12 July 22
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Just 12 days after November’s election, President Biden will turn 80, which is producing massive discussion about his age just as a new presidential-election cycle begins. If things go as badly as expected for Democrats on November 8, many in the party will be quietly and not so quietly urging the 46th president to retire at the end of his term. But if he stubbornly refuses to pack it in, what then? Are Democrats stuck with Biden-Harris ’24 anyway? Strange to say, but they might be.
Such questions are being raised right now thanks to a New York Times–Siena poll showing that an imposing 64 percent of self-identified Democrats would prefer a different presidential nominee in 2024. Democrats saying Joe should go range from 47 percent among Black voters (who were so crucial to Biden in 2020) to an incredible 94 percent of voters under age 30 (who were cool to Biden in the primaries but supported him strongly in the general election).
This is just one poll, but you have to go back to Jimmy Carter to find anything like this level of intraparty disaffection with a Democratic president. One source of that discontent, Biden’s age, isn’t going to get any better; 33 percent of Democratic respondents who prefer someone else cited Biden’s age as the most important reason for wanting a new 2024 candidate — higher than any other single factor.
Other factors could actually reduce the pressure on Biden to bow out before the next election. Despite the apparent “red wave” building for November, Democrats are still even money to hang onto the Senate. Thanks to the shrinking number of competitive House seats, estimates of likely Democratic House losses are in the 20–35 range, far lower than what Democrats experienced in 2010. Concerns about the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the continued threat of a Donald Trump comeback could boost Democratic turnout and further insulate the party from disaster.
As for 2024, it’s worth remembering that the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, bounced back from horrible midterms to get themselves reelected. And even in this terrible Times-Siena poll, Biden would be narrowly favored (44-41) over Donald Trump in a 2024 rematch. But Clinton was 50 years old and Obama 51 when they were reelected. Joe Biden was 50 in 1992, the year Clinton was first elected; if reelected in 2024, Biden would be 86 at the end of his second term. This cannot be wished away as anything less than problematic. As my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti concluded in May: “There is no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden’s future.”
Let’s say that on Biden’s 80th birthday, there is powerful Democratic sentiment for sending him to the rest home. If he doesn’t go away quietly, can he be pushed aside?
The only Biden heir apparent, of course, is his vice-president. Kamala Harris is not going to turn on the man who placed her a heartbeat from the presidency. Even if she did, she’s currently less popular than Biden, and in fact, fears about Harris’s electability could lead some Biden disparagers to reconsider putting him on an ice floe. Meanwhile, Harris’s positioning as a future nominee could freeze some primary voters (particularly the Black voters among whom Biden already has a relative advantage) in his camp. More important, none of the many politicians being discussed as potential Biden successors (Gavin Newsom, J. B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Murphy, Roy Cooper, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg) have the combination of name ID and broad-based support to topple an incumbent president.
Since Biden circa 2022 is often compared to 1970s Jimmy Carter due to a combination of sluggish job approval ratings, unhappy progressive activists, and big-time economic problems (especially inflation), it is germane to observe that Carter managed to soundly defeat Ted Kennedy — the liberal lion of the 1970s and subsequent decades — in the 1980 nomination contest.
Are there any Ted Kennedys around right now to mobilize progressive anti-administration grievances into a successful insurgent candidacy? Someday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have that stature — but not now. Indeed, the only potential rival from any wing of the party who is in that position is Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden. And even if there were some Kennedy-like figure available, would the fight disable the Democratic Party (as it arguably did in 1980) more than slogging ahead with the incumbent?
The most plausible precedents for pushing Biden out are those that occurred in 1952 and 1968, when unpopular incumbent presidents performed poorly against nuisance candidates in early primaries and took a hint. But this scenario still leaves the decision to fold the tent to a wounded but not defeated president. Biden doesn’t really resemble the Harry Truman of 1952 or the Lyndon Johnson of 1968 — presidents with great landmark achievements behind them. He’s where he’s fought to be for many decades and may still consider himself a good bet — perhaps the best bet — against a vengeful Trump in 2024. It’s unclear if even an early primary defeat would deter him; after all, he lost the first three contests in 2020 (the first two very badly) and was repeatedly left for dead.
All in all, the ball remains in the 46th president’s court. If he can get through the midterms without catastrophe and past his 80th birthday with some spring in his step, he could talk himself into one more campaign. And if his inner voice continues to tell him to defy the critics one more time, he may not listen to anyone else.
U.S. President Joe Biden prepares to delivers remarks at an event to celebrate the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act on the South Lawn of the White House on July 11, 2022 in Washington, DC. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Manuel Oliver, the father of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver, interrupted Biden’s remarks during a televised event celebrating the passage of modest gun reform legislation.
Manuel Oliver, the father of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver, interrupted Biden’s remarks during a televised event celebrating the passage of modest gun reform legislation. Oliver, whose interjection was broadcast by multiple networks, seemed to be expressing that the bill did not do enough to address the epidemic of gun violence in the county. “I’ve been trying to tell you this for years, for years,” he said.
Oliver’s remarks were largely inaudible, but the President responded by asking him to “Sit down, you’ll hear what I have to say, if you think—” before the president was interrupted. The exchange continued, with Biden eventually asking Oliver to “let me finish my comment … let him talk, let him talk.” Oliver was escorted out of the event shortly after.
Earlier on Monday morning Oliver appeared on CNN, and critiqued the use of the word “celebration” at the event, which Biden had also used in a tweet on Saturday about the law’s passage. “It’s been a while that I’ve been calling out that using the words “celebration, getting together,” it’s like we’re going to a party, to a wedding today, you know, we all received invitations. And meanwhile, you can see these mothers in Uvalde that just saw how their kids were massacred inside a school,” he said.
The President has been struggling with a lack of public support for a second term, and many democratic voters now feel the Biden administration has done little to address issues of public concern, including gun violence and the erosion of reproductive rights.
— Senate confirms Biden’s pick to lead gun regulation agency: The Senate approved Steven Dettelbach’s nomination today to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, making him only the second Senate-confirmed director in the gun regulatory agency’s history. In a 48-46 vote, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio joined Democrats in supporting the former U.S. attorney.
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Ocasio-Cortez urged Senate Democrats to say whether Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch lied. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
The New York Democrat, along with Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California, sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday demanding he address the matter.
"We request that the Senate make its position clear on whether Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lied under oath during their confirmation hearings," the lawmakers wrote in the letter. "We must call out their actions for what they were before the moment passes, so that we can prevent such a mendacious denigration of our fundamental rights and the rule of law from ever happening again."
Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, both conservative justices appointed by President Donald Trump, have come under scrutiny following their votes last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that established the constitutional right to abortion almost 50 years ago.
In their confirmation hearings, the justices called Roe a "precedent" that had been "reaffirmed," but neither directly said whether he'd overturn the landmark 1973 ruling if presented with the opportunity to do so. Gorsuch said Roe v. Wade was "precedent of the US Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other" and had been "reaffirmed many times." Kavanaugh similarly called Roe "important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times."
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who voted to confirm Gorsuch in 2017 and Kavanaugh in 2018, have expressed alarm at the consequential outcome, saying they felt misled by the two justices.
"This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon," Collins, an abortion-rights supporter, said in a statement.
"I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans," Manchin, who's personally against abortion but supports legislation to protect abortion rights, said in a statement.
Ocasio-Cortez, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision, seized on the justices' past statements and accused them of lying about their views on Roe. The progressive Democrat has been highly outspoken and critical of the Supreme Court since its conservative majority tossed out federal abortion rights, arguing the institution faces a "legitimacy crisis."
Ocasio-Cortez said she believed lying under oath during confirmation hearings was an impeachable offense and was "something that should be very seriously considered" by lawmakers, including Collins and Manchin.
"To allow that to stand is to allow it to happen," she told NBC News on June 26. "What makes it particularly dangerous is that it sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure Supreme Court confirmations and seats on the Supreme Court."
Workers clean up wreckage at the Amstor Mall in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, after the building was hit by a Russian cruise missile. (photo: Jason Beaublen/NPR)
Ihor Mykhaylov and his wife were waiting for a bus in front of the Amstor shopping mall. "We decided to go into the mall to buy some water," Mykhaylov says.
Minutes later, a nearly 40-foot-long, Soviet-era missile crashed into the complex. Mykhaylov's wife and 20 other people were killed. That was June 27, and the Amstor Mall joined more than two dozen other shopping centers that Russian forces have destroyed in more than four months of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"When I woke up, I realized I'd lost my arm," Mykhaylov says about regaining consciousness on the floor of the mall. Propped up in a hospital bed, his right arm is amputated just below the elbow. His other arm is wrapped in gauze, from fingertips to shoulder. Cuts and bruises mark his face and chest. He remembers fire was spreading through the mall.
"I realized I had to crawl out of there," he says.
The 53-year-old used to work in construction. A week after the attack, he still couldn't walk. Mykhaylov was one of nearly 60 people seriously injured by the Russian missile strike on the Amstor Mall.
The hit on the mall was followed moments later by an explosion roughly 500 yards away. At 3:52 p.m., a second Russian missile smashed into the grounds of a factory behind the shopping complex.
Viktor Shybko, the deputy head of Kredmash, a road-paving equipment company, points to a muddy crater on the edge of the industrial compound where the missile struck.
It hit the Kredmash compound 20 minutes after most workers had left for the day. The explosion injured two security guards, damaged one assembly line and blew out a lot of windows.
Russia makes incredible claims about attacks
Russian officials have made conflicting and at times ridiculously false claims about the airstrikes that hit Kredmash and the Amstor Mall. Those assertions include that the shopping mall was empty and that the casualties were staged. Another claim is that Russia only targeted the factory, where it alleged the Ukrainian army was hiding weapons, and that when the factory exploded, fire spread to the mall.
Shybko laughs when asked about this, saying he heard this rumor too — from Russian media.
"You can see that all of our storage is open," he says as he walks across through the aging industrial compound. "So there's no place to keep any type of military machines here."
Yet Kredmash is a massive industrial complex, covering nearly 60 acres. Before the Russian invasion in February, it employed 1,800 workers.
The factory may have been the target
The compound is a collection of warehouses and metal working factories with direct access to rail lines and truck loading docks. It certainly has the potential to hide weapons. The two Russian missile strikes, including the deadly one on the mall, hit nearly a quarter-mile apart on either side of the complex.
Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former head of the U.S. Army in Europe, says the plant appears to have been the intended target. Russia is desperately trying to hit Western military supplies that are moving across Ukraine to the front lines in the east.
Russian forces "have not been able to in any way effectively disrupt the logistical network inside Ukraine" of ammunition and equipment, says Hodges, who's now with the Center for European Policy Analysis.
He says Russia can't strike moving trains or trucks inside Ukraine, so it's going after suspected weapons warehouses and transfer points. But even hitting those is difficult because Moscow has used up most of its precision missiles. The Russians are now using missiles built 40 years ago that lack sophisticated targeting systems. And making those weapons even less accurate, they're firing them from hundreds of miles away.
"The Russian air force does not even come into Ukrainian airspace because there they have failed to achieve air superiority," Hodges says. "They're terrified of the Ukrainian air force and air defenses. So they stay in the airspace over Belarus or Russia to launch these missiles into their targets."
If they end up killing innocent bystanders, Hodges says, this is not a problem for commanders in the Russian military. He says not only is no one going to get in trouble for it, the collateral damage actually plays into the scorched earth policy the Russian military used in Mariupol and many other parts of Ukraine.
The Russians try to terrify the local population, Hodges says, to undercut Ukrainian support for the war.
"How do you achieve maximum terror? You hit a shopping mall at peak hours," he says.
This is a pattern for Russia
Despite regularly proclaiming that it does not attack civilian targets, Russia has obliterated apartment buildings across the country, bombed theaters and destroyed museums, in addition to blowing up shopping malls in Ukraine.
United Nations human rights experts have counted almost 5,000 civilians killed and more than 6,000 injured since the start of the war in February.
Just days after the airstrike on the mall in Kremenchuk, Russian missiles killed 21 people at an apartment building and a recreation center in a coastal resort near Odesa. A few days later, in the town of Chasiv Yar, in the eastern Donetsk region, Russian artillery brought down a residential building, killing at least 30 civilians.
Even if these recent strikes on civilians were accidents, Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties Ukraine, says they are war crimes. It doesn't matter, she says even if President Vladimir Putin and Russian military commanders claim they were aiming for military targets.
"You have always to evaluate the possible damage for civilians even when you try to hit a military object," she says. Russia routinely isn't doing that evaluation, she adds.
And she says this is not new for the Russian military.
"They've enjoyed impunity for decades," she says. "They committed the same [attacks on civilians] in Georgia and Moldova, in Syria, in Mali, in Libya. They really think that they can do whatever they want and they can say whatever they want."
Hodges, the former Army commander, says he expects Russian strikes on civilians to continue. These attacks may even increase, he says, as military leaders in Moscow face dogged Ukrainian resistance on the front lines and the Kremlin grows more frustrated with what it had expected to be a quick war.
The former Trump strategist thought he had a winning move. It turned out to be a blunder. (photo: Kay Nietfeld/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Bannon Contempt of Congress Trial
Echoes Nixon Burglar Liddy's
The former Trump strategist thought he had a winning move. It turned out to be a blunder.
After nine months of refusing to answer the House Jan. 6 Committee’s questions—and fighting off related criminal contempt charges in court—the right-wing provocateur is suddenly dangling an offer to finally testify. The gambit is supposed to make the Justice Department look bad. But doing so on the eve of trial risks having him incriminate himself before Congress, then get convicted the very next week.
On Saturday, after what inside sources described as a week-long effort to convince former President Donald Trump’s inner circle, Bannon’s legal team managed to convince Trump to issue a letter waiving executive privilege. The letter allows his former White House chief strategist to testify before the Jan. 6 committee. (Never mind that a federal judge, an appellate panel, and even the Supreme Court have already said the ex-president doesn’t have any executive privilege to assert or waive anyway.)
The letter was a last-minute attempt to throw a curveball at the Justice Department just a week before Bannon’s criminal contempt of Congress trial for refusing to show up before that very committee.
But on Monday afternoon, a D.C. federal judge knocked down every conceivable defense the right-wing media personality could present at his criminal trial.
When Bannon’s lawyers argued that the politicians on the Jan. 6 committee must be forced to testify at trial, the judge questioned why Bannon’s lawyers couldn’t just ask committee staffers. When his lawyers asked for permission to tell a future jury that Bannon was just following his lawyer’s advice when he didn’t show up to Congress, the judge said no. And when they argued that the trial should be delayed, the judge told them to come back prepared for the final showdown next week.
Now Bannon is barreling toward a trial while dangling potential testimony before the congressional panel—a prime opportunity to perjure himself or explain why he broke the law—and lawyers say there’s practically nothing he can do that won’t land him in even more legal jeopardy.
“It’s going to make it very hard for him to figure out what he could say that won’t incriminate him. I think he’s going to land in trouble. It just seems inevitable,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina.
It’s unclear if the nine-member House Select committee led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has any appetite for putting Bannon on the stand—much less on live TV, as he apparently demands. Committee staff did not answer The Daily Beast’s questions about the offer on Monday.
But from now until the trial that is set to start next week, Bannon is in limbo.
If the committee accepts his tenuous offer, Bannon is in the awkward position of putting himself in one hot seat just days before he’s in yet another. For example, committee members could ask him why he never showed up last fall—and whatever Bannon says under penalty of perjury could appear at trial just days later. If he contradicts himself on anything at any point, prosecutors can argue that he lied to Congress—yet another crime—or is lying at trial.
There’s an obvious expectation that Bannon would try to use his congressional testimony to essentially put on an episode of his MAGA-raging, daily War Room: Pandemic podcast—to grandstand, attack the committee’s work, and spew conspiracy theories. But that’s an act of self-immolation, because pissing off federal prosecutors is the last thing Bannon should be doing, lawyers said.
“If he’s calculating that he can make a better plea deal, it would undermine those strategies… he could make his situation worse if he perjures himself or is seen as an extremely uncooperative witness,” said George Washington University law school professor Catherine J. Ross.
His options at the moment: Show up and play nice or face the wrath of the Department of Justice.
In a text message to The Daily Beast, David Schoen, one of Bannon’s defense lawyers, described the team’s offer to the Jan. 6 Committee as “no game.”
He reiterated his argument that Bannon truly operated on the belief that Trump retained some kind of executive power after leaving the White House—and the committee should have sued Bannon in civil court and have a judge officially declare Trump’s executive privilege claims as invalid and force Bannon to testify instead of having the DOJ pursue criminal charges.
“Bannon is true to his word and to his principles,” Schoen wrote. “It was not his privilege to waive and his hands were tied. However, he also said he absolutely would comply if they resolved privilege with former President Trump or a judge ordered that privilege wasn’t valid. That was the only reason he didn’t comply.”
“For the committee’s part of course they should have respected that and should have told the government to drop the criminal charges; but as we suspected from the start they never really wanted his testimony. They wanted to set him up for contempt,” he added.
In recent days, Bannon’s legal team has tossed one Hail Mary after another at U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, perhaps expecting a receptive audience from the Trump appointee who once clerked for the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Schoen and Bannon’s other defense attorney, Evan Corcoran, have tried to use the criminal case to search for documents that might show how political forces at the Biden administration or Justice Department have chosen to target Bannon and make an example out of him for defying the congressional panel loathed by Trump-loyal Republicans. They tried to claim that DOJ memos protecting a president’s staff gave Bannon permission to ignore the Jan. 6 panel’s congressional subpoena. They tried to fall back on the idea that Bannon was merely following the advice of his other attorney, Bob Costello. And they tried to drag House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other members of Congress into court to testify.
However, Nichols summarily shot down every one of those defensive maneuvers, leaving an exasperated Schoen to blurt out in court on Monday, “What’s the point of going to trial if there are no defenses?”
The three federal prosecutors trying the case, who have repeatedly insisted in court filings and in person that this case is a one-day slam dunk, have come out on top.
“He got a subpoena. He didn’t honor it. That’s illegal. That’s contempt. He’s being prosecuted for that. He doesn’t have any defenses. This is an open-and-shut case, so he has legal jeopardy,” Ross told The Daily Beast.
Bannon’s eleventh-hour offer to testify before the Jan. 6 committee also doesn’t technically absolve him of the crime for which he’s on trial, lawyers said. The DOJ prosecutors working on his case have already said in court filings that they plan to go after him no matter what.
“The Defendant’s last-minute efforts to testify, almost nine months after his default—he has still made no effort to produce records—are irrelevant,” prosecutors wrote in a filing early Monday morning, saying that jurors shouldn’t even hear about “his eleventh-hour efforts.”
“The criminal contempt statute is not intended to procure compliance; it is intended to punish past noncompliance,” they wrote.
“It's futile, because the judge in his criminal trial ruled that it doesn't get him off the hook. He still refused to comply with the subpoena at the time when he should have complied, and it doesn't erase his illegal act of not showing up,” Ross said.
US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the TPS extension is one of several ways Washington 'is providing humanitarian support to Venezuelans at home and abroad'. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Temporary Protect Status extension shields Venezuelans in US as of March 2021 from deportation for 18 more months.
In a statement on Monday, US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said that Venezuelans in the country as of March 8 last year would be eligible to apply.
Majorkas said the move was “ one of many ways the Biden administration is providing humanitarian support to Venezuelans at home and abroad”.
TPS is a designation that allows the US government to shield foreign nationals already in the country from deportation when it is deemed not safe for them to return to their home countries due to armed conflict, natural disaster or other temporary conditions.
Venezuela is experiencing a widespread refugee crisis, as escalating violence, a lack of access to basic goods, including food and medicine, and political uncertainty have pushed more than six million people to flee the country, according to the United Nations.
Last month, thousands of migrants – mostly from Central America and Venezuela – set off on foot from southern Mexico towards the US border in search of asylum.
But Monday’s DHS order does not re-designate TPS for Venezuela, meaning that those who have come to the US since March 8, 2021, will not be eligible, drawing criticism from migration advocates.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said on Twitter that this means “none of the 150,000+ Venezuelans who entered since then will qualify”.
Immigration rights groups and some US legislators, including members of President Joe Biden’s own Democratic Party, had called on the administration to re-designate Venezuela to widen the scope of the protections.
In a statement on Monday, FWD.us, a progressive advocacy group, said that they were “disappointed” with the decision to extend but not re-designate TPS for Venezuela.
“Instead, these community members will now be at risk of being deported to a country in chaos where they continue to face unsafe conditions,” the organisation said. “Placing them at extreme risk of violence and even death.”
The 18-month extension will begin on September 10, 2022, and expire on March 10, 2024.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 343,000 Venezuelans in the US are eligible for TPS, which also allows foreign nationals to get jobs and apply for travel authorisation.
The Biden administration extended TPS to Venezuela in March 2021, saying the South American nation was “in turmoil” and unable to protect its citizens.
Since then, “threats to civilians by armed actors, the complete erosion of the rule of law, and the systemic collapse of vital infrastructure have forced nearly half a million additional people to flee the country”, Democratic US senators Chris Van Hollen and Bob Menendez said in a letter last week to Majorkas and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The legislators said 76,450 Venezuelans had been approved for TPS as of May 5, and they urged the Biden administration to extend and re-designate the country.
“Denying access to TPS will not serve as an effective deterrent to future border crossings, it will simply ensure that Venezuelans will live in poverty in the United States, with no other options,” they wrote.
Other countries in the Americas region with TPS designations include Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and El Salvador.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a US think-tank, said in late March that the US was home to 198,000 TPS holders from El Salvador; 41,000 from Haiti, and 60,000 from Honduras.
However, the US has been criticised by human rights groups for denying entry to migrants and asylum seekers from countries where violence is widespread, largely under a pandemic-era border restriction known as Title 42.
While Haiti, for example, has a TPS designation, the Biden administration has turned away Haitian migrants at the US’s southern border with Mexico and even sent some people back to Haiti on deportation flights.
In September 2021, a former US special envoy to Haiti quit his post over the “inhumane” deportations of Haitian asylum seekers.
Biden, who promised to overturn some of his predecessor Donald Trump’s most hardline, anti-immigration policies, has been under political pressure amid record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico border.
Molly-Catherine Kennedy, 11, poses for a photo with her father, Tom Kennedy, who is suffering from cancer, in the backyard of their home on July 1, 2022, in Wilmington, North Carolina. (photo: Allison Joyce/Guardian UK)
Exposure to harmful PFAS remains almost impossible to escape – particularly for the people of the Cape Fear River basin
A deadly cancer has already taken 43-year-old Amy Nordberg away from her family, also of Wilmington. Nordberg died in January after a three-year battle with a vicious cancer that followed the development of multiple sclerosis. The cancer moved through her body faster than doctors expected, enveloping her colon and invading her bone marrow.
Kennedy and Nordberg are only two among many sick and dying people who live in the Cape Fear River basin of North Carolina, where environmental testing has found persistently high levels of different types of toxic compounds known collectively as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
Several industries operating in the area have been using PFAS for years, while DuPont and successor Chemours have been producing the chemicals at a plant in Fayetteville situated along the river. PFAS are typically part of the manufacturing of thousands of products resistant to water, heat and stains.
Some of the most widely studied types of PFAS have been linked to a range of human health problems, including cancers. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade and accumulate in the environment and human bodies.
But despite more than 20 years of warnings from public health advocates, exposure to the chemicals remains almost impossible to escape – particularly for the people of the Cape Fear River basin.
The physical and emotional suffering that comes with living in an area polluted by toxins is ripping through families, scarring lives and short-circuiting dreams for the future.
Making it all worse is the fact that while many people feel certain the health problems they or their friends and loved ones are experiencing are connected to the PFAS pollution, confirming those suspicions has been almost impossible. State and federal regulators have pushed back against requests for in-depth studies.
“The response is not proportional to the harm that’s been committed here,” said Emily Donovan, executive director of the Clean Cape Fear advocacy group, created in 2016 in response to the crisis.
Splashing in PFAS foam
Chemours has acknowledged the concerns about PFAS contamination and says it has been working for several years to address them with residents and regulators.
Still, the signs of contamination are all around. On beaches in Oak Island, near where the Cape Fear spills into the Atlantic Ocean, children build sandcastles and splash in PFAS foam, a form of toxic waste. When it rains, PFAS-laced foamy water bubbles in gutters in the town of Leland.
PFAS contamination has been documented throughout the region – in drinking water; in air and soil samples, in crops, in livestock and fish; and, notably, in blood samples taken from people who live and work in the region.
The basin is considered an important natural resource for drinking water, agriculture, and recreation. But the 450,000 residents and another 200,000 tourists who visit the area annually risk exposure to PFAS contaminants, experts say.
It all makes the region a perfect “petri dish” for PFAS research – a chance to study how 40 years of exposure to a broad cross-section of PFAS affects a large population’s health, according to a coalition of community and environmental justice groups that have demanded comprehensive research program on 54 PFAS emitted by the Chemours plant.
The EPA has rejected the requests and has said it will analyze only seven PFAS and attempt to extrapolate their health impacts and toxicity data across the entire class of over 9,000 PFAS compounds.
Last month, the coalition sued the EPA over the issue.
“We’re outraged – they basically gave us nothing,” said coalition attorney Bob Sussman.
The problems in Cape Fear persist even after the Biden administration last year launched a sweeping multibillion-dollar project aimed at reducing PFAS use and public exposure to the chemicals.
Because the chemicals don’t naturally break down, meaningfully reducing levels in drinking water near the plant and remediating the land will likely take decades, said Detlef Knappe, a PFAS researcher with North Carolina State University.
“Peoples’ lives really got turned upside down because it’s not just drinking water, it’s likely food, fishing, swimming in the lakes, property values: all of these things won’t change for the foreseeable future,” Knappe said. “It’s a tragedy, a travesty, and, yes, it’s a result of four decades of Chemours basically operating without oversight in terms of those compounds.”
DuPont owned Fayetteville Works until it spun off Chemours in 2015 to protect itself from PFAS-related legal liabilities.
Researchers estimate Cape Fear residents spent decades drinking water with staggering PFAS levels exceeding 100,000 parts per trillion (ppt) – far above the federal advisory level of 70 ppt for two kinds of PFAS. Some public health groups say no amount above 1 ppt is safe.
Low-income residents who can’t afford costly filtration systems, who subsist on fish in the river and who have less access to information are more vulnerable.
Though Chemours is not the only PFAS source in the watershed, a study Knappe co-authored linked a significant portion to Fayetteville Works.
Chemours states on its website that over the last five years it has “taken numerous steps to dramatically reduce water discharges and air emissions” of PFAS and other compounds from the Fayetteville Works plant.
In a statement to the Guardian, Chemours said it was fulfilling its pledge to sharply reduce PFAS contamination and noted it has spent $400 million on pollution controls. The company said it operates with transparency and claimed “no other company in North Carolina .. has made a similar commitment.”
Though Chemours stopped discharging PFAS directly into the Cape Fear River in 2017, the aquifers around Fayetteville still teem with decades worth of contamination.
The chemicals move into the river and wildlife and that helped push drinking water levels around Wilmington to 380 ppt in January – well above what’s considered safe. Almost all of the 10,000 wells tested in the region show some level of PFAS contamination and over two-thirds are above the threshold that requires Chemours to provide filtration.
Fayetteville Works installed air pollution controls in 2020 that partially reduced emissions, but state records show some continues. The chemicals are volatile, also meaning they can move from the ground into the air. Then, as PFAS drop or rain down on the region’s sandy, red soil, they can move back into the aquifers and re-contaminate drinking water. The toxins have even been found at high levels in kale, lettuce, tomatoes, blueberries and blackberries.
‘I have to do what’s right for them’
Though regulators have refused to conduct blood studies, an ongoing North Carolina State analysis of blood samples from more than 500 residents has confirmed the presence of some Chemours-produced PFAS compounds in the blood samples.
About a week after an early May spine surgery, Kennedy lay weakened in a rehabilitation center bed, his contorted, frail body covered in bruises and sores. His wife, Christine, helped him change positions and sip juice from a straw.
Though doctors say he could live several more years if he continues treatments, Kennedy said his constant sickness is ruining the lives of his children, trapping them in a steady state of grief.
“How many times can they see me get put into an ambulance?” he asked from the hospital bed. “Who wants to die? I don’t, but I have to do what’s right for them.
Beth Markesino, 38, who lives roughly 11 miles away from Kennedy, still mourns the loss of a 2016 pregnancy she believes is connected to the fact that she drank water potentially laced with PFAS. About 23 weeks into her pregnancy, sharp stomach pain sent Markesino to doctors who found her unborn child had not developed kidneys, a bladder, or bowels, and wasn’t producing amniotic fluid.
Six months after burying the boy she named Samuel at a family plot in Detroit, Markesino saw a local news story reporting that PFAS linked to pregnancy complications had contaminated her drinking water.
“I’ll never know 100% if that’s what happened with my son, but I drank the water, and I drank tons of it,” Markesino said. She has since suffered from PFAS-linked health problems that include ovarian cysts, thyroid cysts and tumors.
Over 70 miles west, near Fayetteville, 38-year-old Adrian Stokes suffers from health problems that include thyroid disease, kidney cysts, pulmonary embolisms, an autoimmune disorder, an enlarged liver, and debilitating exhaustion.
“I feel like I could probably kill myself because of how bad I hurt,” he said. Pets he once had also suffered a range of health problems.
A few miles away, US army veteran Mike Watters founded a citizens’ group to seek answers on PFAS contamination concerns after his three dogs died of pancreatic cancers. He helped connect 30 local owners of sick dogs and horses with university researchers who drew blood from the animals, tests that confirmed the animals were contaminated with PFAS too.
The blood test results, and other data has been shared with state officials, and the legislature did create a “PFAS Collaboratory” made up of university researchers to study contamination. But the Collaboratory can’t enforce laws, fine companies or order cleanups.
And even though Chemours is operating under a 2019 consent order issued by regulators, the company has regularly violated that order.
‘We thought we had time’
For Amy Nordberg’s husband Jonathan Shands, the push for research comes too late. He has little doubt about who and what to blame for her January death. Tests showed Chemours’ PFAS not only in the family’s drinking water, but also in his wife’s blood.
Before she developed cancer, Nordberg was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which new science links to PFAS exposure. Then, over the course of three agonizing years, a cancer that first attacked her sinuses and face spread rapidly.
Nordberg had been determined to live long enough to see the couple’s daughter Izzy, 15, graduate from high school. But the cancer moved too fast, attacking her colon and bone marrow late last year.
“We thought we had time,” Shands said. “But none of that happened. Chemours can hide behind lawyers and they can do whatever they want to do. The fact is, she is no longer here. And that’s not going to bring her back.”
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