06 July 22
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The US supreme court is helping to destroy our climate. But it was a much smaller decision, closer to home, that was the final straw for me
The day before, in the UK, the government’s climate change committee reported a “shocking” failure by Boris Johnson’s administration to meet its climate targets. So stupid and perverse are its policies on issues such as energy saving that it’s hard to see this as anything other than failure by design. On the day of the supreme court ruling, the UK government also announced that it intended to scrap the law protecting the UK’s most important wildlife sites.
But the final straw for me was a smaller decision. After two decades of disastrous policies that turned its rivers into open sewers, Herefordshire county council, following a shift from Tory to independent control, finally did the right thing. It applied to the government to create a water protection zone, defending the River Wye against the pollution pushing it towards complete ecological collapse. But in a letter published last week, the UK’s environment minister, Rebecca Pow, refused permission, claiming it “would impose new and distinct regulatory obligations on the farmers and businesses within the catchment”. This is, of course, the point.
It’s the pettiness of the decision that makes it so shocking. Even when the cost to the government is small, it seems determined to destroy everything good and valuable about this country. It’s as if, when ministers go to bed, they ask themselves, “What have I done to make the UK a worse place today?”
Just at the point at which we need a coordinated global effort to escape our existential crises – climate breakdown, ecological breakdown, the rising tide of synthetic chemicals, a gathering global food emergency – those who wield power string razor wire across the exit.
When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. The UK government and the US supreme court look as if they are willing the destruction of our life support systems.
The supreme court’s ruling was neither random nor based on established legal principles. It arose from a concerted programme to replace democracy in the US with judicial dictatorship.
As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has documented, hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money (funds whose sources are unknown) were poured into the nomination and confirmation of the three judges appointed to the court by Donald Trump. Among the groups leading these campaigns was Americans for Prosperity, set up by the Koch brothers: oil tycoons with a long record of funding rightwing causes. As an investigation by Earth Uprising shows, there’s a strong correlation between the amount of oil and gas money US senators have received, and their approval of Trump’s supreme court justice nominations.
Once the favoured justices were in place, the same networks started using their financial power to steer their decisions. They do so through “amicus briefs”: advice notes to the court supporting a plaintiff’s position. The judicial process is meant to be unswayed by political pressure, but amicus briefs have become one of the most powerful of all lobbying tools. As Whitehouse points out, the funders of these briefs are “not just ‘friends of the court’ – in many cases, they are quite literally friends of the judges they have put on the court”.
While some oligarchs lobby within the judicial system, others operate to great effect outside it, distorting public perceptions about such rulings through a barrage of propaganda in the media. No one, arguably, has done more to stymie effective environmental action than Rupert Murdoch.
In this case, the supreme court has strayed way beyond its mandate of interpreting the law, into the territory of the executive and the legislature: making the law. It is imposing policies that would never survive democratic scrutiny, if they were put to the vote. By seizing control of regulatory power, it sets a precedent that could stymie almost any democratic decision.
All this might seem incomprehensible. Why would anyone want to trash the living world? Surely even billionaires want a habitable and beautiful planet? Don’t they like snorkelling on coral reefs, salmon fishing in pristine rivers, skiing on snowy mountains? We suffer from a deep incomprehension of why such people act as they do. We fail to distinguish preferences from interests, and interests from power. It is hard for those of us who have no desire for power over others to understand people who do. So we are baffled by the decisions they make, and attribute them to other, improbable causes. Because we do not understand them, we are the more easily manipulated.
The media often represent politicians’ interests as if they were mere political preferences. Very rarely is the lobbying and political funding behind a decision explained in the news. The Conservatives don’t permit intensive livestock units and sewage treatment works to pour filth into rivers because they like pollution. They do so on behalf of the powerful interests to whom they feel obliged, such as the water companies and their shareholders, the farming lobbies and the billionaire press.
But even financial interests fail fully to explain what’s going on. The oligarchs seeking to stamp out US democracy have gone way beyond the point of attending only to their net worth. It’s no longer about money for them. It’s about brute power: about watching the world bow down before them. For this rush of power, they would forfeit the Earth.
All these cases expose the same political vulnerability: the ease with which democracy is crushed by the power of money. We cannot protect the living world, or women’s reproductive rights, or anything else we value until we get the money out of politics, and break up the media empires that make a mockery of informed political consent.
Since 1985, I’ve been told we don’t have time to change the system: we should concentrate only on single issues. But we’ve never had time not to change the system. In fact, because of the way in which social attitudes can suddenly tip, system change can happen much faster than incrementalism. Until we change our political systems, making it impossible for the rich to buy the decisions they want, we will lose not only individual cases. We will lose everything.
Demonstrators gather in front of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, to protest the ratification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over Trump in the 2020 election. A pro-Trump mob later stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty)
The past month’s conservative victories were decades in the making. Three books about the right reveal what it cost the movement.
That Trump would incite violence in pursuit of power was not only predictable but predicted — including by his Republican opponents in the 2016 primary. Yet Republicans elevated him to the world’s most important job, and have made no secret why. “The first thing that came to my mind [after Trump’s general election win] was the Supreme Court,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Washington Post in a recent interview.
With Trump’s election, the conservative establishment succeeded in cementing its control over the Court. But this victory required that they cede control over their movement to an unstable demagogue.
American conservatism is thus simultaneously ascendant and in crisis. The right has extraordinary political power, but its traditional leadership seems less capable than ever of imposing limits on how it is wielded. The GOP’s future belongs to the radical forces represented by Trump and the members of the establishment most willing to cater to them. Those few Republicans in power willing to stand up to the rot of Trumpism — like Rep. Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, and Sen. Mitt Romney — find themselves on the outside looking in.
This state of affairs is perhaps the inevitable endpoint of the American right’s decades-old strategy for attaining power. Conservative doctrine never truly captured the hearts of a mass audience; to attain power, the movement needed to ally itself with forces of far-right reaction who raged against the idea of equality at the heart of modern democracy.
American conservatism was an attempt to tame the untamable: to domesticate this reactionary impulse and channel it in electoral politics in service of an elite-driven agenda. Its leaders managed to exercise some control over radicals in the specific context of Cold War America — but the effort was fated to fail eventually.
And now it’s threatening to bring American democracy down with it.
The dark heart of reactionary politics
Modern democracy is, at heart, premised on the liberal ideal of equality: that because no person is inherently superior to any other, all deserve to help shape the rules that govern society as a whole.
That this idea will strike many readers as banal speaks to the success of the liberal democratic project, which has taken a premise that challenges every historical hierarchy and elevated it to the level of received wisdom.
These hierarchies, however, are not without their defenders. Anti-egalitarian politics have regularly proven to be politically potent, with many citizens in seemingly advanced democracies repeatedly showing themselves willing to support political factions that challenge liberalism’s most cherished ideals.
Matthew Rose’s recent book A World after Liberalism tells the story of a handful of “radical right” thinkers who built intellectual foundations for anti-egalitarian politics. The writings of the people he highlights — German cultural essentialist Oswald Spengler, Italian quasi-fascist Julius Evola, American Nazi sympathizer Francis Parker Yockey, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, and the proto-Trumpian pundit Sam Francis — range from mystical treatises about cultural symbology to conspiracy theorizing to more conventional political journalism.
But according to Rose, a scholar of religion by background, they share key traits in common: most fundamentally, a belief in the group as the primary unit of political life. The group they champion happens to be European peoples or, for some, the white race.
Liberalism centers individuals, treating them as equals and granting them rights against the state in order to be able to live their lives in the way they choose. Radical right theorists see this as a terrible mistake.
“Liberalism is evil in principle because it destroys the foundations of social order,” Rose writes, summarizing his subjects’ views. “Political life does not depend on truths or values that transcend our identities [but rather] recognizing that human identity, at its most primordial level, is something inherited.”
Their reasons for arriving at this conclusion differed, but virtually all venerated Western culture and deplored its alleged corrosion by liberal thought.
Evola’s pre-World War II work, for example, argued that humans by their nature require rituals and a sense of the sacred to achieve meaning in their lives. He believed that liberalism destroyed this most profound source of human significance by subjecting what Evola called capital-T Tradition to rational scrutiny and arguing for the political equality of all persons.
Meanwhile, Yockey, writing in the late ’40s and ’50s, argued that rationality is an expression of Western man’s most fundamental feature: a drive toward mastery and domination. He blamed a deformed “Jewish” form of reason, embodied in the work of Marx and Freud, for corrupting the West — seeding a corrosive self-doubt about its own heroic past that has put Europe and North America on the road to cultural suicide.
Such ideas may seem far removed from the mainstream, but you hear their echoes in today’s berserk politics. Steve Bannon has cited Evola as an influence; Rose sees in Yockey’s writing the seeds of the “cultural Marxism” theory popular on the culture warrior right.
More importantly, a dive into their work reveals that these thinkers capture something real: a politics that’s felt, on a more instinctual level, by millions of ordinary people across the Western world.
We have ample evidence from social science that large swaths of the white population across Europe and North America find cultural and demographic change unsettling. This sense of cultural displacement has powered the rise of a particular kind of reactionary nationalism, from Trump to Brexit to the continental far-right.
The thinkers of the radical right were at once too intellectual, too bizarre, and too unfashionable to ever really gain a mass following in their lifetimes. But they intuited something that many mainstream thinkers failed to see — that there is a persistent constituency for illiberal cultural politics in advanced Western democracies.
This insight comes out most clearly in Rose’s chapter on Sam Francis, an American political writer who died in 2005. Francis was once a member in good standing in the mainstream conservative movement. Yet Francis came to see the Reaganite GOP as a sham opposition — “beautiful losers” unable to grapple with the looming demographic threat to American civilization posed by a rising non-white population.
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people,” he said at a 1994 white nationalist conference.
This racism got him booted from the ranks of mainstream conservatism; Rose describes a 1995 op-ed offering a “biblical defense of slavery” as the breaking point. Yet Francis’s viciousness also made him perversely prescient. He believed that, for Republicans, “trying to win non-whites, especially by abandoning issues important to white voters, is the road to political suicide.”
Instead, he argued that the GOP would need to awaken the slumbering consciousness of the so-called “Middle American Radicals” — middle- and lower-class white voters who were core supporters of right-wing extremists like Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace.
The best way to do so, Francis argued, was “to make use of a Caesarism and the mass loyalties that a charismatic leader inspires.”
The American right’s long ride on the reactionary tiger
When Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, most observers dismissed him as a joke. As he rose in the polls, the mainstream right saw him as less funny and more of a threat. In January 2016, the flagship conservative magazine National Review dedicated an entire issue, titled “Against Trump,” to reading him out of the movement.
But as we came to learn, elite disapproval proved unable to withstand Trump’s ability to harness the rage of Francis’s Middle American Radicals. The conservative movement, conquered, bent the knee — bringing the radicals out from the shadows and into positions of power.
A few lifelong conservatives have since come to ask themselves: “How did it come to this?”
Matthew Continetti has an insider’s perspective on this question. Founder of a right-wing news site called the Washington Free Beacon, he is currently a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The conservative movement is not just his professional career, but also personal: He is the son-in-law of Bill Kristol, a leading light of the movement turned Never Trumper.
Continetti’s new book The Right, a history of (as the subtitle puts it) “the hundred year war for American conservatism,” tells the story of a mainstream conservative movement that tried to include the far right in its political coalition while maintaining control — a balancing act that started failing the second Trump began running.
For his part, Continetti has played the Trump ascendancy coyly. He has both effusively praised Trump, writing in 2018 that “for Republicans, it doesn’t get much better than this,” and called for the president’s impeachment after the events of January 6 — making him the embodiment of the internal conflict at the heart of his book.
The bulk of The Right is devoted to explaining how modern conservatism rose to challenge the hegemonic liberalism of FDR, eventually emerging as a dominant force in American politics. Scholars like libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek developed the raw intellectual materials for what would become conservatism. Popularizers like National Review founder William F. Buckley synthesized these ideas into a coherent whole and brought them into the political realm. Leaders like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan applied conservative doctrine to the political realm, seizing the reins of one of America’s two major parties.
In broad strokes, this is the fairly standard origin story that conservatives tell about themselves. What sets Continetti’s account apart is a willingness to engage more honestly with the darker side of the movement — how a movement that claimed to venerate the American founding and Constitution repeatedly aligned itself with forces that stood against some of its most cherished principles.
Take Joe McCarthy, the communist-hunting demagogic senator. At the height of McCarthy’s powers in 1953, Buckley and co-author L. Brent Bozell wrote a book — titled McCarthy and His Enemies — that criticized his excesses but mostly defended him from his critics. Years after McCarthy’s fall from grace, in 1968, Buckley still described him as a man ultimately pushing a decent anti-communism.
In one of Continetti’s deftest passages, he draws a subtle equivalence between the reasoning behind the conservative defense of McCarthy and its contemporary embrace of Trump:
McCarthy had enveloped the Right in his elaborate conspiracy theory. He fed off conservative alienation from government, from media, from higher education. For a time, it seemed as though this strategy of condemning American institutions as irrevocably corrupted was popular and might succeed. It could not, of course. Ultimately fantasies cannot withstand the pressure of reality.
Here Continetti exposes a central danger for the conservative movement: Its alliance with the radical right over shared antipathy to the mainstream tends to bleed over, inexorably, into outright sympathy for the radicals.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the John Birch Society — a grassroots radical right organization that pitched a McCarthy-style conspiracy theory about a creeping communist takeover — emerged as a potent political force.
At first, conservatism’s most prominent leaders chose to tolerate the organization. Barry Goldwater said he disagreed with Birchers on some issues but saw “no reason to take a stand against” them; Buckley said he hoped the group “thrives” (with the caveat that they tone down conspiracy theories directed at Republicans like Eisenhower). In private, Continetti records, these men would admit that the Birchers were absurd and dangerous — but necessary for the movement’s cause.
Conservatives did eventually break with the Birchers after using them to gain a political foothold. And for some time, they really did have success channeling the radicals without succumbing — keeping the fringe “cabined off,” as Continetti puts it, due in no small part to America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union.
But almost immediately after the Cold War, the equilibrium began to wobble. In 1992 and 1996, Pat Buchanan — an anti-immigration extremist who had held important positions in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses — ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Those radical right campaigns, both advised by Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis, were more successful than many expected.
“There was no doubt that Buchanan connected with large numbers of grassroots conservatives and GOP voters,” Continetti writes. “That Republican leaders sought to handle him with kid gloves...signified a malaise within conservatism.”
This is an admirably frank assessment, but one that also lets the conservative center off a little too easy — treating them as merely accommodating illiberal forces rather than acting illiberally themselves, as they frequently did in the post-Cold War era.
In 1994, a new crop of hard-right conservatives entered Congress and, under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, reoriented the party towards a no-holds-barred legislative style scornful of historic norms. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court’s conservatives embraced dubious legal logic to elevate George W. Bush to the presidency; once in office, Bush proceeded to shred civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. After Barack Obama’s election, the rise of the Tea Party led to another far-right resurgence in the Republican Party — one embraced, despite its clear racist overtones, by the party leadership.
Mainstream conservatives were not pure victims of a hostile radical right takeover: Their in-principle commitment to democracy and liberal rights was always thinner than their paeans to the Constitution made it seem. A movement with a history of sacrificing democratic principles in pursuit of policy and political victories was always vulnerable to a demagogue — as Donald Trump would prove in 2016.
Continetti seems to condemn the Trump presidency in the book’s penultimate chapter, but his assessment is colored by the tendencies in conservatism he himself diagnosed. In Continetti’s view, the Trump presidency was not necessarily rotted from the core, but was a largely successful enterprise ruined almost single-handedly by the Capitol riot:
If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom [and] reoriented America’s opinion of China... Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6.
In the final chapter, he argues that the future of conservatism rests in a kind of Trumpism without Trump: one that incorporates “the modifications to conservative policy positions that Donald Trump forced on the movement [while] untangling the Republican party and conservative movement from Donald Trump.”
Continetti’s faith in the movement’s power to channel the forces behind Trumpism, even after January 6, is an unintentional vindication of one of his book’s core lessons: that riding the radical right tiger is fundamental to conservatism’s political strategy.
How power corrupted conservatism
Unlike Continetti, Tim Miller has made a decisive break with Trump and the Republican Party. A longtime Republican campaign operative who worked for John McCain in 2008, the Republican National Committee in 2012, and Jeb Bush in 2016, he was one of the authors of the now-infamous “Republican autopsy” after the 2012 election, which argued that the party should embrace a more socially moderate agenda (especially on immigration) to win over younger voters and people of color.
Miller’s just-released book Why We Did It attempts to tell the story of how he went from Republican stalwart to Never Trumper — and why the overwhelming majority of his friends and coworkers did not.
Miller points to the strategy laid out by Continetti as a key source of rot: that decades of courting far-right supporters helped convince Republicans that they could stoke reactionary fervor while simultaneously controlling their real-world influence.
“Those of us at the Republican National Committee, on the Hill, and throughout various GOP campaign high commands were under the impression that we were wise enough to be the self-imposed limits on the base’s excesses,” he writes.
Miller uses himself as an example of the psychology at work — a long-closeted gay man who worked for a party that opposed his fundamental rights. He describes himself, and most political operatives, coping with such tensions by treating politics as more of a game they played for a living than something with real-world stakes.
Once you start playing the game, it’s very hard to quit. Your professional success and financial well-being depend on continued advancement in the party. The demanding nature of the job leaves limited time for socializing and hobbies. Your coworkers become your social circle, your job your entire identity.
When your entire life centers on the party, you contort your own psychology to justify unconditional allegiance — even when someone you despise becomes its leader. Miller illustrates the power of this psychology, and the way in which it contorted the entire Republican Party, through a series of vignettes and case studies of high-profile Republicans he knows personally.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — who Miller recalls cornering him and Jeb Bush in a New York bar for hours to rant about Trump — believed converting to Trumpism would better position him to influence key decisions. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the formerly moderate lead author of the GOP autopsy report, correctly judged Trumpism to be the best way to advance her career.
The most affecting such portrait in Miller’s book is of his formerly close friend Caroline Wren, a top Trump fundraiser who helped plan the January 6 rally. Miller describes Wren as kind and empathetic; in 2015, she was so affected by the Syrian refugee crisis that she flew to Germany to help resettle children seeking asylum.
Yet this person, somehow, ended up as an enabler for Donald Trump. Today, she still refuses to admit that Biden won the election.
When Miller presses her on why, she says her attraction to Trump was “probably all negative” — that she had come to despise liberals so much that she was willing to help Trump burn it all down. This idea, that America’s greatest enemy is overweening liberalism, is what justified the political alliance with the far right even among the most high-minded conservative intellectuals.
Joe McCarthy had the right enemies, so his excesses could be forgiven. The Birchers could help fight the liberals, so they needed to be tolerated and even appeased (for a time). Trump may have tried to undermine democracy, but at least he can give us the Supreme Court.
In creating or capturing a series of institutions — think tanks, magazines, activist groups, and above all the Republican Party — the conservative movement built a political entity that could help it challenge liberalism. But this body was so oriented toward anti-liberal politics that it could muster little resistance against a radical right infection; once a serious enough case presented, the virus swiftly consumed the host. And after it did, the social and professional structure of these institutions compelled nearly everyone involved to get with the program — even at the cost of abandoning democratic institutions.
The Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion, guns, and religion may have many conservatives thinking it was all worth it: Despite the indignities, their partnership with Trump got them the policy victories they wanted. And with Trump facing mounting legal trouble while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues rising in the 2024 primary polls, they may believe in their power to create a Trumpism without Trump.
But the split screen last week between the January 6 hearings and the Supreme Court’s seismic decisions couldn’t have been more instructive on the dangers of this belief — twinned reminders of what the Republicans were willing to countenance and what it won in the process. The only two Republicans who dared to join the January 6 Committee, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, are (respectively) retiring and facing a daunting primary challenge. A Republican who stood up to Trump’s lies — Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers — nonetheless affirmed he’d still vote for the former president in 2024.
What America faces now is a conservatism unbounded. While the movement of the past regularly partnered with the radical right, and even shared some of its beliefs, it also would on occasion police it — belatedly turning out the Birchers and Sam Francis. Today’s conservatism has jettisoned that modicum of caution. It’s a conservatism that isn’t conservative but downright revolutionary.
And having had a taste of victory, there is no sign that the Republican Party is willing, or even capable, of reimposing the limits that once made it safe for democratic politics.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg looks on as Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto (left) and Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde (right) bump fists after holding a joint press conference after their meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Jan. 24. (photo: John Thys/Getty)
The ceremony in Brussels took place as Russian forces continued to make “substantive progress” in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry
“This is truly a historic moment for Finland, for Sweden, for NATO — and for our shared security,” said Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, noting that NATO’s door “remains open” to other democracies.
The signing ceremony follows a decision during a NATO summit in Madrid last week to invite Sweden and Finland to join the alliance. It came after some wrangling with NATO member Turkey, which had blocked the countries from joining over historical grievances about what Ankara saw as their support for militant groups. A deal was struck to end the standoff when Sweden and Finland agreed to address issues raised by Turkey, including the possible extradition of Kurds labeled “terrorists” by the Turkish authorities.
The decisions by Finland and Sweden, traditionally nonaligned militarily, to join NATO will not only transform Europe’s security landscape but probably further strain relations with Russia, which opposes the alliance’s expansion near its border.
Delegations from Finland and Sweden at the signing event expressed gratitude and said joining would strengthen “collective security” and aid the alliance. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the major factor in leading the two countries to seek membership.
“This is a good day for NATO,” Stoltenberg added.
The ceremony in Brussels took place as Russian forces continued to make “substantive progress” in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, following the capture of the city of Lysychansk, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry. Unlike in earlier phases of the war, Russia appears to have “achieved reasonably effective co-ordination” between groupings of its armed forces under military leaders, the ministry said Tuesday.
However, the intelligence update added that Ukrainian forces have probably withdrawn in good shape and in line with existing plans. “There is a realistic possibility that Ukrainian forces will now be able to fall back to a more readily defendable, straightened front line,” it said.
The ministry said it predicted that further battles for Donbas would be characterized by “slow rates of advance” by Russian forces and the mass use of artillery “leveling towns and cities in the process.” And on Tuesday, Russia fired missiles at a market and residential area in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, damaging several houses and destroying one. At least two people were killed and seven injured, officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his nightly video address Monday, said it will take “colossal funds” to rebuild critical infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and waste processing plants, and to restore “normal economic life.”
Zelensky said that “tens of thousands” of homes have been destroyed across the country and that “thousands of enterprises are out of business.”
“That is why the recovery of Ukraine is not only about what needs to be done later, after our victory, but also about what needs to be done at this time,” he said. “The reconstruction of our state is not just the restoration of the walls that we had. … Ukraine must become the freest, most modern and safest country in Europe.”
Earlier Monday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal estimated at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, that his country needs $750 billion for a sweeping three-stage rebuilding and recovery plan.
On Tuesday, Russia’s lower house of parliament approved legislation that would force businesses to produce whatever the government wants, at a price and time frame set by it. The legislation, among two measures that cleared the State Duma, is expected to pass swiftly through both houses of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament before being signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.
Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has struggled to sustain personnel and equipment, with Western countries imposing broad sanctions and supplying Ukraine with weapons.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said it was necessary to “optimize” the work of the military-industrial complex and related enterprises. He said the legislation would allow Russia to mobilize its economy to support what Moscow calls its “special military operation” against Ukraine.
“This does not mean that any enterprise — small, medium-size businesses, any other — will be forcibly involved in the implementation of state defense order measures,” he said, noting that they would not affect companies not producing goods for the military. “There is no need for this.”
One of the two bills said the state could impose “special economic measures” during military operations, requiring firms to supply goods and services to the military. The second bill would give the government authority to alter the working hours of businesses supplying the goods — employees may be asked to work at night, on weekends and on holidays — with the possibility of no annual leave.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, said discussions on the measures would continue behind closed doors Wednesday.
Texas Department of Public Safety special agents apprehend a group of five men from Honduras who were caught on private property as part of Operation Lone Star in Kinney County near Brackettville, Texas, in November 2021. (photo: Veronica G. Cardenas/The Texas Tribune)
Emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune confirm that federal authorities are probing discrimination claims involving Gov. Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border initiative.
The Legislature last year directed more than $3 billion to border measures over the next two years, a bulk of which has gone to Operation Lone Star. Under the initiative, which Abbott said he launched to combat human and drug smuggling, the state has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members and Department of Public Safety troopers to the border with Mexico and built some fencing. Thousands of immigrant men seeking to enter the country have been arrested for trespassing onto private property, and some have been kept in jail for weeks without charges being filed.
Since the operation’s launch, a number of news organizations, including ProPublica and the Tribune, have outlined a series of problems with state leaders’ claims of success, the treatment of National Guard members and alleged civil rights violations.
An investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project found that in touting the operation’s accomplishments, state officials included arrests with no connection to the border and statewide drug seizures. The news organizations also revealed that trespassing cases represented the largest share of the operation’s arrests. DPS stopped counting some charges, including cockfighting, sexual assault and stalking, after the publications began asking questions about their connections to border security.
Another investigation by the Tribune and Army Times detailed troubles with the National Guard deployment, including reports of delayed payments to soldiers, a shortage of critical equipment and poor living conditions. Previous reporting by the Army Times also traced suicides by soldiers tied to the operation.
Angela Dodge, a DOJ spokesperson, said she could not “comment on the existence or lack thereof of any potential investigation or case on any matter not otherwise a part of the public court record.”
“Generally, cases are brought to us by a variety of law enforcement agencies — federal, state and local — for possible prosecutorial consideration following their investigation into a suspected violation of federal law,” Dodge wrote in an email. “We consider each such case based on the evidence and what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a federal court of law.”
But at least two Texas agencies involved in carrying out the border initiative have pointed to a DOJ investigation in records obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune through the Texas Public Information Act.
In an internal email in May, DPS officials said that the DOJ was seeking to review whether Operation Lone Star violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin by institutions receiving federal funding.
According to the emails, the federal government requested documents that include implementation plans, agreements with landowners and training information for states that have supported Operation Lone Star by sending law enforcement officers and National Guard members to Texas.
“If you are not already aware, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is investigating Operation Lone Star,” Kaylyn Betts, a DPS assistant general counsel, wrote in a May 23 email to a department official. She added that the agency should respond in a timely and complete manner.
In a letter sent Friday to the state’s attorney general, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also cited a “formal investigation” of Operation Lone Star by the DOJ. The agency, which manages the state’s prison system, pointed to the investigation while fighting the release of public records sought by the news organizations.
In the letter, the department’s deputy general counsel wrote that the DOJ is investigating whether the state agency is subjecting people who are arrested as part of the border operation to “differential and unlawful conditions of confinement based on their perceived or actual race or national origin.”
None of the agencies have publicly released information related to the DOJ’s requests.
Neither DPS nor the Texas office of the attorney general, which is representing the state, responded to requests for comment. Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said in an email that her agency provided the DOJ the requested information.
“The agency has and continues to follow all state and federal laws as the state of Texas responds to the ongoing crises at the border,” she wrote in an email to the news organizations.
State and federal lawmakers as well as civil rights and immigrant groups have repeatedly called for investigations into Operation Lone Star. In the letters to the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, the groups have cited reporting from the Tribune that shows some immigrants were illegally detained or kept in jail too long due to delays by prosecutors, in violation of state law.
“It is critically urgent that the Biden administration not only investigate but hold agencies accountable for violations of Title VI to protect the civil rights of people in South Texas,” said Kate Huddleston, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. The nonprofit, along with more than 100 other groups, filed a 50-page Title VI complaint in December with the DOJ asking it to investigate alleged civil rights violations.
Operation Lone Star, Huddleston added, “is targeting individuals for enhanced punishment and subjecting them to a separate state criminal system that is created specifically for this purpose that is riddled with civil rights violations.”
Abbott’s office has said the arrests and prosecutions under the operation “are fully constitutional.”
Highland Park Police Chief Louis Jogmen and Mayor Nancy Rotering look on as Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli, of the Lake County sheriff's office and the Lake County major crimes task force, speaks to the media during a news conference outside the Highland Park Police Department in downtown Highland Park, Ill. (photo: Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times)
ALSO SEE: Highland Park Suspect Was in
Online Communities Where People Are
“Programming Themselves to Kill”
The revelation that Crimo, 21, had at least two previous encounters with law enforcement has raised new questions about how he was able to legally purchase his guns and whether more could have been done to prevent the massacre that killed seven people and injured more than 30.
In September 2019, a family member told Highland Park police that Crimo had threatened to “kill everyone,” said Christopher Covelli, a spokesman for the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Officers visited Crimo’s home and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword, but made no arrest, Covelli said on Tuesday, because they lacked probable cause. However, they notified Illinois State Police, he said.
Months later, in December, Crimo applied for a firearm owner’s identification card, the document required to possess a gun in Illinois. Because Crimo was under 21 at the time, state law required him to have the consent of a parent or guardian before he could own a firearm or ammunition. According to state police, which issues the cards, Crimo’s father sponsored the permit application.
State police had received a “clear and present danger report” on Crimo after the September incident, but because at the time he did not have a pending application or an active permit, known as a FOID (Firearm Owner’s Identification) card, the agency ruled there was no action it could take. When reviewing Crimo’s application less than six months later, state police officials once again decided there was nothing they could do — this time, the agency said, because Crimo had a sponsor.
“The subject was under 21 and the application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” Illinois State Police said in a statement. “Therefore, at the time of FOID application review in January of 2020, there was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger and deny the FOID application.”
In a subsequent statement, state police said Crimo had passed four federal background checks when purchasing his firearms and said the report from Highland Park police indicated he had told officers that he did not feel like hurting himself or others when they interviewed him in September 2019. At the time, Crimo’s father claimed the seized knives were his, and Highland Park police returned them that afternoon, state police said.
Officials on Tuesday did not say whether police confiscation of knives and other weapons should have been basis enough to deny Crimo’s application.
“Highland Park police notified the Illinois State Police,” Covelli said. “Where it goes from there, I don’t want to speak to it.”
The news comes as police said Crimo had planned the attack for weeks and used a legally purchased military-style weapon in the massacre. Authorities charged Crimo with seven counts of first-degree murder Tuesday but said they have found no definitive motive for the rampage, which has left the Chicago suburb of 30,000 reeling two days after the Independence Day shooting.
Crimo had acquired five firearms in 2020 and 2021, Covelli said, including the semiautomatic rifle he allegedly used to fire more than 70 rounds into the crowds gathered to celebrate the American holiday. He tried to conceal his identity by wearing women’s clothing, police said, and initially eluded capture by blending in with those fleeing the gunfire.
The victims identified by authorities ranged in age from 35 to 88. Some of the victims included Jacki Sundheim, a staff member and preschool teacher at a nearby synagogue; Nicolás Toledo-Zaragoza, a doting grandfather who had recently returned to Highland Park to be closer to family; and Kevin and Irina McCarthy, the parents of a 2-year-old boy.
Cassie Goldstein told NBC News on Tuesday that she and her mother, Katherine Goldstein, 64, were watching the city’s Fourth of July parade when they heard what they thought were firecrackers being thrown at the street.
“And then I looked up and I saw the shooter shooting down at the kids,” the 22-year-old told anchor Lester Holt. “And I told her that it was a shooter and that she had to run.”
Shortly after they started running, Katherine Goldstein was shot in the chest and hit the pavement, the daughter said.
“I knew she was dead,” Cassie Goldstein told NBC. “I just told her that I loved her, but I couldn’t stop, because he was still shooting everyone next to me.”
A FOID card is required under Illinois law to possess guns. The cards issued by the Illinois State Police require “any qualified applicant” to meet at least 15 requirements listed on the agency’s website.
At a news conference announcing the initial criminal charges against Crimo, Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said Illinois’s red-flag law, which allows loved ones to ask a court to temporarily remove guns from those deemed violent or threatening, is “very powerful.” Yet the law is rarely used.
“We must vastly increase awareness and education about this red-flag law,” Rinehart said.
In the days following the shooting, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has vowed to strengthen state laws in an effort to prevent another tragedy like the one in Highland Park.
“Unfortunately, every time a mass shooting occurs it serves as a stark reminder that our gun laws often fall short of the rigorous standards that feel like common sense to most Americans,” the governor said in a statement. “I call on all Illinoisans to learn about and use the Illinois Firearm Restraining Order Act already in law to alert authorities to dangerous individuals with guns. My administration will work with the General Assembly to ensure we take on the gun lobby and do everything we can to further strengthen our gun control and red flag laws.”
Attorney Steve Greenberg, who is representing Crimo’s family, defended the parents in an interview with NewsNation, saying that “they would have acted” if they had seen any red flags that their son was capable of a mass shooting.
“I think the bigger issue here is why is a kid able to get a FOID card and then purchase a military assault weapon?” Greenberg said. “I think that’s a bigger question that we should be asking ourselves. Not whether the family should have sponsored him to get a FOID card when there were no red flags and it was perfectly lawful.”
Critics, however, are demanding answers as to why Crimo’s father sponsored his gun permit application.
“He threatened to kill everyone, his knives were taken away, and 3 months later, his father still co-signed his Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card, making him eligible to purchase a firearm,” tweeted Joe Walsh, the former GOP congressman from Illinois who has become a vocal critic of former president Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party. “His father has some explaining to do.”
A detained demonstrator shows a sign 'No War!' from a police bus in St. Petersburg, Russia, Feb. 24, 2022. When President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine, a massive wave of outrage and anti-war sentiment swept Russia. (photo: AP)
“Do not believe the propaganda you see on the TV, read independent media!” reads one. “Violence and death have been constantly with us for three months now — take care of yourselves” reads another.
The 31-year-old teacher, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she fears for her security, said she wanted “a safe and simple method of getting a message across.”
“I couldn’t do something huge and public,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “I want to get people to think. And I think we should influence whatever space, in whatever way we can.”
Despite a massive government crackdown on such acts of protest, some Russians have persisted in speaking out against the invasion — even in the simplest of ways.
Some have paid a heavy price. In the early, wintry days of the invasion in February, authorities moved quickly to quash demonstrations, arresting people who marched or even held blank signs or other oblique references to the conflict. Critical media outlets were shut down as the government sought to control the narrative. Political opponents were singled out by President Vladimir Putin or commentators on state-run TV.
Lawmakers rubber-stamped measures that outlawed the spread of “false information” about what the Kremlin called a “special military operation” and disparaging the military, using them against anyone who spoke out against the attack or talked about the atrocities Russian troops were alleged to have committed.
As the war has dragged on into the languid days of a Russian summer, some like Anastasia feel guilty that they cannot do more to oppose the invasion, even within the constraints of the new laws.
When Russian troops rolled in Ukraine on Feb. 24, Anastasia said her first thought was to sell all her possessions and move abroad, but she soon changed her mind.
“It’s my country, why should I leave?” she told AP. “I understood I needed to stay and create something to help from here.”
Sergei Besov, a Moscow-based printer and artist, also felt he couldn’t stay silent. Even before the invasion, the 45-year-old was making posters reflecting on the political scene and plastering them around the capital.
When Russians voted two years ago on constitutional amendments allowing Putin to seek two more terms after 2024, Besov used his old printing press with hefty wooden Cyrillic type and vintage red ink to print posters that said simply: “Against.”
During the 2020 unrest in Belarus over a disputed presidential election and the ensuing crackdown on the protesters, he made posters saying “Freedom” in Belarusian.
After the invasion of Ukraine, his project, Partisan Press, started making posters saying “No to war” – the main anti-war slogan. Video of the poster being printed became popular on Instagram, and demand for copies was so great that they were given away for free.
After some of his posters were used at a demonstration in Red Square and some people displaying them were arrested, it became clear that the police “would inevitably come to us,” Besov said.
They showed up when Besov wasn’t there, charging two of his employees with participating in an unauthorized rally by printing the poster used in it.
The case has dragged on for over three months, he said, causing all of them lots of stress over whether they will be penalized and to what extent.
Besov has stopped printing the “No to war” posters and went for subtler messages such as “Fear is not an excuse to do nothing.”
He considers it important to keep speaking out.
“The problem is we don’t know where the lines are drawn,” Besov said. “It is known that they can prosecute you for certain things, but some manage to fly under the radar. Where is this line? It is very bad and really difficult.”
Sasha Skochilenko, a 31-year-old artist and musician in St. Petersburg, failed to stay under the radar and is facing severe consequences for what she thought was a relatively safe way to spread the word about the horrors of war: She was detained for replacing five price tags in a supermarket with tiny ones containing anti-war slogans.
“The Russian army bombed an arts schools in Mariupol. Some 400 people were hiding in it from the shelling,” one read.
“Russian conscripts are being sent to Ukraine. Lives of our children are the price of this war,” said another one.
Skochilenko was really affected by the war, said her partner, Sophia Subbotina.
“She had friends in Kyiv who were sheltering in the subway and calling her, talking about the horror that was going on there,” Subbotina told AP.
In 2020, Skochilenko taught acting and filmmaking at a children’s camp in Ukraine and worried how the conflict would affect her former pupils.
“She was really afraid for these children, that their lives were in danger because of the war, that bombs were falling on them, and she couldn’t stay silent,” Subbotina said.
Skochilenko faces up to 10 years in prison on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army.
“It was a shock for us that they launched a criminal case, and a case that implies a monstrous prison term of 5 to 10 years,” Subbotina said. “In our country, shorter sentences are handed down for murder.”
‘The EPA is doing the bare minimum it can and that’s putting people’s health at risk,’ said Kyla Bennett, policy director at the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. (photo: EPA)
Guardian analysis of water samples taken in nine US locations shows test agency uses is likely missing significant levels of PFAS pollutants
Firefighting foam from the nearby Pease air force base had polluted the water for decades with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and in recognition of the public health threat the US military funded the city’s new filtration system.
Officials said after implementing the upgraded filtration, testing no longer found detectable levels of PFAS chemicals in the water. They called the work in Portsmouth a “national model” for addressing PFAS water contamination.
“We are here to celebrate clean water,” Senator Maggie Hassan said at the time.
But the water may not be clean after all.
A Guardian analysis of water samples taken in Portsmouth and from eight other locations around the United States shows that the type of water testing relied on by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – and officials in towns such as Portsmouth – is so limited in scope that it is probably missing significant levels of PFAS pollutants.
The undercount leaves regulators with an incomplete picture of the extent of PFAS contamination and reveals how millions of people may be facing an unknown health risk in their drinking water.
The analysis checked water samples from PFAS hot spots around the country with two types of tests: an EPA-developed method that detects 30 types of the approximately 9,000 PFAS compounds, and another that checks for a marker of all PFAS.
The Guardian found that seven of the nine samples collected showed higher levels of PFAS in water using the test that identifies markers for PFAS, than levels found when the water was tested using the EPA method – and at concentrations as much as 24 times greater.
“The EPA is doing the bare minimum it can and that’s putting people’s health at risk,” said Kyla Bennett, policy director at the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
Ties to cancer
PFAS are a class of chemicals used since the 1950s to make thousands of products repel water, stains and heat. They are often called “forever chemicals” because they don’t fully break down, accumulating in the environment, humans and animals. Some are toxic at very low levels and have been linked to cancer, birth defects, kidney disease, liver problems, decreased immunity and other serious health issues.
The Biden administration in June announced new actions aimed at protecting drinking water from PFAS contamination, saying the chemicals “pose a serious threat across rural, suburban and urban areas”. The administration has allocated $10bn to specifically address PFAS and other contaminants in drinking water.
But critics say when it comes to identifying PFAS-contaminated water, the limitations of the test used by state and federal regulators, which is called the EPA 537 method, virtually guarantees regulators will never have a full picture of contamination levels as industry churns out new compounds much faster than researchers can develop the science to measure them.
That creates even more incentive for industry to shift away from older compounds: if chemical companies produce newer PFAS, regulators won’t be able to find the pollution.
“Industry has had a 70-year head start and we’re never going to catch up,” said Graham Peaslee, a University of Notre Dame researcher.
Many researchers consider a type of test known as “total organic fluorine” (TOF), which detects a PFAS marker called organic fluorine, to be the most accurate way to test water samples.
The European Union is proposing switching to a TOF test, and states such as Maine, which are planning to regulate PFAS as a class instead of regulating individual compounds, will need more robust testing to enforce their laws.
“The TOF isn’t the end-all, but it’s telling us there’s more fluorine out there, and we need to look for it,” Peaslee said.
Clean water advocacy groups last year urged the EPA to use more comprehensive tests that they said would “give us a better understanding of the totality of PFAS contamination”, but the agency told the Guardian it currently has no such plans.
In a statement to the Guardian, the EPA said it “continues to conduct research and monitor advances in analytical methodologies … that may improve our ability to measure more PFAS”.
For researchers worried about PFAS contamination, that is not good enough.
“We’re looking for and studying less than 1% of PFAS so what the heck is that other 99%?” Peaslee asked. “I’ve never seen a good PFAS, so they’re all going to have some toxicity.”
Guardian sampling
The samples analyzed for the Guardian were collected from municipal systems and private wells. An accredited lab conducted the EPA 537 test, while Peaslee checked the samples using a TOF method he developed.
In water from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the levels were 10 parts per trillion (ppt) found in the EPA 537 test and 164ppt found in the TOF test.
Water samples collected in Titusville, Florida, also showed a large disparity – the EPA 537 test found PFAS at 16ppt, while the TOF test found PFAS levels at 176ppt. In Bethesda, Maryland, the results were 18ppt from the government-favored test and 185ppt from the TOF.
Similar results were seen in sampling from other communities, including in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona and Massachusetts.
Though the EPA doesn’t have limits in place for mixes of PFAS compounds, many public health advocates say no level over 1ppt is safe.
One of the samples in the Guardian analysis – water from Oscoda, Michigan – showed 13.7ppt in the EPA 537 test and 0 (non-detect) for the TOF test. Testing of a sample from Gustavus, Alaska, found 127ppt in the EPA 537 test, and a lower amount – 102 ppt – in the TOF test, considered within the margin of error.
The EPA and industry have long argued that many newer PFAS that can’t be detected are safe. However, most new compounds have not been independently reviewed, and the types of PFAS that have been studied have been found to be toxic and persistent in the environment, said Bennett.
“There are so many PFAS that we don’t know anything about, and if we don’t know anything about them, how do we know they aren’t hurting us?” Bennett asked. “Why are we messing around?”
The test results for Portsmouth, where water tested by the TOF method revealed levels around 16 times higher than the EPA 537 method found, is probably due to some combination of issues, Peaslee said.
Though firefighting foam used at Pease air force base and elsewhere is largely made with PFAS compounds the EPA test can detect, the chemicals, once in the environment, break down into different PFAS compounds that can’t be detected.
It’s also possible that other sources are polluting the region’s water with newer PFAS that can’t be read by the EPA test.
The results are “surprising”, said Andrea Amico, a public health advocate who in 2014 first sounded the alarm about Portsmouth’s PFAS contamination.
“That’s left me with more questions about what’s making up that total and makes me want more testing in my community,” she added.
Health problems
In the region around Cape Canaveral, Florida, which includes Titusville, some suspect PFAS contamination stemming from two military bases and Nasa facilities is behind their health problems.
Since 2019, Titusville utility officials have either reported no PFAS in the city’s drinking water or have said detections were at levels considered by regulators to be safe. But the TOF analysis for the Guardian detected 176ppt in the water there.
Among the water samples collected for the Guardian, some came from the home of a Titusville resident who suffers thyroid problems, a condition linked to PFAS exposure. The resident, who declined to be named, can’t afford a water filtration system, a situation that underscores the fact that many low-income people can be at more risk than people with higher incomes.
“They used [the EPA 537] results as cover,” said Stel Bailey, who has suffered from PFAS-linked ailments such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma and works with the clean water advocacy group Fight for Zero. “We need better testing technology so we know where to focus.”
Contamination stemming from airport and military facilities has also plagued Tucson, Arizona, for years, and new measures put in place by state and local officials are supposed to largely eradicated the problem.
But while water from the city’s south side showed just 2ppt in the EPA 537 test, the TOF found a level 24 times higher, according to the Guardian analysis. That means PFAS remains a concerns for Tucson resident Mary Ann Granillo, who suffers from lupus, a PFAS-linked disease that already killed two of her family members.
Granillo said she can’t afford a water filtration system, and bottled water is an expensive addition to her monthly bills. The family washes dishes, cleans clothes and showers in contaminated water. She fears nothing is likely to change.
“It really worries me a lot,” she said.
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