08 March 21
Again Disaster Strikes, and I Mean Strikes
So my home/office is in Northern California in a still-redwood-forested area. It’s beautiful, but it’s also risky. In addition to the now yearly wildfires that threaten the area, the forest itself can make living there hazardous.
Last Friday night at around 10 pm, just after I had gone to bed, the top 1/3 of a large redwood tree snapped off in the wind and sent thousands of pounds of trunk and branches crashing down onto the roof of my house.
The house still stands, but I’m being moved out as the repair crews takeover. RSN’s Managing Editor, Angela Watters, is going to be taking over the fundraising duties. Please give her your support. She’ll need all she can get.
Truly,
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
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CA 95611
08 March 21
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The Differences Between the Vaccines Matter
Hilda Bastian, The Atlantic
Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same.
ublic-health officials are enthusiastic about the new, single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, despite its having a somewhat lower efficacy at preventing symptomatic illness than other available options. Although clinical-trial data peg that rate at 72 percent in the United States, compared with 94 and 95 percent for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, many experts say we shouldn’t fixate on those numbers. Much more germane, they say, is the fact that the Johnson & Johnson shot, like the other two, is essentially perfect when it comes to preventing the gravest outcomes. “I’m super-pumped about this,” Virginia’s vaccine coordinator told The New York Times last weekend. “A hundred percent efficacy against deaths and hospitalizations? That’s all I need to hear.”
The same glowing message—that the COVID-19 vaccines are all equivalent, at least where it really counts—has been getting public-health officials and pundits super-pumped for weeks now. Its potential value for promoting vaccination couldn’t be more clear: We’ll all be better off, and this nightmare will be over sooner, if people know that the best vaccine of all is whichever one they can get the soonest. With that in mind, Vox has urged its readers to attend to “the most important vaccine statistic”—the fact that “there have been zero cases of hospitalization or death in clinical trials for all of these vaccines.” The physician and CNN medical analyst Leana Wen also made a point of noting that “all of the vaccines are essentially a hundred percent” in this regard. And half a dozen former members of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board wrote in USA Today, “Varying ‘effectiveness’ rates miss the most important point: The vaccines were all 100% effective in the vaccine trials in stopping hospitalizations and death.”
There’s a problem here. It’s certainly true that all three of the FDA-authorized vaccines are very good—amazing, even—at protecting people’s health. No one should refrain from seeking vaccination on the theory that any might be second-rate. But it’s also true that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t all the same: Some are more effective than others at preventing illness, for example; some cause fewer adverse reactions; some are more convenient; some were made using more familiar methods and technologies. As for the claim that the vaccines have proved perfectly and equally effective at preventing hospitalization and death? It’s just not right.
These differences among the options could matter quite a bit, in different ways to different people, and they should not be minimized or covered over. Especially not now: Vaccine supplies in the U.S. will soon surpass demand, even as more contagious viral variants spread throughout the country. In the meantime, governors are revoking their rules on face masks, or taking other steps to loosen their restrictions. It’s tempting to believe that a simple, decisive message—even one that verges on hype—is what’s most needed at this crucial moment. But if the message could be wrong, that has consequences.
The idea that all of the vaccines are pretty much the same, in that they’re perfect at preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations and death, got its legs on social media. The USA Today op-ed by the former members of the Biden team illustrated this by linking to a data table found on Twitter. Created by the infectious-disease doctor Monica Gandhi, it showed a variety of trial results for six different vaccines. One column was rendered in canary yellow—“Protection from hospitalizations/death”—and every cell read “100%.” A similar table, tweeted out a few days earlier by the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Ashish Jha, conveyed the same idea through a grid of zeros—as in, zero people hospitalized, zero people dead. The prominent physician and researcher Eric Topol followed with his own clinical-trial data summary featuring a column of 100 percents. “That is impressive!” he wrote across the top. All told, their posts would be retweeted about 15,000 times.
The data were indeed suggestive of an encouraging idea. Based on the numbers so far, we can expect the vaccines to provide extremely high levels of protection against the most dire outcomes. Still, we don’t know how high—and it’s clear they won’t uniformly cause hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 to disappear in vaccinated people.
The experts understand this, of course. Gandhi has been updating her table as more data come in, and now pegs Moderna’s efficacy on that front at 97 percent; Jha has since tweeted that “nothing is 100 percent … But these vaccines sure are close”; and Topol told The Atlantic that the numbers in his tweet are not a sufficient basis from which to draw “any determination of magnitude of effect,” though the fact that they all point in the same direction is “very encouraging.” Still, the message of perfection that their initial tables and tweets spawned—the gist, for many readers, of all those 100s and zeros—has since been picked up far and wide, and misinterpreted along the way.
To grasp the shaky nature of these particular data, it’s important to remember how the vaccine-development process began. Last April, not long after the pandemic began, the World Health Organization set out a target efficacy for vaccines of 50 percent, with options for how that value should be measured. A vaccine could be shown to reduce the risk of symptomatic disease, severe disease, or transmission of the coronavirus. The FDA offered similar guidance in June, and other regulatory agencies also followed the WHO’s lead. Among these choices, symptomatic disease was the most feasible, because it’s both a common outcome and one that’s easier to confirm in a large-scale trial. An outcome that included asymptomatic infections would have been even more common, but screening for all infections would have been prohibitive, especially early in the pandemic. So that’s how the vaccine trials were designed: Each would try to demonstrate at least 50 percent efficacy with respect to symptomatic disease as its “primary outcome.”
The trials could have used severe disease, hospitalization, or death as primary outcomes, but that would have slowed things down. These events are far more infrequent—there could have been 200 infections for each COVID-19 death in the U.S.—and that means it would have taken more time, and larger numbers of trial participants, to generate enough data to be sure of a 50 percent efficacy. Developers did include “severe COVID-19” as a secondary outcome—that is, one that would be measured and analyzed, but for which the trial might not have been designed to provide a definitive answer. Efficacy against hospitalization and against death, however, were not included as secondary outcomes for every trial.
Given that fact, the data can’t support a claim that the vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing these serious outcomes. (Topol highlighted this very issue in an op-ed last fall for The New York Times.) Out of the six vaccines included in the dramatic data tables that made the rounds on Twitter, the clinical trials for only two of them—Oxford-AstraZeneca’s and Johnson & Johnson’s—included hospitalization for COVID-19 as a secondary outcome, and reported that efficacy rate. The clinical research for one other vaccine, made by Novavax, had hospitalization as a secondary outcome, but that trial hasn’t been reported in full yet. (On my website, I’ve provided more detailed information and analysis of the relevant data.)
Now, a casual reader of clinical-trial reports—or their summaries on social media—might take the fact that no hospitalizations of vaccinated people are mentioned to mean that none occurred. That’s risky, given that pieces of the data have been published across various medical journals and via several different regulatory agencies rather than in full in one place; that the plans for some trials did not specify ahead of time that the vaccine’s efficacy at preventing hospitalizations would be calculated; and that we’ve seen only minimal early data (via a press release from Novavax) from one of them. It would be just as risky to assume that all hospitalizations would be included in the analyses of people who developed severe COVID-19. Hospitalization and severe disease are not synonymous—people could be coping at home even though COVID-19 has caused their oxygen levels to drop severely, and moderately ill people might be hospitalized out of an abundance of caution when they are at high risk of getting worse.
The two vaccine trials that did explicitly report hospitalizations as an efficacy outcome make this latter issue very clear. For the AstraZeneca vaccine, one person in the control group had severe COVID-19, but eight people were hospitalized; for Johnson & Johnson, 34 people in the placebo group had severe COVID-19, but only five people were hospitalized. It’s true that zero vaccinated people were hospitalized in either study after the vaccines took effect. But with numbers that small, you can’t draw a reliable conclusion about how high efficacy may be for these outcomes. As Diana Zuckerman of the National Center for Health Research pointed out about the Johnson & Johnson trial, “It’s misleading to tell the public that nobody who was vaccinated was hospitalized unless you also tell them that only 5 people in the placebo group were hospitalized.” She’s right. And you can’t be confident about predicting effectiveness precisely in a wider population outside the trial, either. For example, some of the vaccine trials included relatively few people older than 60 as participants.
You can see how fragile these numbers are by looking at those compiled for severe disease. In the Pfizer trial, for example, just one vaccinated person developed severe COVID-19 versus three in the placebo group—which meant that a single bout of disease made the difference between a calculated efficacy rate of 66 percent and one of 100 percent. For the Novavax and Oxford-AstraZeneca trials, there were zero people with severe disease in the vaccinated group versus only one in the control group, so adding or subtracting one would have been even more dramatic. The problem is even greater for deaths. For that efficacy analysis, only two of the vaccine trials—for Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s—reported any COVID-19 deaths at all in the control groups.
It’s also important to remember that these are early results: Some people who enrolled very late in the trials aren’t yet included in reported data, and analysis is still under way. Indeed, the FDA pointed out in December that one vaccinated person in the Moderna trial had been hospitalized with apparently severe COVID-19 two months after receiving a second dose. That person was in a group still awaiting final assessment by the researchers, and was not mentioned in Moderna’s formal readout of results.
We’ve learned a little more from the ongoing public vaccination programs. Four important reports have come in the past two weeks. In one, researchers compared about 600,000 people who had had a full course of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel with 600,000 people matched in age and other demographics who had not been vaccinated. The shots’ effectiveness at preventing hospitalization was measured at 87 percent. (“This vaccine is fabulous in a real world setting,” Jha tweeted in response.) A preprint from Scotland reported an efficacy rate against hospitalization of about 80 percent among people 80 or older, almost all of whom had received only one dose of either the Pfizer or the AstraZeneca vaccine. Two reports from Public Health England estimated a reduction of hospitalization of about 50 percent and 43 percent for the same age group, again almost all after just one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. These are exciting outcomes—those vaccines really, really worked! But they oughtn’t lead anyone to think that the vaccines are all the same, and that protection will be perfect.
Where does that leave us for making decisions? As Anthony Fauci told The New York Times last weekend, “Now you have three highly effective vaccines. Period.” Again, you will get a lot of benefit from any of them, and your risk will shrink even more as those around you get vaccinated too. Whichever one you start with, a booster may be coming in the not-so-distant future, of the same vaccine or perhaps a different one. By taking the first vaccine you can get, you’ll also avoid the risk of finding yourself without protection if infection rates surge where you live.
Efficacy is merely one layer, though. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an edge at preventing symptomatic illness, but the Johnson & Johnson vaccine brings its own advantages. It has no demanding freezer requirements, which means it’s easier to distribute and more accessible to many communities. It’s more affordable than the other two—the company is providing it at cost around the world. Then there’s the fact that resources can be stretched a lot further when only a single dose has to be administered.
For individuals, too, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has benefits. As a one-and-done injection, it’s more convenient. It also has a lower rate of adverse events than Moderna’s. You can’t compare results of these trials too precisely, but there are indications of a striking difference. About 2 percent of those who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine recorded having reactions, such as fatigue, muscle aches, and fever, that were severe enough to interfere with daily activities. For those getting their second injection of Moderna, that rate was higher than 15 percent. People who are on the fence about getting vaccinated may find that this difference tips the scales in favor of getting a shot. Others who have doubts about the newness of the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may appreciate the fact that Johnson & Johnson’s approach has already been deployed in the company’s Ebola vaccine, which got full drug approval in Europe last year.
Given these concerns, there’s some danger in the message—however well intentioned—that the COVID-19 vaccines are all the same by any measure, or that they’re perfect wards against severe disease. Vaccination is a public-health imperative, and going full tilt to promote uptake supports the common good. But it’s a personal health decision too. People want to protect themselves and those close to them, and they are likely to care about outcomes other than hospitalization and death, no matter what anyone says now.
Still, raising these concerns in public can be fraught. In response to an inquiry about her data table, Gandhi affirmed the importance of looking at severe-disease outcomes and noted that “careful, collegial and collaborative scientific discourse on the vaccines is imperative moving forward to help us get through the pandemic.” Topol pointed out that he has emphasized the vaccines’ measured efficacy against symptomatic disease many times before, so any isolated reference to his table “takes that particular post out of context.” Jha wrote in an email that he stands by the message of his original tweet, and notes that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are so rare among the people vaccinated in these trials, to quibble over differences is akin to “counting how many angels are dancing on the head of the pin.”
I can see why this might seem like quibbling, but I just don’t think it’s a trivial matter. It would be different if I thought the effectiveness of every one of those six vaccines against hospitalizations and death would really end up being close to 100 percent—or if I bought into the idea, now widespread, that they have already been shown to “nearly” or “effectively” eliminate these outcomes. There is very good reason to be encouraged by the data, but to say right now that people who have been vaccinated face zero risk of serious outcomes—that, for them, COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the common cold—is sure to influence behavior. Imagine how people in high-risk groups would feel about going to the movies, or how their employers would feel about putting resources into workplace safety, if we all assumed that vaccines confer perfect protection against hospitalization or death. Now imagine how the same people and employers would feel knowing they were 85 percent protected.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the public or the personal interest will be served by hype. People who think the vaccines provide ironclad protection may lose trust in experts if reality falls short. Trust in coronavirus-vaccine information is already a problem, and could sink even lower. Activists who are opposed to vaccination may end up turning experts’ “super-pumped” promises against them.
“The idea that people can’t handle nuance,” Jha tweeted at the end of February, “it’s paternalistic. And untrue.” I couldn’t agree more. The principle of treating people like adults is fundamental. We don’t need to exaggerate. Talking about the trade-offs between different medicines and vaccines is often complicated, but we do it all the time—and we can do it with COVID-19 vaccines too.
Protesters in Atlanta on Saturday. (photo: Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters)
US Supreme Court Rejects Last of Trump's Election Appeals
Al Jazeera
The court threw out the last of Donald Trump’s appeals challenging election results in battleground states that he lost.
he US Supreme Court on Monday disposed of the last of the three cases brought to the justices by former President Donald Trump challenging his election loss, bringing a muted end to his quixotic quest in the courts that had been aimed at holding onto power.
The court, without comment, rejected Trump’s appeal challenging thousands of absentee ballots filed in Wisconsin, an election battleground that the Republican businessman-turned-politician lost to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 20,000 votes. Biden became president on January 20.
It was the last of the three petitions filed at the Supreme Court near the end of Trump’s presidency that the justices declined to take up. The court on February 22 turned away Trump’s other two appeals – a second Wisconsin challenge and one relating to voting in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state Trump lost. Lower courts had previously ruled against Trump in those three cases.
It was already clear that the high court, which includes three justices appointed by Trump, had no intention to intervene in the cases and others filed by his allies because it did not act before Congress on January 6 certified Biden’s victory. That formal certification was interrupted when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol.
The court on Monday turned away another election-related case filed by Trump ally Lin Wood, who had asked the justices to block the January 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia. The court never acted on the request and Democrats won both races, giving them narrow control of the Senate.
Also on Monday, the court sidestepped a chance to review the scope of a legal defence called qualified immunity that has been increasingly used to shield police accused of excessive force, turning away an appeal by a Cleveland man who sued after being roughed up by police while trying to enter his own home.
The justices declined to hear the appeal by Shase Howse, who said he was slammed to the ground outside the house where he lived with his mother in a poor and mostly Black neighbourhood, struck in the back of the neck and jailed after police deemed his actions suspicious. Howse, who was 20 at the time, is Black. The police officers involved in the 2016 incident are white.
Qualified immunity protects police officers and other types of government officials from civil litigation in certain circumstances, allowing lawsuits only when an individual’s “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights have been violated.
Police use of force has been closely scrutinised following the May 2020 death of a Black man named George Floyd after a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck.
The US House of Representatives last Wednesday passed policing reform legislation that among other provisions would eliminate the qualified immunity defence for law enforcement. The legislation, supported by most Democrats and opposed by Republicans, faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
Julissa Reynoso, co-chair of the Gender Policy Council and chief of staff to first lady Jill Biden, speaks during a press briefing at the White House Monday. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
ALSO SEE: Biden Establishes Gender Policy Council on International
Women's Day. What to Know
On International Women's Day, Biden Signs Gender Equity Measures
Melissa Block, NPR
Block writes: "President Biden marked International Women's Day on Monday by signing two executive orders geared toward promoting gender equity, both in the United States and around the world."
READ MORE
A recruit receives his weapon at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, Calif., on March 1, 2021. (photo: Lance Cpl. Zachary Beatty/US Marine Corps)
The Military's Failure to Reckon With White Supremacy in Its Ranks
Melissa del Bosque, The Intercept
When it comes to rooting out extremists, military investigators have provided conflicting accounts of their own regulations.
iam Collins joined the Marine Corps in 2017 with the intention of recruiting other soldiers to form a paramilitary defense force, a “modern day SS,” as he wrote in the now-defunct neo-Nazi forum Iron March in 2016. “Everyone [in the group] is going to have been required to serve in a nation’s military, whether U.S., U.K. or Poland,” Collins wrote, according to a federal indictment filed in November. “It’s a goal for the long term.”
In the military, Collins was promoted to Marine lance corporal at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where he served as a rifleman and earned medals including the National Defense Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and a Humanitarian Service Medal, according to his personnel records. The whole time, federal prosecutors allege, Collins was a committed white supremacist intent on inciting a race war and creating a white separatist state.
In the Marines, Collins met like-minded soldiers in Jordan Duncan, a cryptology analyst, and Justin Wade Hermanson, a corporal serving in the same unit as Collins. By the summer of 2020, prosecutors say the three, along with another man, Paul James Kryscuk, were manufacturing their own silencers and fully automatic rifles and amassing an arsenal. They moved to Boise, Idaho, where they surveilled and talked about shooting Black Lives Matter protesters. “The final frontier is real life violence,” Kryscuk wrote to the group on Instagram, according to the indictment. He praised Collins for having “sacrificed the most and contributed the most for the cause. Added 3 leathernecks and got us tons of gear and training while suffering in the Corps for years.”
After the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, in which dozens of those charged had a military background, newly appointed Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin pledged to “rid our ranks of racists and extremists.” But the nation’s first Black defense secretary will first have to contend with a deeply entrenched military culture that has long ignored the problem.
The soldiers, including 21-year-old Collins, who were indicted for illegal weapons manufacturing and distribution, illustrate how military leaders have long resisted more careful vetting during recruitment. Despite posting white supremacist views online during recruitment and after enlistment, Collins didn’t raise any red flags. He was only investigated after anti-fascist activists and journalists publicized his Iron March posts in 2019.
Lecia Brooks, chief of staff for the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, said she and others have for decades lobbied the Department of Defense to implement basic procedures that would detect white supremacists during recruitment, such as tattoo databases and the screening of social media accounts. “They just won’t put robust screening measures in place,” Brooks said. “Looking at social media accounts, for instance, could reveal so much, as we learned recently.”
Brooks was referring to the FBI vetting the social media accounts of thousands of National Guard members providing security at the Capitol during Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. At least 12 members were sent home due to security concerns because they’d posted extremist views online, the Associated Press reported, two of them about Biden’s inauguration. Some had ties to right-wing militias.
“Most people with these views, they’re hiding in plain sight,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The indictment of Collins and his co-defendants, she said, appears to be “another classic example of the fact that the military wasn’t paying very close attention.”
The Scale of the Problem
After years of neglect, Beirich said she’s encouraged that military leaders have admitted they have a problem. “The next step is determining just how big it is,” she said. The Defense Department doesn’t track data on soldiers, like Collins, who are investigated and forced out of the military because of extremist activities. Collins was given a “premature discharge” in September, according to his personnel file, due to the “character of his service being incongruent with the Marine Corps’ expectations and standards.” Investigations and punishment are often left to commanders at the unit level, who don’t necessarily report the outcomes to military leaders higher up the chain of command.
To get a sense of the scale of the problem, in early February, Austin called for a military-wide stand-down in which commanders will be required to carve out a day to talk with their units about extremism. “One of the challenges here, and one of the reasons why he wants to do this, is we don’t know the full breadth and depth of it,” John Kirby, the Pentagon’s spokesperson, told reporters after the announcement. “It’s just not clear.”
Anecdotally, the problem appears to be getting worse. For the last four years, the Military Times, an independent publication that caters to military readers, has polled active-duty service members about whether they’ve personally witnessed white supremacy and racist ideology in the military. In 2020, 57 percent of minority troops surveyed said they had, up from 42 percent in 2017, when the survey was first conducted. The Times noted that the troops surveyed “classified white nationalism as a national security threat on par with al-Qaida and the Islamic State, and more worrisome than the danger posed by North Korea, Afghanistan or Iraq.”
Brooks said it’s not surprising to see increasing evidence of extremism, because the military reflects society as a whole. “The radicalization has grown,” she said. “You’ve got political conspiracy theorists and QAnon mixed with the more traditional hate and far-right groups who are white nationalists. It’s a dangerous mix.”
Beirich said the current climate is the worst she’s seen in two decades of tracking extremism. “White supremacy and militia groups were growing under Obama, facilitated by social media and in relation to America having its first Black president. But once Trump got in there, the ranks grew much quicker, and there were more organizations,” she said. “Now we have white supremacist militias, QAnon, ‘Stop the Steal’ supporters, MAGA supporters all together storming the Capitol.”
Internal Confusion
For decades, the radicalization of active-duty soldiers and veterans has been a persistent and lethal problem for the military. In 2017, Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guard member and co-founder of the violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, was arrested for possessing bomb-making materials after one of his roommates fatally shot two others in their Tampa apartment. On Russell’s nightstand, police found a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh, the Army veteran whose 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma federal building killed 168 people in America’s worst domestic terror attack.
“We know that some groups actively attempt to recruit our personnel into their cause, or actually encourage their members to join the military for [the] purpose of acquiring skills and experience,” a Defense Department spokesperson told reporters after the Capitol siege, according to the Military Times. “It also brings legitimacy, in their minds, to their cause, the fact that they can say they have former military personnel that align with their extremist and violent extremist views.”
But when it comes to rooting out those extremists, the various branches of the military are not only in disagreement, but also confused about their own regulations. Military investigators gave conflicting testimony during a February 2020 congressional hearing after Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., inquired about Cory Reeves, a master sergeant in the Air Force who was outed in 2019 by anti-fascist activists as a member of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group now called the American Identity Movement. After being investigated by the Air Force, Haaland said, Reeves received a demotion and letter of reprimand but was allowed to remain in the military until outside pressure finally forced him out.
“Mere membership” in a white supremacist group is not prohibited under Air Force policy, explained Robert Grabosky, law enforcement deputy director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The OSI only investigates “active participants” in white supremacist groups, he said. The OSI did investigate Reeves because he was fundraising and organizing for Identity Evropa, but disciplinary action was left up to Reeves’s command.
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, who was presiding over the hearing, was surprised to hear Grabosky suggest that the Air Force didn’t have a zero-tolerance policy when it came to white supremacy. “You’re saying active participation equals something like a tattoo, but active participation does not equal being a member of one of these extremist organizations,” she said. “I find that astonishing.”
Another investigator for the Navy argued that any expression of racial hatred was grounds for dismissal. The disagreement among the investigators illustrated one of the military’s biggest challenges, said Beirich, who also testified. “They made it very clear at the hearing that the various investigative departments don’t seem to know what their own rules are.”
A Global Movement
Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi skinhead who now runs a nonprofit that works to de-radicalize extremists, said the military should enforce a culture of zero tolerance from the top down. “But some in our society are still debating whether white supremacy is a problem,” he said. “If the establishment doesn’t recognize it, then the agency just isn’t there to change it.”
Trump’s presidency pushed white supremacist views from the fringes into the mainstream, Picciolini said. “When I was a skinhead in the ’80s and ’90s, we didn’t have somebody powerful in office or an influencer in the media or a whole news network dedicated to what we were trying to recruit people with.”
Social media allows white supremacist groups to connect across borders, Picciolini added. The Christchurch shooter, who killed more than 50 people in New Zealand, cited Dylann Roof and Norwegian white supremacist Anders Breivik in his rambling manifesto, while the gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso invoked Christchurch as inspiration for his massacre in Texas. “These are cross-functional organizations that work with each other. They share propaganda. They share members,” Picciolini said.
All of these groups are looking to recruit members with military training, not only in the United States but around the globe. In January, Canada’s outgoing military leader described xenophobia and violent extremism as a “serious threat,” citing a growing number of hate crimes investigations into soldiers linked to far-right groups like the Proud Boys. In February, Canada listed the Proud Boys, along with Atomwaffen Division and The Base, another violent neo-Nazi group, as terrorist organizations. And last year, Germany’s defense minister was forced to disband an elite anti-terrorism unit after it was discovered that it had been infiltrated by neo-Nazis.
“Canada is having serious problems, and Germany, of course, had to shut down an entire elite commando unit,” said Beirich. “It’s a very deep problem.”
Active-duty soldiers and veterans are especially susceptible to being radicalized, according to Picciolini. “Many of them suffer from PTSD, they’re jaded by their jobs, and maybe they’ve suffered some other loss like divorce, bankruptcy, or a death in the family,” he said. “I call these ‘potholes,’ which can lead people to these toxic movements where they are searching for a sense of identity, community, and purpose.”
Social Media Double Standards
In early February, Speier sent a letter to Biden asking that he issue an executive order directing the military to screen the social media posts of new recruits and those seeking security clearances. Such screenings aren’t currently conducted, she wrote, not even “as part of the background investigation process for security clearances, despite the collection and reporting of other intrusive, private data, such as financial and behavioral health information.”
Military investigators need to take action, said Beirich, instead of largely relying on the media and watchdog groups to unmask white supremacists, as in the case of Collins, who was only investigated after thousands of Iron March messages, posts, usernames, emails, and IP addresses were leaked anonymously online. Vice News counted at least three users on the neo-Nazi forum as being active members of the military, and in November 2019, Newsweek identified Collins as one of them.
“What the military needs to do is create a unit of people who are experts on tracking these sites,” said Beirich. “People are being directed to join the military who come from extremist groups. So they’re going to have to be a little more proactive in stopping this.”
Capt. Casey Littesy, a spokesperson for the Marines, confirmed in a written statement that “Collins was investigated following allegations of white supremacist activities.” Littesy wrote that the Marines began a pilot program last May using the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit database to screen the tattoos of potential recruits for affiliation with white supremacy groups. The military’s use of the FBI database was recommended in a Defense Department report issued last year that examined ways to bolster vetting during recruitment. The report also considered social media screening but concluded that it needed further study because it would be difficult for “human analysts to … effectively search the Internet on the hundreds of thousands of people each year that undergo DOD background vetting.”
Similarly, Littesy wrote that the Marines don’t rely on social media vetting during recruiting because it’s too complicated. “The proliferation of social media platforms, the fact that most of them do not prohibit aliases, and the ease with which a user can conceal or misrepresent their true persona online makes attempts to screen someone based on social media activity unreliable.”
Katrina Mulligan, managing director for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said that creating a social media vetting program could bring up a host of legal and practical concerns. Under current military policy, soldiers who are caught using racist and extremist language on social media can be penalized and kicked out of the military. But Mulligan, who has advised on intelligence policies for both the National Security Council and the Justice Department, said she worries that a vetting program could be used to target the wrong people.
“You have to be very careful about how you do this,” Mulligan said. “Because history is replete with examples of times when we have tried to go after white supremacists and ended up creating legal frameworks and structures that were then used to harm the groups that we’re actually trying to protect.”
Beirich, on the other hand, said that vetting the social media of potential recruits is the least the military can do. “We’re requiring U.S. visa applicants to turn over 10 years of their social media, but we’re not screening people who we’re going to put in programs where they learn to build bombs and kill effectively,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
An Overdue Reckoning
Cameron McCoy, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps and military history professor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said the military’s reckoning with extremism is long overdue. But white supremacy can be as subtle as it is extreme, he said. It’s reflected in who gets promoted within the military and who has the power to make decisions and policies that make a difference for diversity. “I think the argument for many people of color who serve in the military is, ‘Why are we not represented at the top?’”
Neco Armstrong, who served 16 years in the Army Reserve, much of it working in human resources, said reports of discrimination by Black soldiers were so common in one brigade she served in that she began to track each incident in a running document, then reported the problem to the Reserve’s Equal Opportunity Office. “I told them that my unit had white supremacists in it,” she said. “But they ignored me. And there was never any investigation.”
Black soldiers often received more write-ups and harsher punishments, she noticed. “It was just general harassment,” she said. “And when it came time for promotion, they didn’t advance. A lot of the soldiers ended up taking early retirement or transferred out as soon as they could.”
Army Reserve spokesperson Lt. Col. Simon Flake declined to comment on Armstrong’s specific allegations. “There is no place in the Army Reserve for disrespect or intolerance of anyone based on their race, color, creed, gender, national origin, sexual preference, or orientation,” he wrote in an email to The Intercept. “The Army Reserve is a diverse organization that takes all allegations of soldier or Army civilian discrimination seriously.”
But systemic discrimination touches everybody, said McCoy, who has spent nearly two decades in the Marines. He said he’s encouraged by the historical significance of Austin’s appointment but skeptical that a fundamental change in the military’s culture will happen anytime soon. “Obama served for eight years as president, and look where the nation still is,” McCoy said. “What I want to see from them is action,” he said of military leaders.
Seeing the Capitol overrun on January 6 by an angry mob gave him the same feeling as when he saw George Floyd killed in the streets of Minneapolis, McCoy said. “It was sickening and saddening from an emotional standpoint,” he said. “And just this fatigue from constantly the same argument, the same conversation. And we haven’t seen any tangible efforts. Joe Biden seems to be trending in the right direction, but it’s taken him 40 years to come around. Will we have to wait another 40 years?”
Former Guantanamo guard Steve Wood, right, flew to Mauritania this spring to visit Mohamedou Ould Slahi - the detainee he once spent his days guarding. Slahi was released from Guantanamo in 2016. (photo: Mohamedou Slahi/NPR)
Close Guantanamo: Ex-Prisoner and Torture Survivor Mohamedou Ould Slahi Calls on Biden to Shut Prison
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "President Joe Biden is facing new calls to close the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an enduring symbol of U.S. abuses in the 'war on terror.'"
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Women's march against gender violence in Ukraine. (photo: AP)
Women March in Ukraine Against Gender Violence
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Thousands of Ukrainian women marched on Monday in Kyiv to demand the Cabinet of Ministers to ratify the Istanbul Convention, a European multilateral instrument for preventing and fighting violence against women."
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Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO Darren Woods arrives for a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing in 2018. (photo: Getty Images)
Call the Fossil Fuel Industry's Net-Zero Bluff
Kate Aronoff, The New Republic
Aronoff writes:
Nothing in the history of the oil and gas industry suggests we should take its word for it on climate.
his week marked a kind of coming out party for the Biden-era fossil fuel industry. At CERAWeek, the industry’s annual energy conference, its top brass talked about how eagerly they’re participating in an energy transition that will allegedly happen at some point, eventually. The American Petroleum Institute—the trade lobby for the oil and gas industry—expressed its openness to some kind of carbon pricing, which some of its members have backed for years. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said his company is “supportive” of net-zero goals. The several members of the Biden administration who joined repeatedly voiced their commitment to capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as well as an openness to working with industry toward that goal.
The notion that governments could actually do this while keeping fossil fuel companies happy, mind you, is at best wildly optimistic. Without a currently unimaginable quantity of negative emissions—through methods like reforestation or direct air capture—modeling from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that meeting 1.5 degree goals would require global oil use to decline by 87 percent by 2050, relative to 2010 levels, and 37 percent by 2030. Gas should decline by 25 percent by 2030 and 74 percent through 2050, coinciding with a total 32 percent decline in energy demand overall, along the same timeline. Going by the rhetoric on display at CERAWeek, the world’s biggest polluters have a relatively simple strategy to pursue profits while aligning themselves with a 1.5 degree target: magic.
Members of the administration didn’t go out of their way to be friendly to oil and gas executives. But they did avoid topics of conflict, for the most part talking about the investment opportunities of scaling up clean energy. Asked how she planned to work with industry, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pivoted to the work ahead with automakers and utility companies—not major oil and gas producers. International climate envoy John Kerry—who in recent months has mentioned how much he’s been talking to the oil executives for his new climate post—warned that they could either embrace the transition toward a low-carbon world or be left “sitting there with a lot of stranded assets. You’re gonna wind up on the wrong side of this battle.”
What this week made clear is that U.S.-based producers, finally confronted with an administration that seems at least semi-serious about climate change, are now adopting the line European producers like BP and Shell have been using for some time: Our core products will be needed for decades to come. We have the expertise to shepherd this transition, and we will continue to be essential to meeting the world’s energy demand and scaling up more clean energy—on our terms.
This isn’t the old denialism oil companies funded decades ago. But it looks a lot like it. Instead of casting doubt on whether the climate is changing, this new messaging strategy casts doubt on the obvious answer to what should be done about it: i.e., rapidly scaling down production. “Until we know the path and what is going to be required and what the solutions are, it’s hard to know,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told investors in a climate-conscious call this week. “What we can do is commit to figure that out, and once we find the answers, you would see us begin to commit and actually be on the path toward net-zero.” Everyone, it seems, wants to get to “net-zero.” What exactly that means for companies that have only ever revolved around producing oil and gas is anyone’s guess. For now, it’s one part creative accounting and many parts a P.R. strategy of waving around shiny objects like biofuels, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage.
So why not call their bluff? If the administration is really committed to 1.5 degrees Celsius, ask fossil fuel companies to submit concrete plans for reaching net-zero to federal regulators. Put experts to work determining whether they’re realistic. Bring the companies under public ownership if not, and make them decarbonize while keeping every worker on the payroll. Mandate that they capture and store carbon permanently—rather than pouring it back into oil production in what’s known as “enhanced oil recovery”—and invest meaningful portions of their budgets in making the technology work. There is no world in which the United States works earnestly toward capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius that keeps the fossil fuel industry happy. And nothing in their history suggests we should take fossil fuel companies at their word when they say they care about the environment or good-faith public engagement.
Backlash to serious climate policy is inevitable. But the fossil fuel industry isn’t the behemoth it was even a decade ago, when it sabotaged attempts to pass climate policy under Obama. Oil and gas executives are on the defensive, if only judged by the fact that they spent their time at a major industry conference talking about all the ways they’re going to paint themselves green. Firms that used to rule the world are finding themselves increasingly isolated among the Fortune 500. And while hardly climate champions, investor-owned utilities and the automobile sector have plenty to gain from an administration that has its sights set firmly on a low-carbon future. Building up utility-scale wind and solar generation and transmission infrastructure means more business for power providers and more union work. Government procurement orders for electric school buses and mail trucks will drive business toward the automakers and make them more competitive in international markets growing steadily greener. Wall Street is salivating over pouring all the cash sloshing around the economy into clean energy—a stark shift from its dive into the shale revolution after the last financial crisis.
It’s also not so obvious that a Republican Party engulfed as it is by climate denial and conspiracy theories will follow oil and gas executives into a brave new era of greenwashing. The Trump administration offered a preview for how the interests of culture-war extractivism—to “drill, baby, drill”—diverge from the industry it was ostensibly trying to help, which has been desperate for higher fuel prices. There are more divisions than ever to exploit within carbon coalitions. Screw the friendly conferences. Time’s running out to divide and conquer.
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