29 October 22
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Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was.
These moves were necessary to protect American democracy.
But Elon Musk – the richest man in the world, with 80 million Twitter followers – wasn’t pleased. Musk tweeted that US tech companies shouldn’t be acting “as the de facto arbiter of free speech”.
Elon now owns Twitter. Presumably, he’ll let Trump back on.
Musk is now accountable to no one — not even Twitter shareholders, because he’s taken the company private.
Elon has long advocated a libertarian vision of an “uncontrolled” internet. That vision is dangerous rubbish. There’s no such animal, and there never will be.
Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform – how they’re designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide. Musk has now given himself this sort of control over Twitter.
Elon has never believed that power comes with responsibility. He’s been unperturbed when his tweets cause real suffering. During his long and storied history with Twitter he has threatened journalists and tweeted reckless things.
In March 2020 he tweeted that children were “essentially immune” to Covid. He has pushed cryptocurrencies that he’s invested in. When a college student started a Twitter account to track Elon’s private plane, Musk tried and failed to buy him off, before blocking him.
The Securities and Exchange Commission went after Elon after he tweeted that he had funding to take Tesla private, a clear violation of the law. Elon paid a fine and agreed to let lawyers vet future sensitive tweets, but he has tried to reverse this requirement.
He has also been openly contemptuous of the SEC, tweeting at one point that the “E” stands for “Elon’s”. (You can guess what the “S” and “C” stand for.) By the way, how does the SEC go after Elon’s ability to tweet now that he owns Twitter?
Billionaires like Musk have shown time and again they consider themselves above the law. And to a large extent, they are.
Elon has enough wealth that legal penalties are no more than slaps on his wrist, and enough power to control one of the most important ways the public now receives news.
Think about it: after years of posting tweets that skirt the law, Elon now owns the platform.
Musk says he wants to “free” the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now, when it’s often impossible to discover who is making the decisions about how algorithms are designed, who is filling social media with lies, who’s poisoning our minds with pseudo-science and propaganda, and who’s deciding which versions of events go viral and which stay under wraps.
Make no mistake: this is not about freedom. It’s about power.
In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’s the wizard behind the curtain – projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone.
In reality, that world is coming to be dominated by the richest and most powerful people on the globe, who aren’t accountable to anyone for anything — for facts, truth, science or the common good.
That’s Elon’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth.
For the rest of us, it’s a brave new nightmare.
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Agricultural products were Ukraine's primary source of export revenue, and accounted for nearly 10% of the country's GDP. (photo: Fadel Dawood/Getty Images)
One of Russia’s warships sustained “minor damage” in the attack, Moscow said earlier Saturday. Without offering evidence, the Defense Ministry accused Britain of training and guiding the Ukrainian unit behind the drone attack, and of being behind explosions that hit the Nord Stream gas pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe in September.
Britain responded that Russia was making “false claims of an epic scale,” while a Ukrainian official appeared to mock Russia’s claims as ludicrous.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
1. Key developments
- Saturday’s drone attacks off the Crimean city of Sevastopol lasted several hours, the Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said on Telegram. He urged residents not to write social media posts or share video about what they saw, saying that would provide Ukrainian forces with information about the city’s defenses. Sevastopol is the largest city in Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014.
- The strikes were carried out by Ukrainian special forces and destroyed at least three Russian warships, the Mariupol City Council said on Telegram. Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, tweeted earlier that “several” Russian warships were destroyed, including a frigate and a landing ship, “according to some sources.” The Washington Post could not verify the number of ships damaged or destroyed.
- Russia’s Defense Ministry accused British specialists of helping to plan the drone attacks, in comments reported by Russia’s RIA news agency. It also blamed the British Navy for recent explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
- Britain called Russia’s claims an “invented story” designed “to detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine,” adding that it “says more about the arguments going on inside the Russian Government than it does about the West.” Meanwhile, Gerashchenko mocked the Russian claims, tweeting that people should listen to further military briefings from Russia “to find out what else [the U.K., U.S.] & combat mosquitoes are guilty of.”
- Any U.S. plans to send upgraded nuclear weapons to NATO bases in Europe will lower “the nuclear threshold,” Russia’s deputy foreign minister said Saturday, telling the RIA news agency that Moscow would account for the development in its military planning. Earlier this week, Politico reported that Washington had brought forward plans to store the more accurate B61-12 airdropped gravity bomb at NATO bases in Europe — although a Pentagon spokesman told the publication that the move was “in no way linked” to events in Ukraine and had not been sped up. Russia has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
- Zelensky said about 4 million people are under energy-use restrictions as Ukraine attempts to stretch scarce resources after Russian forces destroyed infrastructure around the country. His warning came as Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the capital is preparing for the “worst-case scenario” as winter approaches and warned that people would freeze to death if Western countries do not send blankets and generators.
2. Battleground updates
- Some migrants in Russia have been swept into the ranks of the Russian military despite having no obligation to serve. Migrants seeking help from the Russian government have been coerced or tricked into signing papers, advocates say, while others were wrongly issued draft documents and sent to fight.
- The removal of the remains of a famous 18th-century Russian statesman from Kherson could be another sign of “Russian intent to expedite withdrawal” from the occupied southern Ukrainian region, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its daily update Saturday. Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed governor of Kherson, claimed earlier this week that the body of Prince Grigory Potemkin had been moved from the cathedral in the regional capital to east of the Dnieper River. Potemkin, the British ministry said, “is heavily associated with the Russian conquest of Ukrainian lands.”
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has cast doubt on Russia’s claims to have completed its call-up of 300,000 military reservists, adding that the Kremlin’s forces are “poorly prepared and equipped” and that “Russia may soon need a new wave of sending people to war.”
- Ukraine’s foreign minister urged Tehran to stop sending weapons to the Kremlin. Dmytro Kuleba spoke to his Iranian counterpart Friday and demanded that Tehran “immediately cease the flow of weapons to Russia used to kill civilians and destroy critical infrastructure in Ukraine,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter. Russia has been using Iranian-made drones against targets in Ukraine.
3. Global impact
- A group of House and Senate Republicans opposed Democratic Party-backed plans to fund Ukraine’s war effort with assets seized from Russia. The lawmakers objected to a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act conference report that would allow the United States to transfer proceeds of forfeited Russian property to Kyiv, several people involved with the negotiations told The Washington Post.
- The United States is giving an additional $275 million in defense aid to Ukraine, a smaller sum than was offered in previous packages. The Pentagon on Friday announced the aid, which will include ammunition, vehicles and satellite communications equipment but no counter-drone equipment or air defense systems. Zelensky thanked the United States for the package, which he said was composed of “much needed items for our defenders.”
- A key Putin ally has told Elon Musk to stop providing satellite internet access to Ukraine. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wished Musk “good luck” on Friday after the billionaire took over the social media platform, adding: “And quit that Starlink in Ukraine business.” Earlier this week, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official warned that Russia could target commercial satellites it believed were being used for military purposes.
- U.N. Secretary General António Guterres urged participating countries to allow a renewal of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which is set to expire Nov. 19. The agreement facilitates the safe shipment of grains and fertilizer from Ukraine. Many countries, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, rely on Ukrainian grain and fertilizer to feed their populations. The initiative can be automatically renewed if no party objects.
4. From our correspondents
Russia is cultivating ties with Iran and Saudi Arabia as it desperately searches for allies. A hot-mic incident on pro-Kremlin television last week confirmed that drones manufactured in Iran were being used to kill Ukrainians, but Moscow’s and Tehran’s repeated denials highlight the two countries’ expanding common ground, writes Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia. Saudi Arabia believes that Washington is losing interest in its region, incentivizing it to cooperate more with Moscow.
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Voter suppression is racism in action, and the GOP is counting on it to win in November
Supposedly, these rules are to prevent voter fraud, but countless studies have shown that there is no significant voter fraud in America. Rather, from its origins in 19th Century Jim Crow laws to the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, “voter fraud” is a lie told for ulterior motives.
What motives? Well, that’s where the “certain people” part comes in. Republican voting restrictions just so happen to disproportionately impact people who are Black or Brown, young, poor, queer, or marginalized – in other words, people who just so happen to favor Democrats and oppose nationalistic, white-male-dominated, Christian-fundamentalist-majority party that doles out tax cuts to the ultra-rich and cuts services for everyone else. It really is that simple.
Of all the issues I’ve written about as a journalist – the Supreme Court, climate change, Donald Trump, racism/sexism/homophobia – this one makes me the maddest. Why? Not because Republicans are doing all this and right-wing media is lying about it (though that’s bad enough), but because it’s almost never headline news and rarely an election issue. Most people just don’t know about it, or don’t care, even though the mass disenfranchisement of voters, especially voters of color, is happening in plain sight. This is staggering to me.
Ari Berman has been indefatigably covering voter suppression for well over a decade now. A reporter for Mother Jones, he is the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. He describes the Republican policy as “widespread disenfranchisement.” Says Berman, “They’re trying to get an advantage around the margins. It’s not about disenfranchising everyone, but in a state like Georgia, if you can change turnout among certain groups by 2-3 percent, that’s enough. That’s what it’s about. That’s what’s happening right now.”
Here are six specific things Republicans are doing to make that happen.
1. Closing Polling Places
From 1965 to 2013, the Voting Rights Act required states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the Department of Justice before changing voting rules. But thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court struck down that rule in 2013 in the case of Shelby County v. Holder.
In the next five years, 1,688 polling places were closed in those formerly-covered areas – 750 of them in Texas.
There is a clear pattern of these closures: They mostly happen where people of color live. For example, a 2018 study by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found that in Texas, the counties with the most closures included Dallas county (41 percent Latino and 22 percent Black), Harris county (42 percent Latino and 19 percent Black), and Brazoria County, (30 percent Latino, 13 percent Black).
Similar patterns were found in Arizona and Georgia, where 53 of Georgia’s 159 counties had their polling places reduced. Of those, 39 have poverty rates that are higher than the state average, and 30 have black populations of more than 25 percent. These are not random closures. Overall, a 2020 study found that “during non-presidential elections, effects [of increased distance to polling places] are three times larger in high-minority areas than in low-minority areas.”
You can see this yourself. Go to a predominantly rich, white area, and, usually, polling places are copious and lines are short. Go to less affluent, less white areas and you’ll see people waiting in line for hours.
2. Limiting Early Voting and Voting By Mail
Voting in person on a random Tuesday is no big deal for many people. But for single parents, people without cars, people with mobility challenges, or people whose local polling places have been shuttered — in other words, populations who are disproportionately non-white and Democrat-leaning — it can be an insurmountable challenge.
That was especially true at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, of course, when voting by mail surged. In response, of course, the Trump campaign launched numerous lawsuits alleging widespread fraud, but lost every one, because despite expanded mail-in voting, there was no evidence of fraud.
But that fact didn’t matter. Animated by the Big Lie, numerous states – notably Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Florida Georgia, Iowa, and Kentucky, all governed by Republicans – have made it harder to get a mail-in (“absentee”) ballot, tightened the deadlines for returning it, banned drop-boxes for ballots and so-called “ballot harvesting” (which just means giving your sealed ballot to someone else to deliver for you), and sharply curtailed the time period for early voting.
Not to sound like a broken record here, but there is no justification for any of this. In right-wing fever dreams, drop-boxes, mail-in ballots, and ballot harvesting are frequently depicted as intrinsically fraudulent. But that is simply not true. While voter fraud is fake, voter suppression is very real.
3. Voter ID Laws and Intimidation
For over a decade now, Republicans have pushed for Voter ID laws, requiring citizens to proffer official government identification in order to exercise their constitutional right to vote. 34 states have some form of ID requirement, seven with strict photo ID laws.
Now, for privileged folks like me, this is a non-issue – I carry my ID everywhere. But over 10 percent of the US population – and nearly 25 percent of Black Americans – lack qualified ID for a variety of reasons. For example, IDs can be hard to get if you don’t have a birth certificate, and often require travel to some government office and knowing how to work the system. Meanwhile, the forms of IDs many people do have, such as public assistance IDs, student IDs, or state employee cards, have recently been banned for use by Republicans. (Hunting licenses, by the way, are still allowed.) Moreover, as I noted last week, at least 203,700 trans people in this country lack ID that properly reflects their correct name or gender.
Even more than actually prohibiting people from voting, these rules also enable police and state actors to intimidate and discourage them, as we recently saw happen in Florida, where bewildered citizens were threatened and even arrested for allegedly voting illegally. Think about it: would you go vote if you knew there was a chance that cops would harass and detain you for no real reason?
Once again, there is no actual reason for these rules. One study found that between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 reported instances of voter impersonation in the entire country, out of more than a billion votes cast during the period. But voter ID laws have been shown to reduce voter turnout – once more, disproportionately among Democrat-leaning voters – by 2-3 percentage points. That is more than enough to swing a close statewide election.
4. Voter Purges
Another weapon in suppressing the vote has been to purge “inactive” voters from the rolls, again in the name of preventing fraud, which actually is nonexistent.
In 2019, for example, Georgia purged any voter whose names did not precisely match records held by the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration, even if the mismatch was due to a typo, as thousands were. The AP reported that 53,000 voters were affected by this policy, and 70 percent of them were Black.
There’s no doubt as to why then-Secretary-of-State, later Governor, Brian Kemp did this. In a closed-door session of Republican politicians in 2019, Kemp said, “The Democrats are working hard. There have been these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.”
Of course, Kemp cited the risk of voter fraud, but his own office’s investigation in 2014 found only a few dozen potentially fraudulent voter applications among tens of thousands that were investigated.
Another example is Ohio, where a 2019 Supreme Court decision in June allowed a controversial voter-purge policy: If you fail to vote for two elections, you’re sent a notice; and if you don’t answer the notice, you’re purged from the rolls. That affected nearly two million voters, once again, disproportionately those at or near the poverty line, who may not understand the legalistic notice, or may not have known what it was when they received it, or may be suspicious of sending any such form back to the government.
5. Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering – the rigging of legislative districts for the benefit of a political party – is as old as the republic. It’s named after Eldridge Gerry, who died in 1814. But today’s gerrymandering is different. Thanks to “big data”, political operatives can slice and dice district lines on a house-by-house basis. They know so much about all of us — as we learned from the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal in 2016 — that they can predict with shocking accuracy how we’re going to vote.
Examples? In Wisconsin, Republicans used big data methodologies to create the most slanted electoral map in memory. In 2018, it gave Republicans 60 percent of the seats in the state assembly despite winning only 47 percent of the vote. In Pennsylvania, 44 percent of voters are Democrats—but only 33 percent of its congressional representatives are. And in North Carolina, Republican candidates won nine of the state’s 13 seats in the House of Representatives in 2012, although they received only 49 percent of the statewide vote. In 2014, Republican candidates increased their total to 10 of the 13 seats, with 55 percent of the vote.
Race-based gerrymandering is formally illegal, but in a series of cases, the Supreme Court has (surprise!) made it nearly impossible to prove that a specific gerrymander is based on race, no matter how slanted the results are. As a result, Republicans have a free pass to do whatever they want.
Berman cited Texas as one example. “In Texas, 95 percent of the population growth was in communities of color, but the Texas legislature decreased the number of ‘majority-minority’ districts and increased the number of white-majority districts,” he said. “The map is supposed to be redrawn to take account of population change, but they completely disregarded it.”
Likewise, Berman said, in Georgia, nearly all of the population growth is among people of color, but Georgia “dismantled a congressional district held by a Black democrat.”
Now, gerrymandering isn’t voter suppression in the same way as voter ID laws or voter purges are. But it has a similar effect: disempowering voters, convincing them not to vote, and widening the gap between the U.S. population and its supposed representatives in Congress and state legislatures.
“The partisan gerrymanders in these cases,” wrote Justice Kagan in a dissent in one such case, “deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.”
“Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” asked Justice Kagan rhetorically. “I have yet to meet the person who thinks so.”
6. Post-Voting Shenanigans
Finally, even if you do manage to cast a ballot, the odds are getting higher and higher that it will be thrown out.
That’s because, animated by the Big Lie, 291 Republican election deniers are now running for Secretary of State and similar positions where their jobs would be to supervise elections. And in the meantime, a host of ‘red’ states have made it easier for election officials and even partisan “observers” to “review” ballots for evidence of fraud, to enter into polling places and “supervise” elections, and to otherwise meddle in the tabulation of elections.
For Berman, this last category is the most troubling of all.
“The biggest change since 2020 is that you have election deniers running at all levels of government in 44 states,” he says. “And many are going to win.”
At a minimum, Berman said, these deniers will make voting harder, further limiting early voting and voting by mail. “They’re not just running on denial of the outcome – they’re trying to deny access to the ballot,” he says.
But outright election denial, Berman said, is not out of the question. “Remember, in 2020, the election was certified and then challenged in court,” he says. “But what if multiple state officials — say the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state — joined forces and refuse to certify it? That would put courts in a much more difficult position.”
For Berman, this represents a sea change in Republican strategy. “This moves from tinkering around the margins to throwing out votes altogether,” he says. “That’s a much larger scale of voter disenfranchisement. The Trump campaign in 2020 tried to throw out magnitudes larger than people affected by voting restrictions… It’s a ‘flood the zone’ strategy. Suppress the vote on the front end, and then if that doesn’t work, throw out the votes on the back end.”
To be sure, there are concerted efforts to oppose these anti-democratic machinations. But Berman is nervous. “Just because it didn’t succeed in 2020,” he says, “doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. And now they’ve changed who’s refereeing all these disputes. That’s the thing that’s most concerning to me right now.”
From a certain perspective, all these Republican machinations are pretty obvious. If Americans vote in proportion to the overall population, Democrats win. It’s that simple. But if Black, Brown, young, queer, and marginalized voters can be discouraged or blocked, Republicans can gain and maintain white minority rule. That’s why the Republican’s white, traditionalist base believes the Big Lie: because the truth is harder to accept. As a brilliant long-form New York Times piece on election deniers recently put it, “the white majority is fading, the economy is changing and there’s a pervasive sense of loss in districts where Republicans fought the outcome of the 2020 election.”
This isn’t just someone’s opinion – it’s data. As the Times report continued, “a shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat… a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.” Specifically, “the portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans.” And “rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.”
Having covered voter suppression for over fifteen years, I’ve wondered about this many times. The politicians pushing voter suppression surely know that there is no voter fraud crisis, that the 2020 election was not stolen, and that voter suppression has nothing to do with ‘election integrity.’ But their voters do not. They sense a profound change in America, and whether they can articulate it or not, they know that they are losing the country they love. This deep trauma does not excuse their support of racist and anti-democratic voter suppression – but it does help me understand it.
So what can you do? Well, first of all, vote. Even if you don’t feel personally threatened, as the meme puts it, vote as if your skin is not white, as if your parents need medical care, as if your son is transgender, as if your water is unsafe.
Second, talk about this issue. Get your friends informed and angry. Check out the Brennan Center for Justice and their thorough debunking of voter fraud myths. Check out Vox’s charts of new voting restrictions in each state. Or anything Ari Berman says. Follow the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, or the ACLU, Fair Fight, VoteRiders, Democracy Docket, Movement Voter Project, People for the American Way, Voters of Tomorrow, or the other groups working on this issue. Become that annoying person who reminds their friends that Jim Crow is returning, backed by white grievance and legitimated by lies, and that Black voters in particular are under attack. Because I can tell you firsthand, if you don’t say anything about it, your friends won’t think about it.Finally, don’t despair – take courage. Remember, Republicans are doing this because they are afraid. Their white, fundamentalist base is afraid of losing “their” country. Their donors are afraid of losing their corporate welfare and tax breaks. Their politicians are afraid of losing their jobs. And because they know they can’t win a fair fight, they’ve decided to cheat, using a fake crisis to disenfranchise voters. The best revenge is to beat these bastards anyway.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Why were these felons allowed to vote in Florida in the first place?
Those snared that day weren’t plotters of some large-scale election rigging scheme: Most of the people arrested had previously been convicted of murder or felony sex offenses in Florida, which makes them automatically ineligible to vote there even after they’ve completed their sentences, probations, and paid other court-related fees.
Last week the Tampa Bay Times released body-camera footage recorded by local police as they made a few arrests. It caused an uproar. The videos showed arrests of arrestees reacting with genuine shock and confusion at the charges. The police themselves also seem confused and even sympathetic at times.
The big question the video itself and the negative reaction to it presents is: If these people were not allowed to vote in the first place, why were they being held to account when the state failed to do accurate background checks?
“Why would you let me vote if I wasn’t able to vote?” asked Tony Patterson, one of the people getting arrested on video.
According to Lawrence Mower, the Tallahassee correspondent for the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald who first obtained the footage of the arrests, it’s because the laws around who has eligibility to vote in Florida are extremely confusing and have been since 2018. Mower spoke to Vox’s Sean Rameswaram earlier this week for an episode of Today, Explained — Vox’s daily news explainer podcast — about the arrests, and DeSantis’s motivation for kick-starting the program that led to them.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so download Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Sean Rameswaram
What was the thought process behind releasing the video of these arrests?
Lawrence Mower
We put this out there thinking that this is different. You know, witnessing these people get arrested for voting is just not something you see every day. You look at someone like Romona Oliver, a 55-year-old woman, spent 18 years in prison for second-degree murder. She’s got a job. She’s been remarried since leaving prison. She’s arrested on her way to work. She looks like a grandma.
In another case of Tony Patterson, a guy who’s a registered sex offender. He’s stopped outside of his house and police tell him you’ve got a warrant for your arrest. And he says, “What for?” You can see from the video that he can’t really believe it. There’s another telling video, a guy by the name of Nathan Har. He was given a voter ID card even though he was not allowed to vote. The state did an initial check and cleared him and he voted in 2020. The office arresting him even tells him that his story sounds like a loophole.
Sean Rameswaram
You also write that police seem sympathetic toward the people getting arrested.
Lawrence Mower
Yeah, that’s pretty extraordinary. It’s not every day that you hear a police officer lending advice on a sex offender’s defense while they’re arresting that person. So local police seem maybe skeptical or almost sympathetic to these people’s situations here. It’s not the kind of typical perception you have here when you hear “murderers and sex offenders.”
[Editor’s note: You can hear clips of the reactions being described in the Today, Explained episode or watch the videos here on the Tampa Bay Times’s website.]
Sean Rameswaram
What is it about the reactions in the videos that causes shock?
Lawrence Mower
These people’s reactions challenge the laws that they’re being accused of violating. They’re being accused of willfully violating the law, willfully voting when they were ineligible. And I mean, just look at the video. Does it seem like these people knew that they were violating the law at the time? I think there’s probably a real question there for a lot of people, perhaps even a jury, whether or not these people, you know, seemed to have willfully violated the law.
Sean Rameswaram
To understand what’s going on in these videos, you have to understand Florida’s Amendment 4. Can you remind us what that amendment did?
Lawrence Mower
It allowed anyone with a felony conviction to vote. If you did not have a felony sex offense on your record, if you did not have a murder on your record, and if you had completed all terms of your sentence. You know, Amendment 4, when it passed [via ballot initiative in 2018], was considered the greatest expansion of democracy in the United States since the civil rights movement. We’re talking up to 1.4 million people in Florida, presumably getting the right to vote back.
Sean Rameswaram
Governor DeSantis comes into office in 2019. What’s his relationship to Amendment 4?
Lawrence Mower
He was against the amendment, like most of the top Republicans were here. And DeSantis encouraged the legislature to draw a very hard line on the fines and fees issue. He’s the one who really pushed the legislature to require people with felony convictions to pay off all fines and fees and restitution to victims before being allowed to vote.
Sean Rameswaram
So DeSantis sets up a new office to investigate voter fraud, right?
Lawrence Mower
The Office of Election Crimes and Security was something that DeSantis requested from the legislature in 2021. This is a first-of-its-kind office, and these were some of the concerns that some in the legislature had when this office was created. They were wondering — how is this office going to be used? Because this is putting quite a bit of power into a politician’s hands.
Sean Rameswaram
Okay, and I imagine this office is how we get to these arrests?
Lawrence Mower
In August, DeSantis held a press conference to announce the first actions by the Office of Election Crimes and Security. He announces 20 people getting arrested. It’s no debate. They were not allowed to vote, but nevertheless they were given voter ID cards cleared by the secretary of state and were not stopped from going into a polling place and casting a ballot in 2020. Nevertheless, DeSantis announces these arrests, touts that these were the first actions by this new office. You know that these people are going to pay the price.
Sean Rameswaram
So what’s clear is that if you buy that there was widespread election fraud in the 2020 election, so far, arresting 20 people who seem to have been confused about whether or not they had the right to vote isn’t really getting at some larger conspiracy to commit fraud in elections, right?
Lawrence Mower
No, it’s not. You know, DeSantis since 2020 has been under pressure from conservatives in Florida to do an audit of Florida’s 2020 election, which President Trump won handily in Florida. It was a blowout by Florida standards. So it’s kind of no secret from the political class that this was a response to pressure from the right to do something about voter fraud. And these 20 arrests don’t point to any kind of concerted fraud here.
Sean Rameswaram
Right, so what do these arrests actually point to?
Lawrence Mower
It kind of points to faults with DeSantis’s own office, in fact. You know, the basic question here is, why were these people allowed to register to vote in the first place? Why can’t the secretary of state — again, this is DeSantis’s own office — why can’t they still tell you when you register to vote whether or not you’re eligible to vote?
Sean Rameswaram
What is DeSantis after that he will indulge the people who really want to see him police elections this way — when you admit that he doesn’t even seem to really care that much about it?
Lawrence Mower
It’s no secret to anyone in Florida, much less nationally, that DeSantis wants to run for president. And, of course, he’s running for reelection this year. And so this is an issue in which he may be perceived as vulnerable, and it’s something that he has some control over. So he can create an election security force and make arrests, which gets headlines, which makes it look like he’s doing something.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“It was a fake building. I didn’t understand what it was,” he said.
Molina was among 13 migrants who recently arrived in the U.S. who agreed to share documents with The Associated Press that they received when they were released from U.S. custody while they seek asylum after crossing the border with Mexico. The AP found that most had no idea where they were being sent — nor were they expected by anyone at the addresses listed on their paperwork.
Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, did not respond to repeated questions about families and individuals interviewed and the addresses assigned to them.
But the snafus suggest a pattern of Border Patrol agents, particularly in Texas, sending migrants without friends or family in the United States to offices that get no notice. The places often don’t have space to house migrants. Yet because those addresses appear on migrants’ paperwork, important notices may later be sent there.
“We believe that Border Patrol is attempting to demonstrate the chaos that they are experiencing on the border to inland cities,” said Denise Chang, executive director of the Colorado Hosting Asylum Network. “We just need to coordinate so that we can receive people properly.”
Addresses on documents shown to AP included administrative offices of Catholic Charities in New York and San Antonio; an El Paso, Texas, church; a private home in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts; and a group operating homeless shelters in Salt Lake City.
A Venezuelan family that came to the American Red Cross’ Denver administrative offices was referred to multiple shelters before someone volunteered to take them in. Migrants who came to New York ended up in shelters, hotels or temporary apartments that the city helped them find and pay for.
A surge in migration from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua brought the number of illegal crossings to the highest level ever recorded in a fiscal year. In the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, migrants were stopped 2.38 million times, up 37% from 1.73 million times the year before and surpassing 2 million for the first time.
The year-end numbers reflect deteriorating economic and political conditions in some countries, the relative strength of the U.S. economy and uneven enforcement of Trump-era asylum restrictions.
Many are immediately expelled under the asylum restrictions, a public health order known as Title 42, which denies people a chance at seeking asylum on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.
But others — including people from Cuba and Nicaragua, with which the U.S. has strained relations — are released with notices to appear in immigration court or under humanitarian parole. Those migrants must tell agents where they will live, but many can’t provide an address.
“It almost seems as though, at the border, officials are simply just looking up any nonprofit address they can or just looking up any name at all that they can and just putting that down without actually ever checking whether that person has mentioned it, whether there’s beds or shelter at that location, or whether this is even a location that can provide legal assistance,” said Lauren Wyatt, managing attorney with Catholic Charities of New York. “So clearly, this is not the most effective way to do this.”
Most of the migrants interviewed in New York had hopped on taxpayer-funded buses that Texas and the city of El Paso have been sending regularly to the northeast city.
Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona also have been sending migrants released at the border to Democratic strongholds, including Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. They have been criticized for failing to notify local officials of plans. Republicans say they are highlighting issues with President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
The Biden administration recently agreed to accept up to 24,000 Venezuelans at U.S. airports if they apply for asylum online with financial sponsors, similar to how Ukrainians have been admitted since Russia’s invasion. Mexico has said it will take back Venezuelans who cross the border into the U.S. and are expelled under Title 42 authority.
Yeysy Hernández, a Venezuelan who reached New York after taking one of El Paso’s buses, says the address in her documents is for an El Paso church that wasn’t expecting migrants and where she slept just one night. Now she worries immigration notices might be sent there.
Hundreds of immigrants have shown up at one of the offices for Catholic Charities of New York with documents listing the address. Wyatt said the group complained and the government promised to put an end to the practice by Aug. 1 — something that “obviously, hasn’t happened.”
The group also has received more than 300 notices to appear in immigration court for people the organization does not know, Wyatt said. It’s also received deportation orders for migrants who failed to appear in court because their notices were sent to a Catholic Charities address.
Victor Quijada traveled with relatives last month to Denver after border agents sent the Venezuelan family to an American Red Cross office building. Once there, they were referred to a city shelter that also turned them away. They eventually found a shelter that took them in for a few days, but they felt unsafe.
“It was tough what we had to go through; from the things we had to eat to being on the streets — an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” Quijada said.
Chang, from the Colorado Hosting Asylum Network, eventually took the family into her home and her organization helped them lease an apartment. She said she knows of several migrants assigned to addresses of groups that can’t help them.
“The five families that I’ve worked with in the last three months, all five were picked up off the street, literally sitting on the sidewalk with children,” she said.
The building in midtown Manhattan where Molina went is an International Rescue Committee refugee resettlement office, but it provides only limited services to asylum-seekers there, said Stanford Prescott, a spokesman for the group.
Only one of the IRC’s U.S. offices — in Phoenix — operates a shelter for asylum-seekers and most stay less than 48 hours. Yet its Dallas and Atlanta offices also have been listed on migrants’ documents.
“We are deeply concerned that listing these addresses erroneously may lead to complications for asylum-seekers who are following a legal process to seek safety in the U.S.,” Prescott said.
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Demonstrators fill the streets during a protest to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, in the Petion-Ville area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, October 3, 2022. (photo: Richard Pierrin/AFP/Getty Images)
Mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post are eager for US intervention around the globe. They’re currently pushing for American intervention in Haiti, claiming Haitians want it. But Haitians themselves aren’t saying anything of the sort.
And the East Coast establishment media — which have on occasion remembered that Haiti is a near neighbor and has been ravaged by anti-government demonstrations, a failing economy, and gang violence — seem to be breathing a sigh of relief.
The Washington Post ran an editorial: “Yes, Intervene in Haiti — and Push for Democracy.” That followed on the heels of a piece in the other big opinion maker, the New York Times, whose tall title read: “Haiti Appeals for Armed Intervention and Aid to Quell Chaos.”
Without going into the article, it’s fair to ask: Who or what is “Haiti”?
Is “Haiti” the current occupant of the prime minister’s chair?
The myriad and sometimes violent demonstrations against the illegitimate and unelected man suggest that, no, Ariel Henry is not “Haiti.” The New York University law clinic attorney and human rights advocate Pierre Esperance called the Biden administration’s support for Henry, who stepped into power after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, another “bad choice.” Instead, Esperance said, the United States should back “a transitional government.” But that was over a year ago. And that did not happen.
Another reason Henry’s request for intervention does not represent “Haiti” is the fact that the idea seems to actually have been gestated afar. Organization of American States chief Luis Almargo put it pretty bluntly in a tweet on October 6: “I called on Haiti to request urgent support from international community to help solve security crisis and determine characteristics of the international security force.”
Henry issued “his” request on October 7.
Maybe that “suggestion” was already in the air?
Just a day before the Almargo admonition, a number of US lawmakers also asked the Biden administration to end its support for Henry and to support a transitional plan which takes into account “the voice of the Haitian people, including through groups such as the Montana Accord.”
Does “the Montana Accord” represent Haiti?
Arguably, at least partially. The Accord is the nickname for a broad coalition of many scores of political parties, unions, women’s and peasant organizations, chambers of commerce and Protestant and Catholic church organizations. The very day Henry asked for a “specialized military force,” the organization issued a statement opposing any foreign intervention, and calling Henry a “traitor.”
“History teaches us that no foreign force has ever solved the problems of any people on earth,” the press release reads.
Just a month ago, a member of the anti-corruption group Nou Pap Dòmi — also a member of the Accord — was in Washington. Testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Velina E. Charlier rejected foreign intervention.
The United States, she said,
has always followed a paternalistic and interventionist approach that often fails to serve the best interests of the Haitian people. Through its embassy in Port-au-Prince, the United States has continued to support leaders who have emerged from fraudulent elections or corrupt governments that have lost all popular legitimacy.
She noted that international intervention of all sorts “has greatly contributed to bringing Haiti to the brink of collapse.”
But since not all Haitians and Haitian organizations are represented in the Accord, maybe “Haiti” is the Haitian people who take to the streets to demonstrate? And those brave enough to risk possible repression to speak to local and foreign reporters? And those who just continue trying to live their lives in deteriorating economic, political, and social conditions?
Since long before the current unelected and illegitimate government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry took power, people have been demonstrating against the government and against US support for both Henry and Moïse. More recently, those marches and burning barricades have become more focused on denouncing any kind of foreign intervention.
On October 17, the 216th anniversary of the murder of founding father General Jean Jacques Dessalines, many thousands demonstrated against intervention in cities and towns across the country. The crowds also demanded Henry step down and denounced high gasoline prices and the continued rising gang violence.
Reyneld Sanon of Haiti-based Radio Resistance and the Haitian Popular Press Agency explained the ire in a statement quoted in the Real News Network. He rejected the ruling party’s decision “to request international imperialist forces to occupy the country for a third time.” He said that the decision insults “our ancestors, who fought to break the chains of slavery” and asserted that “in the case that the foreign military occupation force arrived in Haiti, all Haitians, progressive groups, popular organizations, and left-wing political parties, will stand to fight.”
In the New York Times article mentioned above, journalists Natalie Kitroeff and Maria Abi-Habib flatly noted, “United Nations peacekeepers who were in the country between 2004 and 2017 committed sexual abuse and introduced cholera to the country, starting an outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.” This immediately followed their suggestion that “it is not clear how an international security force would be received by Haitians, who might see it as meddling in their affairs.”
The Post‘s editorial board went so far as to announce, without supporting evidence, that, “weighed against the cratering prospects of a failed state whose main export is asylum seekers, many Haitians would support — if with misgivings — the chance at restoring some semblance of normal life.” (The board has repeatedly signaled that the rights and interests of Haitians are of less importance than order at the US border.) Revisiting the issue a week later, the board argued that a military intervention is “justified on humanitarian grounds and dovetails with the United States’ own interests,” neglecting to even mention Haitians’ perspectives.
In fact, it seems pretty clear to anyone who follows Haitian news sources like Radyo Rezistans and AlterPresse, checks out what foreign academics and think tanks say, or even peruses mainstream outlets like PBS and NPR that foreign military intervention of any sort is both unwanted and likely to have only negative impacts. Some recent articles have headlines like “Intervening in Haiti, Again” and “The Last Thing Haiti Needs Is Another Foreign Intervention,” and “De Facto Haitian Authorities Call for (Another) Foreign Military Intervention.” None are advising boots on the ground.
To top it all off, even Joe Biden’s former envoy to Haiti, who resigned over what he called “inhumane, counterproductive” policy of deportations, has “slammed” the plan for an intervention, predicting it could lead to an armed uprising.
“It’s almost unfathomable that all Haitians are calling for a different solution, yet the US and the UN and international [institutions] are blindly stumbling through with Ariel Henry,” he said in an interview in the Intercept.
So, New York Times and Washington Post readers and watchers, has “Haiti” appealed for intervention?
A tiger-legged monkey tree frog in Peru. (photo: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay)
This die-off is only one example of the catastrophic loss of wildlife unfolding globally. On average, wildlife populations tracked by scientists shrank by nearly 70% between 1970 and 2018, a recent assessment b WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) found.
“When wildlife populations decline to this degree, it means dramatic changes are impacting their habitats and the food and water they rely on,” WWF chief scientist, Rebecca Shaw, said in a statement. “We should care deeply about the unraveling of natural systems because these same resources sustain human life.”
WWF’s “Living Planet Report 2022,” launched this October, analyzed populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. “It is not a census of all wildlife but reports how wildlife populations have changed in size,” the authors wrote.
A million species of plants and animals face extinction today, according to a landmark 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an international scientific body. The new analysis uncovers another aspect of this biodiversity crisis: The decline of wild populations doesn’t just translate into species loss but can also heighten extinction risk, particularly for endemic species found only in one location.
Instead of looking at individual species, the Living Planet Index (LPI) on which the report is based tracks 31,000 distinct populations of around 5,000 species. If humans were considered, for example, it would like tracking the demographics of countries. Population declines in one country could indicate a localized threat like a famine, but it was happening across continents, that would be cause for alarm.
The steepest species declines occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, where wildlife abundance dropped by 94% on average. In this region, freshwater fish, reptiles and amphibians were the worst affected.
Freshwater organisms are at very high risk from human activities worldwide. Most of these threats are linked to habitat loss, but overexploitation also endangers many animals. In Brazil’s Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve, populations of Amazon pink river dolphin or boto (Inia geoffrensis) fell by 65% between 1994 and 2016. Targeted fishing of these friendly animals for their use as bait contributed to the decline.
Climatic changes render terrestrial habitats inhospitable too. In Australia, in the 2019-2020 fire season, around 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of forestland was destroyed, killing more than 1 billion animals and displacing 3 billion others. For southeastern Australia, scientists showed that human-induced climate change made the fires 30% more likely.
These losses are happening not just in land-based habitats but also out at sea. Coral reefs and vibrant underwater forests are some of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. But they’re being battered by a changing climate that makes oceans warmer and more acidic. The planet has already warmed by 1.2°C (2.2°F) since pre-industrial times, and a 2°C (3.6°F) average temperature rise will decimate almost all tropical corals.
However, the bat deaths in Australia, Brazil’s disappearing pink river dolphins, and the vulnerability of corals are extreme examples that can skew the index, which averages the change in population sizes. In fact, about half of wildlife populations studied remained stable and, in some cases, even grew. Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in the Virunga Mountains spanning Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda number around 604 today, up from 480 in 2010.
Despite these bright spots, the overall outlook remains gloomy. Even after discounting the extremes, the downward trend persists. “After we removed 10 percent of the complete data set, we still see declines of about 65 percent,” Robin Freeman, an author of the report and senior researcher at ZSL, said in a statement.
Often, habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change compound the risk. Even in cases where a changing climate proves favorable, the multitude of threats can prove insurmountable. Take bumblebees, for example. Some species, like Bombus terrestris or the buff-tailed bumblebee, could actually thrive as average temperatures rise. But an assessment of 66 bumblebee species documented declining numbers because of pesticide and herbicide use.
The report emphasizes the need to tackle these challenges together. Protecting habitats like forests and mangroves can, for example, maintain species richness and check greenhouse gas emissions. The kinds of plants and their abundance directly impact carbon storage because plants pull in carbon from the atmosphere and store it as biomass.
One of the deficiencies of the LPI is that it doesn’t include data on plants or invertebrates (including insects like bumblebees).
The report was released in the run-up to environmental summits that will see countries gather to thrash out a plan to rein in climate change in November and later in the year to reverse biodiversity loss. Government leaders are set to meet for the next level of climate talks, called COP27, in Egypt from Nov. 6-13. At the last meeting of parties, known as COP26 in Glasgow, U.K., last year, nations committed to halt biodiversity loss and stem habitat destruction, partly in recognition that this would lower humanity’s carbon footprint.
In December, the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be held in Montreal. Representatives from 195 states and the European Union will meet to decide the road map to 2030 for safeguarding biodiversity.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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