28 June 21
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ince leaving prison in 2017, former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been busy. She ran unsuccessfully for Senate in her home state of Maryland, became a Twitch streamer, and was jailed for contempt after refusing to testify in a U.S. government case against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning joins Ryan Grim and Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein to talk about prison, prospects for whistleblowers in the Biden era, and what she’s been up to since her release.
Michael Flynn. (photo: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
The US has 2,500 soldiers in Iraq, deployed as part of an international coalition to fight what remains of the ISIL group. (photo: Matthew Burch/EPA)
ALSO SEE: US Carries Out Air Raids
on Iran-Backed Militias in Syria, Iraq
The US military said it targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq.
raq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi has condemned the overnight US air attack on Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq and Syria which a monitor said killed at least seven fighters.
In a statement on Sunday, the US military said it targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq in response to drone attacks against the US personnel and facilities in Iraq.
The attacks came at the direction of US President Joe Biden, the second time he has ordered retaliatory attacks against Iran-backed militia since taking office five months ago.
“We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security,” said a statement from the Iraqi PM’s office.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said in a statement that the Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada military factions were among the “several Iran-backed militia groups” that had used the targeted facilities.
“The United States took necessary, appropriate, and deliberate action designed to limit the risk of escalation – but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message,” Kirby said, adding that the targets were selected because “these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] attacks against US personnel and facilities in Iraq”.
The statement did not say whether anyone was killed or injured, but the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least seven fighters were killed and several others wounded.
Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said one child had been killed and at least three other people were wounded.
Threat of retaliation
Two Iraqi militia officials told The Associated Press news agency in Baghdad that four militiamen were killed in the air attacks near the border with Syria.
Armed groups aligned with Iran in a statement named four members of the Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada faction they said were killed in the attack on the Syria-Iraq border. They pledged to retaliate.
“We will remain the shield defending our beloved nation, and we are fully ready … to respond and take revenge,” it said.
Since the start of the year, there have been more than 40 attacks against US interests in Iraq, where 2,500 American troops are deployed as part of an international coalition to fight the armed group ISIL (ISIS).
Saeed Khatibzadeh, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, also reacted to the attacks.
“The US still continues the wrong path in the region. What we see today is not only the sanctions but also following the wrong policies of the previous administration with actions they carry out in the region,” said Khatibzadeh.
Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud Abdelwahed, reporting from the Iraqi capital Baghdad, described the US attacks as “significant”.
“The PMF say that they will attack American military facilities with missiles. Politicians affiliated with the PMF have also been tweeting, saying the United States only understands the language of force,” he said.
“We also know these groups are blaming the United States for not withdrawing from Iraq and for not implementing the decision by the Iraqi House of Representatives,” he added, referring to a parliament resolution approved in January last year, which called for all foreign troops to leave the country in the wake of the US killing of Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani.
Lawrence Korb, a former US assistant secretary of defence, said the raids could “very definitely” be seen as Biden “serving notice” on Iran as negotiations continue to revive its nuclear deal with world powers.
“The first time he used military force was about a month after he was inaugurated,” Korb told Al Jazeera.
“I think it was no accident that he did it then to send that signal to Iran. The fact that he’s doing it now while they are about to undergo the seventh round of the talks on the JCPOA is him saying: ‘Just because we are there, it doesn’t mean we are going to ignore it [other issues]’.”
Researchers and work crews look at items pulled from the ground during the search for remains in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this week. (photo: Mike Simons/AP)
The investigation done by the 1921 Graves Investigation team began in July 2020 with archeologists examining sites potentially linked to the massacre. The team later found 12 graves in October 2020 in the area of the "Original 18," a place where funeral home records show at least 18 Black massacre victims were buried. It wasn't until June 1 that the team began to exhume graves from the site.
The team announced on Friday that a total of 35 graves were found. Of those graves, 19 individuals were taken for forensic analysis, with nine of them completed.
"Five of those nine were juveniles, and the remaining four are adults," said forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield, a descendant of a survivor of the massacre who is assisting in the search. She added that one individual was an older female, while the remaining adults' ages ranged from 30s-to-40s.
Stubblefield said the team is also examining the shapes of skulls to determine their ancestry.
"So far, when we can detect it, has been of African descent,” she said.
There was one Black man found in a casket that still had a bullet lodged in his left shoulder.
"He does have associated trauma," Stubblefield said. "He has multiple projectile wounds... it affects his cranium and possibly his left arm."
Oklahoma state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck told reporters that of the 35 graves, only one was marked, while the rest have no record of name, age or cause of death.
There is no exact number of Black people who died as a result of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which began on May 31, 1921, and lasted two days. As many as 300 Black residents were killed and over 35 square blocks of the area of Greenwood, known as "Black Wall Street", was destroyed.
Once the bodies complete scientific analysis, the Mass Graves Public Oversight Committee will recommend where to permanently bury the people.
Kavin Ross, chair of the Mass Graves Public Oversight Committee and a descendent of a survivor of the massacre, said the process was a "very sobering and very powerful experience," and hopes for more findings.
"There was no documentation of the few that we did find, by the city or anywhere else. But I'm so happy that we did find these folks," Ross said. "I'm anxious to put them in a proper rest."
President Joe Biden in Washington, DC, 2021. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
When you’ve finished Andrew Bacevich’s most recent TD piece, consider getting yourself a copy of his eye-opening new book, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. It’s a genuine must-read. (I edited it, so I should know.) As Adam Hochschild has all too aptly commented, “In a sane country, the estimable Andrew Bacevich would be Secretary of a much-shrunken Defense Department. Deepened by his sense of history, this up-to-the-minute book is his answer to the big question: why is the most powerful nation on earth so ill-prepared to deal with the world it faces?” Indeed. Find out for yourself and, if you want to ensure that you’ll continue to read pieces by Bacevich at this site, do consider visiting our donation page and helping TomDispatch keep going in this ever more unsettling world of ours. Tom]
Though he’s seldom thought of that way, Joe Biden was, to my mind, Trumpian in his first global trip as president. After all, he delivered a fantasy to much of the world, as well as his own citizenry. In a phrase, it was: America is back! We once again have an alliance beyond compare, an “updated” version of the Atlantic Charter, with that crucial queen of powers, Great Britain (now, as it happens, heading for the Brexit version of the subbasement of history). NATO is again ours in a world in which a united Europe will ready itself, however dutifully, to face off against the Soviet Union — whoops, my mistake, Russia — and a China that’s been rising all too unnervingly fast. And yes, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Trumpian figure of the first order, played along. (Why wouldn’t he? His country needs help bad!) And “our” European allies did indeed welcome a Trump-less America back by falling modestly into line, while secretly worrying that the Biden presidency was just part of a holding pattern for Trumpian-style horrors still to come. Think of those initial Biden-esque days abroad, all in all, as the hydroxychloroquine of global diplomacy.
The president then flew on to Geneva where, in an encounter touted as significant beyond belief, he met face to face for several hours with the leader of Russia, a country he — to the thrill of the Russian media — had already called a “great power.” As it happened, his counterpart Vladimir Putin was playing out a similarly Trumpian fantasy: that the leader of an economically bedraggled oil state with a Texas-sized economy is still the equivalent of the Soviet Union and so one of the two (or three) major powers on the planet.
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping, the head of a distinctly rising power, continues to promote yet another global fantasy, since if his country is indeed rising, it’s on a falling planet, one already heating beyond all expectations. Evidently, in these last weeks, few leaders cared to consider this planet and its “powers” as they really are.
Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the recently published book After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, considers what to make of a country in chaos, confusion, and a new kind of disunion, one that now looks increasingly like the living definition of decline on that declining planet of ours. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
So It Goes
The Passing of the Present and the Decline of America
asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly aware that its publication qualified as a literary event, I felt no urge to read it. At that moment, I had more immediate priorities to attend to, chief among them: preparing for my upcoming deployment to Vietnam.
Had I reflected on Vonnegut’s question then, my guess is that I would have judged the present to be both very wide and very deep and, as a white American male, mine to possess indefinitely. Life, of course, was by no means perfect. The Vietnam War had obviously not gone exactly as expected. The cacophonous upheaval known as “the Sixties” had produced considerable unease and consternation. Yet a majority of Americans — especially those with their hands on the levers of political, corporate, and military power — saw little reason to doubt that history remained on its proper course and that was good enough for me.
In other words, despite the occasional setbacks and disappointments of the recent past, this country’s global preeminence remained indisputable, not just in theory but in fact. That the United States would enjoy such a status for the foreseeable future seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, if any single nation prefigured the destiny of humankind, it was ours. Among the lessons taught by history itself, nothing ranked higher or seemed more obvious. Primacy, in other words, defined our calling.
Any number of motives, most of them utterly wrong-headed, had prompted the United States to go to war in Vietnam. Yet, in retrospect, I’ve come to believe that one motive took precedence over all others: Washington’s fierce determination to deflect any doubt about this country’s status as history’s sole chosen agent. By definition, once U.S. officials had declared that preserving a non-communist South Vietnam constituted a vital national security interest, it became one, ipso facto. Saying it made it so, even if, by any rational calculation, the fate of South Vietnam had negligible implications for the wellbeing of the average American.
As it happened, the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were soon forgotten. Although that conflict ended in humiliating defeat, the reliance on force to squelch doubts about American dominion persisted. And once the Cold War ended, taking with it any apparent need for the United States to exercise self-restraint, the militarization of American policy reached full flood. Using force became little short of a compulsion. Affirming American “global leadership” provided an overarching rationale for the sundry saber-rattling demonstrations, skirmishes, interventions, bombing campaigns, and large-scale wars in which U.S. forces have continuously engaged ever since.
Simultaneously, however, that wide, deep, and taken-for-granted present of my youth was slipping away. As our wars became longer and more numerous, the problems besetting the nation only multiplied, while the solutions on offer proved ever flimsier.
The possibility that a penchant for war might correlate with mounting evidence of national distress largely escaped notice. This was especially the case in Washington where establishment elites clung to the illusion that military might testifies to national greatness.
Somewhere along the way — perhaps midway between Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 and the assault on the Capitol in January of this year — it dawned on me that the present that I once knew and took as a given is now gone for good. A conclusion that I would have deemed sacrilegious half a century ago now strikes me as self-evident: The American experiment in dictating the course of history has reached a dead-end.
How could that have happened over the course of just a few decades? And where does the demise of that reassuring present — arrangements that I and most other Americans once took to be fixed and true — leave us today? What comes next?
Inflection Point
“So it goes.” As Vonnegut recounts the journey of his time-traveling protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five, that terse phrase serves as a recurring motif. It defines Vonnegut’s worldview: fate is arbitrary, destiny inexplicable, history a random affair. There is no why. Whatever happens, happens. So it goes.
Such sentiments are deeply at odds with the way Americans are accustomed to thinking about past, present, and future. Since the founding of our republic, if not before, we have habitually imputed to history a clearly identifiable purpose, usually connected to the spread of freedom and democracy as we understand those concepts.
Yet as crises without easy solutions continue to accumulate, Vonnegut’s cynicism – tantamount to civic blasphemy — might warrant fresh consideration. “So it goes” admits to severe limits on human agency. While offering little in terms of remedies, it just might offer a first step toward recovering a collective sense of modesty and self-awareness.
Because he’s president, Joe Biden must necessarily profess to believe otherwise. By any objective measure, Biden is a long-in-the-tooth career politician of no particular distinction. He is clearly a decent and well-meaning fellow. Yet his prior record of substantive achievement, whether as a long-serving senator from Delaware or as vice president, is thin. He is the Democratic Party’s equivalent of a B-list movie actor honored with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in tribute to his sheer doggedness and longevity.
That said, some Americans entertain high hopes for the Biden presidency. Especially in quarters where Trump Derangement Syndrome remains acute, expectations of Biden single-handedly charting a course back from the abyss toward which his predecessor had allowed the nation to drift are palpable. So, too, is the belief that he will thereby reconstitute some version of American political, economic, and military primacy, even in a world of Covid-19, climate change, a rising China, and a host of other daunting challenges. Despite this very tall order, “so it goes” can have no place in Biden’s lexicon.
During its decades-long interval of apparent global dominion, American expectations about the role presidents were to play grew appreciably. Commentators fell into the habit of referring to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the most powerful man in the world,” presiding over the planet’s most powerful nation. The duties prescribed by the U.S. Constitution came nowhere near to defining the responsibilities and prerogatives of the chief executive. Prophet, seer, source of inspiration, interpreter of the zeitgeist, and war-maker par excellence: presidents were expected to function as each of these.
In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt boosted the morale of Depression-era Americans by assuring them that they had a “rendezvous with destiny.” At the very moment when he entered the White House in 1961, John F. Kennedy thrilled his countrymen with a pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, [and] meet any hardship” to prevent the extinction of liberty itself globally. In his second inaugural address, delivered in the midst of two protracted wars, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that “ending tyranny in our world” had become “the calling of our time.” Even today, tyranny shows no signs of disappearing. Even so — and notwithstanding four years of Donald Trump — the delusion that presidents possess visionary gifts persists. And so it goes.
As a result, whether he likes it or not — and he probably likes it quite a lot — observers are looking to Biden to demonstrate similarly prophetic gifts. Even though expressing himself in less than soaring terms, he’s sought to oblige. According to the president, the United States — and by implication the world as a whole — has today arrived at an “inflection point,” a technocratic tagline that’s become a recurring motif for both him and his administration.
That “inflection point” conveys little by way of poetry in no way diminishes its significance. Quite the opposite, it expresses Biden’s own sense of the historical moment. Implicit in the phrase is a sense of urgency. Also implicit is a call to action: “Here we are. There is where we need to go. Follow me.” Consider it the very inverse of “so it goes.”
Three Vectors
Given both Biden’s advanced age and his party’s precarious majority in Congress, not to mention the legions of Americans hankering to return Donald Trump to the White House, the opportunity to act on this imagined inflection point may well prove fleeting at best, nonexistent at worst. If Republicans gain control of the Senate or House of Representatives next year, “so it goes” may become the mournful refrain of a lame-duck presidency. Hence, Biden’s understandable determination to seize the moment, before rising inequality at home, a rising China abroad, rising seas everywhere, and a potentially resurgent Trumpism swamp his administration.
So even though the Biden team is not yet fully in place, the inflection point already finds expression in three distinct commitments. Together, they give us a sense of what to expect from this administration — and what we should worry about.
The first commitment bears the imprint of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It assumes that vigorous government action under Washington’s benign and watchful eye can indeed repair a battered and broken economy, restoring prosperity, while redressing deep inequities. Given the necessary resources, that government can solve problems, even big ones, has for more than a century been a central precept of American liberalism. To demonstrate liberalism’s continued viability, Biden proposes to spend trillions of dollars to “build back better,” while curbing the excesses of a neoliberalism to which his own party contributed mightily. The spending and the curbs inevitably elicit charges that Biden has embraced socialism or something worse. So it goes in American politics these days.
The second commitment that derives from Biden’s inflection point centers on the culture wars. Its progressive purpose is to supplant a social order in which white heterosexual males (like Biden and me) have enjoyed a privileged place with a new order that prizes diversity. Creating such a new order implies expunging the non-trivial vestiges of American racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given trends within late modernity that emphasize autonomy and choice over tradition and obligation, this effort may eventually succeed, but rest assured, such success will not come anytime soon. In the meantime, Biden will catch all kinds of grief from those professing to cherish a set of received values that ostensibly formed the foundation of the American Experiment. So it goes.
The third commitment deriving from that inflection point relates to America’s once-and-future role in the world. Suffused with nostalgia, this commitment seeks to return the planet to the heyday of American dominion, putting the United States once more in history’s driver’s seat. Reduced to a Bidenesque bumper sticker, it insists that “America is back.” With decades of foreign policy experience to draw on, the president appears committed to making good on that assertion.
His much ballyhooed first trip abroad put this aspiration on vivid display, while also revealing its remarkable hollowness. As a start, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a vapid revision of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, in essence posing as ersatz versions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Few who witnessed the charade were fooled.
Then Air Force One delivered the president to Brussels where he cajoled the members of NATO into tagging China as a looming threat. Doing so meant ignoring the ignominious failure of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan and disregarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s reminder that “NATO is an organization that concerns the North Atlantic,” whereas China just happens to be located on the other side of the world.
The pièce de résistance came when Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a nearly substance-free “summit” in Geneva. Possessing neither the drama of Kennedy vs. Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, nor the substance of Ronald Reagan’s encounter with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, it proved an empty show, even if it did play to a full theater.
Still, the entire trip and the bloated media coverage it generated were instructive. They illuminated what Biden’s inflection point truly signifies for America’s role in the world. The Biden administration yearns to reinstall familiar verities dating from World War II and the Cold War as the basis of U.S. policy. Many members of the press corps share that yearning. Hence the inclination to define the present age in terms of a new Cold War version of great-power competition, while paying little more than lip service to the need for fresh thinking and vigorous action on matters like climate change, environmental degradation, refugee flows, and nuclear proliferation.
Modeled at least in part on a New Deal that Americans remember fondly but inaccurately, Biden’s economic policies will in all likelihood promote growth and reduce unemployment. Even taking into account the risk of unintended consequences such as inflation, the effort is probably worth undertaking.
By wading into the culture wars, Biden might also bring the country closer to fulfilling the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No doubt arguments about the proper meaning of freedom and equality will continue. But the correct goal is not utopia. Merely reducing the gap between professed ideals and prevailing practice will suffice. Here, too, the effort is at least worth undertaking.
When it comes to America’s role in the world, however, it becomes difficult to profess even modest optimism. If Biden clings to a calcified and militarized conception of national security — as he appears intent on doing — he will put his entire presidency at risk. Rather than restoring American primacy, he will accelerate American decline.
Harkening back to where the nation was when I received my commission in 1969, I’m struck today by how little we Americans learned from our Vietnam misadventure. Pain did not translate into wisdom. That we have learned even less from our various armed conflicts since appears only too obvious. When it comes to war, Americans remain willfully and incorrigibly ignorant. We have paid dearly for that ignorance and will likely pay even more in the years ahead. So it goes.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Mayor Wayman Newton. (photo: Wayman Newton/Daily Beast)
hen Wayman Newton found out last week about the warrant for his arrest in the town that elected him its first Black mayor, he wasn’t surprised.
Ever since Newton, 40, took office after winning his election in Tarrant, Alabama—population 7,000—by nearly 40 percentage points last year, a small minority of mostly white residents and city leaders have had it out for him, he told The Daily Beast.
They’ve blocked him from making what he and some locals describe as needed changes to the police department in a city mostly comprised of Black and Latino residents, he said.
Newton said the opposition reached its apex last week, when Dennis Reno, the white former chief of police in Tarrant, accused the mayor of assaulting him during a conversation in Newton’s office a day after his swearing-in back in November.
During the meeting, Newton said, he confronted Reno—who was still chief at the time—over what the mayor claimed was a longstanding practice of not hiring Black police officers in the city. He said Reno told him he hadn’t hired Black officers because they weren’t qualified, and couldn’t be trusted to police their own. The conversation evolved into a shouting match, Newton said.
“At a certain point, I had to remind him that I was the mayor and kicked him out of my office,” he told The Daily Beast.
Reno did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. But according to AL.com, he told police last week that Newton slammed a door on his arm and injured him seriously enough that he now needs physical therapy. Newton was arrested on June 16 and charged with third-degree assault, according to records from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, which declined to elaborate on the charges prior to publication.
In an interview, the mayor denied ever slamming the door on Reno’s arm.
For his part, Reno denied any pattern of discriminatory hiring. “I only worked for him for two hours. He never gave me a chance,” he told AL.com of the mayor, adding that he had told Newton, “I don’t hire off race, I hire off qualifications.”
When he was released, the young mayor posted security-camera videos on Facebook that appear to show Reno leaving the mayor’s office and calmly closing the door on his way out. Other videos, apparently from the next day, show him using the left arm he allegedly injured to carry files and climb out of his pickup truck. Newton called the assault charge—in connection with an argument that happened seven months ago—a “stunt,” while Reno has claimed Newton is only releasing part of the footage.
Coming on the heels of a year of racial justice protests, literal dismantling of Confederate monuments, and calls for police reform, the bizarre, small-town, Deep South saga either reflects the rise of a ruthless politician one rival likened to Adolf Hitler, or the last gasp of a white power structure that won’t let go.
It just depends on who you ask.
“My election kind of represented a transition from the old guard to the new,” Newton told The Daily Beast. “If you actually go and talk to most people that actually live here in the city, they actually like the things that I’m doing.”
Deanna Taylor is one of those people. The white 25-year-old said she supports Newton because he has made an attempt to bring needed youth activities to the city, and has helped the police department make great strides. Taylor, who does not buy the assault charge, said her boyfriend is Black, and that for many in the Black community, it has been an open secret that the Tarrant Police Department had no Black police officers and would routinely pull over Black drivers and find excuses to search their cars.
“We would have friends and family that wouldn’t come to Tarrant because they were known for it,” Taylor said.
Lt. Phillip George of the Tarrant Police Department declined to comment about any alleged policy of not hiring Black officers, as well as the alleged targeting of Black drivers. But he told The Daily Beast that the police department employs 18 officers. He said four of those officers are Black, and that all were hired after Reno resigned from his position as chief of police on Jan. 1.
George also shared department data with The Daily Beast that showed how, in 2019, Black drivers represented about 58 percent of those stopped by police, and about 55 percent of stopped drivers in 2020. Those figures are only slightly higher than the 53 percent of the population Black folks make up, according to recent census records.
Meanwhile, white drivers made up about 30 percent of stops in 2019, and 27 percent of stops in 2020, numbers that are a bit lower than their 34 percent share of the population.
Although the numbers don’t tell a damning tale, Newton said, “Tarrant historically has had a problem.”
“I actually question the legitimacy of those numbers like I question the legitimacy of the hiring practices of the previous police chief,” he added.
Newton said he helped solidify an internal affairs office to keep track of any alleged police misconduct. George confirmed that changes to the department made it so that one officer would be in charge of the internal affairs department, rather than a previous system that would tap an available detective or lieutenant to handle complaints.
Tarrant resident Waynette Bonham said things seemed to be changing for the better under Newton. The Black 41-year-old claimed the mayor has also made other positive changes in the city, such as starting a farmer’s market, providing greater access to the community center, and feeding the poorest city residents.
She argued that it was clear from watching “embarrassing” city council meetings every week that he has some enemies. “Mayor Newton is trying hard for the citizens of Tarrant,” she said. “But it’s the people that hold office in Tarrant that’s keeping him from moving forward.”
She called out the longest-serving councilman, Tommy Bryant, in particular. “It’s like now all he’s doing is trying to oppose anything Mayor Newton is doing. And Mayor Newton is trying to correct the things that had been so bad about the city of Tarrant from the previous administration—like not having Black officers.”
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Bryant pushed back against any problems with race that the city and police department may have faced in the past. Bryant, who is white, also said his opposition to Newton has nothing to do with his race but rather stemmed from Newton trampling on the established ways of doing things and instilling a culture of fear among current and city employees because of his temper.
“He is a dictatorial person,” Bryant, 76, told The Daily Beast of Newton. “Reminds me of Adolf Hitler.”
Bryant has served as a councilman for 12 years, and said he’s lived in Tarrant for most of his life. He accused Newton of failing to fill important vacant positions in the city, like the city clerk and the chief of police. (Newton said the reason the city doesn’t have a clerk or police chief is because Bryant and other holdover council members have opposed his choices and instead want to install someone sympathetic to them.)
Bryant also blamed the mayor for firing people without the input of other city officials, such as when he axed Jason Rickels, the former fire department chief in Tarrant, after Rickels was arrested in Georgia in March. According to AL.com, Rickels, who is white, was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possession of a gun after he allegedly pulled a gun on a Black realtor and photographer at a home he owned in Roswell, Georgia.
Brian Steel, Rickels’ attorney, told AL.com the charges were baseless. Neither Rickels nor Steel responded to a request for comment for this story.
Bryant wondered why Newton wasn’t putting himself on leave given the fact that he fired Rickels for his charge. “Two different standards for two different people,” he said.
The councilman went on to say longtime city employees were in a “hostile situation” under Newton’s leadership, and accused the mayor of harassing multiple employees, including himself. He described one meeting a few months back where he said Newton tried to instigate a fight with him. He even claimed that he wore a bulletproof vest to council meetings a few times because he feared for his safety.
Bryant said he isn’t opposed to changes in the city, but believes Newton is going about things in an aggressive way. “I know how things are supposed to be done,” he said. “I don’t mind changes, if they’re done like they’re supposed to be done. He has no regard for the proper procedures to do anything.”
Laura Horton, 73, who served on the city council for 20 years before losing her re-election bid in 2020, echoed Bryant’s assessment of Newton. “It is like he thinks he’s God and he rules this city,” she said.
Newton denied harassing any city employees. In response to the alleged instance of misconduct that Bryant described, in which he said Newton challenged him to a fight, Newton said, “I’m a 40-year-old Black man with an Ivy League degree and I graduated from a top-10 law school. I’m more than qualified to be the mayor of Tarrant. Do you really think that I would say something like that at a public meeting?”
He said the accusations about the supposed threats on Bryant’s life were not worth responding to. Newton only acknowledged using “foul language” one time in private with Bryant, after he said the councilman called him “boy.” “If you know anything about the history of the South and race relations, to have some 75-year-old man calling a 40-year-old Black man a boy is very insulting,” Newton said.
In response, Bryant claimed that he called Newton “little boy,” and that Newton had been trying to instigate him—and that he meant the comment only to “turn the tide” on the situation.
“I was trying to piss him off to see if he’d come after me,” Bryant said.
Freddie Rubio, the city attorney of Tarrant, declined to comment on any formal complaints of harassment against Mayor Newton, and did not respond to a subsequent request for comment about whether procedures had been followed in firing employees. “I do not represent the Mayor, Councilor Bryant or any other employee in its individual capacity,” he said. “I don’t take sides between politicians.”
For his part, Newton said most of the criticism by Bryant, Horton, and others who have opposed him is due to the fact that the city used to be run in a way that gave them more decision-making power than he believes they should have—and led to a cycle of stagnation. For example, he said, the firing of Rickels is something that he didn’t need approval for. “I’m in charge of employees,” he told The Daily Beast.
He called himself the “CEO of the city,” and said Bryant and others have unfortunately been put off by the new structure he’s installed. “My thing is, I was elected to run the city. I take that job and responsibility very seriously. And that’s what I’ve been doing,” he said.
Joel Kimbrough, who is white, has lived in Tarrant his whole life and owns a printing business there. He supports Newton, does not believe the assault claim, and said he believes the real issue has to do with the changing demographics of the city over the past 30 years, which is now largely minority but was once predominantly white.
He said too many longtime residents of the city long for a version back in the ’60s and ’70s, when it was a different place. “We have lived in the past,” he said. “That has done a tremendous amount of damage to the city, because no one has had their eye on the future.”
Kimbrough, 65, said the city has a lot of potential and a significant budget given its size. But he said it has been plagued by a lack of investment, empty storefronts, and what he calls a lack of foresight.
Newton, he said, has been a boon to the city because he recognizes its potential. “He can look and see what it could be without the historical hindsight of what it was,” he said.
But he said people like Bryant and Reno are, in effect, stuck in the past: “They’re longing for a time that was.”
A bridge across the Mississippi could over a new spot for American bison. (photo: Alan Rogers/AP)
Conservationist aims to replace old bridge with bison preserve, benefiting environment and spotlighting Indigenous history
etween Iowa and Illinois, spanning the only stretch of the Mississippi River that flows from east to west, sits an exhausted 55-year-old concrete bridge. Each day 42,000 cars drive across the ageing structure, which is slated to be torn down and replaced.
But when Chad Pregracke looks at the bridge, he has a different vision entirely – not an old overpass to be demolished, but a home for the buffalo to roam.
The conservationist and local hero hails from the Quad Cities, a 300,000-person metropolitan area spanning two states on either side of the Mississippi River. It is named for its four cities: Bettendorf and Davenport in south-eastern Iowa and Moline and Rock Island in north-western Illinois.
Pregracke spends months every year living on barges and cleaning up refuse from the Mississippi, and he has brought his passion for the river to his latest project: converting the ailing bridge into a buffalo preserve. The idea came to him four years ago as he drove across the bridge one day, he says: “I thought, what if we made this a wildlife crossing?”
Now, his unlikely vision is being taken seriously. The departments of transportation in Iowa and Illinois are considering the proposal, which would break ground in as little as five years.
If completed, the bridge would become the longest human-made wildlife crossing in the world. The plan would see a new bridge built further down the river, where car traffic will be rerouted, and the existing bridge converted for use by humans and American bison – colloquially known as buffalo.
On one side would stand a pedestrian path and bike path, and on the other an enclosed bison paddock that would let visitors see eye to eye with the huge creatures. The herds would be free to roam between Iowa and Illinois in the grassy expanse, and the project would establish the first national park in either state.
While in many ways unique, the proposal follows a growing trend of urban renewal projects – perhaps most famously the High Line in New York City, a raised railroad converted into an elevated park. In Chicago, a raised railroad track was also converted into a park and bike trail. In Los Angeles, there have been proposals to convert part of the 101 freeway into a park.
Meanwhile, bison preserves featuring small herds have emerged in various locations across the US, including outside of Denver and in the middle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Advocates for the Bison Bridge, as it is being called, say repurposing the structure rather than demolishing it would reduce waste, save costs, and benefit the environment. Pregracke says the project would help turn the Quad City area into a world-class destination, highlighting the Mississippi River as a feature worth traveling to, rather than a body of water to be crossed on the highway. “I mean, how could you not stop for bison?” Pregracke said.
Native American groups say bison restoration is an important means of reconnecting with the land and local history – and recognizing the interlinked atrocities committed against bison and Indigenous people.
Since 1997, the National Wildlife Federation has held a conservation agreement with an intertribal advocacy group for the return of wild bison to tribal lands and “restoring Native Americans’ cultural connection to bison”. What is now the Quad Cities was, in the early 1800s, a principal trading center for Indigenous peoples. Advocates say highlighting the area’s traditional connection with bison can call attention to that history.
The bison’s history as a ‘cornerstone species’
Buffalo were once abundant in the midwest and western United States, but they were hunted nearly to extinction.
In the mid-1800s it was estimated that 30 million to 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains before the US government began to systematically target them as a means to starve Indigenous Americans and drive them off their land. By the end of the 19th century, only 300 wild bison remained.
Pregracke has convened a team of experts to help bring the bridge to life, including Jason Baldes, a tribal bison coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation. A member of the Eastern Shoshone, Baldes works to restore bison to the lands they once populated and reconnect them with Indigenous peoples who revered them as a main source of food and a spiritual symbol.
“The bison was known as the life commissary for my grandmas and grandpas,” Baldes said. “It was food, clothing, shelter, and was also central to our cultural and spiritual belief systems.”
Baldes said restoring bison in the US was important both culturally and ecologically. Bison are known as a keystone species, meaning their existence benefits a number of species in their native habitats.
The stampedes of millions of bison on the Great Plains helped aerate the soil, aiding in plant growth and the dispersal of native seeds to create a varied ecosystem. The fur of the animal is ideal for insulating the nests of certain birds, and burrowing owls once relied on their dung for building their homes. Bison have a tendency to wallow, or roll around on the ground, creating small depressions that provide unique habitats for plant and animal species.
Baldes said the reintroduction of bison to tribal communities and public parks represented an opportunity to teach the broader public about that painful history and rebuild.
“We are finding ways to heal from the atrocities of the past, and buffalo restoration, and the restoration of the foundation of our cultural values and belief systems, is very important to that,” Baldes said.
Baldes said based on his experience with bison populations, the bridge would be a sufficient size for a small herd of eight to 10 animals. But the small size did not diminish the importance of the project, he said, adding that he saw it as a “very key educational tool” for the broader public. The Meskwaki nation had been contacted regarding the project but was not collaborating in an official capacity as of now, a spokeswoman said.
“Bison were destroyed as a means to eradicate Native American land holdings and inflict genocidal practices, so for our tribal communities, buffalo restoration is very important,” Baldes said. “But it’s not only important to Native American tribes, but it’s important to the American people to at least have an opportunity to learn about this history.”
Local agencies anticipate a bison boom
Daniel MacNulty, an associate professor of wildland resources at Utah State University who studies wild bison populations in Yellowstone national park, said the repurposed bridge would in fact make a feasible habitat for the animals. Bison were hardy animals that could easily adapt to new surroundings, and while the size of the park proposed would not necessarily support a large herd of bison, a small herd would serve an important purpose.
“It is certainly an out-of-the-box idea, but it provides an opportunity to conserve bison,” MacNulty said. “Any time the public is exposed to information about the ecology of bison and the Great Plains, it is a positive thing.”
Officials in the Quad City area have been supportive of the project in part because of the opportunities it could bring for tourism and growth to the area, which has had a stagnant population for more than 30 years. The project has been endorsed by the local community and economic development organization the Quad Cities Chamber and the regional tourism board Visit Quad Cities.
“We are trying everything we can do to make the Quad Cities a prosperous regional economy – and that means we need to think differently about how we attract and retain residents and businesses,” said Paul Rumler, president of the Quad Cities Chamber.
Currently, the area sees 1.6m visitors per year, generating $954m in local spending. Visit Quad Cities estimates a new national park could quadruple that number in just the first year, with sales tax bringing a “huge boost” to local hotels and restaurants.
“We would like to be able to point to this and show that this is how we do business here – we are creative, we are innovative and willing to try new concepts, and we have the perseverance to pull it off,” Rumler said. “We all need a crazy idea to latch on to.”
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