10 March 22
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According to the sources, Trump’s four years of ardent toadying left the Russian President emotionally unprepared for the Ukrainians’ defiance.
“If I wanted Trump to do something, I’d just snap my fingers and consider it done,” Putin reportedly said. “It was wonderful.”
Putin’s entire plan for invading Ukraine, in fact, was predicated on the false assumption that the Ukrainians “would act like Trump,” one source indicated.
“After he invaded, he kept waiting for the Ukrainians to tell him how strong and smart he was,” the source said. “When there were no displays of Trumpian sycophancy, his mood darkened.”
At a Kremlin meeting over the weekend, Putin’s frustration at the Ukrainians for being less obsequious than Trump boiled over, sources said.
“If the President of the United States can abandon democracy and the rule of law, why can’t these people?” Putin asked, pounding his desk.
State propagandists called for Putin to end the "special military operation" before "frightening" sanctions destabilize his regime and risk civil war in Russia. (photo: AP)
State propagandists called for Putin to end the “special military operation” before “frightening” sanctions destabilize his regime and risk civil war in Russia.
The ugly truth about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is slipping through the cracks, despite the government’s authoritarian attempts to control the narrative.
The Kremlin-controlled state media is doing its best to flip the situation upside down, blaming the victims of Russia’s aggression for all of the casualties. On Wednesday’s edition of the state TV show The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, the host claimed the fallout of Russia’s bombing of a maternity hospital this week was “fake” with no one there to be injured, despite photos of pregnant women being carried away from the blast that killed at least one child. A guest on 60 Minutes last Saturday even claimed Ukrainians “are firing on each other and blaming us.”
On Thursday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that Russia never attacked Ukraine and repeated the same lies as Soloviev about the total absence of patients in the maternity ward and children’s hospital bombed by Russia.
Putin’s most trusted propagandists are becoming ever more desperate to distort or deny the evidence of the atrocities because the truth is finding its way past the roadblocks erected by the Kremlin. Russian citizens are not pleased either with the war, nor with the financial price they have to pay for their leader’s ill-conceived military conquests.
Even the infamous show run by Soloviev—who was recently sanctioned as an accomplice of Putin by the European Union—became dominated by predictions of Russian doom and gloom. Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, cautioned: “For our country, this period won’t be easy. It will be very difficult. It might be even more difficult than it was for the Soviet Union from 1945 until the 1960s... We’re more integrated into the global economy than the Soviet Union, we’re more dependent on imports—and the main part is that the Cold War is the war of the minds, first and foremost. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union had a consolidating idea on which its system was built. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia has nothing like that to offer.”
State TV pundit Karen Shakhnazarov pointed out: “The war in Ukraine paints a frightening picture, it has a very oppressive influence on our society. Ukraine, whichever way you see it, is something with which Russia has thousands of human links. The suffering of one group of innocents does not compensate for the suffering of other innocent people... I don’t see the probability of denazification of such an enormous country. We would need to bring in 1.5 million soldiers to control all of it. At the same time, I don’t see any political power that would consolidate the Ukrainian society in a pro-Russian direction... Those who talked of their mass attraction to Russia obviously didn’t see things the way they are. The most important thing in this scenario is to stop our military action. Others will say that sanctions will remain. Yes, they will remain, but in my opinion discontinuing the active phase of a military operation is very important.”
Resorting to the traditional propaganda tropes prevalent in Russian state media, Shakhnazarov accused the United States of starting the war—and trying to prolong it indefinitely. He speculated: “What are they achieving by prolonging the war? First of all, public opinion within Russia is changing. People are shocked by the masses of refugees, the humanitarian catastrophe, people start to imagine themselves in their place. It’s starting to affect them. To say that the Nazis are doing that is not quite convincing, strictly speaking... On top of that, economic sanctions will start to affect them, and seriously. There will probably be scarcity. A lot of products we don’t produce, even the simplest ones. There’ll be unemployment. They really thought through these sanctions, they’re hitting us with real continuity. It’s a well-planned operation... Yes, this is a war of the United States with Russia... These sanctions are hitting us very precisely.
“This threatens the change of public opinion in Russia, the destabilization of our power structures... with the possibility of a full destabilization of the country and a civil war. This apocalyptic scenario is based on the script written by the Americans. They benefit through us dragging out the military operation. We need to end it somehow. If we achieved the demilitarization and freed the Donbas, that is sufficient... I have a hard time imagining taking cities such as Kyiv. I can’t imagine how that would look. If this picture starts to transform into an absolute humanitarian disaster, even our close allies like China and India will be forced to distance themselves from us. This public opinion, with which they’re saturating the entire world, can play out badly for us... Ending this operation will stabilize things within the country.”
The host frowned at the apparent departure from the officially approved line of thinking and deferred to the commander-in-chief. However, the next expert agreed with Shakhnazarov. Semyon Bagdasarov, a Russian Middle East expert, grimly said: “We didn’t even feel the impact of the sanctions just yet... We need to be ready for total isolation. I’m not panicking, just calling things by their proper name.”
Soloviev angrily sniped: “Gotcha. We should just lay down and die.”
Bagdasarov continued: “Now about Ukraine. I agree with Karen. We had prior experiences of bringing in our troops, destroying the military infrastructure and leaving. I think that our army fulfilled their task of demilitarization of the country by destroying most of their military installations... To restore their military they will need at least 10 years... Let Ukrainians do this denazification on their own. We can’t do it for them... As for their neutrality, yes, we should squeeze it out of them, and that’s it. We don’t need to stay there longer than necessary... Do we need to get into another Afghanistan, but even worse? There are more people and they’re more advanced in their handling of weapons. We don’t need that. Enough already... As for the sanctions, the world has never seen such massive sanctions.”
Dmitry Abzalov, director of the Center for Strategic Communications, pointed out that even though energy prices will go up for most of the West, it won’t do much to ease the pain for the Russians: “We’ll still be the ones taking the terminal hit, and an incomparable one, even though other countries will also suffer some losses. We’ll all be going to hell together—except for maybe China—but going to hell together with the French or Germans won’t make our people feel any better.” Abzalov argued that after taking additional territories in Eastern Ukraine, Russia should get out of Dodge, believing that all Western companies that temporarily paused their operations in Russia would then rush to come back. “It’s about toxicity, not just sanctions... It will go away once the situation stabilizes.”
Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, state TV experts predicted that Russia could overtake it in a matter of minutes or a few days. Stunned by the fierce resistance on the part of Ukrainians, Soloviev described them as “the army that is second in Europe, after ours, and which has been prepared for eight years and armed with everything you can imagine.”
Soloviev added: “This is a frightening war that is being waged against us by America.”
To lighten the mood in the studio, the host resorted to one of the favorite pastimes of many Kremlin propagandists: playing yet another Fox News clip of Tucker Carlson and his frequent guest Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor. In the translated video, Macgregor predicted Russia’s easy military victories over Ukraine and its total invincibility to Western sanctions. Soloviev sighed and smiled: “He’s a lot more optimistic than my previous experts in the studio.”
Stills from a Russian-language video that falsely claims to fact-check Ukrainian disinformation. (photo: ProPublica)
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Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn’t stop them from being featured on Russian state TV.
The clip showed two juxtaposed videos of a huge explosion in an urban area. Russian-language captions claimed that one video had been circulated by Ukrainian propagandists who said it showed a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.
But, as captions in the second video explained, the footage actually showed a deadly arms depot explosion in the same area back in 2017. The message was clear: Don’t trust footage of supposed Russian missile strikes. Ukrainians are spreading lies about what’s really going on, and pro-Russian groups are debunking them. (Bezsonov did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)
It seemed like yet another example of useful wartime fact-checking, except for one problem: There’s little to no evidence that the video claiming the explosion was a missile strike ever circulated. Instead, the debunking video itself appears to be part of a novel and disturbing campaign that spreads disinformation by disguising it as fact-checking.
Researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account.
The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub.
“The reason that it’s so effective is because you don’t actually have to convince someone that it’s true. It’s sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust,” said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. “In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing.”
Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine unleashed a torrent of false and misleading information from both sides of the conflict. Viral social media posts claiming to show video of a Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down six Russian planes — the so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” — were actually drawn from a video game. Ukrainian government officials said 13 border patrol officers guarding an island in the Black Sea were killed by Russian forces after unleashing a defiant obscenity, only to acknowledge a few days later that the soldiers were alive and had been captured by Russian forces.
For its part, the Russian government is loath to admit such mistakes, and it launched a propaganda campaign before the conflict even began. It refuses to use the word “invasion” to describe its use of more than 100,000 troops to enter and occupy territory in a neighboring country, and it is helping spread a baseless conspiracy theory about bioweapons in Ukraine. Russian officials executed a media crackdown culminating in a new law that forbids outlets in the country from publishing anything that deviates from the official stance on the war, while blocking Russians’ access to Facebook and the BBC, among other outlets and platforms.
Media outlets around the world have responded to the onslaught of lies and misinformation by fact-checking and debunking content and claims. The fake fact-check videos capitalize on these efforts to give Russian-speaking viewers the idea that Ukrainians are widely and deliberately circulating false claims about Russian airstrikes and military losses. Transforming debunking into disinformation is a relatively new tactic, one that has not been previously documented during the current conflict.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen what I might call a disinformation false-flag operation,” Warren said. “It’s like Russians actually pretending to be Ukrainians spreading disinformation.”
The videos combine with propaganda on Russian state TV to convince Russians that the “special operation” in Ukraine is proceeding well, and that claims of setbacks or air strikes on civilian areas are a Ukrainian disinformation campaign to undermine Russian confidence.
It’s unclear who is creating the videos, or if they come from a single source or many. They have circulated for roughly two weeks, first appearing a few days after Russia invaded. The first video Warren spotted claimed that a Ukrainian flag was removed from old footage of a military vehicle and replaced with a Z, a now-iconic insignia painted on Russian vehicles participating in the invasion. But when he went looking for examples of people sharing the misleading footage with the Z logo, he came up empty.
“I’ve been following [images and videos of the war] pretty carefully in the Telegram feeds, and I had never seen the video they were claiming was a propaganda video, anywhere,” he said. “And so I started digging a little more.”
Warren unearthed other fake fact-checking videos. One purported to debunk false footage of explosions in Kyiv, while others claimed to reveal that Ukrainians were circulating old videos of unrelated explosions and mislabeling them as recent. Some of the videos claim to debunk efforts by Ukrainians to falsely label military vehicles as belonging to the Russian military.
“It’s very clear that this is targeted at Russian-speaking audiences. They’re trying to make people think that when you see destroyed Russian military hardware, you should be suspicious of that,” Warren said.
There’s no question that older footage of military vehicles and explosions have circulated with false or misleading claims that connect them to Ukraine. But in the videos identified by Warren, the allegedly Ukrainian-created disinformation does not appear to have circulated prior to Russian-language debunkings.
Searches for examples of the misleading videos came up empty across social media and elsewhere. Tellingly, none of the supposed debunking videos cite a single example of the Ukrainian fakes being shared on social media or elsewhere. Examination of the metadata of two videos found on Telegram appears to provide an explanation for that absence: Whoever created these videos simply duplicated the original footage to create the alleged Ukrainian fake.
A digital video file contains embedded data, called metadata, that indicates when it was created, what editing software was used and the names of clips used to create a final video, among other information. Two Russian-language debunking videos contain metadata that shows they were created using the same video file twice — once to show the original footage, and once to falsely claim it circulated as Ukrainian disinformation. Whoever created the video added different captions or visual elements to fabricate the Ukrainian version.
“If these videos were what they purport to be, they would be a combination of two separate video files, a ‘Ukrainian fake’ and the original footage,” said Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub with Warren. “The metadata we located for some videos clearly shows that they were created by duplicating a single video file and then editing it. Whoever crafted the debunking video created the fake and debunked it at the same time.”
The Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica ran tests to confirm that a video created using two copies of the same footage will cause the file name to appear twice in the video’s metadata.
Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, called the videos “low-grade information warfare.” She said they don’t need to spread widely on social media to be effective, since their existence can be cited by major Russian media sources as evidence of Ukraine’s online disinformation campaign.
“It works in conjunction with state TV in the sense that you can put something like this online and then rerun it on TV as if it’s an example of what’s happening online,” she said.
That’s exactly what happened on March 1, when state-controlled Channel One aired a screenshot taken from one of the videos identified by Warren. The image was shown during a morning news program as a warning to “inexperienced viewers” who might be fooled by false images of Ukrainian forces destroying Russian military vehicles, according to a BBC News report.
“Footage continues to be circulated on the internet which cannot be described as anything but fake,” the BBC quoted a Channel One presenter telling the audience.
At least one Russian government account has promoted an apparent fake debunking video. On March 4, the Russian Embassy in Geneva tweeted a video with a voiceover that said “Western and Ukrainian media are creating thousands of fake news on Russia every day.” The first example showed a video where the letter “Z” was supposedly superimposed onto a destroyed military vehicle.
Another video that circulated on Russian nationalist Telegram channels such as @rlz_the_kraken, which has more than 200,000 subscribers, claimed to show that fake explosions were added to footage of buildings in Kyiv. The explosions and smoke were clearly fabricated, and the video claims they were added by Ukraininans.
But as with the other fake debunking videos, reverse image searches didn’t turn up any examples of the supposedly manipulated video being shared online. The metadata associated with the video file indicates that it may have been manipulated to add sound and other effects using Microsoft Game DVR, a piece of software that records clips from video games.
The fake debunking videos have predominantly spread on Russian-language Telegram channels with names like @FAKEcemetary. In recent days they made the leap to other languages and platforms. One video is the subject of a Reddit thread where people debated the veracity of the footage. On Twitter, they are being spread by people who support Russia, and who present the videos as examples of Ukrainian disinformation.
Francesca Totolo, an Italian writer and supporter of the neo-fascist CasaPound party, recently tweeted the video claiming that a Ukrainian flag had been removed from a military vehicle and replaced with a Russian Z.
“Now wars are also fought in the media and on social networks,” she said.
At left, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and, at right, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden's nominee to the Supreme Court. (photo: Getty)
Murkowski isn't yet sure what to do.
"The difference is, you have nine people who sit on the highest court in the land, who are there for life, and it requires a level of review and scrutiny that is in line with the position," Murkowski told CNN. "So yeah, this is a different game."
Murkowski is in a bind. If she votes for Jackson, she's bound to give fresh ammunition to a Trump-backed challenger trying to remove her from the seat she's held for the past two decades. Yet if she opposes Jackson, she'll be accused of reversing course to insulate herself from campaign attacks.
The Alaska moderate is widely viewed in the Senate as one of the biggest wild cards in what is expected to be a mostly party-line affair. If she votes no, it's possible that Jackson could win only two GOP votes or perhaps even just one, underscoring how deeply partisan Supreme Court fights have become.
"I am serving a term for six years as a senior senator. I'm interviewing somebody who's going to be there for decades, decades and decades. So this is not about me," Murkowski said. "This is about her. This is about the Supreme Court."
"You point out the obvious that I've got other considerations that go on, but our reality is this is a really big deal," she added.
After decades of escalating fights over the Supreme Court, the Senate hit a new low in the Trump era. As Donald Trump was running for the White House in 2016, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell refused to move on then-President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, an unprecedented move that shifted the court to the right and still infuriates Democrats to this day.
Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat received only three Democratic votes. His next -- Brett Kavanaugh -- received one. And his last -- Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative considered during the 2020 presidential election to replace the late liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- was the first justice to be confirmed without bipartisan support since Reconstruction.
Unlike Barrett, Jackson's confirmation would not alter the ideological makeup of the Court. Unlike Kavanaugh, Jackson hasn't been accused of sexual assault. And unlike Gorsuch, Jackson would not take a seat held open by the Senate's minority party for eight months.
Even though Jackson would be the first Black woman to serve on the court, only a handful of GOP Senate votes are truly in play, including retiring GOP senators, Utah's Mitt Romney and the senators who voted for Jackson to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Murkowski. Yet only Collins has clearly signaled she may back Jackson, while others are waiting for her confirmation hearings later this month and some refuse to talk about her at all.
"I don't want to talk about it," Graham said, after sharply criticizing President Joe Biden for selecting Jackson rather than a South Carolina district judge he had supported.
Democrats recognize winning much GOP support is unlikely, given the polarized nature of modern-era court fights, and unnecessary given they are likely to hold all 50 of their members together to win her confirmation. But they hope that Jackson joins the court with bipartisan credentials, giving a boost to her, Biden and the court's image as a nonpartisan institution.
"It's a process that I won't be handling alone," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, of winning GOP support. "She is actively meeting with senators, and I think she is the most persuasive tool, strategy that we can use. I think she makes an excellent impression, answers questions professionally, and has a resume that is as strong as anyone can ask for."
Murkowski has yet to meet with Jackson, waiting for her to finish meetings with members of the Judiciary Committee, on which she does not serve.
But Murkowski faces a tough decision: support Jackson and risk a backlash from the right or oppose her and appear like she's flip-flopping in the middle of a reelection campaign. So far, Republicans have criticized Jackson's elite educational background, questioned her views on crime and pointed out the support she holds from left-wing groups.
Asked why she backed Jackson for the DC Circuit last year, the Alaska Republican told CNN in the interview that the judge was qualified for the promotion.
"I looked at her record, as it was at that point, and gave an evaluation and said she's got the qualifications," Murkowski said.
Murkowski and her campaign maintained that just because she voted for Jackson in the past does not mean that she will support the nominee for a different position.
But Kelly Tshibaka, a former Alaska Department of Administration commissioner and Murkowski's chief Republican rival in the 2022 Senate race, is already attacking the senator over her record on previous judicial nominations.
In 2020, Murkowski opposed moving forward with Barrett's nomination since it was so close to the presidential election, although she ultimately voted for Barrett after Republicans decided to push forward the nomination anyway.
And in 2018, Murkowski was the only Republican to oppose Kavanaugh after Christine Blasey Ford alleged the nominee sexual assaulted her when they were in high school. Kavanaugh denied the allegation and was confirmed.
"Probably the most important votes a senator can cast are those for lifetime appointments for federal judges, and especially for the Supreme Court," Tshibaka told CNN in a statement. "Lisa Murkowski has spent her career being a dependable vote for leftist judges and opposing the nominations of solid, constitutionalist judges like Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett."
"She has done this over and over to make herself popular with her D.C. insider friends, but it's not what Alaskans want," Tshibaka added. "Her votes have cost Alaska dearly, time and time again."
While conservative voters might oppose Murkowski for supporting Jackson, moderate voters could reward her. Alaska has a new election system where candidates run together in a nonpartisan primary, and the top four finishers advance to the general election, when voters rank their preferences.
Murkowski's record on judicial nominees
Murkowski has been more deferential to Biden's judicial nominees than many of her Republican colleagues. The Senate has voted to confirm 46 of Biden's federal circuit and district judges. Murkowski supported 37, opposed six, and didn't vote on three of them, according to a CNN review.
Murkowski was more willing to consider Obama's nominees too, even though she did not support his Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, in 2009 and 2010.
She was occasionally the only Republican senator to support advancing Obama's picks, saying she thought all judicial nominations deserved an up-or-down vote, except in "extraordinary circumstances," no matter who was President. Other times, she and Collins were the only Senate Republicans who supported advancing Obama's judicial nominees, paving the way for their confirmations, even if she ultimately opposed confirming them.
But Murkowski is no stranger to difficult votes. Tshibaka was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican State Central Committee after Murkowski voted to convict the former President of "incitement of insurrection" in the impeachment trial following the attack on the Capitol last year. She was also a rare Republican vote to doom the party's bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act under Trump.
Besides Murkowski, only a handful of Republican senators appear open to the prospect of voting for Jackson.
"I'm looking to meeting her and we'll see," Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, who is retiring, told CNN when asked if he's open to backing her.
Romney said "sure" he's open to backing her nomination, saying "it will depend on our discussion and judicial philosophy and I'll be looking at her record and seeing how she's decided prior cases. It's a much deeper dive than I took last time."
Asked why he voted against her for the DC Circuit last year, Romney said: "We took a review of some of the cases that she decided and felt that they suggested that she was not in the mainstream of judicial thought."
GOP leaders say no matter how many of their members vote for Jackson, the outcome will be the same.
"She's going to get confirmed," Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of GOP leadership, told CNN. "I'll make that wild prediction."
Like many people who began remote work during the pandemic, Ms. Egziabher now prefers working from home so that she can focus on work - not office politics. (photo: Josh Huskin/New York Times)
“I was presenting the case for you,” he told her. “And people were like, ‘We don’t really know Kristen. We only know her work.’”
What?
Sure, her work. What else could be relevant to a performance review? But this was exactly what had always irked Ms. Egziabher, 40, about her office, where she served as a project manager for a Texas food chain. No matter her productivity, her colleagues seemed to care primarily about the chitchat — what’d you do last weekend, where’d you get that purse? Ms. Egziabher, who is Black, felt that her white co-workers were fixated on who was jostling for entry to their in-group.
“What does all that matter for my pay?” she wondered. “If we’re being real, I don’t care what you did last weekend.”
Remote work brought a reprieve. Several months into being sent to work from home, Ms. Egziabher got a promotion and an 11 percent raise: “If I had continued going into the office,” she added, “there might have been some excuse around likability.”
When one of America’s earliest open-plan offices debuted in Racine, Wis., in 1939, women made up less than one-third of the country’s labor force. The design of that early office, not so different from the one that modern workers experience, fit the needs of a particular employee: someone who could stay late because he didn’t have to rush home to make dinner for his children; someone pleased to cross paths with the boss because it meant time to talk golf.
The office, in other words, was never one size fits all. It was one size fits some, with the expectation that everybody else would squeeze in. Office banter, for example, might have been a small annoyance for a segment of workers. But for many others, it amplified a sense that they didn’t belong.
The last two years ushered in an unplanned experiment with a different way of working: Some 50 million Americans left their offices. Before the pandemic, in 2019, about 4 percent of employed people in the U.S. worked exclusively from home; by May 2020, that figure rose to 43 percent, according to Gallup. Of course, that means a majority of the work force continued working in person throughout the last two years. But among white-collar workers, the shift is stark: Before Covid just 6 percent worked exclusively from home, which by May 2020 rose to 65 percent.
“The only thing holding back flexible work arrangements was a failure of imagination,” said Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. “That failure was remedied in three weeks’ time in March 2020.”
But now some executives are throwing open their office doors, propelled by loosening Covid restrictions and declining cases. Office occupancy across the country reached a pandemic peak of 40 percent in December, dipped because of the Omicron variant and then began to rise again, reaching 38 percent this month, according to data from the security firm Kastle. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Meta, Microsoft, Ford Motor and Citigroup are just a handful of the companies starting to bring some workers back.
When over 700 people responded to The Times’s recent questions about returning to their offices, as well as in interviews with more than two dozen of them, there were myriad reasons people listed for preferring work from home, on top of concerns about Covid safety. They mentioned sunlight, sweatpants, quality time with kids, quality time with cats, more hours to read and run, space to hide the angst of a crummy day or year. But the most strongly argued was about workplace culture.
“There’s not much point in returning to the office if we’re just going back to the old boys’ club,” said Keren Gifford, 37, an information technology worker in Pittsburgh who has not yet been required to return to her office. “What a relief not to have to go in day after day, week after week, and fail at making friends and having fun.”
Many, like Ms. Gifford, realized they felt like they’d spent their careers in spaces built for somebody else. Take something as simple as temperature. Most building thermostats follow a model developed in the 1960s that takes into account, among other factors, the resting metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man weighing 154 pounds, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. That left women to spend their prepandemic years filling cubicles with shawls, space heaters and blankets they could burrow into “like a burrito.”
Some even kept their desks stocked with fingerless gloves, like Marissa Stein, 37, a staffer at an environmental nonprofit. Once Ms. Stein started working remotely, she could set her home temperature to 68 degrees, a compromise between her husband’s chillier preferences and her own.
“Sometimes I will sneak it up to 70 when my husband isn’t paying attention,” she said.
But that’s just the smallest example of how the office was physically designed to fit the needs of a very specific type of worker.
And some of the companies now attempting to call their staff back are facing a wave of resistance from workers emboldened to question the way things always were — which is to say, difficult for many people. There are people of color whose colleagues wouldn’t stop asking them how to work the copy machine. There are the introverts who never wanted to chat about fantasy football leagues. There are the caretakers who used to rush out for school pickup, feeling they were failing to meet unspoken professional expectations and just barely meeting their families’ needs.
Two national surveys found that since the onset of the pandemic there’s been a reduction in the percentage of employees who say that working long hours or being available beyond business hours is important to be successful at their organizations, according to Youngjoo Cha, a sociologist at Indiana University.
“We had a nationwide experiment in telecommuting,” Ms. Cha said. “These conditions challenged the notion of ideal workers.”
Studies of 10,000 office workers conducted last year by Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack, suggest that women and people of color were more likely to see working remotely as beneficial than their white male colleagues. In the United States, 86 percent of Hispanic and 81 percent of Black knowledge workers, those who do nonmanual work, said that they preferred hybrid or remote work, compared with 75 percent of white knowledge workers. And globally, 50 percent of working mothers who participated in the studies reported wanting to work remotely most or all the time, compared with 43 percent of fathers. A sense of belonging at work increased for 24 percent of Black knowledge workers surveyed, compared with 5 percent of white knowledge workers, since May 2021.
Of course, some miss the work-life boundaries that their pre-Covid lives enabled: “My husband will sometimes come home and turn on the T.V., and I’m like, you turned on the T.V. in my office!” said Barbara Harris, 49, who works in professional services in Virginia.
Others, especially managers, argue that culture building is tougher to do virtually — does anybody really want another Zoom trivia night? Some people wrote to The Times to mourn their bonding conversations with teammates over Dungeons … Dragons, Nintendo and Marvel, or simply to say that remote work can get lonely: “I feel a little bit depressed when I wake up at 8 a.m., go to my coffee table, sit there at my computer on Zoom from 9:00 to 5:00, and then just close my computer and haven’t left my tiny studio all day,” said Dave Marques, 24, a student and freelance writer.
But managers pressing for a return are finding themselves up against those employees attached to their newfound sense of comfort.
Before the pandemic, Ms. Gifford, in Pittsburgh, didn’t understand why her workplace wouldn’t just let her work. There was a high school-style clique in her office that talked about Fortnite, cryptocurrency and who had swept up winnings at the most recent poker night. Ms. Gifford said they only asked her about her family, as if being a mother were her entire personality.
“They all know each other, and they have these inside jokes,” she said. “There’s this strong sense of ‘back in the day we were so tight knit, we’ve got to get back to the office.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what you’re remembering.’”
When she’s at home, Ms. Gifford can have conversations with colleagues confined to work, without overhearing their other chatter.
For Chantalle Couba, 46, a consultant in Charlotte, N.C., the specter of office banter is made worse by the gulf between her colleagues’ experience of the pandemic and her own. To some of them, the past two years seemed to have meant: “Let me just retreat to my lake house.” Ms. Couba, meanwhile, can’t count even three people in her communities who have not lost loved ones to Covid-19.
One day recently, she started her morning on the phone with a friend who was trying to decide whether to cremate or bury her mother, who died of Covid. Then Ms. Couba had to hop on a work call and muddle through niceties. She was relieved to be at home, so she could hang up afterward and take time to breathe.
Last year, as Ms. Couba quietly checked on Black women in her circles, she found that for most of them leaving the office had been a source of relief. She sometimes thinks back on the workplace behaviors and microaggressions she used to confront. Once she sat near a man who read aloud resumes submitted by job candidates who didn’t go to prestigious schools, then tossed them dramatically in the recycling bin.
“There are still a lot of spaces in a lot of industries where just being a woman of color is an outlier,” she said. “The side conversations, the pre-meeting conversations, the post-meeting conversations, the inside jokes — they all subtly add up to tell you that you don’t quite fit.”
“What have companies done to upskill senior leaders and managers so they’re going back into the office with empathy?” Ms. Couba added. “Not one single person who re-enters the office in the next three months is the same as the one who left.”
Employers can hear the rumblings of frustration. Salesforce last year rolled out a “success from anywhere” model, in which most of its employees can choose to be permanently remote or flexible, with a memo declaring the 9-to-5 workday dead and noting that nearly half of its staff want to come into an office only a few times per month. PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that some 40,000 of its employees would never be required to return to the office. Last month, Dow Jones and BNY Mellon told employees they would have more flexibility than many of their industry peers, with team leaders deciding how often their employees need to be in the office.
But workplace researchers worry that at many companies, return to office plans will have some “choose your own adventure” elements that penalize those who need flexibility. People might have to request permission from their managers to work from home, for example. Or managers might revive old notions about employee performance and develop a bias against those who can’t spend as much time in the office.
“It’s really important for managers to look at who are they promoting,” said Sheela Subramanian, vice president of Future Forum, Slack's research consortium. “If everyone in the office looks like them or acts like them, they need to go back to the drawing board.”
And some employees, buoyed by the labor shortage, are holding their work-from-home ground, with some two-thirds of remote workers reluctant to return according to the jobs platform FlexJobs. Alice Lemmer, 64, who had worked in university services, quit in September before required return date for full in-person work. Beth Boucher, 40, who works in public health in New Hampshire, is part of a team gathering data on her organization’s productivity, hoping that management will be convinced to keep allowing remote work. One response to The Times questionnaire put it bluntly: “I won’t be going back to the office. Ever.”
Back in San Antonio, Ms. Egziabher recently put in two weeks’ notice at her old job. She received an offer to work at a company based in California that will allow her to be fully remote. The fixtures of her nearly two-decade career now seem like relics of a past she can’t imagine reinhabiting: high heels, early mornings, constant slights.
She says a little prayer of thanks for what remote work has allowed, an ethos strangely absent from the office: “Let’s just focus on the work.”
Supporters of Wet'suwet'en Nation's hereditary chiefs march as part of protests against British Columbia's Coastal GasLink pipeline. (photo: Andrej Ivanov/Reuters)
Oil and gas companies are ‘Indigenous-washing’ their ads to garner support for projects on First Nation lands
“I’m being a steward to my land and I’m being a defender,” read one of 21 ads targeting British Columbia in November 2021, quoting a Coastal GasLink worker from Nak’azdli Whut’en’ First Nation.
As the ad conveying Indigenous support for the pipeline appeared on the Facebook and Instagram feeds of people in the Canadian province, 30 Wet’suwet’en Nation members and supporters were being violently evicted from their territory along the pipeline. Police breached two cabins with an axe, chainsaw, dog unit and snipers aimed at the door.
“The thing I remember most is the dogs … barking and whining, pulling their leashes trying to get at you,” recounts Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en, who was arrested. A recording the police put out over their radios also left a strong imprint on her memory. “They were playing a horror film audio. You know, where the little child sings, ‘I know where you are, I’m gonna get you, I’m coming for you.’”
The fossil fuel groups spent some C$122,000 (US$95,249) on more than 400 targeted Facebook and Instagram ads over the past two years relating to various oil and gas projects throughout the country. The ads spiked last November during Indigenous land defense actions on the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia and solidarity protests across Canada. The vast majority of the ads, which were shown some 21m times in total, were linked to the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the site of intense protest and violent police crackdown in recent years.
Coastal GasLink is one of three multibillion-dollar pipelines facing opposition by some Indigenous and environmental groups in Canada. The construction of the 670km pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory – land never signed away to the Canadian government – has sparked nationwide protests in recent years. The pipeline has also exacerbated complex divisions within the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, some of whom favor the economic opportunities promised by the project.
Analysis of Facebook advertisements from January 2020 to the present by Eco-Bot.Net, a research project exposing climate crisis misinformation and corporate greenwashing online, has found a steady flow of “Indigenous-washing” ad campaigns from TC Energy, the company behind the pipeline, and associated oil and gas lobby groups. TC Energy accounts for almost three-quarters of the ad spend and impressions investigated. As recently as mid-February, the company ran two such ads – both of which were removed by Facebook for running without a disclaimer that includes information on who paid for the advert.
In October last year, solidarity protests were held in British Columbia and other parts of the country after a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief was arrested for blocking pipeline construction. Over the subsequent five week period, TC Energy and affiliated groups launched dozens of ads which were shown 1.7m times across Canada. Together they paid C$14,000 to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company. Advertising rose in the days after the chief’s arrest, and then spiked during the enforcement of a court injunction to remove land defenders.
About half of these ads were targeted at British Columbia, with some ads reaching viewers from within a small “estimated audience size”, indicating that ads used Meta’s interest-based micro-targeting tools. It is not possible to determine the precise audiences targeted, but one Indigenous activist interviewed reported being regularly bombarded with the ads.
“The upticks in industry spending on ads directed at specific demographics and coinciding with protests appear to be classic examples of financially motivated, politically oriented, micro-targeted public affairs campaigns,” said Harvard University climate disinformation researcher Geoffrey Supran. “There are no better predictors of fossil fuel industry ad spending than political action and media attention, and this data appears to be a case in point.”
Launched during the Cop26 climate talks and founded by artist and disinformation researcher Bill Posters and Massive Attack’s Rob Del Naja, Eco-Bot.Net scrapes databases of social media advertising paid for by some of the world’s most polluting companies.
Eco-Bot.Net defines corporate greenwashing as a tactic used to mislead consumers about the green credentials of a product or service, or about the environmental performance of a company. Some researchers use the term Indigenous-washing to refer to the tactic by high-polluting companies to mislead the public about their relationship to Indigenous peoples and their land.
Working with Meta’s Ad Library, the investigation used keyword searches such as “Indigenous” or “First Nations” in conjunction with “pipeline” or “oil”, to identify Indigenous-washing actors in Canada. Journalists and disinformation researchers, including the two authors of this article, then analyzed all of the ads run by the accounts of these groups in 2020 and 2021.
Using terminology such as land “defender”, “eco-colonialism” and “reconciliation”, the ads employ buzzwords and phrases used in Indigenous rights discourse to portray the oil and gas companies as aligned with Indigenous groups.
“The very fact that they’re pushing [these ads] is like a drowning man getting caught in a swift river. A piece of straw goes by and he wants to grab it, hoping it’ll save him,” said the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Na’Moks, who opposes the pipeline.
Last year, Joe Biden revoked a permit for the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline, which is also owned by TC Energy. Indigenous groups and environmentalists had opposed the pipeline for more than decade. TC Energy is seeking $15bn in damages from the US government.
Another spike in the ads found by Eco-Bot.Net went on for almost three months at the start of 2020. The ads were placed amidst nationwide backlash to an injunction barring land defenders from blocking Coastal GasLink construction.
TC Energy and associated lobby groups spent some C$52,000 during this period, resulting in 12m social media impressions in Canada. The ads initially targeted British Columbia but shifted to other parts of the country where solidarity protests were strong, such as Ontario. The end of this spike coincided with declarations of a “state of emergency” across Canada’s provinces, which put a stop to large gatherings in order to mitigate the spread of Covid.
Lobby groups paying for the ads include the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which count Coastal GasLink pipeline partners Shell, Petronas Energy and PetroChina as members. Another involved lobby group, the Canadian Energy Centre, is financed by the Government of Alberta’s Technology, Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund, which oil and gas companies, including TC Energy, pay into.
Earlier this month, land defenders filed a submission to the UN Human Rights Council detailing police raids in recent years, which have resulted in the arrests of 74 people. The Guardian revealed that in one of those raids, officers were prepared to use lethal force against land defenders. The UN submission argues that Canada is violating several articles under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
But the social media adverts tell a different story. “Meet Shirley … Alma, Wet’suwet’en members who see the opportunities Coastal GasLink is bringing to their community,” reads one advert. Another says that land defenders are “disrupting potentially game changing opportunities for Indigenous communities”.
The strategy of elevating the views of Indigenous people who are in favour of the pipeline “pits folks against each other in our communities, driving that divide and conquer tactic that we’ve encountered every step of the way since colonisation,” said Karla Tait, a member of the Gilseyhu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en.
Hereditary chiefs mostly oppose the pipeline, believing that treating natural resources as commodities is fundamentally at odds with Wet’suwet’en responsibilities to the land. But band chiefs and councils – who are democratically elected as part of an administrative structure imposed during colonisation – are generally in favour, saying the pipeline will help lift the Wet’suwet’en Nation from poverty.
Throughout the project, TC Energy has negotiated with the Wet’suwet’en bands for access to the land rather than hereditary chiefs. Facebook adverts suggest broad support from the Wet’suwet’en by only promoting the company’s agreements with the bands. The pipeline, however, cuts across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory and so remains under the jurisdiction of hereditary chiefs, according to a 1997 supreme court ruling, although the judgment allows for “the infringement of aboriginal title”.
In response to a request for comment, TC Energy and CAPP reiterated their support from the band councils, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said it had no choice but to enforce the injunction. The Government of British Columbia, the Canadian Energy Centre and the Wet’suwet’en band chiefs and councils contacted by the Guardian did not provide comment.
In the ads, oil and gas development is portrayed as necessary for Indigenous economic development and poverty alleviation. “A strong oil and gas sector is key for Indigenous education and prosperity,” reads one ad, alongside an image of a Siksika First Nation woman standing next to a tipi.
Ads like this “appear to reduce local Indigenous communities to a homogeneous, single-minded population, which presumably misrepresents the cultural and political diversities and complexities of this situation”, said Supran.
“We live in communities where there’s very few economic opportunities, and jobs are few and far between. So I don’t begrudge anyone that takes a job with the pipelines,” said Tait, who was arrested during the February 2020 raids along with her mother and aunt.
Natural gas projects receive billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies from the British Columbia government, which says it views the pipeline as “a pathway to prosperity” for First Nations. According to the YellowHead Institute, a First Nation-led research centre, this makes government support for First Nations “contingent upon support for pipeline deals”.
Leaders like Chief Na’Moks do not see the pipeline build as a viable route to prosperity. “We as hereditary chiefs have to think thousands of years in the future,” he said. “We protect our lands. That’s what we’re doing right now, peacefully. Yet they come at us with guns.”
A large SUV parked next to a small Fiat in Notting Hill, London, England. (photo: Richard Baker/Getty)
The group said it is the first in what is to be a series of protests.
Thus far, Tyre Extinguishers has “disarmed” SUVs in wealthy areas of London such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Hampstead Heath, as well as let the air out of tires in Bristol, Brighton, Cambridge, Liverpool, Sheffield and Edinburgh, according to a press release, as The Independent reported.
“The group is taking this action because SUVs are a climate disaster – if SUV drivers were a country, they would be the seventh-largest polluting country in the world,” the press release said, as reported by The Independent.
Tyre Extinguishers wants SUVs banned from urban areas and for them to be taxed out of existence through pollution levies, according to the press release, as BBC News reported. They also want to see greater investment in public transportation.
In 2019, a similar campaign in Sweden resulted in a significant decrease in SUV sales.
“Governments and politicians have failed to protect us from these massive unnecessary vehicles,” Marion Walker, spokesperson for the group, said, as reported by The Independent. “Everyone hates [SUVs], apart from the people who drive them. Politely asking for climate action, clean air, and safer streets has failed. It’s time for action.”
Tyre Extinguishers are a “leaderless” group, according to the press release, and when and where its actions happen are decided by its members, Walker told inews.co.uk.
Seventy-five percent of SUV owners live in urban areas, and the carbon emissions from the vehicles are about 14 percent higher than those of smaller cars.
When the group deflates the tires of a vehicle, it also puts a leaflet under the windshield wipers giving the reasons for its actions, such as SUVs being responsible for more carbon emissions in the past decade than the aviation industry.
The leaflets left on the vehicles are also “to inform the owner of what has happened, for their safety,” reported The Independent.
According to an International Energy Agency study, growing SUV sales were the second largest reason for an increase in carbon emissions, BBC News reported.
One upset Twitter user targeted in the action said, “You let down my tyres and I didn’t notice until I started driving with my three children in my car. My car is fully electric. We also had a child that required to be at the hospital for an appointment in the city. Thankfully we had a second car. Please think before you act,” reported The Independent.
Walker said the group will keep up its actions as long as SUV ownership in Britain continues.
“Members are free to repeat the action whenever works for them, so it could happen tonight, and the night after,” said Walker, as inews.co.uk reported. “We will repeat this until it is impossible to own an SUV in Britain.”
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