07 August 22
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From the Washington Post:
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney says.
No. Just, no. Shut up. Go away. How dare you? You are the poster boy for the Unaccountable Executive and for the Unitary Executive Theory, and you have been since your days working for Gerry Ford. You served that function in Congress when you helped cover up the crimes of the Iran-Contra. And in the nervous days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, you found yourself living in authoritarian Xanadu. You turned this country into a nation that tortured. You lied this country into a disastrous foreign war. “The dark side,” you called it.
I suspect that it’s called something quite different around The Hague.
“He is a coward,” Cheney says in the ad, which was released Thursday. “A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.”
Says the guy who shot his friend in the face, and who went for the Scotch before he went for the cops. Says the guy who lied the country into a war. Here he is, lying his ass off to a hopelessly credulous Tim Russert. And somewhere, Valerie Plame must find this all very amusing.
Naturally, the commercial that this old bag of sins cut for his daughter was considered "an event" by our pundit class, especially that element of the pundit class interested in whitewashing everything that Republicans did prior to the 2016 presidential election.
Odds of Liz Cheney’s keeping her seat are pretty damn long, but she seems to have grander plans. Anyone who cares about the future of American democracy should know that keeping the Cheneys away from power is only slightly less important than keeping the Trumps away from power. It’s a choice between the seditious conspiracy of the bear spray and the mob, and the seditious conspiracy of the black site and the waterboard.
The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.
Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona. (photo: Bonnie Cash/Getty Images)
The Arizona senator's support was won late Thursday after fellow Democrats dropped a proposal to close the so-called "carried interest" loophole, which is commonly used by private equity, hedge fund, and property investment executives to pay a lower rate of tax on their compensation.
As such, it was a win for many Sinema campaign donors.
According to Open Secrets, the global private equity firms KKR, Carlyle, and Apollo Global Management are among the leading 20 sources of donations to Sinema's campaign committee between 2017 and 2022.
As Open Secrets notes, it isn't the organizations in the list that donated money directly, but rather, their "political action committees, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families." Further, subsidiaries and affiliates are included in the organizations' total donations figure.
Other organizations listed by Open Secrets among the leading 20 sources of donations include Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb; and Rudin Management, a private commercial and residential landlord and developer in New York City.
All in all, Sinema has received $2.2 million from investment firms between 2017 and 2022, according to Open Secrets.
Sinema's office didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
On Wednesday, Sinema told donors at a campaign fundraiser that it made no sense to squeeze private equity firms by raising taxes on carried interest, because the industry will finance projects under new infrastructure and semiconductor legislation, a lobbyist who attended the event told The Wall Street Journal.
In simple terms, when private equity, hedge fund, or real estate investment executives take a percentage of profits from an investment gain as compensation, they're taxed at the capital-gains rate, which is lower than the comparable income-tax rate.
Dropping carried interest from the package of legislation marks a U-turn for the Democrats after Sen. Joe Manchin announced a deal on the matter with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week.
The carried interest tax provision of the Inflation Reduction Act was expected to have raised about $14 billion over 10 years.
Biden on Thursday evening praised Sinema's cooperation as "another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America's families."
Democrats are seeking to pass the law using the Senate's "reconciliation" process to stave off a Republican filibuster.
In this photo taken from video a view of a destroyed barrack at a prison in Olenivka, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces, eastern Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022. (photo: AP)
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Ukrainian Luhansk province, shared the unsettling photo on his Telegram channel. Insider has not been able to verify the image independently.
Geolocation tools suggest it is genuine, said The Guardian, and the gruesome photo was taken in late July, not far from the center of Popasna.
Near the head are the remains of a decapitated body, in uniform without its hands. Two hands have been placed on metal spikes on a fence on either side of the head, a video shows, reported The Guardian.
"There is nothing human about the Russians. We are at war with non-humans," Haidai said under the image.
Popsana is in the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has fought hard to capture territory after its army was humiliated in the debacle of the first months of the invasion. The Ukrainian army retreated from the town in early May. The president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed his troops had seized control of the town, per The Guardian.
Allegations of the new atrocity follow the shelling of the Olenivka prison housing Ukrainian prisoners of war. Russia and Ukraine blaming the other party.
Photos from the shelling show burnt corpses and skeletal remains.
According to a prisoner recently released from the Olenivka detention center outside Donetsk, Ukrainian POWs are tortured and murdered.
"We heard their cries," Anna Vorosheva told The Guardian. "They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time."
Soon after the bombing, a video circulated on social media showing a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner.
A Ukrainian MP told Insider, "I wish I could turn back time and not see this video. But we knew that this was happening in the occupied territories. The Russian military rapes, mutilates, and kills Ukrainians, both civilians, and POWs."
Responding to the footage, Marie Struthers, Amnesty International's Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said, "This horrific assault is yet another apparent example of complete disregard for human life and dignity in Ukraine committed by Russian forces."
Meanwhile, The head of Amnesty International's Ukraine arm has resigned after the human-rights organization blamed Kyiv for endangering civilians and violating international laws with its wartime tactics, according to reports.
The group said Ukrainian forces had established military outposts in schools, hospitals, and civilian areas, in contravention of international human rights laws.
Oksana Pokalchuk, head of Amnesty International Ukraine, said in a Facebook post late Friday that the report "became a tool of Russian propaganda," per Politico.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slammed the report and said it had sought to offer "amnesty (to) the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim."
Secretary General Agnes Callamard told AFP news agency that Amnesty "fully stands by our research."
Ilhan Omar speaking with supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders at a canvass launch in Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 9, 2020. (photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
lhan Omar, one of the most left-wing members of Congress, faces a primary challenger, Don Samuels, backed by an unsavory circle of right-wing billionaires and cops. Despite being an enemy of public schools, he’s calling himself a progressive.
His Twitter account emphasizes his liberalism: gun control, protecting abortion rights, public school advocacy, and green jobs. He also wants to strengthen voting rights and make health care more affordable. But if he’s that progressive, why is he challenging Ilhan Omar at all? As usual, following the money provides an answer: Samuels and his campaign are supported by reactionary billionaires who want to get rid of Omar.
When Samuels first ran for Minneapolis School Board in 2014, he was backed by a coalition of billionaires — Michael Bloomberg, Arthur Rock, and Jonathan Sackler — supporting charter schools. In an effort to deceive voters who might otherwise oppose their school privatization schemes, these moguls called their PAC the Minnesota Progressive Education Fund and poured what In These Times magazine called an “unprecedented” amount of money (some $290,000) into two school board candidates. One of these was Samuels.
In the current race, Samuels is backed by even worse interests, including several Republican super PACs funded by the same billionaires that support Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Laura Loomer, and Kelly Loeffler.
He’s also backed by the same police PACs that support Senator Tom Cotton and Lee Zeldin (the far-right zealot seeking to unseat New York governor Kathy Hochul). (These groups also donated to candidates trying to unseat Omar’s Squad-mates AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.)
It’s not hard to see why. Samuels has been a staunch opponent of local campaigns to shift funding from the police into other priorities, efforts Omar has supported. Indeed, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis cops, when millions of Americans were pouring into the streets to protest racist police violence, Samuels and his wife were suing the city of Minneapolis to demand that the city hire one hundred additional police officers. (That lawsuit is ongoing.)
Right-wing donors have been hosting fundraisers for Samuels. These include Andy Brehm (a prominent critic of progressive attorney general Keith Ellison), Steve Cramer of the Minneapolis Downtown Council (a prominent opponent of police accountability), and several of Minneapolis’s worst landlords — including one family of billionaires who faced state investigation in 2020 for creating an atmosphere of racial discrimination, harassment, and hostility for their tenants, who were Somali women with children.
The conservative National Review magazine published a fawning profile of Samuels on Thursday, noting that even though he is a Democrat, “there are reasons for conservatives and others on the right to wish him well on Tuesday.” In addition to Samuels’s die-hard police fandom, the National Review writer appreciated his support for charter schools and vouchers and, “most importantly,” emphasized that Samuels had, of any opponent, the best chance of defeating Omar.
The teachers’ union has not fallen for Samuels’s claims to the progressive mantle. (The United Steelworkers and a couple of building trades unions unfortunately are backing him, though Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and other unions are behind Omar.) Greta Callahan, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Education Support Professionals, in an op-ed for the Star Tribune, pointed to Omar’s support for public school teachers and students — from pushing for universal free school lunch during the pandemic, cancellation of school lunch debt, and a permanent end to punitive school lunch policies to standing with striking Minneapolis teachers on the picket line in the freezing winter. (The strike, which called for caps on class sizes and increased mental health support for students, as well as higher teacher pay, was successful.)
In her op-ed, Callahan contrasted the congresswoman’s allegiances with those of her opponent: Samuels not only failed to support the striking teachers but has said he would never send his children to public school and memorably called for burning down one of Minneapolis’s high schools.
Since her election to Congress in 2018, Omar has been an effective fighter not only on education but also on climate, health care, affordable housing, food justice, and greater accountability for the military and military contractors. Among elected officials serving at the federal level, she has also been one of the few outspoken opponents of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
For all these reasons and many more (including, of course, the fact that Omar is Muslim), she has received countless death threats and been singled out for violent harassment by Donald Trump’s followers. She has been the target of knuckle-draggingly ignorant bigotry from her own colleagues, with Representative Lauren Boebert calling her a member of the “jihad Squad.”
Omar’s last primary challenge was animated by Islamophobic elements of this kind. That’s not where Samuels is coming from, but the ruling class and organized cops supporting him are equally dangerous and deserving of defeat.
Given Omar’s courageous positions, it’s easy to understand why right-wing billionaires would want to stop her. But the Democratic voters of Minneapolis should not be fooled by their faux-progressive campaign.
Brittney Griner, who was detained at a Moscow airport and later charged with illegal possession of cannabis, leaves the courtroom after the court's verdict in Khimki outside Moscow, on August 4, 2022. (photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)
A scholar on hostage negotiations explains.
Now that the trial is over, Griner’s situation is revealed for what it always was: hard-core geopolitics.
The Phoenix Mercury women’s basketball superstar is caught between Russia and the US, competing powers on opposite sides of the Ukraine war. “It’s unacceptable, and I call on Russia to release her immediately so she can be with her wife, loved ones, friends, and teammates,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. The US State Department has been attempting to negotiate for her release, possibly through a prisoner swap, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the sentencing “further compounds the injustice of her wrongful detention.”
Griner is not a hostage per se, but scholar Danielle Gilbert says that it’s part of the strategy Russia is deploying called hostage diplomacy, where the country is using the basketball player as a pawn to extract concessions from the US.
Griner’s case has “enormously raised the profile of this phenomenon,” Gilbert said. But she’s far from the first to be victim to it.
“One thing to remember in these cases is that we’re never talking about exchanging prisoners with our friends. So anytime that there’s one of these prisoner swaps, it’s with a US adversary,” Gilbert said. “The good news is that even when there have been geopolitical tensions between the United States and another country, that these deals are still able to go through.”
To understand the complex dynamics of Griner’s situation — and what it might look like going forward — I spoke with Gilbert, who is a fellow at Dartmouth College and assistant professor at the United States Air Force Academy. Gilbert is writing a book on why states and rogue actors take hostages and how their freedom is negotiated.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jonathan Guyer
Brittney Griner isn’t the first American detained in a foreign country. Former Marine Trevor Reed was returned home in a prisoner swap with Russia earlier this year after being detained since 2019.
Give us a sense of how these negotiations work. Why do they take so long? Why are they mostly behind closed doors?
Danielle Gilbert
Negotiations in these kinds of cases are extremely high stakes. These are leaders of adversarial governments who are trying to find common ground to bring their citizens home or other diplomatic concessions.
So the same way that we would consider it difficult for the US and Russia to negotiate about any other political issues on the world stage right now, these cases often take months or years to play out. There are Americans who’ve been wrongfully detained or held hostage overseas for as much as a decade, and many for five years or more. It’s not that the two sides are sitting down across the table from each other every day and finding it impossible to negotiate. But they are thinking about all of the different foreign policy interests they have, and how to get the best bargain that they can.
Jonathan Guyer
Would you describe Griner’s situation as hostage taking? I understand these are really trumped-up charges.
Danielle Gilbert
I’m really careful about when I use the word hostage or hostage taking in these kinds of situations. People are sometimes very casual about what they call a hostage taking. Specifically, I would consider it “hostage diplomacy,” which is when states use their criminal justice system to arrest foreigners with the intention of using them for foreign policy leverage.
Yes, she is arrested, she pled guilty to a crime. Russia has a criminal justice system, she broke the law. However, [there’s] the fact that they have accused her and sentenced her with international drug smuggling, which she clearly was not doing and didn’t intend to do. The fact that they sentenced her to a nine-and-a-half-year prison sentence, which is completely outside the norm of what someone would get for the amount of drugs she had in her possession. The fact that they have telegraphed that they want prisoners exchanged for her and Paul Whelan’s release, indicates to me that this is a hostage taking, which is when someone holds a prisoner with the threat to continue holding that person until certain conditions are met. In this case, those conditions are the prisoner exchange or other concessions that they might be asking for behind the scenes.
Jonathan Guyer
What are the risks of a prisoner swap? What is the White House and State Department thinking through in terms of costs on that balance sheet?
Danielle Gilbert
The first risk is that it is rewarding our adversaries for really quite heinous behavior. It’s giving up someone like arms dealer Victor Bout, who the United States considered dangerous enough to arrest and sentence to 25 years in prison. [Public reporting suggests Bout may be the focus of a possible two-for-one prisoner swap for Griner and another American detained in Russia.] Russia is currently engaged in this totally egregious war in Ukraine. It’s not exactly the kind of moment that we would want to be rewarding Russia in any way. So that’s the short-term problem with a prisoner swap.
There’s also a long-term problem with making prisoner swaps or concessions, which is the fear or the risk that it incentivizes future arrests, just like this one. The more publicity that this case receives, and the more attention that we pay to the possibility of a prisoner swap, there’s a fear that that puts a target on the back of Americans traveling to Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela in the future, where the leaders have learned that arresting an American is a great way to coerce concessions.
There’s also a domestic political risk, which is that there can be real divisions among the American public about what kinds of victims deserve government assistance. And some people would say that Brittney Griner’s case is divisive because of the circumstances of her arrest, because it’s a drug charge.
Jonathan Guyer
How does Brittney Griner’s case fit into this spectrum of how the US is handling Americans detained, arrested, or convicted in Russia?
Danielle Gilbert
Brittney Griner was designated as wrongfully detained in May, and “wrongfully detained” is an official State Department designation, which means that the secretary of state has looked at her case and has determined that there’s something illegitimate about her arrest and her trial. Americans get arrested overseas all the time for breaking laws in other countries. And most of the time, the US government does not do anything to intervene in those cases. When a US citizen receives this designation, it means that the US government is committed to intervening on their behalf.
It also means that the case is taken out of the purview of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, which is essentially concerned with the welfare of Americans abroad, and transferred into the office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. That office serves as the chief diplomat on the world stage that thinks about wrongful detainees and hostages issues — and essentially serves as a US chief hostage negotiator.
One of the most striking things about the way that her case fits in with all of these other cases is that it has enormously raised the profile of this phenomenon. This is something that those of us who follow hostage and detainee issues have been worried about for quite some time. But the other dozens of hostages and wrongful detainees are not household names, and had not gotten the kind of attention that Brittney Griner’s case has now brought to all of these other cases — and the unjust treatment that American citizens are currently facing abroad.
Jonathan Guyer
What are historical examples or analogs to a potential swap like this in a fraught geopolitical moment?
Danielle Gilbert
One thing to remember in these cases is that we’re never talking about exchanging prisoners with our friends. So anytime that there’s one of these prisoner swaps, it’s with a US adversary.
The good news is that even when there have been geopolitical tensions between the United States and another country, that these deals are still able to go through. So sometimes these deals are quite unpopular. The most famous one might be Bowe Bergdahl, who was a US Army soldier who walked off his base, and was taken captive by the Haqqani Network and the Taliban, and was ultimately exchanged for five senior Taliban officials who were being held at Guantanamo. That’s probably one of the most famous cases of a prisoner swap in recent memory.
But there are many others that have broken through to the public attention. One is Alan Gross, who was wrongfully detained in Cuba, and was ultimately released as part of a prisoner exchange for three Cuban prisoners who were held in a US prison, at a moment when the United States was working on broader diplomatic negotiations that represented an opening between the US and Cuba.
The 2015 Iran deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was the Obama administration’s deal to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on their nuclear program, also included a prisoner swap. Jason Rezaian, a journalist for the Washington Post, had been the Tehran bureau chief; he was arrested in Iran and charged with espionage. He and his wife and several other prisoners were exchanged as part of the broader JCPOA deal.
Sometimes these are much larger geopolitical negotiations and not a direct one-for-one prisoner swap.
Jonathan Guyer
Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. You don’t have any inside information about that, but what might it look like, hypothetically, in terms of what you described as a high-stakes conversation?
Danielle Gilbert
There’s a phenomenal episode of the Foreign Policy magazine podcast, The Negotiators, with Mickey Bergman, who is the No. 2 guy at Ambassador Bill Richardson’s organization, the Richardson Center, that conducts a lot of these prisoner and hostage negotiations all around the world. In the interview, Mickey talks about what went down in a prisoner swap negotiation with an American who was imprisoned in Iran.
A hostage negotiation or a prisoner negotiation, in some ways, is not that different from any negotiation that people might have in their professional or personal lives; two people come to the table with different things that they want to get out of it with different sets of interests. The goal is to find where your interests align.
Both the Biden and the Putin administrations will want to look good for their own domestic audiences. They want to look strong on the international stage. The US is pretty clear. We have two Americans who are wrongfully detained: we want Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan home as soon as possible.
The Russians might have a long list of things that they’re interested in, that they might be communicating directly to the American government behind the scenes, even if they’re not saying those things out loud. That might be prisoners that they want released from US custody. It might be other diplomatic and economic concessions. And we can surmise that those might be the Russian interests, because that’s what other governments have negotiated in the past for the release of Americans held hostage abroad. That might be sanctions relief or debt relief. It might be diplomatic recognition, it might be an opportunity to get involved in something that they want to do internationally.
Jonathan Guyer
What can we expect going forward? What indicators will you be watching in Griner’s case?
Danielle Gilbert
Today was a very public day with lots of news. She was in the courtroom, she was sentenced, we have a statement from the White House. Going forward, there’s going to be a lot less that we see happen publicly.
Despite the fact that the Biden administration announced last week that it had previously put an offer on the table to the Russians, it’s not typical to announce the steps in a negotiation as they’re happening.
My hunch is that there will be a lot of outward quiet, and it will be basically a waiting game. Hopefully, now that the trial is over, and that she has been sentenced, the Russians will be ready to properly come to the negotiating table. And hopefully, they will have some compassion and let her and Paul Whelan come back to the United States as quickly as possible.
A jury has ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay millions of dollars for spreading lies about the Sandy Hook school massacre. But his influence in right-wing media and politics remains strong. (photo: Matt York/AP)
The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013? Staged by the FBI.
The shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011? A government mind control operation.
The September 11th terrorist attacks? An inside job.
All lies.
The conspiracy theorist and radio host was confronted with his track record of fabulism this week in an Austin, Texas, courtroom. He was on trial to determine how much he should pay for defaming the parents of a first grader killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, after years of falsely claiming that no children died and the families were "crisis actors" in a "giant hoax" designed to take away guns.
"Would you agree with me that there is not a mass tragedy, mass bombing, mass shooting that has occurred in America in the past 15 years that you have not attached the words 'false flag' to?" Mark Bankston, the parents' attorney, asked Jones.
"I have asked the question because I believe a lot of things are provocateur or allowed to happen," Jones replied.
The jury ordered Jones to pay $49.3 million in damages to Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, for the mental anguish caused by his lies about Sandy Hook.
Jones has a history of prolific fabulism
Jones got his start in public access broadcasting in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s. From his early days on air, he spouted conspiracy theories about the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
When his wild claims got him fired from a local radio station, he founded Infowars in 1999 and started broadcasting over the internet and in radio syndication.
After the September 11th attacks, Jones surged to fame as a "truther," claiming the Bush administration was behind the tragedy.
As his audience grew, Jones popularized a vocabulary for pernicious doubt: not just that officials and media are hiding the truth, but that tragic events are being engineered for nefarious purposes.
"He's at least a catalyst of those prevailing narratives that follow almost every newsworthy tragedy, whether it's a mass shooting or otherwise," said Sara Aniano, a disinformation researcher at the Anti-Defamation League.
Jones's response to Sandy Hook was perhaps the most egregious example. For years, Infowars aired falsehoods that the tragedy was invented and implied the families of the murdered children were lying.
That created a template to cast doubt on subsequent mass shootings.
"A lot of people who share these theories that those were staged by the government for gun control reasons or that the children and parents are crisis actors will reference Sandy Hook as the basis of that conclusion," Aniano said.
The lies on Infowars had real-world consequences.
At the trial, Lewis and Heslin testified about the harassment and death threats they've received from people who believe Jones.
"When you say those things, there's a fringe of society that believe you, that are actually dangerous," Lewis said in emotional testimony addressed directly to Jones.
Infowars profits from "preaching apocalypse"
Infowars doesn't just disseminate harmful lies; it profits from them.
According to a forensic economist called by the parents' lawyers, Infowars' parent company raked in $64 million in sales of supplements, survivalist gear and other products last year.
The plaintiffs also presented evidence from Jones's own cell phone showing in 2018, Infowars was making as much as $800,000 a day.
The combined net worth of Jones and Infowars is between $135 million and $270 million, the economist estimated.
Jones is not the first person to grift off conspiracy theories, but Infowars harnessed the power of the internet to do so on a massive scale — a model that's been imitated by anti-vaccine advocates, COVID-19 deniers and champions of baseless claims that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
"You preach apocalypse and then you sell stuff that can help you in an apocalypse," said Yunkang Yang, a communications professor at Texas A&M.
Trump and Jones find common ground in conspiracism
Jones has also left a mark on conservative politics.
When Barack Obama was president, Infowars and Donald Trump both promoted the racist lie that he was not an American citizen.
Infowars was also a big spreader of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely accused Hillary Clinton and other Democrats of running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, DC pizzeria. Days after Jones urged his audience to investigate, a man, who told the New York Times he listened to Jones's radio show, entered the restaurant and fired a rifle. (Jones later apologized to the restaurant owner for promoting the lie.)
In late 2015, ahead of Republican primaries, Trump called into Infowars for a mutually fawning interview with Jones.
Trump "gave those folks who are conspiracy theorists signals that he was their guy and they had a candidate who was a conspiracy theorist for the first time," said Melissa Ryan, CEO of consulting firm CARD Strategies, which tracks disinformation and extremism.
"Trump won by being willing to appeal to this base of supporters that other people in the party would have kept at arm's length," she said, "lest they be called out for having extremist views."
The early years of Trump's presidency may have been the peak of Jones's mainstream influence. By 2018, pressure mounted on tech companies to crack down on hate speech and harmful falsehoods. Jones and Infowars were kicked off Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Apple's app store.
That curbed his ability to reach a wider audience, but according to evidence presented in court, he's still making plenty of money. The forensic economist called by the plaintiffs said Jones's deplatforming has not dented his revenues.
Now, Jones and Infowars are facing multiple trials that could put them on the hook for further damages to the victims of his lies.
Jones is trying to shield his assets through bankruptcy, but has vowed to keep Infowars alive.
But even if Jones were to go silent and Infowars went out of business tomorrow, the seeds of doubt he so effectively planted are flourishing.
"Conspiracy is a permanent part of our political and cultural discourse now," Ryan said. "I think you can say that Alex Jones was an innovator in that."
Firefighter foam remains on the surface after firefighters placed a Class B fire under control at an off ramp of the Interstate I-95, in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania, on February 7, 2019. Aqueous film forming foams (AFFF) used in fighting fires of flammable liquids or flammable gases, oils, solvents and alcohols. (photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
US Ecology failed to report more than 11 million pounds of PFAS-contaminated waste at its facility in Beatty, Nevada.
US Ecology, a hazardous waste company with dozens of sites around the U.S., received 11,638,732 pounds of waste containing the firefighting foam known as aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, at its facility in Beatty, Nevada, in 2020, according to public reports filed under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The company has also received, and did not report, waste containing AFFF at its facilities in Robstown, Texas, and Grand View, Idaho. It is unclear whether the company’s failure to disclose the waste violated the law or whether it was legal under a loophole in the reporting requirement.
US Ecology referred questions for this story to Republic Services, a waste management company that acquired US Ecology in May. Republic Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
AFFF — which has been used for decades by firefighters in the military, airports, and other settings to put out jet fuel fires — contains PFAS chemicals that have been detected in drinking water across the country, as The Intercept was the first to report in 2015. (At the time, PFAS chemicals were known as “PFCs.”) PFAS have also been used to make Teflon and hundreds of other products, and some of the compounds have been shown to cause health problems, including immune deficiency, cancer, liver damage, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, obesity, hormonal irregularities, and high cholesterol.
In 2019, as the public became increasingly aware of the health risks from widespread water and soil contamination from PFAS, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which required the EPA to add certain PFAS compounds to the Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, a public EPA database to which companies must legally report if they have “manufactured, processed, or otherwise used” certain chemicals. There are now 180 PFAS compounds on the list.
EPA Loopholes Violate Law
But there are critical gaps in the requirements for reporting PFAS-containing waste, as the massive amount of unreported waste at the Nevada facility suggests. There is a 100-pound reporting threshold for PFAS chemicals — a huge amount considering that even extremely low levels can cause health problems. The agency recently acknowledged the threat when it set dramatically lower safety thresholds for levels of PFOA, PFOS, and two other PFAS compounds in drinking water in June.
The EPA allows companies to avoid reporting PFAS to the TRI, through a loophole known as the “de minimis exemption,” if the individual PFAS compound makes up less than 1 percent of the total volume of the waste — or .1 percent, in the case of PFOA. But AFFF often contains multiple PFAS chemicals, and even low concentrations of a single compound can add up to extremely dangerous amounts — especially when large quantities are involved, as is the case with the 11 million pounds of AFFF-related waste at the US Ecology facility in Beatty, a small town northwest of Las Vegas.
The loopholes undermine the intent of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, according to advocates. The law, which was passed after a leak of poisonous gas killed thousands in Bhopal, India, enabled community members and environmental agencies to learn about chemical releases and pollution control measures reported by local companies. “Without it, it’s impossible for regulators to have any idea where they might have hot spots of pollution, where they might have industries where they should be looking into wastewater permitting, where these chemicals are being burned, where you might need to put a fish advisory in place,” said Sonya Lunder, the senior toxics policy adviser at the Sierra Club.
According to Eve Gartner, the managing attorney for the Toxic Exposure and Health Program at Earthjustice, the exemptions violate the letter and spirit of the 1986 law. “The fact that EPA made PFAS subject to these exemptions was an illegal move that was first adopted during the Trump administration and has now unfortunately been replicated two times in the Biden administration,” said Gartner, who sued the EPA in January on behalf of the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the National PFAS Contamination Coalition over the issue. “This is not at all what Congress intended.”
In an emailed response to questions from The Intercept, EPA spokesperson Timothy Carroll wrote that the agency plans to address the problem soon. “This fall EPA plans to propose a rulemaking that would classify certain PFAS as ‘chemicals of special concern,’” Carroll wrote. “Such a rule, if finalized, would increase PFAS reporting under TRI by, among other changes, removing the eligibility of the de minimis exemption for PFAS for reporting and supplier notification purposes — reversing the approach set forth by the previous Administration. Until such a rule is finalized, EPA must continue to allow the de minimis exemption.”
Over the past year, Gartner and her staff have compared filings under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which requires reporting of hazardous waste, with records from the TRI. The results showed that several companies that reported receiving hazardous PFAS waste under the law did not report the waste to the TRI. US Ecology had the largest amount of unreported material, according to Earthjustice research, but other companies also reported significant amounts of the compounds under the RCRA and failed to disclose them to the TRI, which requires more detailed and in-depth information.
On August 3, the Sierra Club sent a letter to Republic Services inquiring about the unreported waste and providing records that it says suggest the company violated the TRI’s reporting requirements.
Advocates fear that many other companies may be failing to report PFAS to the TRI. “These chemicals are circulating in products and in ways throughout the United States with almost no tracking and ability to know where they’re going and where their final destination might be,” said Lunder.
Gentle Reminder
The EPA also may have noticed the discrepancy between the RCRA and TRI records, according to emails obtained through a public records request. In one sent to US Ecology in July 2021, a senior chemical engineer at the EPA named Velu Senthil wrote, “Your facility has not submitted any report for Hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid to TRI for reporting year 2020, but might have received Hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid in excess of processing / otherwise use reporting threshold amounts from one or more TRI facilities for waste management activities such as disposal and/or treatment. Please review and submit new report for Hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid for reporting year 2020, if required.”
The email referred to a PFAS compound that was added to the TRI’s list of reportable chemicals in 2020. According to the law, companies may be fined up to $25,000 for each day they are in violation of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. But Senthil was clear that he didn’t intend to punish them.
“This inquiry does not assume that there is a reporting error,” he wrote in the email. “Rather, EPA would like to provide you an opportunity to review and validate your submission(s) regarding the below observation(s) and make correction(s), if necessary.”
The EPA has given companies the opportunity to review and change their TRI reporting before. As The Intercept previously reported, under President Donald Trump the agency encouraged some facilities that emit ethylene oxide to lower the amounts of releases of the carcinogenic gas that were recorded in the TRI.
But according to Earthjustice’s Gartner, the most alarming aspect of the EPA’s communication with US Ecology about its TRI reporting isn’t the gentle tone or omission of any possible penalties but its failure to mention that the company had also apparently received and failed to report more than 11 million pounds of AFFF-containing waste in addition to the hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid.
“When you compare our letter to US Ecology with EPA’s letter to US Ecology, they’re night and day,” said Gartner. “I’m glad they asked about that chemical if they thought maybe there was noncompliance for that chemical. But if EPA was looking at the same RCRA manifests that we were, why didn’t they say anything to US Ecology about receiving 11.6 million pounds of PFAS-contaminated AFFF?”
Enforcement is key to making the TRI meaningful, according to Gartner. “Because if this law is just an empty promise to communities, it’s really not going to do anything. The facilities have to know that if they don’t comply, there will be enforcement,” she said. “So they have to be honest about the level of PFAS they’re manufacturing using and releasing.”
The EPA’s Carroll said the agency is doing all it can to address the PFAS problem.”EPA is leveraging the full range of statutory authorities to confront the human health and ecological risks of PFAS,” Carroll wrote. “These actions include a regulatory process to remove exemptions and exclusions that limit the quality of TRI data, expanded unregulated contaminant monitoring of 29 PFAS in more drinking water systems and at lower levels than ever before, and a commitment to use enforcement tools to better identify and address PFAS releases at facilities.”
Everyone Is Exposed
The discovery that huge amounts of PFAS-contaminated waste are escaping the EPA’s chemical tracking system comes just as the agency has begun to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of these industrial chemicals. The drinking water advisories the agency set in June are just .004 parts per trillion for PFOA and .02 parts per trillion for PFOS — which are roughly 1,000 times lower than the previous standard and below the current limits of detection.
The updated advisories are likely to mean that everyone encounters chemicals at levels above what the EPA has deemed safe. “My guess is that there are no people on the planet who have that kind of low exposure,” said physician and environmental health researcher Philippe Grandjean.
Grandjean, who studies the immune effects of PFAS, has known for years that extremely low levels of the chemicals can be dangerous. In 2008, he noticed a study that showed that mice exposed to the chemicals had decreased immune function. And in 2012, he documented the same phenomenon in children living in the Faroe Islands.
By analyzing the blood of children before and after they were vaccinated for tetanus and diphtheria, he found that those with lower levels of PFAS had stronger responses to vaccinations. His findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association in 2012, were striking: Among 7-year-olds who had been vaccinated against diphtheria, higher levels of PFAS were associated with lower levels of antibodies to those diseases. For each doubling of exposure to the chemicals, the risk that the vaccine didn’t take increased two- to four-fold.
The following year, Grandjean calculated that the safety levels for both PFOS and PFOA should be less than 1 part per trillion. Yet until June — more than a decade after Grandjean’s results were first published — the EPA’s official safety threshold sat at 70 parts per trillion.
Deadly Delay
A similar lag has plagued the EPA’s handling of PFAS waste reporting, according to environmental advocates. The agency has taken more than a decade to begin tracking the chemicals around the country, even though it was clear as far back as 1999 that some members of the class were toxic. By 2006, the EPA had helped craft a voluntary agreement with eight companies to phase out the use and production of PFOS and PFOA, two of the best-known PFAS compounds. At the time, the agency issued a press release stating that it was “initiating efforts to add PFOA and related chemicals to the Toxics Release Inventory.” But PFOA and PFOS were first added to the list of reportable chemicals in 2020, more than a decade after the EPA said it had begun the process.
“The failure to list PFAS on the TRI as soon as EPA knew how toxic and persistent they were was a major failure that led to the loss of lives,” said Gartner, who pointed to the EPA’s 2006 announcement that it had begun the process of adding two PFAS compounds to the inventory. “That didn’t actually happen until 2020 — so 14 years of delay in giving communities information about releases of PFOA and PFOS into their drinking water. And that’s unacceptable.”
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