
John Timmer, Ars Technica
Timmer writes: "Agencies will perform evidence-based evaluations of their own performance."
esterday, US President Joe Biden signed three executive orders. The order with the widest scope was focused on climate policy, and it received the most attention. But the other two, while more narrowly focused, may also have a profound impact because they seek to reorient the entire federal government's approach to science itself. That includes both protecting scientists from political interference and ensuring that government decisions are based on the evidence produced by science as often as possible.
PCAST is back
One of the two executive orders officially starts off the Biden administration's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST. The organization is typically set up by an executive order and runs for two years before being renewed by a second. It dates back to the George H.W. Bush administration and has a broad remit to identify the current consensus in relevant fields of science and technology as well as to advise the entire executive branch regarding them.
The importance of PCAST isn't just limited to science agencies; for example, an Obama-era council issued a report on forensic science that was relevant to everything from research-funding bodies to federal law enforcement agents.
The two-year term of PCAST ensures that each president would typically get the chance to establish their own shortly after inauguration. But President Donald Trump took nearly three years to name his first Council, meaning that it was still technically in place until yesterday, when Biden's new order dissolved it. The quick action is likely to be indicative that the administration plans on leveraging the council's advice. Biden has already named Nobel Laureate and Caltech chemist Frances Arnold and MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber as PCAST co-chairs.
And it will be listened to
Having good science advice is not especially useful if it doesn't get heard. Which is why an accompanying memorandum, entitled Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking, is a critical accompaniment to the formation of PCAST. The memo states a proposition that really shouldn't be controversial but seemingly has been: "science, facts, and evidence are vital to addressing policy and programmatic issues across the Federal Government."
The memorandum establishes President Biden's policy regarding the use of evidence in government decision-making. The relationship between science and policy should be a two-way conversation. Science isn't a body of facts that should be treated as the final word; it's a collection of conclusions in which we have varying degrees of confidence. And policies necessarily involve compromises that may require input from scientists on how best to balance competing needs.
But there have been many instances—most notably in the pandemic response—when scientists were prevented from communicating accurate information to the public or when scientific conclusions were distorted in order to enable them to support a predetermined policy. "Improper political interference in the work of Federal scientists or other scientists who support the work of the Federal Government and in the communication of scientific facts undermines the welfare of the Nation, contributes to systemic inequities and injustices, and violates the trust that the public places in government to best serve its collective interests," the memorandum argues.
The memorandum then goes on to say that the Office of Science and Technology Policy—a White House office that will be headed by geneticist Eric Lander—will be responsible for ensuring that the federal government follows scientific integrity policies. These policies ban political interference and prevent the "suppression or distortion of scientific or technological findings." The National Science and Technology Council, a cabinet-level body, is charged with forming a task force for evaluating scientific-integrity policies in all agencies of the federal government.
The evaluation will include consideration of policies regarding instances when federal scientists and contractors interact directly with the public through news and social media. The task force will also identify means of handling areas of genuine scientific agreement (as opposed to fake disagreements, like those regarding the existence of climate change). Policies will be updated as needed due to recent advances in fields (such as artificial intelligence) and new methods (such as citizen science).
What to expect
When the report is done, every federal agency will be expected to name a chief science officer who will be responsible for ensuring that the agency follows the guidelines developed by the task force. Agencies will also be expected to provide annual reporting on any instances when there are complaints that the guidelines aren't being followed and the outcome of any investigations into them.
The agencies will also be expected to apply evidence-based evaluations of their own activities. "Agencies' evidence-building plans and annual evaluation plans shall include a broad set of methodological approaches for the evidence-based and iterative development and the equitable delivery of policies, programs, and agency operations," the memorandum advises. These should include everything from analysis of data we already gather to evaluations of pilot projects and randomized control trials. In short, Biden wants agencies to have ways of determining whether what they're doing is effective.
Overall, many agencies probably have polices that already handle some of these issues. But this executive order represents a significant effort to ensure that those policies are up to date and consistent across agencies. While the order might not fully restore "trust in government," it could certainly repair some of the damage caused by the government's recent attempt to tailor aspects of the pandemic response according to its political needs.
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