30 October 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
A thrilling performer with a volatile persona, Lewis always knew he was playing the devil’s music.
Lewis, who died at the age of eighty-seven, on Friday, was the last survivor of the generation that included Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard. Raised in a Pentecostal Christian family in Ferriday, Louisiana, he always knew he was playing the devil’s music. He revelled in it. Presley had a superior voice, and Berry and Little Richard came up with nearly every distinctive instrumental lick of the era. But Lewis had it all. He could write or, like Elvis, create the definitive version of someone else’s lyric. He sang with hellacious force and conviction. He played the piano in a way that was both melodic and percussive. Above all, Lewis put on one hell of a show. Long before the Who shattered their instruments or Jimi Hendrix played guitar with his teeth, Lewis was playing the piano keys with his heel or elbow in time to the music. The pace of his shows accelerated like a car running downhill without brakes. Even in his waning years, he drove audiences to the sorts of abandon that concert-hall operators and insurance adjusters always feared.
Lewis was competitive with his generational rivals. Early in his career, he was annoyed that Berry was awarded the closing spot during a series of concerts they were headlining. One night, the story goes, Lewis pulled out a Coke bottle filled with gasoline and poured it on his piano. He set the instrument ablaze and kept on playing “Great Balls of Fire.” When he was done, he walked off the stage and taunted Berry: “Top that!” he said, adding a vile slur.
In the late fifties, while Elvis was abroad and in the Army, Lewis was poised for dominance, but he undermined himself badly when reporters discovered he had married his underage cousin, Myra Gale Brown, while still married to another woman. In a typically clueless explanation, he told a reporter for the Wall Street Journal many years later, “I probably would have rearranged my life a little bit different, but I never did hide anything from people.”
The business and music worlds wanted it both ways with Jerry Lee Lewis: they craved his unmistakable talent but wanted to keep their distance. In a recording studio for McDonald’s, in 1982, he played “Great Balls of Fire,” but sang lines like “Goodness, gracious, Big Mac and fries,” and “some cool thick shakin’ going on.” As he vamped at the end of the jingle, he exhorted listeners, “Tell ’em the Killer sent you.” Cathy Altman, the copywriter who had written the new lyrics for the ad, admitted that her agency didn’t want the public to know this was really Jerry Lee; they just wanted people to think it sounded like him. “If you think of rock and roll, you think of one living person,” Altman said: “Jerry Lee Lewis. We wanted this to sound right, to feel right.” And then she added, memorably, “The client doesn’t want this too identified with him. I mean, drinking, drugs, child abuse . . .” The spot never aired.
Lewis was open about his struggles with alcohol and drugs. And he was given to volatile behavior, including drunkenly demanding entry to Graceland armed with .38-calibre Derringer. He explained his many marriages (six) as a matter of artistic necessity: “I had a guy tell me once, a songwriter, that the only way he could write another good song was to go out and get him a new wife or a new girlfriend and make his life miserable.”
What really irked Lewis was the non-reaction to Elvis’s similar behavior. “I don’t want to sound disrespectful to the dead,” he said, “but fuck Elvis.” In Lewis’s analysis of the situation, he had been condemned even though nobody seemed to mind that Elvis had started dating Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, in Germany, when she, too, was underage. When someone mentioned that Priscilla had been fourteen, and not Elvis’s cousin, Lewis grew angry. “Stop right there,” he said. “He was not married to her. I was married, because I was an honest, God-fearing man.”
READ MORE
Brandon Burden at his Frisco church. (photo: Denton Record-Chronicle)
For nearly 70 years, federal law has barred churches from directly involving themselves in political campaigns, but the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen about publicly backing candidates.
Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.
“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”
What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.
Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.
At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.
In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.
Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.
Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.
Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Indiana-Purdue, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”
The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.
Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.
Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.
While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.
Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.
“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”
At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”
Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.
“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.
“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”
Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots
Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”
Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.
But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.
In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.
Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.
Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.
The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”
The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.
The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”
Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.
Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.
In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.
In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an audit into alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.
The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.
Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.
During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.
Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”
As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.
Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.
Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.
In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.
But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”
The Pulpit and Politics
There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)
Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”
The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.
The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.
Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he said at the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”
Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.
As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.
White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.
“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won't take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”
Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles
In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”
“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”
Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”
Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.
“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”
She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.
In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.
“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”
“Demonic” Candidate
Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.
But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.
The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.
“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”
“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.
He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”
Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”
The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.
The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.
Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.
“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.
Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.
In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.
“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.
Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.
Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.
“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.
Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.
O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.
O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”
“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”
Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.
Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”
Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.
A New Tactic
On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.
“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.
“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”
Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.
The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.
“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”
Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.
Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.
McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.
“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.
Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”
Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.
“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”
READ MORE
Trump. (photo: Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s leadership PAC just made a $20 million donation to another PAC. Trump could’ve spent the money on other Republicans. Now the PAC can spend it on him.
The contribution—Trump’s largest ever by far—went from his Save America leadership PAC on Oct. 3 to a new Trump-aligned super PAC, called Make America Great Again Inc. That same day, an old pro-Trump super PAC threw another $8.9 million behind the new group.
Super PACs can spend unlimited amounts of money to support candidates, so on its face, the donation could be said to be a generous contribution from Trump to the MAGA cause during a critical election. But as a number of campaign finance experts explained, the specifics here suggest Trump is really trying to get around laws that would otherwise prevent him from spending his personal stash on a 2024 presidential run.
Paul S. Ryan, a veteran campaign finance lawyer now serving as deputy executive director at the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, said that was “the only plausible explanation.”
“The only thing Trump cannot do with the millions and millions of dollars he’s raised into his leadership PAC is support himself. The only plausible explanation for this move is to convert that money to be spent on his own campaign,” Ryan told The Daily Beast.
Bodycam video shows the fraught minutes that ensued. Officers rushed to the school, some entering with their rifles and pistols drawn, running breathlessly through the hallways to find the right classroom.
But there was no shooter.
Students had been placed on lockdown, police units deployed and school staff were plunged into minutes of terror as a hoax unfolded. After finding no threat at the school, the officers regrouped in a school hallway. One said to the others, "Did you see the email we got today? Swatting. Somebody's swatting the schools."
Similar scenes have played out at schools across the country in recent weeks.
NPR has found local reports indicating 182 schools in 28 states received false calls about threats between Sept. 13 and Oct. 21. These have prompted a response known as "swatting," where law enforcement swarms a location where a crime is reportedly in progress. Swatting incidents can be particularly dangerous, as officers often enter with force, guns drawn.
But in some of these places, the pattern behind this wave of hoax calls has felt familiar. Authorities in Minnesota have said it echoes what they saw in March and April, when a caller falsely reported bombs at schools in several states.
Now, NPR has obtained records that suggest that there may, indeed, be a connection.
Audio from one of those springtime hoax bomb alerts sounds markedly similar to the voice, accent and narrative behind recent active shooter calls that NPR has listened to from Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio and Florida.
Through an open records request, NPR has obtained detailed information about the phone number behind that call, made about a high school in Louisiana. The records shed further light on the person or entity behind these schemes, and how they systematically target local institutions.
'A suspicious backpack'
On the morning of April 21, the Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana received a call from someone saying there was "a suspicious backpack" in a classroom at Benton High School.
The caller, who sounded like a grown man with a North African accent, claimed to be a student. Students were evacuated from the school, the parish fire department deployed and the grounds were searched. No bomb was found.
An investigation and report by the sheriff's office, obtained by NPR through an open records request, found that the call came from an internet, or VOIP, phone number. It also found that the VOIP account was tied to IP addresses in Ethiopia owned by the AFRINIC network, and specifically to the Ethiopian state-owned phone and internet service called Ethio Telecom, based in Addis Ababa. On the day that Bossier Parish received a call from this number, so, too, had 79 other places across Louisiana, Arizona and New Mexico.
An NPR analysis of the number's call logs between March 12 through April 21 offers a snapshot of how a mass hoax threat campaign may be conducted.
During a 40-day period, the VOIP number received or made 437 calls — all of them on just 10 of those days. But the usage pattern suggests that this phone number was really created with the purpose of making phone calls, because 80 percent of that activity was outgoing calls. The incoming traffic appeared to be mostly return dials from individuals or institutions that this VOIP user had called.
An examination of the number's outgoing calls details a curious pattern of activity.
More than three-quarters of the calls placed were made on just three days: March 15, April 5 and April 21. On those days, the VOIP user spent between 6 and 8 hours systematically dialing — and often re-dialing — phone numbers. Sometimes with as few as four seconds between hanging up one call and dialing the next, the number reached 125 places.
The rapid-fire dialing of numbers also indicates that the user had a list of targets at the ready, and a specific focus on schools, law enforcement agencies, fire departments and emergency dispatchers. Together, these accounted for 92% percent of the places that the VOIP number called. And while the caller blanketed 19 different states, they tended to focus on a small number of states on the days they were most active. On April 5, the number made outgoing calls only to North Carolina and Ohio. On April 21, it was only calls to Louisiana, New Mexico and Arizona.
NPR has reached out to Ethio Telecom for comment, as well as to the email address that was used to create the VOIP account. So far, neither has responded. NPR also called the VOIP number tied to this activity and reached the automated voicemail recording for the service carrier, a Canada-based company called TextNow.
For experts in VOIP and telephony fraud, the connection to TextNow is unsurprising.
TextNow and VOIP fraud
For several years, Fred Posner has been tracking call center scams, technical support scams, fake threatening calls from the IRS, and more in his spare time.
Posner, a retired police officer from Florida who is now a VOIP consultant, says those numbers often end up being TextNow numbers. He's been sending them to the TextNow company, sometimes tweeting in frustration. He sometimes hears back, but he worries it's never fast enough.
TextNow is one of many free or low-cost Internet based calling platforms, similar to Zoom, Skype, or WhatsApp. It is easy to sign up for a new TextNow number. Using an NPR email address, it took less than a minute to choose an area code and generate a new number capable of making calls or texts from an Internet browser or phone.
But that facility in creating a number means the service is prone to fraud and abuse. Scammers have been known to use these numbers to make spam calls that ultimately aim to persuade targets to wire money. The numbers are also disposable. Users can sign up, use the number for a while, and make a new one if it gets reported. Posner said that while TextNow is a favored carrier for these scammers, it's an industry-wide problem.
TextNow spokesperson Nick de Pass told NPR that "we place a high value on customer safety and privacy." Specifically, he continued, "our internal security team works diligently to identify and disable accounts that are being used for illegal activity or violate our terms of service." The company declined to comment on the specific false bomb alert in Louisiana.
But according to the investigative files obtained by NPR, Bossier Parish did receive records from TextNow detailing the email address, username, registration date, original IP address, and IP logs of the person behind the spring bomb scares.
"We quickly identified that he had a Gmail account and the registration IP address, along with a consistent IP address on the day that this occurred, [and that it all came] out of Ethiopia," said Captain Shannon Mack, an investigator with the Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office.
The Ethiopia Connection
To Mack, the evidence that the caller was operating out of Ethiopia was clear.
The IP addresses tied to both the TextNow activity, as well as the caller's Gmail account, were all based in that country. She and other experts said it doesn't appear that the caller was using a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to disguise their location. For instance, Mack noted that on the day her office received the false bomb alert, the caller stayed on the same IP address through hundreds of calls they made over several hours.
"A VPN will generally change by itself, whether you log in or out, about every 30 seconds," she said.
Additionally, TextNow has publicly said that it doesn't allow its users to use its service if it detects they're on a VPN.
But that doesn't mean that the caller wasn't using other techniques to make it falsely appear that they were in Ethiopia. For instance, it's possible the caller hacked or found other means to access digital infrastructure in Ethiopia, in order to route their calls through the compromised network.
"I did find a fair amount of compromised Ethio Telecom IPs that are out there on various markets like Genesis and Russian Market," said Keven Hendricks, referring to two online marketplaces on the so-called darknet, where illicit goods and services tend to be sold. Hendricks, an expert in cybercrime who has investigated swatting calls and VOIP abuse, said the activity of the caller behind the bomb hoaxes is not unprecedented.
"I have seen similar call patterns from swatters and people who abuse Voice Over IP services to create mass panic," he said.
Ultimately, it may be difficult to track down exactly where this caller is located and who they are. But this is a key reason that experts like Fred Posner are calling for additional regulations or safeguards to allow VOIP providers to better detect fraudulent and abusive call schemes on their networks.
One major step TextNow took last Friday was to ban the entire country of Ethiopia from use of its service, to cut down on a high amount of fraudulent activity.
""Our dedicated Trust & Safety team is taking aggressive action and proactively working with law enforcement to respond to these incidents, including banning all accounts associated with these calls," wrote Nick de Pass, TextNow spokesperson in an email to NPR. "We have also added Ethiopia to our list of unsupported countries to help eliminate this activity from our platform, which means that all calling and texting from the country has been banned from our service."
According to an industry source, VOIP services have chosen to ban other countries from their platform in the past when a pattern of abuse is established. Even so, criminals can find ways around measures like these.
TextNow publishes a scam round-up to alert users to potential fraud, and there are third party providers that work to automatically detect fraud which many voice and text providers work with--though they're not infallible. (Without being able to listen in to calls, it's difficult to clearly establish malicious behavior.)
Ultimately, there are challenges, and, perhaps, a lack of incentive, to proactively monitor for fraud on VOIP platforms before law enforcement serves a search warrant. Ultimately, the companies' goal is to make it easier for people to communicate, not harder.
The challenge of investigating
Mack of the Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office said she took the investigation in the Benton High School hoax bomb alert as far as she could.
"Because obviously we can't go to Ethiopia," she said, "and I have never had, in my personal experience as a police officer, anybody from Ethiopia co-operate with an investigation in United States."
Mack said when she investigated the false bomb alert in April, there was no indication that federal authorities were paying attention to the scheme. But with the recent wave of hoax active shooter calls, police at the state level in several places and the FBI are taking an interest. The agency has said "we will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention."
Several localities denied open records requests from NPR, citing pending investigations by higher authorities. Nonetheless, information that others have released has shown that the active shooter scheme may be much wider-reaching than the bomb hoax was in the spring.
Between Sept. 19 and 23, at least eight different phone numbers were used to make false calls about active shooters. Of those, NPR confirmed that six numbers are offered through TextNow. Calls to the other two numbers either failed or were not returned.
Although it's understood that swatting can have dangerous, and sometimes even fatal, results, experts say it's too often left to local agencies to investigate. In a widespread, and seemingly coordinated, scheme such as the current wave of active shooter threats, that approach may not be sufficient. Hendricks said it is heartening to see that federal authorities are taking an interest.
"I really feel that it's something we view more of a nuisance versus something that can be investigated and hold these people accountable," he said. "That's something that hopefully changes."
In all this, the motive itself remains a mystery.
"I don't know. [Maybe it's] some type of what they think is an assault on the American way of life," Mack said. "Especially disrupting schools, scaring parents and teachers and children. So I don't know if that is what their gain is, just to cause that chaos."
Online algorithms are pushing young boys towards right-wing ideology. (photo: MBI/Alamy)
Almost 1,000 references to misogyny and violent action are recorded each day on dedicated incel forums
Analysis of the incel movement found that online references to inflicting violence and extremely degrading language on dedicated incel forums are running eight times higher than in 2016, when researchers first began tracking misogynist content on the internet.
Academics from the University of Exeter also noted an increasing overlap between incel followers and the far right, with online algorithms blamed for pushing young boys towards extreme rightwing ideology.
Lewys Brace, who advises the government on extremism, led a long-term study that recorded, on average, 112 references a day to extreme misogynistic terms along with words “punch, stab, shoot, attack” in 2016 on dedicated incel forums.
Numbers have steadily increased since, now rising to a daily total of 849 references, prompting fears over the movement’s trajectory following a series of terrorist attacks linked to online misogynists.
The incel – or “involuntarily celibate” – movement is an online subculture in which a misogynistic worldview is promoted by individuals who blame women for their lack of sexual activity.
Incels have been linked to violent extremism and are classified by the government’s anti-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, as having a “mixed, unstable or unclear” ideology.
The most recent data reveals that such ideologies account for more than half of all referrals to Prevent.
Brace, a lecturer in data analysis at Exeter, said: “The incelosphere is definitely growing and diversifying and has increased in the toxicity of its discussions since 2016.
“The cross pollination of ideologies is helping to drive this.”
He singled out YouTube whose content recommendation algorithms, he claimed, had in the past pushed users “towards increasingly extreme content; particularly in the case of anti-woman/feminist content”.
YouTube says its recommendation system is designed to limit the spread of harmful misinformation and point people to authoritative sources.
This week, research funded by the UK’s Home Office and security and intelligence agencies will reveal the extent of “incel contagion” online and the growing threat posed by male supremacist ideology at a Dublin conference showcasing new studies documenting the internet.
Brace said the volume of references to committing violence should be taken seriously, with more than 50 cases of incel-related violence documented since 2014.
Cases include the murder of five people in August 2021 in Plymouth by Jake Davison, who expressed misogynistic views on online incel forums.
Another involves Gabrielle Friel, who in 2019 amassed weapons in preparation for a terrorist attack in Scotland and who “idolised” incel Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014. One concerning dynamic, said Brace, was how boys as young as 12 were being drawn into misogynistic ideology.
Recent police figures reveal that more under-18s were arrested in the 12 months to March 2022 than any other year, with senior counter-terrorism officers describing the trend as of “real concern”.
This month, the Department for Education published new safeguarding guidance regarding the radicalisation of young people, warning that some may target gender or other protected characteristics, but “do not otherwise identify with one particular terrorist ideology or cause – for example, involuntary celibates (incels) who direct their anger mainly at women”.
However, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation cautioned that, despite the rising number of arrests of young people, only one child had been imprisoned for terrorism in the last two years.
Jonathan Hall KC, told the Observer that the old-school approach to tackling terrorist offending needed to be recalibrated in the case of children.
“This discrepancy between numbers of arrests and sentences of imprisonment shows that the traditional method of prosecution, conviction and incarceration as a way of managing terrorist risk is no longer in play.”
Hall also stressed that, increasingly, a distinction needed to be made between terrorism and something falling short of terrorism, which could be described as extremism.
“Although we have to be careful about trying to codify extremism because, as has been found time and time again, extremism is a concept without natural boundaries.”
Brace said: “At the heart of the debate lies the question of how concerning discussions on online incel spaces are; a question further exacerbated by the manner in which the incel subculture is amorphous and evolving.”
He said the movement had evolved from a series of subreddits to dedicated forums – the “incelosphere” – but which were now spreading across other online spaces, such as Instagram, TikTok, Discord and Twitch.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday about admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina — and the meaning of a civil rights landmark.
Both sides claim the mantle of Brown, which is widely thought to be the court’s finest moment. The challengers say the decision requires admissions policies to be colorblind, dooming race-conscious programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
The universities respond that Brown meant to do away with a racial caste system that subjugated Black students, and that the decision surely allowed efforts to assemble varied student bodies to ensure educational diversity.
Brown’s singular status only deepened the debate over its meaning, Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale, said.
“Brown is the Mona Lisa of American constitutional law,” he said. “It is not only the court’s most scrutinized and most famous opinion, but its meaning also shifts when viewed from different angles.”
Both sides may have a point, Michael W. McConnell, a law professor at Stanford, said.
“The Brown opinion is profoundly ambiguous, and they are appealing to different aspects of the opinion, legitimately different aspects,” he said. “Is it a case about not assigning on the basis of race or is it a case about making sure that African American schoolchildren get a fair shake in education?”
The group challenging the two admissions programs, Students for Fair Admissions, or S.F.F.A., put Brown front and center in its briefs.
“Any discussion of racial classifications in education must start with Brown,” its lawyers wrote in May.
And here are the opening lines from a reply brief filed in August: “U.N.C.’s argument is not with S.F.F.A.; it is with Brown. That landmark decision fulfilled the 14th Amendment’s promise by requiring that ‘education … be made available to all on equal terms.’”
Lawyers for U.N.C. said that was a profound misreading of the decision. “Brown held that the arbitrary separation of students based on race violates equal protection,” they wrote. “Institutions like U.N.C. that seek to bring students of diverse backgrounds together are the rightful heirs to Brown’s legacy.”
In a brief for student and alumni groups at Harvard, lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the civil rights group that litigated Brown, wrote that the court would be playing with fire were it to adopt the challengers’ understanding of the decision.
“The Brown decision was one of the finest moments in this court’s history,” they wrote. “Yet, this court risks jeopardizing that legacy — and damaging its own legitimacy — should S.F.F.A. prevail in misconstruing one of its canonical decisions to dismantle decades of precedent that affirmed the legality of race-conscious admissions.”
The court in Brown held that segregated public schools denied Black students the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote.
Exactly what else the ruling and its reasoning required has long been the subject of debate. In 2007, for instance, the Supreme Court debated the meaning of Brown in a decision that limited the ability of public schools to take account of race to achieve integration, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Only three justices serving then are still on the court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. Along with Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, they all signed a plurality opinion adopting a colorblind understanding of Brown.
The parties “debate which side is more faithful to the heritage of Brown,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in 2007 for the plurality, “but the position of the plaintiffs in Brown was spelled out in their brief and could not have been clearer.”
The chief justice quoted from the transcript of the 1952 argument in the case.
“We have one fundamental contention, which we will seek to develop in the course of this argument,” Robert L. Carter, a lawyer with the legal defense fund, said then, “and that contention is that no state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”
Chief Justice Roberts added: “There is no ambiguity in that statement. And it was that position that prevailed in this court.”
S.F.F.A., the group challenging admissions policies, repeatedly cited a truncated version of Mr. Carter’s statement in its briefs, indicating that it represented the holding of the 2007 decision. “The court vindicated the promise of the 14th Amendment in Brown v. Board of Education,” one S.F.F.A. brief said, by “rejecting ‘any authority … to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities.’”
In an interview with The New York Times on the day the 2007 decision was issued, the lawyer who had made that statement, by then a 90-year-old senior federal judge in Manhattan, said the chief justice had gotten things backward.
“All that race was used for at that point in time was to deny equal opportunity to Black people,” Judge Carter, who died in 2012, said of the 1950s. “It’s to stand that argument on its head to use race the way they use it now.”
Jack Greenberg, another lawyer who had worked on the Brown case, said on the same day that the chief justice’s interpretation was “preposterous.”
“The plaintiffs in Brown were concerned with the marginalization and subjugation of Black people,” Professor Greenberg said. “They said you can’t consider race, but that’s how race was being used.” Mr. Greenberg died in 2016.
That understanding of Brown, articulated by the civil rights lawyers who won the case, may be overtaken by a more limited one when the Supreme Court decides the new cases, probably in late June. The court’s six-member conservative majority now includes three justices appointed by President Donald J. Trump.
The court has issued three major cases on the use of race in admissions decisions in higher education: University of California v. Bakke, in 1978; Grutter v. Bollinger, in 2003; and Fisher v. University of Texas, in 2016. All were closely divided and all sent the basic message that numerical racial quotas were forbidden but that a holistic approach, using race as one factor among many in the admissions process, was permissible.
The decisions allowed only a single justification for race-conscious admissions plans: creating educational diversity so that students of different backgrounds may learn from one another.
Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been among the lawyers who argued the Brown case, issued a partial dissent in the Bakke case, saying that Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s controlling opinion was too cramped in rejecting the use of race to remedy past discrimination.
“It must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution as interpreted by this court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro,” he wrote. “Now, when a state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”
In the Grutter decision, the majority endorsed Justice Powell’s approach. The challengers in the new cases ask the Supreme Court to overrule Grutter.
“Because Brown is our law,” S.F.F.A’s lawyers wrote, “Grutter cannot be.”
In its Supreme Court brief, lawyers for Harvard wrote that the three affirmative action cases rested on Brown. “Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher uphold Brown in every way,” they wrote. “Like Brown, those decisions relied on the overriding importance of education.”
The Biden administration, in a brief supporting the universities, urged the justices to reject what it said was a revisionist view of Brown.
“Nothing in Brown’s condemnation of laws segregating the races to perpetuate a caste system calls into question admissions policies adopted to promote greater integration and diversity,” the brief said. “And petitioner’s persistent attempts to equate this case with Brown trivialize the grievous legal and moral wrongs of segregation.”
But the challengers wrote that Brown must be read broadly to forbid consideration of race.
“Harvard and the United States trivialize Brown by trying to confine that foundational precedent to its facts,” lawyers for S.F.F.A. wrote, adding: “Surely Harvard doesn’t think that Brown would have been different if Southern schools had used a holistic policy that covertly reduced the number of Black students.”
At bottom, said Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University, the debate over the meaning of Brown turns on how and why school officials take account of race.
“The segregationists believed in race-conscious policies that entrenched the subordination of Black Americans,” he said. “U.N.C.’s race-conscious policies, in stark contrast, seek to ameliorate that dehumanizing subordination. This has always been the crux of the affirmative action debate. Does the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause forbid racial classification itself or only racial classification that entrenches historical subordination?”
Highway traffic in Madrid, Spain, on Oct. 29, 2021. Ricardo Rubio / Europa Press/Getty Images)
Greenpeace argues 'not quick enough' to contain global warming
With the Fit for 55 targets, car manufacturers will need to reduce emissions of new cars sold by 55% compared to 2021 emissions by 2030. Then, the companies will need to further reduce emissions to zero by no longer selling new combustion engine cars and vans by 2035.
“Closing a first deal on a proposal from the ‘Fit for 55’ package is a strong signal that the EU is determined to make progress towards climate neutrality and the green transition,” Anna Hubáčková, Czech minister of environment, said in a statement. “Zero-emission mobility will be a building block for slowing down climate change that can create severe disruptions in many sectors of our society, including environment, migration, food security and the economy.”
Additionally, the deal will establish a common methodology for member states that will assess the full life cycle of emissions on cars and vans in the EU market as well as the fuels and energy they consume. This methodology will allow manufacturers to report life cycle emissions of new vehicles to the EU Commission, but only on a voluntary basis.
According to the EU, cars and vans make up 15% of total EU carbon emissions. It said that transitioning to 55% fewer emissions, and ultimately 100% zero emissions, will lead to better air quality, improved public health, more affordable electric vehicles and more development and manufacturing jobs.
There are some challenges to the deal, though. For one, the EU does not offer evenly distributed charging stations, The Associated Press reported, and may have too few to support the expected rapid increase in electrical vehicle use in the coming years.
The announcement was made to show “that the EU is serious about adopting concrete laws to reach the more ambitious targets set out in the EU Climate Law” ahead of the UN COP27 Climate Change Conference in November. A new UN Environment Programme report found that the world is already on track to reach 2.4°C to 2.6°C of warming by 2100 and that countries may only be able to limit global warming to 1.5°C with immediate, large-scale separation from fossil fuels to cut emissions at least 45%.
Greenpeace criticized the ban, saying it will take effect too late to keep global warming at 1.5°C.
“The EU is taking the scenic route, and that route ends in disaster. A European 2035 phase-out of fossil fuel-burning cars is not quick enough: new cars with internal combustion engines should be banned by 2028 at the latest,” Lorelei Limousin, Greenpeace EU transport campaigner, said in a statement. “The announcement is a perfect example of where politicians can bask in a feel-good headline that masks the reality of their repeated failures to act on climate. The UN has just confirmed that the climate crisis will spiral out of control unless governments take rapid and decisive action, including a shift to cleaner modes of transport.”
The EU announced the deal agreement on Thursday, October 27, but the European Parliament and member states will need to formally approve of the deal before the ban can take effect.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.