22 May 21
Where Have Our Larger Donors Gone?
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22 May 21
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Jeremy Scahill | Why Biden Is Right to Leave Afghanistan
Jeremy Scahill, The New York Times
Scahill writes: "When Joe Biden assumed the presidency in January, he embarked on a mission to reverse a slew of policies put in place by former President Donald Trump while leaving untouched the elite foreign policy consensus."
Mr. Biden issued 42 executive orders in his first 100 days — more than than any other president since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and has waged a methodical campaign against Mr. Trump’s agenda. With one major exception: Afghanistan.
Beginning with his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump railed against America’s forever wars and pledged to bring American troops home and to get out of Afghanistan. Despite his rhetoric, Mr. Trump vacillated between winding down some Obama-era lethal U.S. campaigns (in Pakistan and Libya) and expanding others (in Syria, Somalia and Yemen). He loosened the dubious Obama-era restrictions on killing civilians in airstrikes after suggesting, when he was a candidate, that the United States should kill the families of suspected terrorists. He also reauthorized the C.I.A. to conduct drone operations after Barack Obama’s administration shifted those powers to the Pentagon.
Mr. Trump basked in his self-perceived glory when in April 2017 the United States dropped the 21,600-pound “mother of all bombs,” the most powerful nonnuclear weapon, on a village in Afghanistan. In 2019 alone, the United States carried out more than 2,400 airstrikes in Afghanistan.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
One Year On, How George Floyd's Murder Has Changed the World
Deborah Douglas, Angelique Chrisafis and Aamna Mohdin, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "George Floyd's murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same, said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May."
The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
“How many times have we seen Black death go viral?” asked Noor, the co-founder of Black Visions, which advocates for abolition, an approach to public safety that does not involve the police.
Noor, who helped found the group in 2017, knows that to abolish policing you also must confront systemic racism and the weight of history. And Noor also knows as the child of Somali immigrants, that the issues are global.
The high-profile murder of Floyd, who was pinned under the knee of a police officer for nine minutes and 29 seconds, captured the parallels between police violence against Black people across the globe, and evoked the deaths of Adama Traoré in France and Mark Duggan in the UK before him, even though the circumstances of the deaths differ. And the execution reflected a common history of violence against Black people, from slavery to colonialism, that united protesters in a renewed global movement against the legacy of empire and its enduring racist symbols.
Since his death, those public images have rapidly come down – from the toppling of a statue honoring the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, to the official removal of the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis’s statue from the Kentucky state capitol.
More statues honoring the Confederacy, the band of southern states that fought against the US government in the civil war, have been taken down in the past year than in the previous four years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Since Floyd’s death, nearly 170 statues, street names and other tributes to the Confederacy have been removed or renamed in the US, SPLC data shows. More than 2,100 tributes to the Confederacy remain in public places; over 700 are monuments.
This reclaiming of public history isn’t new, but Floyd’s death was the latest catalyst, said historian Robin DG Kelley. “There has been a continuous reckoning around public history and race,” said Kelley, Gary B Nash endowed chair in UShistory at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And it wasn’t his death but the presence of 26 million [protesters] and the fear it generated that compelled institutions to act.”
Demands to remove monuments, change names and decolonize history were a part of the US culture wars of the 1990s, which included defending ethnic studies at universities. More recently, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, the successful 2015 student movement in South Africa to remove a statue of Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, has inspired similar action in the UK and other countries.
Noor, who uses the pronoun “they”, said they were taught a whitewashed version of US history through the perspective of white, cisgendered men, while growing up in Rochester, Minnesota.
“To sell so many untruths, so many lies as factual, you have to actually erase. You have to omit whole lived histories,” said Noor, who delved deeply into African and African American history for the first time while attending the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Historian Nell Irvin Painter, who addresses Confederate iconography in an ink, graphite and collage series called From Slavery to Freedom, said many people weren’t ready to reckon with the symbols until Floyd’s death.
“When the big public got ready around 2020, all this came to the fore,” said Painter, author of The History of White People. “[Floyd’s] murder was so egregious that you just couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen. Like with civil rights, there’s a long history that most people hadn’t known about … that could only be seen by lots of people at the right historical time.”
That was also true in the UK.
In what historians describe as an “unprecedented” public reckoning with the British empire, an estimated 39 names – including streets, buildings and schools – and 30 statues, plaques and other memorials have been or are undergoing changes or removal since last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in the UK.
“The death of George Floyd sparked an exploration for me on how this country deals with racism. It was a big awakening,” said Tyrek Morris, a university student in Manchester.
Morris, who organized his first protest following Floyd’s death, said wherever he turned, he saw placards with an enduring slogan: “The UK is not innocent.”
The message reverberated deeply within him and started him on a journey where he interrogated what he was taught and, more importantly, what he wasn’t. At these Black Lives Matter protests, Morris heard from the family of Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of the police sparked the 2011 London riots; of Shukri Abdi and Christopher Kapessa, two children who drowned, but whose families say authorities failed to take their cases seriously; of the crimes of the British empire and a frank assessment of Britain’s role in the slave trade.
An estimated 15,000 people marched with Morris, who organised with the group All Black Lives UK (ABLUK), in Manchester on 6 June, one of 160 protests that weekend. ABLUK also organized a gathering of 10,000 demonstrators in Bristol, where they toppled a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Colston. Xahra Saleem, a writer who runs a small jewellery business, clearly remembers the moment the Colston statue was taken down. She was one of the organisers of the protest and was walking ahead of the march. She passed the statue and joked to a friend: “Wouldn’t it be crazy if it fell down at some point?” Then it did. “It was like we manifested it,” she said.
A decades-long campaign by the local community to get the statue removed had been ignored by the local authority. But once the statue fell, everything changed.
“Schools changed their names and roads’ names changed. Everything happened so quickly. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of a push,” Saleem said.
In France, the only country that outlawed slavery and later reinstated it, outrage over Floyd’s death quickly revived a tense debate about the weight of colonial history and the country’s slave-trading past. Starting in French Caribbean islands, statues were pulled down or defaced by protesters. In Martinique, a long-simmering controversy over white figures on plinths boiled over: statues of the white politician Victor Schœlcher, who facilitated the decree to abolish slavery, were targeted amid calls for more visibility for the rebellions by enslaved people, which led to abolition.
“George Floyd’s death opened up a lot of debate on race in France – around questions of white privilege, police violence and racism in the police as well as France’s colonial past,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a writer, broadcaster and anti-racism campaigner.
“But there was also a lot of resistance and denial of the problem, particularly in TV studio debates,” Diallo said. “There will always be some denial, but what has changed is that we can no longer ignore the issue. The lid can’t be put back on, particularly for young people today.”
France was the first country to officially recognise slavery as a “crime against humanity” – enshrined in a 2001 law which set out to improve the teaching of slavery and the colonial era. But historians have raised concerns that teaching in French schools is still too little.
“The Napoleon commemorations in France this May showed that this is still a debate,” Diallo said of the bicentennial observance of the emperor’s death.
Though he has promised to be “uncompromising in the face of racism, antisemitism and discrimination”, President Emmanuel Macron has insisted that France would not take down statues of controversial, colonial-era figures.
The response to Floyd’s death “already had an international dimension”, historian Kelley said. “It wasn’t simply sympathy for another African American victim. It was recognition that this kind of violence was happening all over the world.”
Floyd’s case was eerily like that of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black man, who died after being stopped by gendarmes outside Paris in 2016. Pinned to the ground, he told officers: “I can’t breathe,” just as Floyd did. Investigating judges are examining conflicting medical reports in his case.
Assa Traoré said her brother initially ran from police because he didn’t have his identity card with him, an extension of life there. A Black or North African man in France is 20 times more likely to be stopped for an identity check than a white man, research shows. And those controls can end in violence or death.
Black people enslaved by he French had to carry official documents, according to Traoré, who said the need for documentation “links back to everything that is unsaid about colonial history and its consequences … As long as the French police doesn’t confront its past and say there is racism in the police, we won’t get anywhere, it’s a struggle that will never end.
“So yes,” Traoré said, “statues and street names are a start in a country facing up to the violence of its past.”
For Bree Newsome Bass, who in 2015 removed the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina statehouse, the whole story of America is in question, similar to the debates in France and the UK.
“We tend to think of ourselves as having broken free of colonialism, but what is lost is the history of genocide of the indigenous Americans. I’ve really come into recognizing what that means in terms of how we think of America, as this new nation as opposed to what it is, which is really a colony,” said Newsome Bass, a film-maker and activist. “It began as a slave colony, and even though we broke off from Britain, the United States evolved into its own white settler colonial state.”
Since Floyd’s death, there is a new roll call of Black people in the US who have died at the hands of police, a painful reminder of what hasn’t changed when the statues came down. While Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing Floyd, names like Rayshard Brooks and Daunte Wright join a growing list of lives lost, linked to steady demands for institutional change and greater accountability.
Kelley said events of the past year illustrate how easy it is to topple a statue or change the name of a building, and how difficult it is to topple an empire, dismantle racial capitalism and patriarchy, and replace prisons and jails with “non-carceral, caring forms for public safety”.
The situation also creates a quandary, Kelley said. What do we make of universities that change building names but have huge real estate holdings in neighboring low-income communities or endowments with investments in private prisons or occupied Palestine? What do we make of Barclays Bank removing the name of enslaver Andrew Buchanan from its new Glasgow property, and yet it has its own sordid history with trading the enslaved?
“[Removing symbols] makes us feel good, but it ironically has the effect of personalising and individualising racism,” Kelley said. “Some of the most important British abolitionists, for example, came from the ranks of industrial capitalists. Do they stay or fall?”
In the UK, campaigners also fear that changes such as removing statues are cosmetic. Robert Beckford, a professor of Black theology at the Queen’s Foundation, said: “Presenting a more balanced view of the history is necessary, but I’m worried that removing the symbols, removing of a plaque is viewed as equivalent to anti-racist, institutional change.”
For Morris, the work has only just begun. He points to the British government’s controversial report on race, which claimed to not find evidence of institutional racism in the UK in the areas it studied, as a sign of how far the UK must go to confront its past and present. He believes the answer to that is more protests.
Saleem, who organised the Colston protest, agrees. “We’re planning to make it a summer of anti-racist movements, activities and protests.”
The work continues in Minneapolis, too. This summer, Black Visions plans to gather residents to answer the question: “What will keep us safe?” The goal is to have a mandate and collective definition of safety that is driven by Minneapolis residents and includes alternatives to current approaches to public safety.
A coalition called Yes 4 Minneapolis submitted a petition to change the city charter, which requires the city to rely on police for public safety. The petition calls for a November ballot question to allow residents to replace police with a public safety department.
“I want to see more of my people and my ancestors reflected in the world that I live in,” said Noor. “But how about we just build that world instead of just changing the street signs in this one?
“It’s Black folks continuing to fight for the basic right … to live so we can thrive. George Floyd is a part of that story.”
Members of the Palestinian Abu Dayer family cry at al-Shifa hospital after the death of family members in an Israeli airstrike on the family's home in Gaza City on May 17, 2021. (photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)
Israel Attacks on Gaza Left Strained Health Care System in Tatters
Shrouq Aila, Anna Therese Day, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Dr. Khaled Harazeen described the scene at al-Shifa Hospital in the occupied Gaza Strip as 'catastrophic.'"
After a ceasefire on Thursday, Palestinians took stock of damage wrought by airstrikes that left doctors dead and at least 19 health care facilities destroyed.
“We are already working within extreme limitations and now we face dozens of victims at a time,” he told The Intercept. “We try our best to triage the cases, but there are so many wounded. The end result is a lot of deaths and an unbearable load on the medical staff.” Harazeen added, “We are shattered.”
Leading up to the ceasefire announced on Thursday evening, the medical professionals of Gaza’s main hospital had worked around the clock for more than a week to treat the soaring number of war injuries inflicted by Israeli airstrikes — nearly 2,000 in only 10 days. Medical workers and their facilities have not been exempt from the attacks: Israeli airstrikes have killed doctors and damaged at least 19 health clinics, drawing increasing international outcry and condemnation.
The swelling number of patients, casualties among medical staff, and attacks on infrastructure surrounding medical facilities all compounded a longstanding crisis in the Gaza Strip, which has been besieged by Israel for a decade a half.
“The war injuries are the most brutal additional burden on a health care infrastructure that was already on its knees because of the occupation’s systematic ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s health care sector,” said Dr. Osama Tanous, a Palestinian pediatrician with Physicians for Human Rights–Israel. “Gaza’s doctors and staff are absolutely inspiring, hardworking professionals, but they’re working in an intentionally broken system by the occupation, always pushed to its most extreme limits.”
Harazeen said he and his colleagues have only slept “a few hours here and there” during the hostilities because “the need is nonstop.” The few times he had reached his home through the Israeli shelling, he was physically and emotionally exhausted, “barely able to open my eyes or have a good chat with my family.”
He and his colleagues are “haunted by the sound of screaming children and all the shredded bodies.”
Since last Monday, at least 243 Gazans, including 66 children, were killed by Israeli airstrikes, using U.S.-made warplanes and bombs. Twelve Israelis have been killed by rockets fired by Gazan militants.
This week, in response to the alarming scenes of civilian devastation emerging from Gaza, several U.S. lawmakers launched efforts to block the transfer of more U.S. weapons to Israel. Last week, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American member of Congress, delivered an impassioned speech on Palestinian human rights on the House floor, and 25 lawmakers condemned Israel’s forced displacement of East Jerusalemite Palestinians from their homes.
This movement in Washington follows weeks of online organizing around disturbing scenes of Israel’s disproportionate violence against Palestinians on the ground across the Holy Land. In recent weeks, Palestinian activists mobilized demonstrations, strikes, and viral social media campaigns providing new entry points to Israel’s longstanding human rights abuses against Palestinians. The unfolding violence and resistance has opened new conversations about the U.S.’s unconditional military support for Israel, even as congressional resolutions on the issues are unlikely to advance.
A shifting conversation thousands of miles away stands to be cold comfort in Gaza, where 11 days of war imposed a massive cost on civilians, straining medical care resources.
By Monday, Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital issued a desperate plea for volunteers to donate blood and warned that shortages of critical supplies, including water, electricity, and fuel, were already jeopardizing its patient care. By Wednesday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health released an emergency $46 million appeal in response to the infrastructure damages and shortages within the Gazan health care sector. The escalating war casualties, paired with the pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, threatens to collapse a health care system that human rights groups say was already overwhelmed and its capacity deliberately degraded by the Israeli siege.
“When we see these images of war in Gaza, people often forget that this is a territory that has been under siege for nearly 15 years. What that means is that the Palestinians inside the territory have been drip fed everything from food to medicine,” Amnesty International’s Sherine Tadros told The Intercept. “When a war hits, the Gazans are starting from a situation that is already dire, a situation that is already inexcusable.”
Bombing Roads Near Hospitals
Israel has been accused of targeting health care workers and facilities in each of its three previous military campaigns in Gaza. Yet, in this war, it is Israel’s bombing of the major streets around al-Shifa Hospital that represented a new low for the doctors and paramedics trying to provide emergency care.
“It is a basic right of a person to be able to seek medical help when they need it, let alone in Gaza during the war,” said Tadros. “And the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including roads that civilians use to go to a hospital, is inexcusable and will, no doubt, lead to even more death.”
Hazareen, the doctor at al-Shifa, described such scenes. “Victims lost their lives at the last minute before reaching the hospital because of the bombing of the roads,” he said. “That is devastating for all of the health care workers.”
“The last war” — in 2014 — “was unbelievable because it lasted almost two months, and there were so many massacres,” Hazareen said. “But this war is different and difficult because most of the targets are houses and towers and roads, so no one understands why they are hitting these targets, and we are just living with an obsessive fear of these strikes.”
It was one of these chaotic airstrikes that delivered a further blow to Gaza’s health care professionals. Last Sunday, in what became the deadliest day in Gaza so far during this bombardment, 42 people were killed in a series of airstrikes in a neighborhood near al-Shifa Hospital. Among the many civilian casualties, two doctors, Ayman Abu al-Ouf and Mooein Ahmad al-Aloul, were killed within hours of each other at home with their families. It took rescue teams days to pull civilians from the rubble, and the airstrikes on the road delayed paramedics’ access to the hospital.
Both prominent doctors lived in the neighborhood precisely because of its close proximity to al-Shifa Hospital. Al-Aloul was one of Gaza’s only neurologists, and al-Ouf led al-Shifa’s coronavirus response as well as its Department of Internal Medicine.
“Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf was a pioneer of internal medicine here in Gaza, also a pioneer of free treatment for patients and just beloved by his patients and colleagues. Many Gazan doctors and students studied at his hand,” Harazeen said of his al-Shifa Hospital colleague. “He was distinguished by his love for his work and his patients.”
Outside al-Shifa Hospital, doctors and staff held a grim impromptu funeral for al-Ouf. It took more than 10 hours to recover his body from the bombing site, where other members of his family were also killed.
“This is a tragedy for his family and his colleagues, but it is also a loss of a medical professional who was saving lives and educating future generations of Gazan doctors,” said Tanous of Physicians for Human Rights–Israel. “It’s so important to understand that the occupation has limited the workforce of Gaza, preventing medical professionals from leaving to get specialized training, so it’s not like there are 10 other doctors who will come the next day or a massive list of specialists. So beyond the devastation his death means for our colleagues, the killing of doctors is a brutal act of warfare, indescribable in the context of Gaza.”
Coronavirus Woes Exacerbated
Gaza has not been spared from the pandemic. On Monday, an Israeli airstrike nearby Gaza’s only Covid-19 laboratory rendered it inoperable. Two weeks ago, a deadly surge in cases had finally begun to decline. With the hospitals now overwhelmed by war injuries and nearly 60,000 Gazans evacuated to crowded temporary shelters, United Nations officials warned that coronavirus cases could spike again.
“Whether attacks on doctors or coronavirus, we need to stop treating these emergencies as ‘the red line’ that is finally crossed in Gaza,” said Tanous. “Yes the Israelis were preventing vaccines, they targeted medical facilities, they’ve killed medical workers. But they crossed the red line years ago, we are so far past the red line. We need to look at the whole architecture of occupation that forces our colleagues to work in an impossible, absurd system and denies Gazans their health care and human rights.”
At al-Shifa Hospital, Harazeen said his colleagues are living minute by minute, patient by patient, praying Thursday’s ceasefire will hold, preventing further war injuries or additional damage to Gaza’s medical facilities. This is how they will honor their fallen colleagues, he said: through their service to Gazan patients and by training the next generation of Gazan health care professionals.
“Gaza will rise again as we always do. It is pure misery here, but we are working unstoppably to save the lives of the injured,” said Harazeen. “Doctors, nurses, paramedics, and our neighbors defend our people with our souls, hand in hand, and we will remain steadfast until our last breaths, cursing the occupation all the time.”
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
Lawyers Find the Parents of 54 More Migrant Children From Families Separated Under Trump
Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
The parents of 391 kids have yet to be reached, down from 445 in April. Lawyers say parents of 227 were deported and parents of 100 are somewhere in the U.S.
awyers working to reach the migrant families separated by the Trump administration have found the parents of 54 more children in the past month, according to a court filing on Wednesday.
Now the parents of 391 children have yet to be reached, down from 445 in April. And pro bono lawyers commissioned to find them by a federal judge say the parents of 227 of those children have been deported, 100 are somewhere in the U.S. and 14 have no contact information that the government has provided.
The Biden administration set up a task force to reunite separated parents, and the task force is working with the lawyers to bring back deported parents who have been identified. This month, the first four families were reunited.
The Trump administration separated more than 5,500 families during 2017 and 2018, the pro bono lawyers estimate. Most of those separated under what was known as the "zero tolerance" policy in May and June of 2018 were reunited soon after, but many separated prior to the official launch of zero tolerance were not known about because the government kept no records of their separation or whereabouts.
The Biden administration task force estimates roughly 1,000 families remain separated.
QAnon activists. (photo: Robin Rayne/Shutterstock)
Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Are Taking Over State Republican Parties
Cameron Joseph, VICE
Joseph writes: "The Republican Party chairs of Texas and Wyoming have flirted with secession from the United States. Oklahoma's Republican chair has called Islam a 'cancer.'"
A VICE News review of public positions of all 50 GOP state chairs shows a growing number of conspiracists winning control of state party chairmanships.
he Republican Party chairs of Texas and Wyoming have flirted with secession from the United States. Oklahoma’s Republican chair has called Islam a “cancer.” The Oregon GOP called the Capitol insurrection a “false flag” operation. And at least 19 Republican state chairs—including most of the ones in key swing states—publicly pushed former President Trump’s big lie about the election.
A VICE News review of public positions of all 50 GOP state chairs shows a significant number are openly pushing conspiracy theories, spouting unhinged rhetoric, and actively undermining voters’ trust in democracy. That includes the chairs of nearly every swing state in the U.S. And the trend is accelerating: Many of the most extreme chairs just won their chairmanships or have been reelected since Trump left office four months ago, a number of them with his explicit endorsement.
Liz Cheney’s ouster from GOP party leadership showed how much Trump retains his stranglehold on the GOP on the national stage. But the overwhelming wins by Trump loyalists in the first widespread internal Republican elections since Trump left office, albeit in small contests chosen by a hardcore, activist subset of the GOP base, show that his conspiratorial claims about the election run even deeper in the states than in Washington—and will guide the grassroots for years to come.
“I don’t know why people are sitting around expecting that somehow this is going to fix itself,” said Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee’s national chairman from 2009-2011 and a fierce Trump critic. “It won’t fix itself because Donald Trump won’t allow it to be fixed. And people who back Donald Trump and all the stuff that comes with it, they think they're right, they think this is working, they think this is what a party should be like.”
“I don’t know why people are sitting around expecting that somehow this is going to fix itself.”
Former GOP officials say it was entirely predictable that the state parties would get Trumpier while he was president, but found it notable that the trend has continued since he left office.
“I don’t think we’re in the post-Trump era yet. I don’t think there’s any question that he’s still the most popular face in the Republican Party. His endorsement matters,” said John Whitbeck, who chaired the Virginia Republican Party from 2015-2018. “The culture of the Trump era remains the primary dynamic in the party, and I don’t know when that’s going to end.”
The most common and pernicious conspiracy pushed by state party chairs is the one that’s come to define the Republican Party: the big lie that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump and marred by widespread voting fraud. A significant plurality have publicly undermined voters’ trust in their elections, and those chairs who aren’t explicitly repeating his lies have pointedly refused to dispute them, while pushing “election integrity” measures to make it harder to vote.
They’ve supported moves to censure their own members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump, a ceremonial shaming that’s taken place from Alaska to Louisiana to North Carolina to Ohio to Wyoming. And while a handful of chairs sought to push back against the party’s drift further into conspiracy-mongering, others are pushing hard in the opposite direction, using their chairmanships to promote unhinged conspiracy theories.
It’s coming from the top down, too. The Republican National Committee launched an “Election Integrity Commission” in February. RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel argued that states’ efforts to expand mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic “brought chaos and uncertainty to our sacred democratic processes,” and promised the RNC would advocate for “best practices to ensure that future elections are free, fair, and transparent,” lending support to state GOP lawmakers’ moves to add requirements to the voting process.
Of the six GOP state party chairs serving on the commission, just one has come close to acknowledging the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory—South Carolina chair Drew McKissick, who with Trump’s endorsement just warded off a challenge from QAnon-touting lawyer Lin Wood. Three others on the commission pushed Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him or argued the election wasn’t settled even after the Electoral College had voted to officially cement it in mid-December.
That includes Wyoming Republican Party Chairman Frank Eathorne, who penned a January 2 letter claiming “extensive evidence” of voter fraud in “numerous states,” attended the January 6 Trump rally in D.C. that turned into a riot, defended that protest as mostly peaceful, and in early January floated the idea that Wyoming and other “self-reliant” conservative states should consider seceding from the United States. Eathorne won Trump’s support for another term when the state party censured Cheney, and sailed to an uncontested reelection victory last Saturday. “The people of Wyoming are special, and so are you!” Trump declared in congratulation.
The commission’s chair, longtime Trump ally and Florida Republican Party Chairman Joe Gruters, has done what many Republican state chairs have: avoided commenting directly on whether Biden won fairly while advocating for states to crack down on the threat of voter fraud, even though there’s no evidence there was significant voter fraud last election.
“We cannot allow voting irregularities that create distrust in the election system to continue. The Republican Party is working hard on election integrity issues and we will be ready for 2022,” Gruters said in a statement announcing the commission.
Gruters called his own state’s 2020 election process “the gold standard”—but that didn’t stop him from loudly supporting the restrictive new law Florida Republicans just passed that put additional requirements on mail voting and ballot drop boxes.
Republican National Committee spokesperson Emma Vaughn disputed that the party is trying to make it harder to vote.
“The media has bent over backwards to tell lies about election integrity efforts,” she said in a statement to VICE News. “But the fact is, Republican legislatures around the country have passed much-needed reforms that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat—this includes measures like voter ID laws, which are supported by [the] vast majority of voters including Democrats and independents.”
“The media has bent over backwards to tell lies about election integrity efforts.”
Who’s the Trumpiest
The most striking sign of where the Republican Party is headed is the new class of GOP state party chairs elected since Trump lost. A number of the competitive races for state chair this year have hinged on who’s the Trumpiest, most outlandish, and conspiratorial candidate.
In Oklahoma, former state Rep. John Bennett won a battle to become party chairman in April following a long history of incendiary comments. Bennett called for a “firing squad” for Hillary Clinton right before the 2016 election, and has a long history of attacking Islam, which he once called a “cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out.” His candidacy was backed by former Trump National Security Director Michael Flynn, who pushed Trump to declare martial law to overturn the election. A few weeks ago, Bennett grouped himself with Trump, Flynn, and top election conspiracists Mike Lindell and Lin Wood, saying they were “out there speaking the truth boldly” and needed backup in the face of media attacks.
Oregon’s state party is similarly off the rails. Its executive committee put out a statement in late January claiming there was “growing evidence” the Capitol insurrection was a “false flag operation designed to discredit” Trump and the GOP.
The Oregon GOP said the insurrection was a “false flag operation designed to discredit” Trump and the GOP.
A few weeks later, they elected lightning-rod state Sen. Dallas Heard as their new chairman.
Heard is a member of the COVID anti-lockdown and anti-masking group Citizens Against Tyranny, and on Dec. 21 he encouraged a protest at the state Capitol, telling them “I’m in full support of your right to enter your Capitol building.” Some of the protesters tried to storm the closed building, pepper-spraying police and breaking windows in an attempt to enter the statehouse. Undeterred, Heard called the statewide mask mandate a "campaign against the people and the children of God” later that day.
On January 6, as pro-Trump rioters descended on the U.S. Capitol, Heard told the crowd at a satellite “Occupy the Capitol” protest in Salem that anti-Trump lawmakers were “the enemy of the people.”
But Texas is even wilder.
Shortly after former Florida congressman Allen West defeated Texas’ GOP chair last July, the state party began using “We are the storm” as its slogan—a term popularized by the QAnon community. West denied that it was borrowed from QAnon, insisting a separate meme inspired him and stating that he’s “not into internet conspiracy theories.” But West is scheduled to speak at a Dallas Memorial Day rally organized by “QAnon John” Sabal that has a lineup chock-full of movement influencers.
West fully embraced the lie that the election was stolen from Trump, pushing false claims that Dominion Voting Systems had changed votes from Trump to Biden.
“We will not stand down until justice is done,” West bellowed during a late-December Stop the Steal rally. “We will not be subjugated, we will not be relegated, we will never surrender.”
And after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s final Hail Mary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, West floated the idea that Texas and other states should secede from the U.S. "Perhaps law-abiding states should band together and form a union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” he said in a press release.
West’s schtick isn’t new. He was a Tea Party star during his one term in Congress, and after losing his seat became a favorite on the right-wing media circuit, keeping his name in the news by calling President Obama an “Islamist” in 2014 and arguing Islam isn’t really a religion but a “totalitarian theocratic political ideology.” But his recent return to power shows how the Trump era has shifted the Overton window so that Republicans whose extreme views once hurt their careers are getting new life in the political arena.
Republicans’ lies about voting fraud and attempts to use them for voting suppression go back years, and there’s no better example of a Republican who played a key role in spreading that myth than former Trump senior campaign adviser Bob Paduchik, who became Ohio state party chairman in February with Trump’s strong support.
Back in 2004, Paduchik helped Republicans pioneer the use of flimsy claims of “voter fraud” to try to disqualify Democratic votes while working on President George W. Bush secretive campaign project dubbed the “Voter Reg Fraud Strategy.”
He played a key role on Trump’s campaign in 2020, helping to run its “voter integrity” program that smeared mail voting, and successfully lobbied Ohio GOP legislators to reject their own secretary of state’s push to make mail voting easier.
These aren’t isolated examples.
Anti-abortion activist Kristi Burton Brown took over the Colorado GOP after declaring in March “there are very valid questions still being asked about the 2020 election.” She was endorsed by gun-toting, militia-curious Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert.
Maine’s Republican chair was reelected in January, after she’d claimed the coronavirus was intentionally unleashed by the Chinese government in order to hurt Trump’s reelection chances.
Massachusetts GOP chair Jim Lyons said on November 12 that Biden was “falsely posing as the winner of the 2020 presidential election,” claimed Democrats were “committing voter fraud,” and insisted “dead people voted.” Lyons was reelected to his chairmanship in February in spite of opposition from moderate Republican Gov. Charlie Baker.
This trend isn’t universal: California’s GOP chair, Jessica Patterson, is a Latina moderate who defeated a pair of hard-line Trumpers for the job in 2019 and recently helped block an attempt to censure a GOP congressman who’d voted to impeach Trump. Don Tracy was elected chair of the Illinois Republican Party in early February and promptly moved to quash efforts to censure GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger for his fierce attacks on Trump. Utah’s new GOP chairman criticized the party convention delegates who booed Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.
But they’re vastly outnumbered by Trump hard-liners—like New Mexico Republican Party chair Steve Pearce, a former congressman who pushed the birther lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and claimed two days after the Capitol riots that “our democracy has been tarnished” by the 2020 election because of “anomalies and issues that were never addressed.” That claim came just weeks after he won another term.
Un-fringing the conspiracy theories
It’s not unusual for state parties in deep-red or blue states to elect chairs who espouse fringe views—it’s happened for years in the GOP, where Tea Party activists and social conservative hard-liners would hijack lightly attended conventions and seize power. And Democrats aren’t immune to this either: A coalition of hard-left Democratic socialists recently defeated Nevada’s Democratic machine to seize control of the party.
But what’s different for Republicans now is that most of the GOP chairs running state parties in crucial battleground states have actively embraced conspiracy theories, putting them at the center of the party’s efforts in the states that will determine the 2024 presidential election.
The best-known of the bunch is Arizona Republican chair Kelli Ward, who seized control of the state GOP in 2019 after losing a 2016 primary challenge to then-Sen. John McCain (his team nicknamed her “Chemtrail Kelli” because she’d convened a hearing where people pushed conspiracy theories about chemtrails). Under Ward, the Arizona Republican Party has grown increasingly conspiratorial.
Ward spoke at multiple Stop the Steal rallies in Arizona about the “stolen” election—and filed an unsuccessful court challenge to nullify Arizona’s election that claimed “massive voter fraud’ had occurred. The judge tossed it out because the case was based on “gossip and innuendo” and “sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence.”
But that didn’t stop her. She called Biden’s win a “coup” on Dec. 20, and called on Trump to “cross the rubicon” to stop it, a reference to Julius Caesar’s historic decision to overthrow the Roman Republic. When Stop the Steal leader Ali Alexander tweeted in early December that he was “willing to give my life in this fight,” the Arizona Republican Party retweeted it, asking: “He is. Are you?”
Trump endorsed Ward for another term, and she narrowly won in late January, in an election marred by claims of vote rigging (no irony there). The same day, the state party censured sitting Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain. Ward has since vocally supported the incompetent partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots.
But Ward is far from the only swing-state Republican who helped Trump push lies about their own state’s results.
Georgia GOP chair David Shafer actively spread false information about the results in Georgia, buttressing Trump’s repeated false claims that the state had been stolen from him. He filed a lawsuit objecting to the state certifying the election results, and after Georgia finished a full statewide hand recount of its ballots that confirmed Biden’s win and showed no evidence of voter fraud, Shafer led a letter that expressed “grave concerns” about voter fraud. He’s bragged about suing Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and he encouraged Republicans to primary him because of Raffensperger’s refusal to help Trump try to steal Georgia’s electoral votes.
Shafer is the heavy favorite to win another term as chairman in June— largely because he has Trump’s endorsement. “He NEVER gave up!” Trump said.
North Carolina Republican chair Michael Whatley falsely claimed in February that “we certainly saw evidence of voting irregularities, of election counting irregularities in a number of places around the country,” and invented the claim that the reason Trump won North Carolina was his state party’s vigilance against Democrats’ attempts to cheat. Under his leadership, the state party censured retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr for voting to impeach Trump.
Ron Weiser, a longtime establishment GOP figure, won Michigan’s GOP chairmanship in January by partnering with Meshawn Maddock, an active Stop the Steal leader who aggressively “monitored” Detroit’s vote-counting, repeatedly lied that Michigan’s election had seen widespread election fraud, and organized 19 buses to the January 6 rally in Washington. Even after the Capitol riots, Maddock pushed false claims that Trump would remain president.
Weiser himself stirred controversy when he described the trio of Democratic women who hold statewide office as “the three witches” and said the party’s job was to soften them up so “that they are ready for the burning at the stake” in the next election. That list includes Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom a right-wing militia recently plotted to kidnap and execute. Weiser also joked about “assassination” when discussing the two Michigan House Republicans who’d voted to impeach Trump. After initially resisting, he apologized for both remarks.
In Pennsylvania, GOP chair Andrew Tabas publicly floated the possibility of his state’s Republican-controlled state Legislature overriding the election results and appointing Trump electors if he lost the state—before the election. Tabas insisted he was misquoted. But on Dec. 14, as the Legislature met to appoint Biden’s electors to the Electoral College, the Pennsylvania Republican Party members met separately “to cast a conditional vote” for Trump, creating an alternate set of electors to the Electoral College to help continue the fight to overturn the election.
The silent types
There are plenty of Republican chairs who haven’t been willing to explicitly echo Trump’s lies and conspiracies about the election. But most of them have refused to stand up for the truth.
State party chairs are chosen by the most dedicated, hardcore party activists—the types willing to spend their Saturdays arguing over party rule arcana at conventions. Because people showing up to vote are convinced that Trump really won in 2020, Republican state party chairs must agree with his premise, or at least pretend to stay in power.
“You see folks who don’t believe that who are saying those things or staying quiet because they want to stay a state party chair for whatever reason,” said former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye, who opposes Trump.
There’s also political utility in declining to dispute Trump’s claims. In state after state, Republicans are pushing bills to restrict voting. If they don’t think the election was rigged, there’s not much reason for the new restrictions besides an attempt to make it harder for Democrats to vote.
Iowa Republican Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann is an avatar of the GOP establishment and a prime example of how much that establishment has changed.
He first won his job with strong backing from then-Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, ousting a hard-line Ron Paul acolyte in the process.
But Kaufmann was a fierce Trump cheerleader throughout his presidency, and supported Trump’s legal efforts to reverse the election results. A late-January interview sheds a lot of light on why he and more establishment-leaning Republican leaders won’t contradict Trump: They may not want to claim the election was rigged, but they see political utility in using that lie to push new voting restrictions.
“Donald Trump’s claims that were controversial is whether the election fraud and the election irregularities actually cost him the presidency. I don’t think there’s anybody that seriously doubts that in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania there were problems,” Kaufmann said in the PBS interview.
When pressed on whether Trump lost fair and square, Kaufmann would only say that he had lost the Electoral College vote.
Then he made clear exactly why he wouldn’t admit Biden had won fairly.
“Here’s what I worry about: If we say that Joe Biden won, if I say that there was absolutely no election problems, that there’s no fixes that are needed, then all of a sudden we continue to do the same thing and we don’t work on voter identification, other states don’t work on ballot harvesting,” he said.
Weeks later, Iowa Republicans passed a voting suppression law that eliminated a week of early voting.
Women shout slogans during a demonstration against the Colombian government's proposed tax reform, in Bogota, on May 1. (photo: Fernando Vergara/AP)
Colombia: Mass Demonstrations 'Reflect a Deep National Crisis'
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Anti-government protests have stretched into their fourth week in Colombia, as student groups, unions and others took to the streets again on Wednesday to demand social change amid continuing talks between the government and strike leaders."
Protesters take to the streets for fourth week demanding government action on poverty, police violence, and other issues.
About 8,000 people attended protests in the capital, Bogota, the mayor’s office said.
“We’re accompanying our young people, our children, our grandchildren, who still lack opportunities despite our fighting for so long,” lawyer Roberto Hermida, 68, told the Reuters news agency.
Hermida said he wanted to provide more educational opportunities and better healthcare.
The protests began last month after right-wing Colombian President Ivan Duque’s government introduced a tax reform that critics said would disproportionately harm the working and middle classes, already hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Duque withdrew the proposal, but the demonstrations have continued as protesters expanded their list of demands to include the withdrawal of a proposed health reform, an end to widespread violence in the country, and steps to address economic inequality.
The protests have been marked by violence, but the exact death toll remains unclear. The attorney general’s office has confirmed 15 deaths connected to the protests, while one human rights group says the tally is at more than 40.
Duque has blamed armed groups for most of the violence, but the United Nations and several rights groups have condemned Colombian police for “opening fire” on protesters.
On Wednesday, former President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos urged Duque to assume responsibility for abuses committed by the police.
“We need more gestures, we need more empathy and more humility, and for the state to recognise: ‘Look, we committed abuses’,” Santos told W Radio.
The national strike committee, made up of major unions, student groups and others, has held several discussions with government representatives about the protesters’ demands, but the two sides are not yet holding formal talks.
They are expected to meet again with the government on Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Dickinson, senior Colombia analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the rallies demonstrated “deep social and economic inequality, frustration with police brutality, widespread distrust of government”.
Protesters’ demands fall into two categories, Dickinson said on Twitter: social justice and security – and while both issues have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, they are historical grievances.
The pandemic, which has killed more than 82,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data, has also worsened longstanding economic inequalities.
“Protests are everywhere. The demonstrations reflect a deep national crisis that transcends geography. Although grievances vary by region, the sense of exasperation and frustration is shared,” Dickinson wrote.
“The crisis is critical, deep and requires gravitas that we have not yet seen,” she said.
Madagascar's baobab tree, or 'the tree of life.' (photo: Intelligent Living)
Madagascar's Vanishing Trees
Malavika Vyawahare, Mongabay
Vyawahare writes: "Aina Randriarisoa found a perch for Labramia ambondrombeensis on the taxonomical tree of life. She helped identify the tree from its genetic signature, the arrangement of its leaves, the shape of its flowers. Yet Randriarisoa, a 28-year-old Malagasy botanist, has never set eyes on the tree, and she fears she never will."
ina Randriarisoa found a perch for Labramia ambondrombeensis on the taxonomical tree of life. She helped identify the tree from its genetic signature, the arrangement of its leaves, the shape of its flowers. Yet Randriarisoa, a 28-year-old Malagasy botanist, has never set eyes on the tree, and she fears she never will.
A 400-hectare (988-acre) forest fragment in northeast Madagascar, slightly bigger than Central Park, is the tree’s only known habitat, and it is shrinking. In Madagascar, a bottle-gourd-shaped island off Africa’s eastern coast, it is easy to miss the trees for the woods. Its fabled forests are retreating rapidly; 1-2% are wiped out each year.
Millions of years of isolation have given birth to a breathtaking variety of life-forms on the island, including 2,900 endemic tree species. Today, only a few thousand years since humans appeared here, two-thirds of these unique tree species are at risk of disappearing.
Scientists are racing against the extinction clock to document this mind-boggling biodiversity and determine just how imperiled individual species are. The effort sprinted forward this year with the completion of more than 2,400 assessments by a team of Malagasy and foreign researchers.
It was spearheaded by the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG), Kew Madagascar Conservation Centre, the University of Antananarivo, and the IUCN. It is part of Botanic Gardens Conservation International’s Global Tree Assessment initiative. Madagascar is a top priority; it has 5% of the world’s tree species, high endemicity, but also one of the highest deforestation rates.
Of the 3,118 species covered in a recent report, more than 90% had never been systematically evaluated before. One in 10 of these trees falls in the IUCN’s critically endangered category, a step away from extinction in the wild. It’s analogous to Madagascar’s iconic lemurs; almost all of the 108 lemur species are threatened.
The incredible array of fauna the country has to offer often overshadows its vegetal diversity. Some experts estimate that only about half of Madagascar’s tree diversity is known to us.
Even when it does attract attention, the focus tends to be on high-value species like rosewood, palisander and ebony. Madagascar is rich in precious wood, home to more than a third of Dalbergia (including rosewood) and Diospyros (ebony) species. The illicit export of their timber has decimated large swaths of Malagasy forests. Randriarisoa and colleague Laurent Gautier from the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva hope to save the Sapotaceae, a family of 90 species of hardwoods, including L. ambondrombeensis, from a similar fate.
These towering trees are in high demand locally, if not in the international market. Gautier described them as “old aristocrats.” They are well-adapted to their environs and do not take kindly to change. They grow and reproduce slowly, reaching sexual maturity in about 20 years. A Sapotaceae tree is confirmation that the forest has stood the test of time. “They are a symbol of a healthy forest,” Randriarisoa said.
But such undisturbed old-growth forests are dwindling. Slash-and-burn cultivation has eaten into woodland, and uncontrolled fires sear through forested areas every year. Even within the vestiges that remain, people single out these massive trees for logging.
L. ambondrombeensis is found in a coast-hugging evergreen littoral forest, which grows on sandy soils. It sits next to the Makirovana-Tsihomanaomby protected area, a block of moist, humid forests further inland in the Sava region of Madagascar. These rainforests lining the island’s eastern escarpment are bursting at the seams with endemic plant life.
At higher altitudes, the montane forests take over, which host the third-highest number of documented endemic species. Though bereft of its natural vegetation, the central high plateau still retains islands of high diversity, says Pete Lowry, director of MBG’s Madagascar program.
The western flank of the island sports dry forests dotted by majestic boababs, a ubiquitous Malagasy motif. The harsh dry clime is not suitable for all life, but these stout giants flourish by storing water in their bulbous trunks. They are bearers of precious water and innumerable tales. The Alley of the Baobabs and Baobab Amoureux in the west, the 1,600-year-old Grandmother’s Baobab in Tsimanampetsotse National Park in the south, and Mahajanga’s gigantic baobab in the northwest are landmarks on Madagascar’s landscape, must-sees on a tourist’s itinerary.
Of eight baobab species on Earth, six are found only in Madagascar. Three of those are currently endangered, none more so than Adansonia perrieri, of which fewer than 250 mature trees remain today. Its cousin, A. grandidieri, as its name suggests, counts among its ranks some of the grandest baobabs. It is also faltering in the face of human-made threats. Lonely giants remain scattered around the famous Alley of Baobabs that cuts through a landscape ravaged by fire.
These trees are built to last; they are no stranger to fire, but even they cannot survive repeated burning. New seedlings also perish in fires because they lack the thick, protective bark of older trees. Their only shield is the vegetation around the parent tree. Isolated in a singed terrain, they are unable to regenerate.
Like baobabs, Sapotaceae trees, too, are difficult to replace.
Madagascar’s protected area network has expanded rapidly in the past decade, and today spans 7 million hectares (17 million acres). Yet 307 endemic tree species like L. ambondrombeensis lie outside this safety net. “Before establishing a protected area, we must know what we are protecting, and that is why these assessments are important,” said David Rabehevitra, a botanist at the Kew Madagascar Conservation Centre. “It helps in prioritizing conservation.”
Until 2017, only about 12% of the island’s tree species had been assessed. More species joined Madagascar’s ever-growing catalog of trees between the time the research took place and the report’s publication this year. Samples collected over many decades are still waiting to be disentangled, new species waiting to be described.
“We find new species every year. Even for species that have been discovered, we have a lot of work to do in gathering data,” Rabehevitra said. “It requires money and knowledge.”
These records allow researchers and conservationists to seek greater protection and funds not just for individual species but plots that could harbor other endemic species, known and unknown.
The approach has worked in some places. The Ankafobe protected area, co-managed by MBG, was set up, in part, after the discovery of the critically endangered Schizolaena tampoketsana in the tiny forest spread across 33 hectares (82 acres). Forest fires menace even this shard of forest. Community members have taken an active role in recent years to protect the forest with modest funding from MBG. They have put in place fire breaks and carry out patrols to prevent illegal logging.
In the case of L. ambondrombeensis, Laurent said they would like to see the existing protected area extended to the adjacent forest, where the tree is found. With biological riches hidden in every nook and cranny of Madagascar, deciding what to safeguard and what to leave out is devilishly difficult. “Population geneticists would say everything should be protected,” Laurent said. “but from the point of view of someone who has been in the field [and] seen the people trying to grow rice for their daily needs, we have to be reasonable in the trade-off between what is needed and what is possible.”
But protected area designation itself can only go so far if the dependence of people on forests and forestland is not reduced. With existing protected areas, deforestation pressure is often deflected to surrounding areas, Randriarisoa said. The L. ambondrombeensis trees standing at the edge of a protected forest also bear this brunt.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put Randriarisoa’s planned visit home and to the refuge of L. ambondrombeensis on hold. It is an unnerving wait as satellite imagery shows the green isles spangled across Madagascar steadily withering away.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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