14 February 21
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Charles Pierce | At Least I've Lived Long Enough to See Bernie Sandersas Chair of the Senate Budget Committee
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The day's most interesting congressional sideshow probably was the appearance before the Senate Budget Committee of Neera Tanden, the longtime progressive activist and Internet lightning rod and the new administration's nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget."
He led a useful discussion with Joe Biden's nominee for OMB Director, Neera Tanden, when many senators wanted to talk about tweets.
This would have been the case no matter who the nominee was, since it also was the public debut of the Democratic-majority Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of new chairman…Bernie Sanders. At least I’ve lived long enough to see that.
Tanden, whom I know and whom I like, was heretofore known as a ferocious partisan activist and a longtime ally of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was policy director for HRC’s primary campaign, and that got her sideways with a lot of people who opposed HRC because she’d voted for the Iraq War. Nevertheless, Tanden joined Barack Obama’s campaign and later, his administration, the latter as an aide to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, which put Tanden in the middle of the bloody legislative brawl that culminated in the passage of the Affordable Care Act. But it was in 2016, during HRC’s primary campaign against Sanders, that Tanden was turned into a cartoon bogeyperson by the Sanders forces, and she took the piss out of them in return and in kind. The whole matter always seemed to me to be the living definition of the old saw about academic politics: that they are so vicious because the stakes are so small, particular given the stakes in 2016, which only grew in retrospect over the ensuing four years.
So it was a fairly cool Washington moment when Tanden appeared before Chairman Sanders in her confirmation hearings on Wednesday. The senator got right to the point.
SANDERS: I have a letter in front of me from, I'm sure you have seen, a number of Republican members of the House concerned about some of the things you said as the head but, of course, your attacks were not just made against Republicans, there were vicious attacks made against progressives. People I have worked with, me personally. So as you come before this committee to assume a very important role in the United States government at a time when we need serious work on serious issues and not personal attacks on anybody, whether they're on the left or the right. Can you reflect a little bit about some of your decisions and the personal statements that you have made in recent years?
TANDEN: Yes, senator. I really appreciate that question. And I recognize that my language and my expressions on social media, you know, caused hurt to people and I feel badly about that. And I recognize it's really important for me to demonstrate that I can work with others and I look forward to taking that burden and I apologize to people on either the left or right who are hurt by what I've said.
SANDERS: As you know, it's not a question of being hurt. We're all big boys, I don't see too many girls here, big boys who get attacked all the time. But it's important that we make the attacks expressing our differences on policy and that we don't need to make personal attacks no matter what view somebody may hold. Can we assume as the director of the OMB, we're going to see a different approach, if you are appointed than you have taken?
TANDEN: Absolutely. I would say social media does lead to too many personal comments and my will be radically different.
There were a few bad-faith dives for the fainting couch from the minority-party members of the committee; Lindsey Graham pronounced himself positively vaporous on the subject of Tanden’s having been mean to Sanders. Then there was Senator John (The Wrong) Kennedy, the Jubilation T. Cornpone of Magdalen College, Oxford, who decided to channel some neolithic Saturday Night Live.
KENNEDY: Okay, let me interrupt you. I have to go to another subject. I have to tell you I'm very disturbed about your personal comments about people. It's not just one or two. I think you deleted about 1,000 tweets. And it wasn't just about Republicans. And I don't mind disagreements and policy. I think that is great. I love the dialectic. But the comments were personal. I mean you called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut…did you mean them when you said them?
TANDEN: I really feel badly about them, Senator.
Tanden is an unusual choice for a job virtually designed to be done by a bloodless pedant. But given that the administration seems to be spoiling for a fight with 40 years of oligarchical conservative economics, somebody who swings back from that chair probably is what’s called for. In fact, the most compelling exchange of the hearing came when Sanders asked Tanden about the corporate fundraising that she’d done when she was running the Center For American Progress.
SANDERS: Let me get to another issue that concerns me very much. I happen to believe that big money has an undue influence over the political and economic life of our country. That too often campaign contributions are what determines policy rather than the needs of ordinary Americans. According to the "Washington Post" since 2014, the Center for American Progress has received roughly $5.5 million from WalMart, a company that pays its workers starvation wages. $900,000 from the Bank of America, $550,000 from JPMorgan Chase, $550,000 from Amazon, $200,000 from Wells Fargo, $800,000 from Facebook and up to $1.4 million from Google. Some of the most powerful special interest in our country. How will your relationship with those very powerful, special interests impact your decision making if you are appointed to be the head of OMB?
TANDEN: Senator, I thank you for that question. It will have zero impact on my decision making. I'm actually capped in a number of positions that disagreed vigorously with the policy of those institutions and I appreciate this question and it is my role, it will be my role to ensure that I am only serving the interests of the American people, the administration and its agenda to address rising inequality and address the needs of working families.
This was the discussion worth having. Sanders then took Tanden through a litany of progressive issues, from a living wage to the climate crisis. And it took place almost entirely on grounds that would have been unthinkable back when Tanden was working for the Clintons. Times have changed, and Bernie Sanders is the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and make what you will of that.
Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take groups of them into custody in June near McAllen, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Why Biden's ICE Is Still Deporting People
Belle Cushing, Ani Ucar and Jika Gonzalez, VICE
Excerpt: "Biden's 'pause' only applied to migrants who have orders of removal and thus are already slated for deportation pending any immigration appeals."
Trump used an obscure public health rule that dates back to the 1940s to deport migrant children. Biden hasn't repealed it.
n the morning of Thursday, February 11, an Swift Air charter plane flew from an ICE detention center in El Paso, made a stop in Miami, and finally landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, carrying a group of Haitian asylum seekers. Two more removal flights landed in Haiti that day, including one that had been delayed in Laredo overnight. Another flight had landed on Tuesday, and another the day before that. A sixth flight is scheduled to arrive Friday.
At least 50 removal flights have taken off in total since Biden took office, according to Tom Cartwright, whose group Witness at the Border tracks deportation flights.
On the second day of his term, Biden declared a “pause” on certain deportations for 100 days. That moratorium was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, who this week extended the temporary restraining order for another 14 days.
But even if the moratorium had stayed in place, the flights to Haiti and other countries like El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras, would still have gone ahead, because Biden has not reversed a Trump-era policy that used an obscure public health rule to effectively close the southern border to asylum seekers.
Title 42 is a previously little-used public-health rule that dates to the 1940s. The 1944 Public Health Service Act gave the Surgeon General (later the secretary of Health and Human Services) the power to suspend entry of people or goods to the U.S. for public-health reasons. The 1944 law was preceded by a 1892 law designed to target cholera and yellow fever, and it was expressly written to apply to all travelers, citizens and non-citizens alike.
The Trump administration revived the law with a new interpretation: to give Border Patrol officers the right to turn away non-citizens approaching the borders with Mexico and Canada, even asylum seekers and unaccompanied children, under the guise of keeping out the coronavirus. Migrants expelled under the regulation are not booked into the immigration system, but instead are kept in holding cells for up to several days until they are released into Mexico, or put on a flight to their home country.
Biden’s “pause” only applied to migrants who have orders of removal and thus are already slated for deportation pending any immigration appeals. People expelled under Title 42 don’t fall under that category, since they never made it far enough into the immigration system to receive an alien number, or a credible fear interview, let alone a removal order from a judge. Most of the people on the flights to Haiti were Title 42 expulsions, according to DHS.
CBP turned away 395,128 migrants and asylum seekers from the southern border in 2020 under Title 42. Another 64,136 were expelled in January of this year alone.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that Title 42 would continue to be invoked. “The vast majority of people will be turned away,” Psaki said during a briefing. “Asylum processes at the border will not occur immediately; it will take time to implement.”
The number of people approaching the southern border was up 6 percent in January, according to CBP. There are over a million pending asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database, a backlog that grew during the Trump administration.
The ACLU has sued under multiple lawsuits to block Title 42 for children and families. In one D.C. court, it won a temporary injunction that would allow unaccompanied children to enter the U.S. and claim asylum—until an appeals court struck that down, allowing expulsions of children to continue.
It wasn’t until Thursday that the CDC issued an order stating that unaccompanied children had been exempt since January 30, the day after the appeals court ruled that they were allowed to expel kids. Families are not exempt, however, and advocates have reported removals of children this week.
The order is temporary, and the Biden administration—now a defendant in the lawsuit—will have to decide whether to keep defending the use of Title 42 against families.
Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney suing the government over Title 42, called the policy “unlawful and inhumane.”
“For those looking to assess how far the Biden administration is prepared to abandon the prior administration’s horrific asylum policies, the Title 42 policy and the ongoing litigation challenging the policy is where to focus,” he said.
Despite the CDC’s order, conditions on the ground remain confusing, with some border patrol officials continuing to stop children from entering, according to Jennifer Podkul, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at KIND, which monitors children crossing the border.
“We’re terrified about what is happening to kids right now,” she said.
Even if unaccompanied children are exempt from Title 42, meaning they can claim asylum in the U.S., Podkul and other advocates are concerned about repercussions for families attempting to cross, who may decide to send children across the border alone. “We don’t want there to be any sort of incentive that they’d be willing to send their children ahead to keep them safe,” says Podkul.
This week, a new CBP processing facility opened in Donna, Texas. A tent city for unaccompanied children is planned for Carrizo Springs, Texas.
Biden has reversed some of Trump’s nearly 5,000 changes to the immigration system. On the first day of his term, h signed an order to preserve DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that granted deportation relief to undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children, that Trump sought to undo. Biden halted construction of the border wall, and also announced he will stop enrolling asylum seekers in the Remain in Mexico program, which forced them to await the processing of their asylum claim in Mexico, and Friday announced plans to begin slowly admitting asylum seekers who have been waiting for months.
Those changes were welcome, but Podkul said, “it doesn’t convert to a change in policy at the border as long as Title 42 is still in place.”
Back in May of 2020, dozens of health professionals signed onto a letter stating that there was no disease-prevention benefit to the rule, which was “being used to target certain classes of noncitizens rather than to protect public health.”
That this move was a thinly veiled way to implement immigration policy under the guise of public health was made more clear by a leaked CBP memo on how to implement the new policy, which gave border patrol agents wide latitude to expel any noncitizen they encountered. As the government cites public health to keep out undocumented inmmigrants, people actually do cross the southern border all the time. Over 13 million non-immigration-related border crossings—including bus, train, and car passengers; commercial trucks; and pedestrians—took place at the southern border in December 2020 alone.
“Expelling people under Title 42 is a ruse,” says Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “There is no reason that the United States of America cannot facilitate a process to get these people to safety. No more excuses. This needs to happen now.”
Neo Nazis, alt-right, and white supremacists march through the University of Virginia Campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va. on August 11th, 2017. (photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Meet the Undercover Anti-Fascists
Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone
Kroll writes: "A journalist and online researcher, Conger specializes in infiltrating and exposing the violent far right. Using dummy accounts and pseudonyms, she lurks in private chat rooms and invitation-only forums used by neo-Nazis, militias, Proud Boys, and other right-wing extremists."
Embedded with the team of anti-fascist researchers and activists who infiltrate and expose Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, militias, and other members of the violent far right
n the morning of Wednesday, January 6th, as supporters of Donald Trump gathered near the White House for a last stand to “Save America,” Molly Conger said goodbye to her two dachshunds, Otto and Buck, tossed a wig into her car, and began the two-hour drive from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, D.C.
A journalist and online researcher, Conger specializes in infiltrating and exposing the violent far right. Using dummy accounts and pseudonyms, she lurks in private chat rooms and invitation-only forums used by neo-Nazis, militias, Proud Boys, and other right-wing extremists. When she sees someone make threats or plan for violence, she screenshots the person’s messages, digs up the person’s real identity and employer, and publishes her findings on her Twitter account, @SocialistDogMom, where she has more than 110,000 followers.
Because of her work, Conger is well known among the people she tracks. Members of the online far right have made grotesque sexual comments about her and expressed a desire to physically harm or kill her. She knows this because, in some cases, she’s observed them saying these things without them realizing it. She anticipated some of those people being in the crowd on January 6th, and with her buzz-cut blond hair and slight build, Conger feared she would be easily recognizable. When she got to Washington, she put on the wig and a pair of sunglasses and met up with a friend who is a trained medic.
“The Proud Boys had instructed their members to beat me to death on sight,” she told me. “I traveled with a medic in case I got stabbed.” She planned to take as many photos and videos as she could, gathering evidence for future investigations.
The crowd was larger than she’d expected — she saw enough people to fill a professional football stadium. Some ate from cans of tuna as they listened to Donald Trump Jr. (“The people who did nothing to stop the steal, this gathering should send a message to them”), Rudy Giuliani (“Let’s have trial by combat!”), and other Trump allies rail against the “stolen” election. When Trump addressed the crowd around midday, people climbed into trees to try to catch a glimpse of him. As Trump egged on his supporters — “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — Conger watched the people around her, masked guys in tactical gear next to dads with kids and senior citizens with Trump flags, whip one another into a frenzy. “There was this crusade mentality,” she says.
Since the 2020 election, Conger had monitored a variety of social-media platforms, including Facebook; Parler, the Twitter-like platform funded by at least one member of the conservative Mercer family; and Telegram, an app favored by white supremacists, racists, and anti-Semites. She was disturbed by what she saw. In Facebook groups filled with MAGA fans, the tenor of the conversation was moving toward the language she saw in the more hardcore groups. “These suburban dads are talking about murdering journalists, murdering Nancy Pelosi, hanging Chuck Schumer,” she told me. “Their rhetoric was starting to sound like the race-war guys’.”
She followed the MAGA march as it marched to the Capitol, and was struck by how the light the police presence was in the heart of America’s capital. As her Twitter handle would suggest, Conger identifies as a socialist and an anti-fascist. She’s marched for racial justice and against police violence in dozens of cities. “I’ve been pushed down, beaten, choked, and gassed by a variety of cops,” she says. Now, as the pro-Trump crowd reached the outer security perimeter of the Capitol, she braced for the police to use force on the marchers. “My body is reacting based on past experience: This is where it gets ugly. And then it just … didn’t happen.”
At the base of the Capitol, she finally peeled away from the crowd and watched as the mob fought past the outnumbered police force and ransacked the seat of American democracy. She struggled to process what she was seeing. For years, researchers and journalists like her had warned about the thin line between online hate and real-world violence, and about “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that a drumbeat of hateful rhetoric and political demagoguery leads to unpredictable acts of violence. Still, she had never imagined this.
It was “a logical end point for something I’ve been watching for a long time,” she told me a few days later. “But it’s still a hard thing to absorb watching a group of MAGA dads beat a cop.”
“Seeing it coming and seeing it happen,” she said, “are two very different things.”
A FEW DAYS BEFORE the 2020 election, I was sitting in my apartment when a dozen unfamiliar faces, Molly Conger’s among them, appeared on my laptop screen. The people on the Zoom call were in their twenties and thirties; most knew each other online by their Twitter handles, but for many it was the first time they had seen one another’s faces or heard one another’s voices. Nearly all of them identified as anti-fascists, and all had years of experience infiltrating and exposing the online far right. They had been brought together by a progressive not-for-profit to watch for and prevent election-related violence, for which they would receive a modest stipend for several weeks of work.
The group was so new, it didn’t yet have a name; it later settled on Deplatform Hate. “It was very ‘Antifa avengers assemble!’ ” says Talia Lavin, a member of the group who had recently published Culture Warlords, her chronicle of investigating online white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
I listened as different people described what they were seeing in different corners of the internet. (I was allowed to embed with the group on the condition that I not name the not-for-profit that helped form it or anyone involved who didn’t want to be identified.) The group’s de facto leader is an activist and writer named Christian Exoo. On the Zoom call, Exoo reported back on a nightly planning call hosted by the Oath Keepers, a dues-paying national militia group popular among current and former law enforcement officers. An Oath Keepers leader had talked on the call about defending the White House in the event “Antifa rushes it” and even doing battle with the Secret Service until it “runs out of bullets.” Exoo said he thought this was mostly bluster, but asked the team to be on guard for similar rhetoric among other groups. Another member said militia groups were plan possible operations using an online map of “Protect the Results” demonstrations that had been assembled by a number of progressive groups. Liberal activists and Oath Keepers colliding on election night had all the makings of a disaster; Exoo made a note to alert the liberal groups about what was happening so they could prepare accordingly.
For as long as hate groups have used the internet to advance their cause, a loose network of journalists and activists have committed themselves to disrupting them. Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights who has tracked the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis since the early 1990s, says one of the biggest challenges of this work is keeping up with the far right’s constantly changing tactics, whether by moving to different platforms or devising new ways to recruit members. Today, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Strategic International Studies, far-right extremists “operate and organize to a great extent online, challenging law-enforcement efforts to identify potential attackers,” adding that “right-wing terrorists have used various combinations of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gab, Reddit, 4Chan, 8kun (formerly 8Chan), Endchan, Telegram, Vkontakte, MeWe, Discord, Wire, Twitch, and other online communication platforms.” The need for researchers and infiltrators familiar with all of these platforms, skilled in online surveillance, and fluent in internet culture was greater than ever.
Anti-fascist activists and journalists are far from the only ones working undercover online. The FBI does it, as do state and local law-enforcement agencies. Last fall, the FBI arrested a group of men who dubbed themselves the Wolverine Watchmen and were planning to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; in a criminal complaint in the case, the feds alleged that they first took notice of two of the group’s leaders on an unnamed social-media platform, where the men had joined a group “discussing the violent overthrow of certain government and law-enforcement components.” Established, well-funded nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center also monitor online hate. Overseas, the London-based Moonshot CVE specializes in tracking online extremism in dozens of languages and staging interventions to prevent people from getting drawn into extremism.
But unlike the case in many European countries, the United States’ speech protections and criminal laws make it more difficult to investigate or arrest someone for spewing threatening and dangerous rhetoric online. “We have extremely few tools to appropriately deal with people who express violent hateful things unless they’re violent toward particularly public figures, or violent with an extremely specific place and time,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in Democracy, Conflict, and Governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
For Christian Exoo, the problem isn’t whether law enforcement has enough tools to stop white supremacism and fascism; it’s that the FBI and the police have a long history of actively enforcing the country’s racist hierarchy and suppressing progressive activists and movements. Exoo told me he saw Deplatform Hate as a part of a decades-long anti-fascist and anti-racist movement to fight fascism and white supremacy in America. He traced the fight back to the 1980s, when leftists and socialists in places like Minneapolis used dossiers, public flyers, and sometimes physical violence to keep neo-Nazis from infiltrating the punk-music scene. And like those original anti-fascists, researchers and activists like Exoo see themselves in a struggle against both fascism and governmental institutions. Unlike the Anti-Defamation League or other more mainstream groups, he and his colleagues won’t work with law enforcement. “We fight the police,” Exoo told me. “The police are absolutely a white supremacist institution.”
It’s the combination of a political ideology that sees the police as a part of the problem and a fluency with online culture that puts Deplatform Hate at the leading edge of the fight against fascism and hate. “It makes perfect sense,” says Devin Burghart at Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, “to have folks who are peers of the next generation of white nationalists do their best to disrupt and expose the work that they’re doing.”
WHEN I ASKED members of Deplatform Hate how they learned the skills needed to infiltrate and expose the online far right, many of them brought up Exoo. While there is no rigid structure among the loose network of undercover anti-fascists, Exoo is probably the closest thing to a leader. Part den mother, part organizer, he connects up-and-comers with others in the movement and runs workshops several times a month on how to use open-source intelligence (OSINT) — social media, newspaper databases, forums, property records, tax records, voter records, DMV records, and leaked or breached data sets — to run investigations and identify individuals.
On a Friday afternoon in December, I joined one of Exoo’s workshops. A pale-skinned 39-year-old with a flashy haircut (long on top and buzzed short on the sides; yes, he sees the irony), he wore a black T-shirt, chunky Buddy Holly glasses, and a pair of stereo headphones. Talking into a Larry King-style microphone, he had a polite demeanor — he says, “That’s so sweet of you,” and, “You’re so kind,” unnervingly often — which made for a jarring effect when it was interspersed with a detailed explanation of how to credibly impersonate a neo-Nazi.
Exoo grew up in upstate New York. His dad was a professor and his mom a lawyer who served on the board of the local rape crisis center. He remembers his mom battling with the district attorney’s office and the local police department for doing little to investigate and prevent sexual assault. The experience radicalized him, he says, instilling in him a distrust of law enforcement and a belief in the need for community defense. He dabbled in freelance journalism after college, but he found the work stifling, and editors weren’t interested in his pitches about the alt-right or white nationalism. Around 2014 or 2015, he told me, “I just said, ‘Well, fuck it,’ and went full vigilante.”
Most of the people in Deplatform Hate started out in journalism, labor organizing, or local politics. None had gone out in search of neo-Nazis; more often than not, the hate had come to them — to their communities, their schools, their workplaces. “A lot of people got into this work because of their farmers market Nazi,” Molly Conger told me. (In 2019, a controversy embroiled Bloomington, Indiana, after a farmers market vendor was revealed to have made frequent posts on a message board for Identity Evropa, a white-nationalist group. The vendor denied being a white supremacist and called herself an “identitarian,” which the Anti-Defamation League links to white nationalism in the U.S.) “A lot of people didn’t experience racial terror until the Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist. It’s foolish to think that.”
In 2017, Conger was living in Charlottesville when Identity Evropa, neo-Nazis, the Proud Boys, and other hate groups converged on the city for the Unite the Right rally. A friend of Conger’s named Emily Gorcenski, who had attended the rally as a counterprotester, was attacked and later filed criminal charges against Christopher Cantwell, a far-right figure better known as the “crying Nazi,” for assaulting her with pepper spray; Cantwell responded by suing Gorcenski and another counterprotester for malicious prosecution, demanding $1 million in damages. Conger began listening to Cantwell’s podcast, noting discrepancies between what he was saying on his show and what he was saying in court, and sending them to her friend’s lawyer. Cantwell later pleaded guilty to assaulting Gorcenski and was banned from Virginia for five years. (Last year, a different jury found him guilty of extortion and threatening to rape a rival white nationalist’s wife. He faces up to 22 years in prison and will be sentenced this month.)
Having glimpsed this online underworld of hate, Conger couldn’t look away. Over the next few years, she taught herself open-source intelligence through trial and error. If she could do it over, she told me, she would have done a better job of hiding her personal information online, including her name and where she lives. She has been doxxed, received death threats, and had at least one neighbor post harassing flyers outside her house. Abner Hauge, the editor of the news outlet Left Coast Right Watch, is another member of Deplatform Hate. (Hauge uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them.) Hauge recently told me that after they’d been doxxed by the far right, they now keep a gun on their desk for self-protection. As Conger put it, “All of us doing this work live with the knowledge that maybe some guy that doesn’t like you is going to show up at our house and kill you.”
Christian Exoo began his workshops so people wouldn’t have to experience the harassment that Conger and Hauge have. In the workshop I joined, Exoo started with the basics of infiltrating far-right online spaces: Use a virtual private network, or VPN, to hide your real IP address, which can be used to identify you. Start multiple dummy email accounts and use those accounts to create sock-puppet accounts, or “socks” — fake accounts created for the purpose of going undercover — for whatever platform you’re trying to infiltrate. Deplatform Hate members say they’ll have active socks in dozens and sometimes hundreds of online groups, across numerous platforms, at any given time.
Exoo told the workshop that, when going undercover, it’s important to craft personas to inhabit. He said he keeps Post-it notes around his laptop screen to remind him about various details of the “characters” he uses. “A lot of it is just learning the handshakes of these different worlds,” he told me. “For the Boogaloo Boys, you have to know their memes and talk about guns. In militias, you have to talk about guns and what fleck patterns you like.” (Flecktarn is a camouflage pattern.) To get into some chat rooms, you had to post photos of yourself with your guns or dressed in tactical gear; for others, you went through an interview process, sometimes by phone, other times in writing. These included questions like “What is your race?,” “Define fascism in your own words,” “What are your thoughts on Jews, the alt-right, America, fags, and Trump?” and “Are you ready to become active in real life and not LARP (live-action role play)?”
Those specific questions, Exoo told the workshop, had come during a written interview to join an accelerationist neo-Nazi group based in Eastern Europe. Accelerationists are a strain of neo-Nazis who want to start a global race war. Exoo said he decided to infiltrate and disrupt the group to thwart its ongoing efforts to expand into North America. After passing his interview, he said he noticed one user talk about attacking a leftist podcaster named Daniel Harper. Exoo typed the user’s screen name into Google. One of the first hits was a public Instagram account in Kansas that belonged to a William Smith. The account featured a selfie of a young man in Army fatigues, the name “SMITH” visible on his uniform. Exoo said he found a William Smith in Kansas’ voting records, compiled all his research, and sent it to Harper. A few days later, The New York Times reported the FBI had arrested a 24-year-old Army soldier based at Fort Riley named Jarrett William Smith who had discussed plans to attack a major news network and shared bomb-making instructions. (A judge later sentenced Smith to two-and-a-half years in prison.)
There was another person in the accelerationist chats Exoo was after, he told the workshop. It was the group’s leader, a user who went by the screenname Commander. Exoo said he noticed that Commander had said he lived on an Estonian island with a population of about 32,000 people named Saaremaa, but there was little else about him online. So Exoo took a different approach, stoking the paranoia often found in far-right groups that the platforms they used — in this case, a chat service called Wire — were insecure and liable to be hacked or accessed by law enforcement. Exoo said he persuaded Commander to move the group to the popular encrypted-messaging app Signal. Exoo had a Signal account with a dummy phone number ready to go, but Commander slipped up: He used his actual phone number. Exoo said he traced the phone number to a Snapchat account opened in Commander’s name, plugged the name into Facebook, and got a hit: a profile for a pimple-faced, smiley, 13-year-old who lived in Saaremaa’s largest city.
Exoo said he sent his findings to a European nonprofit that fights anti-Semitism and extremism. As it turned out, the Estonian police were onto Commander as well, having confronted the teenager, who claimed he cut ties with the neo-Nazi group after he was discovered.
The reality, though, is that what Deplatform Hate does isn’t always so clear-cut; and sometimes, the biggest threats aren’t the leaders or the most threatening voices. A few years ago, Molly Conger was tracking an online troll named Daniel McMahon who for months had harassed and stalked her. (McMahon used the pseudonym “Jack Corbin.”) One day, Conger noticed McMahon interacting online with someone named Robert Bowers. Bowers also made threatening comments about her, and when Conger checked out Bowers’ profile, she saw posts that were unhinged and repugnant, but no more so than what McMahon and many others were saying.
She didn’t think about Bowers again until about six months later, when the police identified him as the man who had killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in the most violent anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. “The second they said his name — Robert Bowers, it’s a generic name, there are probably lots of people with the name Robert Bowers — I said, ‘Oh, no, I remember him,’ ” Conger told me.
There was nothing in Bowers’ online footprint, she went on, to lead her to believe he would commit an atrocity. “I’m very familiar with what rises to a threat,” she told me. “I looked at (Bowers’ posts) and thought, ‘This guy is pretty crazy.’ But there was nothing he said that was a crime.” And as she would later learn, the FBI had also been monitoring Daniel McMahon, the same troll Conger was tracking, and so the feds would’ve seen the same exchanges between McMahon and Bowers that she had. (McMahon was later arrested and convicted for making online threats and election interference. His mother told the police that she thought her son had exhibited characteristics of a mass shooter.)
Still, she felt survivor’s guilt that on a rational level made no sense. Her voice caught as she talked about Bowers. In our conversations, she often leavened her stories with a dark humor; that humor was now gone. “This is one of those things that knocks the wind out of me every time it comes up,” she said. “I’ve thought about those people who died every day for the past two and a half years.”
A FEW DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Conger received a series of screenshots taken by someone who was monitoring the Proud Boys on Parler. As the conversation around the then-upcoming January 6th rally was heating up, a user named @WeThePeopleWarrior had made threatening statements about former president Barack Obama, doctors administering Covid-19 vaccines, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Responding to a comment about Roberts’ lifetime appointment, @WeThePeopleWarrior responded: “Sounds like he needs to have his life shortened.” The user went on to write, “If this is our time to refresh the Tree of Liberty then let’s not half ass our sacrifice, the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” The user posted about having a “badge,” suggesting he worked in law enforcement, but at the same time he also wrote that he was not beholden to “a Governor, Mayor, County Executive, or any other commie that thinks the [sic] rule over the people.”
Conger noticed that @WeThePeopleWarrior’s profile picture was an illustration of an animal styled like Rambo, complete with a red headband and a rifle held across its chest. Conger did a reverse-image search of the illustration and found it was a custom piece of art purchased by someone who identified himself as “Grant Tucker.” She tracked down a Facebook profile for Tucker, scanned Tucker’s photos and found a shot of him in a sheriff’s uniform. Within minutes, she had connected @WeThePeopleWarrior to a deputy in the Prince William County, Virginia, sheriff’s office named Aaron Hoffman.
On Christmas Day, Conger published her findings on Twitter. The next day, the Prince William County sheriff’s office announced it had investigated the matter and terminated Hoffman; a county later told me the investigation had discovered a “direct violation” of the office’s social media policy. (Attempts to reach Hoffman through his former employer were unsuccessful. Hoffman told The Washington Post his Parler account had been hacked and he didn’t write the posts in question. “I am in no way a threat to the public. This disturbs me as well.”)
Deplatform Hate’s members use various tactics to try to prevent possible violence. One is basic information sharing, passing intel about the movement and operations of various far-right groups to racial-justice and anti-fascist organizers working on the ground. Another tactic is using an undercover sock to join an online conversation that’s edging toward violence and to attempt to turn down the temperature. Members of the team told me they take different approaches to de-escalation. The most effective is stoking paranoia. Often, a carefully worded question or two about the operational security of an upcoming demonstration or the possibility that law enforcement has infiltrated the group is enough to derail the plan. “You mostly just want to use their language of military tactics to sow confusion and dissension and paranoia, which is not hard,” Talia Lavin says. “These are very paranoid spaces.”
Public exposure — what Conger did by outing Aaron Hoffman — is the most controversial strategy. Critics call it just another form of doxxing, posting someone’s home address, phone number, or other personal information online in an effort to harass, intimidate, and endanger them. Daryle Lamont Jenkins, a longtime anti-racist activist who runs a watchdog group called One People’s Project and who advices Deplatform Hate, says anti-fascists adopted the tactic of exposing their targets in response to anti-abortion activists who published the names and addresses of abortion providers, believing it was only fair to use their own version of this tactic. “We never looked at doxxing as a weapon,” he told me. “We called it reporting.”
Exoo and other members of Deplatform Hate told me they never go further than publishing a target’s name and employer, and that they insist on rigorous fact-checking and a peer-review process before releasing any information. They’ve studied books on open-source intelligence by experts such as former FBI official Michael Bazzell to avoid exposing the wrong person. And while some on the team balked at the word “doxxing” to describe this tactic, they all believed in its usefulness as a way to de-escalate, and also a necessity in situations when law enforcement can’t — or won’t — intervene. “When these guys are pseudonymous or anonymous, the rhetoric gets so loud,” he says. “By identifying them publicly, we’re letting them know that if they’re going to talk like that, there’s going to be accountability.”
Other anti-extremism experts voice doubts about this approach. “I understand why people want to dox the far right,” says Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I also think that what you’re basically asking for is mob rule — and that’s worse.”
Michael German, a retired FBI special agent who worked undercover to disrupt domestic terrorism and who has been one of the loudest voices demanding the federal government pay more attention to white supremacists and other violent extremists, says citizen outfits such as Deplatform Hate have resorted to protecting themselves out of necessity because law enforcement has failed to do so. “It shouldn’t be that way, but it clearly is,” German says.
Yet the potential pitfalls he sees with these citizen groups comes down to oversight and accountability. “Nobody has deputized these individuals, so whose authority are they working under and who is holding them accountable?” German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, told me. “There is one end of the spectrum in which what individuals could do might be extremely dangerous. The best of them on the other end of the spectrum have reputations to uphold, and the reason people follow them is because they’re honest and accurate and accountable to their audiences.”
WHEN MOLLY CONGER RETURNED to her car on January 6th, she had gotten what she’d come for. Her iPhone was filled with photos and videos of the MAGA mob that had stormed the Capitol, faces and hairlines and militia patches and tattoos that could help her later identify members of the crowd, ground truth to use in future investigations. But almost immediately she realized how pointless those photos and videos would be. Hundreds of people who participated in the Capitol Riot insurrection had their phones out as they broke through windows, assaulted cops, forced their way into the Capitol, and ransacked the Senate floor; some of these people had even livestreamed the entire thing, documenting their crimes in real time.
In the days afterward, the staggering volume of content to come out of the Capitol insurrection fueled a nationwide dragnet for anyone who had participated. The FBI released hundreds of potential suspect photos on Twitter, asking for the public’s help with identification; a dedicated FBI tip line received more than 50,000 calls in three days. Digital forensics specialists used facial recognition technology to ascertain some of the most visible participants in the riot. One woman told the feds her ex-husband was one of the mob members who stormed onto the Senate floor. Everyone, it seemed, was now researching and identifying far-right extremists.
Weirdly, it made little sense for Deplatform Hate to join this spot-the-Proud-Boy pile-on. Instead, the team discussed how the events of January 6th would reshape the larger landscape of online hate. On their weekly Zoom call the Monday after the attack, Exoo said that far-right groups like the Oath Keepers militia saw the failed insurrection as a huge show of power and a potent recruiting tool. “This was the biggest galvanizing day for the far right since November 3rd, 2016,” Talia Lavin said on the call. A few weeks later, the Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory warning that the country would continue to see incitements or actual violence by “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition.”
The members of Deplatform Hate were already noticing new mutations in the landscape of far-right hate groups. In the groups he monitored, Exoo told me he was seeing more coalescing around hashtags and conspiracy theories — QAnon, Stop the Steal, fear of 5G telecommunications networks — than explicit racial ideologies, as well as a shift away from established conservative media like Fox News toward fringe outlets including InfoWars and One America News Network. He had also seen some early organizing under the banner of the Patriot Party, which Donald Trump has reportedly considered launching as a third party.
It used to be that regional affiliations were key to far-right organizing: you joined the militia or KKK chapter closest to where you lived. Now, a culture of celebrity defined the far right. Nick Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist and Holocaust denier who calls himself and his followers “groypers,” is one such figure who has amassed a large following. Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn also fit the mold of the far-right celebrity except, unlike Fuentes, they now operate from within the halls of Congress. Whether on the inside or outside, these people used social media to push extreme ideas and disinformation, and then monetized their audiences via livestreaming platforms and online donations. What they all share, Exoo told me, is a belief in the idea that violence was necessary and more important than democracy. “This idea of militant action has absolutely entered the mainstream of the Republican Party,” he says. (Cawthorn, who spoke at the January 6th rally, later said he condemned the attack at the Capitol.)
By late January, the liberal group that helped launch Deplatform Hate had raised more funds, and team members were making plans to ensure its long-term sustainability. They put together a list of de-platforming targets that included Nick Fuentes and GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising site used by the Proud Boys to raise legal defense funds. In the group’s three-month existence, Exoo told me, the team had achieved some notable successes: Zello, the walkie-talkie app, removed more than 2,000 channels “associated with militias and other militarized social movements”; email and fundraising services banned Fuentes from using their services; and PayPal and Venmo said they would block MyMilitia.com from raising money on their platforms.
Is this what success looks like? How do you even measure it? I recently put these questions to Exoo. The members of Deplatform Hate told me they believed in the need to chase these extremists wherever they went and get them de-platformed over and over again. With most successful action, they told me, the target’s audience size dropped off and rarely recovered, meaning fewer people were exposed to their hateful rhetoric. Still, the work could often feel like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. “Deplatforming by itself is not going to rid the world of hate,” Exoo says. “It’s a tourniquet on an open wound. It’s not a solution in and of itself.”
Exoo allowed that January 6th “was absolutely a failure” on the part of anyone who was trying to stop far-right organizing and violence, which included Deplatform Hate. “If we do our jobs right, the world doesn’t know about it,” he said. “The bomb doesn’t go off. The Capitol doesn’t get stormed.” But to a much larger extent, he added, “it was a failure for a lot of people who hold power and who just didn’t take far-right organizing seriously.”
I thought back to something Molly Conger had said about her encounter with Robert Bowers. As guilty as she had felt about not paying more attention to Bowers, the experience had also left her more resolute that what she did, that what Deplatform Hate does, was needed more than ever. “To me, it’s proof that some of these shit posters are murderers,” she told me. “We have to believe it’s possible to turn the tide.”
Under the STAR program, health providers use vans such as these equipped with food, water and other resources to travel to incidents. (photo: Denver Police Department/CBS News)
Denver Health Care Workers Replaced Cops in Handling Hundreds of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Cases - and It Saved Lives
Li Cohen, CBS News
Cohen writes: "A program that replaces police officers with health care workers on mental health and substance abuse calls in Denver, Colorado, is showing signs of success, according to a six-month progress report."
program that replaces police officers with health care workers on mental health and substance abuse calls in Denver, Colorado, is showing signs of success, according to a six-month progress report. Despite responding to hundreds of calls, the workers made no arrests, the report said — and the city's police chief told CBS News on Friday that he believes the program "saves lives."
Under the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, health care workers are dispatched in lieu of police when responding to incidents involving issues with mental health, poverty, homelessness or substance abuse. STAR providers only respond to incidents in which there is no evidence of criminal activity, disturbance, weapons, threats, violence, injuries or "serious" medical needs.
During the first six months of the program, from June 1 to November 30, health professionals responded to 748 calls, including trespassing, welfare checks, narcotic incidents, and mental health episodes, according to the report. None of those cases required help from Denver police and no individuals were arrested.
Police chief Paul Pazen told CBS News that all of those calls were a success.
"That's 748 times fewer that the police department was called, meaning we can free up law enforcement to do what law enforcement is supposed to do, and really what law enforcement is good at, and that is addressing crime issues, violent crime, property crime and traffic safety," he said. "...You have a safer community and you have better outcomes for people in crisis."
Pazen recalled one case in which an individual was complaining of their feet hurting. Under typical circumstances, Pazen said, an ambulance, police and maybe a firetruck would have been dispatched to the scene. Instead, workers equipped with food, water, and hygiene products handled the situation.
"They needed shoes, so [the STAR] team just bought the guy a new pair of shoes," Pazen said. "The typical answer to that would have been to take that person to the hospital. Imagine what that would have cost in response. Imagine what that would have cost in medical bills, for the physician to say the guy needs a new pair of shoes."
The health care workers are intentionally given cases that are less likely to result in police use of force. But as the deaths of Daniel Prude, Patrick Warren Sr. and countless others have shown, police responses to such cases can end in tragedy.
People who have untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter, and those who have an untreated severe mental illness are involved in up to half of all fatal police shootings, according to research by the Treatment Advocacy Center.
In 2020, Mapping Police Violence found that 94 people were killed by police who had responded to reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis.
"By dismantling the mental illness treatment system, we have turned mental health crisis from a medical issue into a police matter," John Snook, executive director and a co-author of the Treatment Advocacy Center study, said in a press release. "This is patently unfair, illogical and is proving harmful both to the individual in desperate need of care and the officer who is forced to respond."
Going into 2020, Denver police said they found that calls for mental health assistance were 17% higher than the three-year average. Of the cases to which STAR responded, nearly 60% of the people who had diagnosed mental health issues were affected by schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.
Similar programs to STAR have been rolled out elsewhere in the U.S. STAR was modeled after the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Oregon, which also uses unarmed intervention members to respond to mental health calls without police backup.
Denver's latest program is just one aspect of the police department's "layered" approaching to tackling issues in the community, Pazen told CBS News.
The city also has three other alternative response programs, including a co-responder program that pairs police with licensed professional behavioral health clinicians to respond to incidents in which people are experiencing behavioral health or substance abuse issues, Pazen said. The department has seven case managers who follow-up with people who were assisted by co-responders or the STAR team, or who were referred by police officers.
While the analysis of the first six months of program found "no concerning issues" and said the program is accomplishing its goal, it also noted that the only way to measure wide-scale effectiveness is to apply it to a larger area over a longer period of time.
STAR teams were only able to be used in certain areas from Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the pilot period.
The program is ongoing, and Pazen said the Denver mayor has committed $1.4 million from the city's general fund to expand the service. The program is also expected to receive an additional $1.4 million in matching funds from Caring for Denver, a foundation that funded the pilot program, and $200,000 carried over from the pilot funding from Caring for Denver.
This, Pazen said, will allow the program to be used seven days a week in more areas.
"We must be mindful that the data is from a small window of time, in one area of the city, during the busiest months of the year for call volume, and co-occurring with a global pandemic," the report states. "...The STAR program has been successful based on the metrics and program goals we evaluated. However, the STAR program will continue to be successful only if the City can continue to engage and build with the community."
During his campaign, President Biden said his administration would fund initiatives to pair police departments with mental health professionals, substance use disorder experts, social workers and disability advocates.
A national rollout such of a comprehensive program like Denver's, Pazen said, could play a major role in that plan.
"I think it saves lives," he said. "It prevents tragedies."
A nursing home resident receives a shot of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine at King David Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a nursing home facility, on January 6. (photo: Yuki Iwamura/Reuters)
I Work in a Nursing Home. Here's Why My Colleagues Are Skipping the Vaccine.
Asif Merchant, The Washington Post
Merchant writes: "As we learned more about the virus - treatments, proper infection control - conditions improved. Then the vaccine offered our first real hope that this pandemic would eventually end. I got my shots in January, as soon as I could. But I soon realized that not everyone shared my enthusiasm."
n almost two decades working in nursing homes, I’ve never been through a time as dire as last spring. Facilities like mine, in the greater Boston area, were working with minimal to no protective gear, very little infection-control training, limited laboratory services and constantly changing public-health guidelines. Residents with covid-19 deteriorated so quickly that they’d crash right in front of me, before we even got their test results.
Staff members got sick, and others stayed home because they were scared to get sick. While many doctors stopped going into nursing homes out of fear for their own safety, my team of physicians and nurse practitioners felt it was our duty to continue seeing patients every day. The need was so great: Units that usually had one certified nursing assistant for every eight to 10 residents suddenly had one person in charge of 30 to 40; we were also short on nurses. People weren’t getting their meals or personal care on time; they suffered from dehydration, bedsores and social isolation. It was a heartbreaking time. I lost over a hundred patients.
As we learned more about the virus — treatments, proper infection control — conditions improved. Then the vaccine offered our first real hope that this pandemic would eventually end. I got my shots in January, as soon as I could.
But I soon realized that not everyone shared my enthusiasm. About half the staff in the four facilities where I serve as medical director said they would not take the vaccine. This might seem shocking: We work in the medical field, and we saw some of the worst ravages of this disease up close. And yet, despite the misery we’d witnessed, my colleagues were wary of the one intervention that offered a light at the end of the tunnel.
Health authorities across the country have reported widespread vaccine hesitancy among nursing home staff. Uptake among residents is high. But a national survey of certified nursing assistants late last year found that nearly 72 percent didn’t want to be vaccinated. The governor of Ohio reported in late December that around 60 percent of his state’s nursing home staffers had elected not to take the vaccine yet. Last month, a union representing nursing home staff in Maryland and D.C. estimated that up to 80 percent of its members opted not to be vaccinated in the first push at their facilities. One Miami health system found that only half its employees wanted to get vaccinated immediately; about 15 percent said they were not interested in getting vaccinated at all.
Those statistics are much less surprising when you consider who works in nursing homes. A lot of the certified nursing assistants I work with are people of color. Their mistrust has deep roots: The United States has a long, ugly history of doctors experimenting on Black people without regard for their consent or needs. And working with the elderly — another population our society marginalizes and neglects — has done little to shore up my colleagues’ faith that the government is acting in their best interests. Nursing homes were among the first and hardest-hit settings in this pandemic, and we never had enough N95 masks or even simple surgical face coverings. So when nursing home employees are informed that they’ll be among the first to get the vaccine — that they’re in the highest-priority group — they’re skeptical. It doesn’t help that many of the most widely available educational materials about the vaccine are produced only in English, shutting out my co-workers who primarily speak Spanish or Haitian Creole.
I started running town halls, in person and over video, to talk to the staff in various Massachusetts nursing homes about the vaccine. Some people come with questions about their specific situations: autoimmune conditions, allergies to food or medicine, pregnancy. I’ve heard more lurid worries, too. Some people thought the shot had a GPS tracker in it that would allow the government to follow their movements. Others claimed that the vaccine changed your DNA and that any future children could inherit the mutation.
No matter how outlandish some fears seem, I can’t shrug them off. People’s concerns aren’t totally random; it’s counterproductive to just dismiss them. Instead, I try to figure out where their understanding went wrong and to offer an explanation for that misunderstanding. For example, vaccines definitely don’t contain GPS-enabled chips, but the Pfizer boxes carrying the doses do have a tracking device so that we can follow shipments to our facilities. After I show the staff videos of the boxes and their bar codes, that seems to assuage their fears. I also talk about the differences between RNA and DNA — people often confuse the two, I say, but the vaccine won’t affect the latter.
Some people have more general concerns: Did some stringent standard fall by the wayside to speed up the development and approval process? A nurse asked me: “So, Dr. Merchant, was there any point in time when you didn’t want to take the vaccine? And at what point did that change?” It helped, I think, that I could answer honestly: Yes, I was skeptical, especially in the spring of 2020. It seemed like President Donald Trump was making unrealistic promises about the timeline for a vaccine and the whole development and approval process might be politicized. But as more data emerged about the vaccines’ efficacy, and as I read up on their safety, the more I trusted the science behind them.
I also talk about why I took the vaccine: I see covid-19 patients every day. I got the shot to protect myself, of course, and to protect my family members — especially my parents, who are elderly and live at home with me. I also want to keep my nursing home residents and co-workers safe; I have a responsibility to my community. And, I add, I’m tired of all the precautions that have become life-or-death necessities in the pandemic. We all want normalcy. Vaccine uptake is our ticket there.
These conversations are incredibly time-consuming — hours that I could’ve used elsewhere, seeing to patients — but they’re worth it. Usually, at the end of the town halls, at least a couple of staff members will say they now feel more comfortable with the vaccines. Others say that they’ll at least consider taking it, or that they don’t want to be the first in line but they’ll get the shot the next time it’s available to them. When you talk to people, when you take them seriously, you can change their minds. I really believe that. I have to believe it.
Protesters march against the Dakota Access Pipeline on March 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
An Open Letter to Biden From Indigenous Peoples
On behalf of Land is Life, In These Times
Excerpt: "The Trump administration has done enormous harm over the past four years to the relationship between the U.S. government and Indigenous peoples, not only in the United States but also around the world. It is of the utmost importance that your administration and the 117th Congress take urgent action to repair this damage."
Trump wrecked the relationship between the U.S. government and Native nations. Here’s how the Biden Administration can repair this damage.
ear President Biden,
Congratulations to you and Vice President Harris on your historic election. We pray for the success of your administration and your efforts to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, reduce global conflicts, respond to challenges presented by global climate change, and restore the ecological integrity of the planet.
Today, as we begin the work of Building Back Better, we are confident that you and Vice President Harris recognize and will honor the fundamental role of Indigenous peoples in addressing the world’s most urgent challenges, including global climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme poverty, and other social and environmental conflicts.
Domestically, this means restoring government-to-government relations with Tribes; honoring the government’s treaty and trust obligations; investing in Tribal health, education, and economic development programs; and promoting Tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
Internationally, the United States must become a champion for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and, in our foreign policy and foreign assistance, engage Indigenous Peoples as partners — through their own social, political, and legal institutions — in addressing the world’s most urgent challenges and in advancing security, prosperity, sustainability, and peace.
As we begin the work of Building Back Better, we humbly, hopefully, and insistently urge your administration to carry out the following actions in the first 100 days of your presidency:
1. Draft a National Action Plan for implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
2. Secure permanent protection for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and halt construction of the Dakota Access and Enbridge Line 3 pipelines.
3. Secure permanent protection for the sacred sites Mauna Kea, Bears Ears National Monument, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
4. Reengage and revitalize the Trilateral Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls (U.S., Canada, Mexico).
5. Commit to engaging and supporting the work of United Nations bodies that address Indigenous peoples’ rights, includingUN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and provide funding for the UN Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples.
6. Make Indigenous Peoples’ issues a standing agenda item at the UN Security Council.
7. Commit to transforming USAID’s development model to one that is based on human rights, a model that — with regard to Indigenous peoples — invests in strengthening their collective rights to lands, territories, and resources; recognizes and respects their right to self-determination; and embraces a standard of free, prior, and informed consent.
8. Commit to promoting and implementing effective actions for the protection and respect of the human rights of Indigenous defenders globally.
9. Confirm that Indigenous Peoples will have a prominent, meaningful space in the 2021 Global Summit for Democracy.
10. Pardon and free Leonard Peltier.
Nominating a daughter of the Laguna Pueblo, Rep. Deb Haaland, as the next Secretary of the Department of the Interior is an inspired, important choice. We believe that she is uniquely qualified for this position, and we are confident that she has the vision and wisdom needed to usher in a new era of true government-to-government relations between the United States and Native American Nations; an era that not only recognizes but also celebrates the role of Native Americans in creating a stronger, more sustainable, more resilient USA.
Revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on your first day in office also fills us with hope, but, as you know, there is so much more work to do.
As you asserted in your inaugural address to the nation, “there’s much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.” For Indigenous Peoples, these words carry enormous significance. Only a strong resolve, together with bold and visionary actions, will enact systemic change and stop the long historical process of dispossession of Indigenous lands and violations of their rights.
Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, said during your inauguration ceremony, “While we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.” President Biden, you have the unique opportunity and power to change history and set strong foundations to begin moving toward a future where Indigenous peoples are allowed to assume their rightful role as partners in creating a more just and sustainable world; where they are self-determined, and their collective rights to territories, resources, and knowledge are recognized and respected.
We are prepared and motivated to collaborate with your administration in moving forward toward this brighter future.
Signed by:
Brian Keane, Former Member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), Former Advisor — Indigenous Peoples’ Issues — USAID and Land is Life Co-Founder and Board Member
Casey Box, Executive Director, Land is Life
Mariam Wallet Aboubakrine, Tin Hinane Association — Mali, Former UNPFII Chair, Land is Life Board Member
Marcos Terena, Inter Tribal Committee (ITC) — Brazil and Land is Life Co-Founder and Board Member
Cecilia Baltazar Yucailla, Kichwa Indigenous leader from Ecuador and Land is Life Board Member
Gleb Raygorodetsky, Land is Life Board Member
Bernadette Demientieff, Gwich’in Steering Committee Executive Director
Gregorio Mirabal, Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA)
Jiten Yumnan, Centre for Research and Advocacy, Manipur – India
Jackson Shaa, Narasha Community Development Group, Kenya
Daniel Kobei, Ogiek Peoples’ Development Program (OPDP), Kenya
Gloria Ushigua, Sapara Indigenous activist from Ecuador
Alicia Weya Cahuiya, Waorani Indigenous activist from Ecuador
Killa Becerra, Inga Indigenous activist from Colombia
Olé Kaunga, IMPACT Kenya and PARAN Alliance
Basiru Isa, The Network of Indigenous Peoples and Local Population for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystem in Central Africa (REPALEAC)
Nicolas Salazar Sutil, Forest Guardians
Elias Kimaiyo, Sengwer Indigenous Community, Kenya
Tezera Getahun, Pastoralist Forum Ethiopia (PFE)
Close-up of white plastic bag with yellow smiley slowly drifting under surface of water with school of tropical fish. (photo: Andrey Nekrasov/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)
Hundreds of Fish Species, Including Many That Humans Eat, Are Consuming Plastic
Alexandra McInturf and Matthew Savoca, The Conversation
Excerpt: "Trillions of barely visible pieces of plastic are floating in the world's oceans, from surface waters to the deep seas. These particles, known as microplastics, typically form when larger plastic objects such as shopping bags and food containers break down."
Researchers are concerned about microplastics because they are minuscule, widely distributed and easy for wildlife to consume, accidentally or intentionally. We study marine science and animal behavior, and wanted to understand the scale of this problem. In a newly published study that we conducted with ecologist Elliott Hazen, we examined how marine fish – including species consumed by humans – are ingesting synthetic particles of all sizes.
In the broadest review on this topic that has been carried out to date, we found that, so far, 386 marine fish species are known to have ingested plastic debris, including 210 species that are commercially important. But findings of fish consuming plastic are on the rise. We speculate that this could be happening both because detection methods for microplastics are improving and because ocean plastic pollution continues to increase.
Solving the Plastics Puzzle
It's not news that wild creatures ingest plastic. The first scientific observation of this problem came from the stomach of a seabird in 1969. Three years later, scientists reported that fish off the coast of southern New England were consuming tiny plastic particles.
Since then, well over 100 scientific papers have described plastic ingestion in numerous species of fish. But each study has only contributed a small piece of a very important puzzle. To see the problem more clearly, we had to put those pieces together.
We did this by creating the largest existing database on plastic ingestion by marine fish, drawing on every scientific study of the problem published from 1972 to 2019. We collected a range of information from each study, including what fish species it examined, the number of fish that had eaten plastic and when those fish were caught. Because some regions of the ocean have more plastic pollution than others, we also examined where the fish were found.
For each species in our database, we identified its diet, habitat and feeding behaviors – for example, whether it preyed on other fish or grazed on algae. By analyzing this data as a whole, we wanted to understand not only how many fish were eating plastic, but also what factors might cause them to do so. The trends that we found were surprising and concerning.
A Global Problem
Our research revealed that marine fish are ingesting plastic around the globe. According to the 129 scientific papers in our database, researchers have studied this problem in 555 fish species worldwide. We were alarmed to find that more than two-thirds of those species had ingested plastic.
One important caveat is that not all of these studies looked for microplastics. This is likely because finding microplastics requires specialized equipment, like microscopes, or use of more complex techniques. But when researchers did look for microplastics, they found five times more plastic per individual fish than when they only looked for larger pieces. Studies that were able to detect this previously invisible threat revealed that plastic ingestion was higher than we had originally anticipated.
Our review of four decades of research indicates that fish consumption of plastic is increasing. Just since an international assessment conducted for the United Nations in 2016, the number of marine fish species found with plastic has quadrupled.
Similarly, in the last decade alone, the proportion of fish consuming plastic has doubled across all species. Studies published from 2010-2013 found that an average of 15% of the fish sampled contained plastic; in studies published from 2017-2019, that share rose to 33%.
We think there are two reasons for this trend. First, scientific techniques for detecting microplastics have improved substantially in the past five years. Many of the earlier studies we examined may not have found microplastics because researchers couldn't see them.
Second, it is also likely that fish are actually consuming more plastic over time as ocean plastic pollution increases globally. If this is true, we expect the situation to worsen. Multiple studies that have sought to quantify plastic waste project that the amount of plastic pollution in the ocean will continue to increase over the next several decades.
Risk Factors
While our findings may make it seem as though fish in the ocean are stuffed to the gills with plastic, the situation is more complex. In our review, almost one-third of the species studied were not found to have consumed plastic. And even in studies that did report plastic ingestion, researchers did not find plastic in every individual fish. Across studies and species, about one in four fish contained plastics – a fraction that seems to be growing with time. Fish that did consume plastic typically had only one or two pieces in their stomachs.
In our view, this indicates that plastic ingestion by fish may be widespread, but it does not seem to be universal. Nor does it appear random. On the contrary, we were able to predict which species were more likely to eat plastic based on their environment, habitat and feeding behavior.
For example, fishes such as sharks, grouper and tuna that hunt other fishes or marine organisms as food were more likely to ingest plastic. Consequently, species higher on the food chain were at greater risk.
We were not surprised that the amount of plastic that fish consumed also seemed to depend on how much plastic was in their environment. Species that live in ocean regions known to have a lot of plastic pollution, such as the Mediterranean Sea and the coasts of East Asia, were found with more plastic in their stomachs.
Effects of a Plastic Diet
This is not just a wildlife conservation issue. Researchers don't know very much about the effects of ingesting plastic on fish or humans. However, there is evidence that that microplastics and even smaller particles called nanoplastics can move from a fish's stomach to its muscle tissue, which is the part that humans typically eat. Our findings highlight the need for studies analyzing how frequently plastics transfer from fish to humans, and their potential effects on the human body.
Our review is a step toward understanding the global problem of ocean plastic pollution. Of more than 20,000 marine fish species, only roughly 2% have been tested for plastic consumption. And many reaches of the ocean remain to be examined. Nonetheless, what's now clear to us is that "out of sight, out of mind" is not an effective response to ocean pollution – especially when it may end up on our plates.
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