01 December 22
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Musk's fetid new swamp may push us all onto higher ground
I should say at the outset that I'm not leaving, yet.
Jelani Cobb offered the best account yet of why we should
To the extent that people remain active on Twitter, they preserve the fragile viability of Musk’s gambit. The illusory sense of community that still lingers on the platform is one of Musk’s most significant assets. No matter which side prevails, the true victor in any war is the person selling weapons to both sides.
But in my case it feels a little complicated by the fact that I've used the medium not just to communicate, but actively to organize. It's been a truly helpful tool in nationalizing key fights, from Keystone to the divestment battles: yes, we're all speaking to our particular choirs, but trying to help the choir sing from the same page in the hymnal is highly useful. Also, there's a part of me that bridles at being bullied off the playground. I've signed up for admission to some of the alternative playgrounds (Post.News) and watched with admiration as people pioneer new ground (the Mushroom project) but I have a bad feeling that my understanding of Mastodon may always be like my understanding of the blockchain: I nod while someone explains it, and then… Well, Twitter’s simplicity was its charm.
That said, there's no question that Musk's version of the site is on the verge of becoming entirely useless. There were always ugly currents there, but they are turning into daily tides—his notion of free speech is that anyone should say pretty much anything at all times, and so they are. When I post something now, many of the replies are weird anti-Semitic rants. (Last week someone insisted to me that "Jews invented pornography," which seems, on the archaeological evidence, the single least likely thing on earth). When one objects, as I did, scores of newly unleashed commenters pile in to insist that one should engage with the anti-Semites and explain the error of their ways. "You have lived in a protected hive mind bubble that shelters you from real people," someone called "Lizard King" explained to me today--and it's true. We've all lived in and benefited from a "hive mind bubble" that decided, post-Holocaust, that anti-Semitic declarations were to be shunned. The widespread acknowledgement that anti-Semitism was a disgusting source of unending horror was one of the few clear victories of the 20th century (of course, vaccines were another...). We shouldn't have to refight this particular battle every day for the rest of our lives, especially since the advocates of fascism are not likely to yield to facts. If Elon Musk, in his tantrum against "content moderation," wants to overturn these few slender civilizational achievements, then eventually most decent people will drift away from his orbit, and it will become a place populated mostly by unhappy weirdos. One has so much time and energy; arguing with people who want to tell you about "the Jews" (or "the Muslims" or "the Blacks" or whatever) is not, ultimately, a good use of that time and energy. You can block people all you want, but every day there's a new cadre; they're morons, but committed ones.
Which, as I've said, will cause a problem for organizers. We've come to rely on Twitter for certain things: it's an efficient way to spread important new information and to highlight important new voices; most of my Tweets for the last decade have been, in one form or another, saying "thanks" to someone for doing something useful, in the hope that others will notice. (And because I have a big list of followers they usually do). Things like this Substack rely, to some extent, on Twitter too--it's been the biggest source of new readers.
But I think this utility has come at a cost (and not just the personal one of spending way too much time scrolling). We've almost certainly relied too much on Twitter and the rest of its digital ilk. Posting, as many have pointed out, has become a substitute for other kinds of action. But more, it's given us less incentive to build out real and substantial networks. I've been reminded of this in the past year, as Third Act has sprung into life. We've patiently built up networks of flesh and blood people in physical places (Third Act Ohio debuts tomorrow!) and also in virtual space (Third Act Educators, say, are scattered across the country). They've gotten to know each other, face to face or face to Zoom. And that's turned out to be...effective.
Here's CNN describing our efforts in the critical Nevada election, for instance:
the week before the election, Third Act, a new national group targeting people over 60 to work on climate justice and protecting democracy, sent its celebrity founder, climate activist Bill McKibben to Nevada to meet with hundreds of older Nevadans. He was joined by renowned author Rebecca Solnit and Secretary of State candidate Cisco Aguilar at a “Defend Our Democracy” event in Reno.
That event inspired scores to show up the next day to walk door-to-door for pro-democracy candidates, shining a bright spotlight on Aguilar who subsequently won a close race against a staunch election-denier, Jim Marchant.
Forget the part about "celebrity founder," the key was that hundreds of people got together to do something. Organizing it was much harder than tweeting (huge shoutout to Third Act Nevada and the redoubtable Bob Fulkerson) but it will also pay much larger dividends going forward: there are new bonds, new friendships, and a new sense of our strength.
We'll always use digital tools to help in that work--this is the world we live in. But Twitter's sudden lurch into ugliness is a good reminder not to rely entirely on them. There's nothing self-driving about good organizing!
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Mehran Samak, 27, was shot dead after honking his car horn in Bandar Anzali, a city on the Caspian Sea coast, north-west of Tehran. (photo: Twitter)
Mehran Samak was killed by security forces after honking car horn in celebration of Iran’s defeat to US, human rights groups say
Mehran Samak, 27, was shot dead after honking his car horn in Bandar Anzali, a city on the Caspian Sea coast, north-west of Tehran, according to human rights activists.
Samak “was targeted directly and shot in the head by security forces … following the defeat of the national team against America”, said the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).
The contest between the two countries which severed diplomatic ties more than 40 years ago took place against a backdrop of violent repression in Iran after protests triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, in September.
Iran’s security forces have killed at least 448 people in the crackdown on the protests, including 60 children under the age of 18 and 29 women, according to IHR.
In an extraordinary twist, Iranian international midfielder Saeid Ezatolahi, who played in the US match and is from Bandar Anzali, revealed that he knew Samak and posted a picture of them together in a youth football team.
“After last night’s bitter loss, the news of your passing set fire to my heart,” said Ezatolahi on Instagram, describing Samak as a “childhood teammate”.
He did not comment on the circumstances of his friend’s death but said: “Some day the masks will fall, the truth will be laid bare.”
He added: “This is not what our youth deserve. This is not what our nation deserves.”
Ezatolahi, distraught at the result, had been seen after the final whistle being comforted both by his teammates and the US players.
Many Iranians had refused to support the national team, and after the match on Tuesday night, footage on social media showed crowds cheering and setting off fireworks.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) also reported that Samak had been killed by the security forces while celebrating. CHRI published a video from Samak’s funeral in Tehran on Wednesday at which mourners could be heard shouting “death to the dictator”. The chant, aimed at Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is one of the main slogans of the protests.
Late on Tuesday, the exiled Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad posted videos of celebrations on Twitter, writing: “Iran is a country where people are very passionate about football. Now they are out in the streets in the city of Sanandaj and celebrate the loss of their football team against the US.” She also posted a video of fireworks being let off in Saqqez, Mahsa Amini’s home town.
Iranians also celebrated in Marivan, which was among the cities in western Iran’s Kurdish-populated regions where, on 21 November, security forces intensified a crackdown that killed a dozen people over 24 hours, directly shooting at protesters and using heavy weapons, rights groups said.
There were also celebrations in Tehran and Sanandaj, Kurdistan’s capital.
The celebrations came after fans outside the stadium in Doha sought to highlight the protests and the Iranian government’s crackdown. “Everybody should know about this. We don’t have a voice in Iran,” an Iranian living in the US, who gave his name only as Sam, told Reuters.
Speaking by phone from Tehran shortly before kick-off, Elham, 21, said she wanted the US to win because victory for the national squad, known as Team Melli, would be a gift for Iranian authorities. “This is not my national team. It is not the melli team, it is the mullahs’ team,” she said.
Extra security personnel, some mounted on horseback, patrolled outside the Al Thumama stadium before the match, while guards at the perimeter made Iranians unfurl their flags before entering. Police were stationed throughout the stadium alongside regular security guards. Some carried batons.
Early in the second half, a group of fans briefly held up letters spelling Mahsa Amini’s name to applause from the Iranian supporters around them. Security personnel took their signs but allowed them to remain in their seats.
Under pressure to publicly support protesters at home, the Iranian team declined to sing the national anthem in their first game against England, which they lost 6-2. But they sang it before the second game, a 2-0 victory over Wales, and again on Tuesday. When Iran lost to England, there were celebrations in Tehran too.
Outside the stadium after the match, Reuters journalists saw security chase two people in a series of scuffles on the ground’s perimeter. Three guards pinned one man to the ground who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “woman, life, freedom”, the central slogan of the Iranian protest movement.
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Storm clouds over the U.S. Capitol dome on July 12, 2022. A House subcommittee on Thursday released a report on how fintech companies processed Paycheck Protection Program loans early in the coronavirus pandemic. (photo: Tom Brenner/The Washington Post)
Little-known firms such as Blueacorn and Womply allegedly collected taxpayer-funded fees as they overlooked signs of grift, according to a report released Thursday by congressional investigators
Speeding through applications, Blueacorn employees and contractors allegedly began to overlook possible signs of fraud, according to interviews and communications later amassed by investigators on Capitol Hill. The company weighed whether to prioritize “monster loans that will get everyone paid,” as the firm’s co-founder once said. And investigators found that Blueacorn collected about $1 billion in processing fees — while its operators may have secured fraudulent loans of their own.
The allegations against Blueacorn and several other firms are laid out in a sprawling, roughly 120-page report released Thursday by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, a congressional watchdog tasked to oversee roughly $5 trillion in federal pandemic aid. The 18-month probe — spanning more than 83,000 pages of documents, and shared in advance with The Washington Post — contends there was rampant abuse among a set of companies known as fintechs, which jeopardized federal efforts to rescue the economy and siphoned off public funds for possible private gain.
Some of the companies involved had never before managed federal aid, the report found. At the height of the pandemic, they failed to hire the right staff to thwart fraud. They amassed major profits from fees generated from the loans — large and small, genuine and problematic — that they processed and reviewed. And they repeatedly escaped scrutiny from the Small Business Administration, putting billions of dollars at risk, the probe found.
The trouble began under the Trump administration, after Congress first authorized the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in 2020. The roughly $800 billion initiative saw the government disburse more than 11 million loans to companies at risk of shutting their doors for good, helping keep them afloat until the health emergency eased. But the money became a tempting target for malicious actors, who took advantage of lax rules — and inadequate oversight — to bilk the government for staggering sums.
Fintech companies including Blueacorn, Womply and Kabbage were supposed to serve as middlemen — helping applicants complete paperwork and processing their requests for aid on behalf of banks and other large financial institutions. In some cases, though, the digital firms instead became vectors for the worst waste, fraud and abuse, according to congressional investigators led by Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the panel’s chair.
At Blueacorn, for example, loan reviewers tied to the company told the select committee they were pressured to “push through” PPP applications even if they seemed suspicious. The company was especially interested in processing high-dollar applications, the report stated, even creating a special, internal “VIPPP” label to ensure the biggest borrowers — which carried the promise of great fees — could receive expedited treatment.
The approach may have cost the government, though House investigators could not compute a final sum. It also came at the expense of smaller borrowers arguably in the greatest need, according to the report. As one Blueacorn co-founder, Stephanie Hockridge, appeared to remark over the messaging service Slack about these applicants: “who f---ing cares.”
It was the largest burst of emergency spending in U.S. history: Two years, six laws and more than $5 trillion intended to break the deadly grip of the coronavirus pandemic. The money spared the U.S. economy from ruin and put vaccines into millions of arms, but it also invited unprecedented levels of fraud, abuse and opportunism.
In a yearlong investigation, The Washington Post is following the covid money trail to figure out what happened to all that cash.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hockridge also did not immediately respond. Reached by The Post, a contractor that worked with Blueacorn rejected the conclusions of the report.
“As today’s report details, many fintechs, while promising to help disburse billions of Paycheck Protection Program dollars to struggling small businesses efficiently and expeditiously, refused to take adequate steps to detect and prevent fraud despite their clear responsibility to safeguard taxpayer funds,” Clyburn said in a statement.
The allegations underscore the challenge that the U.S. government faced amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Totaling more than $5 trillion, the country’s generous covid aid helped rescue millions of families, workers and businesses from financial ruin, even as it emerged as a tempting target for grift large and small, The Post has found in its year-long investigation, the Covid Money Trail.
The losses have been especially stark at the SBA, an agency tasked at the height of the pandemic to administer about $1 trillion in loans and grants. As it rescued businesses, the agency systematically failed to take proper care of its funds, opening the door for criminals around the world to use stolen or false information to obtain limited pandemic aid.
Repeatedly, the SBA’s inspector general, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, has joined other federal watchdogs in needling the agency for its poor oversight. In one early estimate, Ware said there could be more than $4 billion in PPP-related fraud, adding the losses are likely to grow as they continue to scrutinize the program.
Yet fintech companies presented a special challenge to PPP. The firms were seen as critical in expanding access to capital, particularly for smaller borrowers, which could not obtain easy help during the pandemic from larger traditional lenders like banks. But some fintech start-ups had few, if any, preexisting relationships with needy businesses. And in their haste to come online, the companies may not have been as diligent in scrutinizing PPP applications, experts later discovered.
“The involvement of fintech lenders in the paycheck was definitely a double-edged sword,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the Project On Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “A lot of fintechs, but not all, really exercised insufficient due diligence in vetting loan applicants, and as a result, are disproportionately represented in the loans that have been deemed fraudulent or potential fraudulent.”
Congressional investigators last year came to identify six firms in particular — Blueacorn, BlueVine, Cross River Bank, Celtic Bank, Kabbage and Womply — that they believed were associated with potentially fraudulent loans. Their report released Thursday, issued after the committee requested an intricate series of records from these and other companies, shed new light on what Clyburn described as troubling business practices that have cost the government immensely.
At Kabbage, a fintech firm later acquired by American Express, the company’s own workers repeatedly shared concerns in private about fraud risks. In the earliest days of the pandemic loan program, an unnamed employee remarked to their supervisor in July 2020 — according to internal chat records later obtained by the House committee — their fear that the “level of fraud we’re reviewing is wildly underestimated.”
Kabbage, like many fintech companies, sought to streamline the process for small businesses to obtain PPP loans. They pitched potential customers on the premise that they had helped a wide array of firms — restaurants, retailers, shrimp boat operators and beekeepers, to name a few — obtain aid through the program even when big banks had stopped accepting new applicants. The company in 2020 said its efforts alone had helped save about 945,000 jobs.
But the committee said that senior officials at Kabbage seemed to miss obvious flags for fraud — incorrect tax documents, names and addresses didn’t match on applications, identities that may have been stolen and profit margins that didn’t make sense. Internally, its leaders appeared to dismiss the warning signs, too. Explaining its approach, a risk manager at Kabbage acknowledged in a separate exchange obtained by Congress that they took a more lax view on PPP lending because “the risk here is not ours — it is SBAs [sic] risk.”
Another Kabbage policy official put it more bluntly over email in September 2020, using a profanity to blast the SBA’s “rules that created the fraud,” not the company.
For Kabbage, the consequences became apparent in October 2020, after American Express acquired much of the company, leaving a portion of its remaining PPP loan portfolio into a new entity called KServicing. That company filed for bankruptcy two years later, as agents for KServicing said its outstanding PPP loans — roughly $1.3 billion — had become “overburdened” by ongoing disputes and open investigations.
KServicing did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It said in its October bankruptcy filing that it has “successfully serviced approximately 80 percent” of its PPP loans. It added that it “vigorously disputed” allegations of fraud, citing probes by the Justice Department and the work of the House’s select committee.
The PPP did not just provide financial support to businesses facing a sudden drop in customers as the pandemic forced people to stay home. The law setting the program up also allowed major banks and other firms to collect fees based on the sizes of the loans they processed. Lenders then paid some of those fees to fintech companies, which helped recruit applicants and vet them for potential trouble.
In August 2021, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin painted a staggering picture of those earnings: They estimated that the PPP appeared to generate about $38 billion in fees for lenders, about $8.6 billion of which ultimately went to fintech companies. The numbers led the report’s authors to conclude that the pandemic program “had the potential to be a profitable business” for its participants.
Before the pandemic, the fintech company Womply had supplied other businesses with marketing software. Then arrived the PPP, which helped spur the company to put together what it branded as a “fast lane” service in February 2021 — a way to market, underwrite and vet PPP applications on behalf of major lenders.
The endeavor would prove profitable for Womply, which over the life of the program earned more than $2 billion in fees, lawmakers found. But officials at one lender that worked with Womply — in conversations with congressional investigators, detailed in the report — said it had earned that money even as it ignored “rampant fraud.”
That lender, a Florida-based company called Benworth, later indicated in an email that Womply had “placed our company in a very bad predicament due to the high likelihood of fraud” in its referred loans. Citing significant glitches in its systems to evaluate loans, another described Womply’s fraud-prevention efforts as “put together with duct tape and gum,” according to an email cited in the report.
The report alleges that Womply itself may have received federal funds improperly. Congressional investigators said the company in 2020 and 2021 obtained about $7 million in PPP aid. This September, however, the SBA determined Womply was ineligible to receive the aid — after the company requested to have its loans forgiven.
Womply’s chief executive, Toby Scammell, signed key loan documents seeking the government’s permission to waive its outstanding debts, according to the panel. Scammell, who previously pleaded guilty in 2014 to federal insider trading charges, ran his business’s stimulus fraud prevention efforts, investigators alleged.
The lawmakers’ report contends that Scammell later resisted providing key documents to the SBA and its inspector general in the course of their fraud investigations. Congressional aides also alleged that Womply transferred millions of PPP applicants’ tax and banking information to a new company, Solo Global, for unclear purposes.
Solo Global did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For taxpayers, the risk that even larger sums of money may be lost to fraud remains great.
Under PPP, Congress allowed the SBA to forgive the loans of eligible borrowers provided they followed the rules, particularly by maintaining their payrolls. Lawmakers wanted to ensure the money could keep Americans employed — while sparing hard-hit, small employers from debts that they might struggle later to repay.
By October, 93 percent of PPP recipients had some or all of their balances forgiven, according to the SBA’s data. But the high degree of forgiveness — and the lack of internal oversight — prompted the agency’s inspector general to warn in March that the government probably was “forgiving PPP loans for potentially fraudulent and ineligible applicants.”
“It’s pretty clear there are a lot of suspicious loans being forgiven,” said Sam Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the UT-Austin McCombs School of Business, who has studied the role of fintechs in pandemic lending.
The losses also have added to pressure on the Justice Department, which tapped Kevin Chambers this year to oversee the government’s work to find and prosecute pandemic-related crimes. This spring, federal prosecutors said they had brought charges and secured convictions involving more than $8 billion in misused covid funds, a significant portion of which includes PPP and other aid administered by the SBA.
On Thursday, Clyburn and his aides called on federal watchdogs to “conduct further investigation into these companies and pursue all appropriate remedies.” That could include Blueacorn, a firm founded by Nathan Reis, Hockridge and other entrepreneurs in 2020 to facilitate PPP loans. They advertised “free money” and loan approvals in “less than 30 seconds,” according to their marketing materials, drawing a flood of applicants. Reis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Over the life of the loan program, the company would process roughly $12.5 billion in PPP loans, a level of involvement in 2021 greater than even the giant multinational bank JPMorgan Chase, the report found. Blueacorn ultimately would reap more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded fees, according to congressional investigators, who said the company invested few of those dollars into oversight while enabling potentially widespread abuse.
Working on behalf of its lending partners, Blueacorn was supposed to oversee fraud and identity verification and other borrower support. But company workers and contractors would later tell congressional investigators that they were ill-equipped for the task: One witness claimed they submitted 300 PPP loans to the SBA before they even received training.
“The more you submit, the more we get paid,” one worker said they were told by Blueacorn management.
In doing so, Blueacorn often prioritized the largest applicants, seemingly hoping to extract the most in taxpayer-funded fees, the report alleged. In a Slack message obtained by the committee and cited in the document, Hockridge at one point called loan reviewers’ attention to a “fire” — a $1.9 million loan that had been in the underwriting process for five days.
“I don’t need to tell you how much Blueacorn makes off of that loan alone,” she wrote.
Most of the fraud reviews ultimately fell to outside firms, the report found, including little-known enterprises like Elev8 Advisors. The company, an Arizona-based firm led by Adam and Kristen Spencer, hired family and friends with seemingly “no connection to the financial sector, and with no apparent experience in financial crime compliance, fraud prevention, or underwriting,” according to the probe.
In an unsigned statement, the company accused the House subcommittee of engaging in “unfair and misleading tactics,” promising a more fulsome rebuttal to come.
“This report represents an unfortunate politicization of an important function of our government,” the statement said. “Congress’ responsibilities to the constituents they were elected to represent does not include engineering misleading and disparaging headlines for political gains.”
The statement added that Elev8 Advisors “did not engage in any self-dealing and their own loans were completely appropriate and would pass muster in any objective review.”
The congressional report also alleged the Blueacorn founders, Reis and Hockridge, personally obtained about $300,000 in PPP loans, in ways that raised congressional investigators’ suspicions. In one application, for example, Reis indicated he was an African American veteran, contradicting information he submitted in the context of other PPP requests. The report claims the duo lived lavishly as a result of their enterprise, pointing to a video that showed Reis “showing off large amounts of cash in a bar.”
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams visits the New York Stock Exchange on Nov. 17. This week, he announced that officials will begin hospitalizing more homeless people by involuntarily providing care to those deemed to be in 'psychiatric crisis.' (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty)
On Tuesday, Adams announced officials will begin hospitalizing more homeless people by involuntarily providing care to those deemed to be in "psychiatric crisis."
"For too long, there has been a gray area where policy, law, and accountability have not been clear, and this has allowed people in need to slip through the cracks," Adams said. "This culture of uncertainty has led to untold suffering and deep frustration. It cannot continue."
And for months, Adams and his administration have discussed stopping unhoused people from sheltering in subways despite pending budget cuts that will remove services the city provides to the homeless. At least 470 people were reportedly arrested this year for "being outstretched" or taking up more than one seat on a train car. In March, the authorities targeted those living under the Brooklyn-Queens expressway in Williamsburg while Adams reportedly attended an event promoting a Wells Fargo credit card people can use to pay rent.
Adams' policies drew criticism from advocates for homeless people.
"Mayor Adams continues to get it wrong when it comes to his reliance on ineffective surveillance, policing, and involuntary transport and treatment of people with mental illness," Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement on Tuesday. "Homeless people are more likely to be the victims of crimes than the perpetrators, but Mayor Adams has continually scapegoated homeless people and others with mental illness as violent.
Eva Wong, the director of the mayor's office of community mental health, defended the changes.
"These new protocols and trainings will ensure that agencies and systems responsible for connecting our community members with severe mental illnesses to treatments are working in unison to get them the support they need and deserve," Wong said.
However, others are unsure if the city has the infrastructure it needs for emergency medical response. New York City public advocate Jumaane D. Williams said the city needs to invest millions into its approach to the ongoing mental health crisis.
The number of respite care centers, which the city uses to house those in crisis, fell by half in the past three years, according to a recent report. Only two drop-in centers for adults dealing with a mental health crisis have been created since 2019. There were more than 60,000 homeless people, including 19,310 homeless children, sleeping in New York City's main municipal shelter system, as of September, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
"The ongoing reckoning with how we define and produce public safety has also put a spotlight on the need to holistically address this crisis as an issue of health, rather than simply law enforcement," Williams said in a statement.
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Former President Donald Trump finishes his speech at the America First Policy Institute’s America First Agenda summit on July 26, 2022. (photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)
“I think we are at the moment living in the high tide of American antisemitism,” one historian says.
In 1918, industrialist Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Ford was a brilliant businessman, the inventor of the Model T and founder of the iconic car company bearing his name. He was also a hardcore antisemite, blaming Jews for everything from World War I to an alleged decline in the quality of candy bars.
Ford turned the Dearborn Independent into a vehicle for promoting his antisemitic obsessions. In 1920, the paper published a series of articles, titled “The International Jew,” on the alleged nefarious activities of Jews in the United States and elsewhere. The series included excerpts from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous Russian forgery that purported to be records of the Jewish conspiracy’s worldwide activities.
Because Ford required Ford Motors dealers to distribute the paper, turning it into the second-largest in the United States at the time, his pet conspiracy theories were sent to a massive audience. The impact was enormous; according to historian Norman Cohn, “The International Jew probably did more than any other work to make The Protocols world famous.” Ford’s propaganda set the stage for a wave of American antisemitism in the runup to World War II, including the rise of infamous antisemitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin.
In 1931, with the Nazis on the brink of taking control of Germany’s government, a Detroit News reporter asked Hitler about Ford. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” the soon-to-be Führer replied, a framed portrait of the American industrialist over his desk.
Nearly 100 years later, Donald Trump — also an avowed fan of Henry Ford — would sit down with Fuentes, a man who denies that the Holocaust happened. Fuentes’s smirking, “just kidding” demeanor on his America First webcast barely hides his eliminationist antisemitism — and sometimes the mask falls off entirely.
“The Jews had better start being nice to people like us,” Fuentes said in a mid-November broadcast. “Because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them than anything that’s being said on this show.”
For the past few years, Fuentes has been attempting to insert himself and followers (called “groypers”) into the Republican Party, getting figures like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) to attend his America First Political Action conference in February. This weekend was Fuentes’s biggest victory yet, a sit-down with the party’s most important leader — who reportedly came away impressed. “I really like this guy. He gets me,” Trump said of Fuentes, per Axios’s Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu.
Meanwhile, West has recently emerged as the highest-profile proponent of antisemitic conspiracy theories in the country, a turn that has generated tremendous backlash — at least from most corners of society.
That Trump sat down with West and Fuentes should not be surprising, his own Jewish family notwithstanding. He has regularly deployed antisemitic rhetoric during his time in public life, and become even more willing to directly engage with his more extreme followers since leaving office (by, for example, regularly promoting QAnon content on his Truth Social website). Hosting West and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago is the logical extension of what he’s been doing since the beginning of his political career.
Leading Republicans are now acting shocked, with some of Trump’s allies in the Jewish conservative world turning on him over the dinner. Whether this round of Republican condemnation will end differently than previous ones remains to be seen. But even if this does mark a turning point in Trump’s political standing, other Republicans can’t unring the antisemitic bell the former president has been banging for years.
What has felt like a very recent spike in antisemitism, with high-profile incidents involving West and basketball player Kyrie Irving, is primarily a continuation of events dating back to 2015 kicked off by Trump’s rise. His political ascendance has had effects similar to Henry Ford’s purchase of the Dearborn Independent, a propaganda victory for antisemites that has helped pull bigotry into the mainstream.
There is, of course, a difference between Ford’s active trafficking of antisemitic propaganda and Trump’s more passive enabling of the same. But the effects of the latter are nonetheless devastating: The last few years have seen an unprecedented spike in antisemitic hate crimes, including the deadliest antisemitic massacre in American history.
“Historians have called the period between World War I and World War II the ‘high tide’ of American antisemitism. I think we may have to rename that: I think we are at the moment living in the high tide of American antisemitism,” says Pamela Nadell, the director of the Jewish studies program at American University.
To be sure, antisemitism is far less socially acceptable now than it was in the 1930s and even the 1960s. But it also seems much more acceptable today than it was prior to 2015 — and perhaps more lethal than it ever has been in this country.
Trump’s willingness to openly consort with notorious antisemites suggests things may be on the verge of getting worse, not better.
The ebb and flow of American antisemitism
To understand the deeper context behind the recent rise in antisemitism, we need to go back nearly 2,000 years.
Deborah Lipstadt, a historian currently serving as the State Department special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, traces the structure of antisemitic ideas back to the very origins of Christianity — specifically, the New Testament description of Jesus’s death.
The early church taught that “the Jews” conspired to kill Jesus — even though Jesus and his apostles were all Jewish and the Romans who actually executed him in the story were not. This, according to Lipstadt, was in part a strategic choice: Christianity had become a competing religion to Judaism, and its leadership wanted to marginalize the older, more deeply rooted tradition. What better way to do that than to blame Jews for killing the literal savior, casting remaining Jews as Christ-denying heirs to a dark conspiracy?
“Jews, [early Christians] argued, repudiated this new faith because of their inherent maliciousness,” Lipstadt writes. “This formulation rendered Judaism more than just a competing religion. It became a source of evil.”
This is the crucial thing to understand about antisemitism: It is both bigotry and an explanatory framework. Jews aren’t just detestable people, in the antisemitic mind; they are the force responsible for all that is bad in the world. After Christianity’s conquest of the Roman Empire and Europe, blaming the Jews for the world’s ills — from war to famine to pandemic — became a persistent feature of the European social environment, morphing with the times to explain whatever plagued the continent at the moment.
When Europeans moved to North America, they brought this way of thinking along with them. While the American state was far more friendly to Jews than its European peers, thanks to a founding emphasis on religious toleration, the prejudice itself still resided in its population — just waiting to be brought to the social fore by contingent events.
This is why historians like Nadell talk about antisemitism as reaching a “high tide.” Antisemitism is always there, but its influence in society ebbs and flows depending on what’s happening in the world. When it hits historical highs, it’s due to a confluence of factors — a perfect storm of Jew hatred.
In the early 1920s, decades of mass immigration, including a surge in Jewish migration, had prompted a nativist backlash. This rising xenophobia, together with a national sense of insecurity created by the post-World War I economic downturn, contributed to a rise in membership for the Ku Klux Klan; by 1925, its cadres claimed between 2 million and 5 million members nationwide. In publishing “The International Jew,” first as articles and then as a widely distributed book, Henry Ford was pushing on an open door.
After World War II and growing public awareness of the Holocaust, antisemitism declined significantly — but it did not go away. In the 1950s, an influx of Jewish admissions to Stanford University led administrators to secretly impose limits on future Jewish acceptance to the school. Between 1957 and 1958, a wave of bombings hit or targeted eight American synagogues — white supremacist terror attacks seemingly designed as retaliation for Jewish participation in the civil rights movement.
These examples illustrate the reactive nature of antisemitism: how events in the world, be they Jewish success or the Black struggle for civil rights, could inflame antisemitic sentiment even at a time when Nazism’s horrors were fresh in American minds.
By the 2010s, the situation was very different.
While explicit discrimination like the Stanford policy was gone, antisemitic groups flourished on the fringes — both the militia-style white power groups and the more genteel intellectual antisemites of the “alt-right.” The rise of the internet, and social media in particular, had given the far right a new ability to network and rapidly disseminate their messages to millions. The kindling for a new antisemitic blaze was there; it just needed a spark.
Enter Donald Trump.
Why antisemitism is rising today
Trump’s explicit employment of fringe-right tropes, calling Mexican immigrants rapists, or giving an antisemitic speech to an audience of Republican Jews, gave these movements a massive boost in influence.
“I think he’s an anti-Semitic enabler,” Lipstadt told me in a 2019 interview. “He’s very careful not to criticize his followers. ... He’ll enable anything that’s going to get him elected or get him support.”
Antisemitic hate speech spiked on social media, as did hate crimes in real life. Data from the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish anti-hate group, regularly showed the highest numbers of recorded antisemitic incidents in nearly 40 years of data. While the ADL’s data is not perfect, primarily due to overly loose definitions, the precipitous and sustained increase since Trump’s entry suggests something really is going on.
Nearly every year saw some kind of high-profile incident. We saw antisemitic marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us” in the streets of Charlottesville in 2017, and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh the following year. In 2019, there was another shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, and the murder of a New York rabbi at a Hanukkah gathering. In 2021, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza led to assaults on Jews in the streets of Manhattan and Los Angeles.
Not all of these attacks came from the sort of white nationalists most attracted to Trump. The rabbi’s killer owned literature from the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group that believes Black people are the true Jews and that white Jews are nefarious impostors — a conspiracy theory recently promoted by both Ye and Irving. The attacks during the Israel war in 2021 seemed to originate with supporters of the Palestinian cause.
This tracks with the historical pliability of antisemitism. Because it is an explanatory framework in addition to a form of bigotry — a way that people can blame someone for whatever they’re unhappy about — it can be adapted by nearly any group for any purpose. Henry Ford blamed the Jews for ruining candy bars; Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed California wildfires on a space laser controlled by prominent Jews.
Once the social barriers against antisemitism are broken down, and one type of antisemitism bursts into the open, people from all ideological persuasions can feel more comfortable expressing antisemitic ideas. Antisemitism becomes part of the ambient environment, popping up at seemingly random intervals from different sources. The surge in public antisemitism in the fall of 2022 is really an expression of a broader pattern that we’ve been seeing since 2015.
Which brings us back to the Mar-a-Lago dinner.
There’s something truly bizarre about Ye, a Black man, bringing a white nationalist like Fuentes to the Mar-a-Lago dinner. But once you grasp the nature of antisemitism, it becomes more comprehensible.
For people like Fuentes, it makes sense to publicly support Ye amid his career suicide — despite his Blackness — because he’s helping spread antisemitic ideas to a wider audience. The Goyim Defense League, a white nationalist antisemitic group, hung banners over LA’s 405 highway saying “Kanye is right about the Jews.” Ye, roundly condemned by mainstream America, took the help where he could get it, allying with Fuentes and handing his movement the major coup of a sit-down with their hero Donald Trump.
“A former president sitting for dinner with a white power activist is the kind of thing that activists can use to claim that they have become a real [political] force,” Kathleen Belew, a historian of white nationalism at Northwestern University, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
Worse, they may actually have a point. Robert Costa, a CBS news reporter and one of Washington’s most plugged-in journalists, wrote that Fuentes represents a kind of subterranean hate ecosystem that has become quietly influential even among mainstream Republicans:
Now that he is out of office, Trump seems even more open about courting this segment of his base. He has recently been promoting QAnon content — a pro-Trump conspiracy theory with some notably antisemitic components.
While Trump has claimed not to know who Fuentes was and that any expression of antisemitism ”wouldn’t have been accepted” at their dinner, he has not issued a full-fledged disavowal of Fuentes and the forces he represents — and Trump’s track record suggests that one isn’t forthcoming. There’s every chance that his 2024 presidential run will be even more extreme than what we saw from him in 2016 and 2020.
How much worse could things get? Nadell, the American University historian, puts it this way: Trump is an even more influential and popular figure than Henry Ford was in his heyday.
Ford “was greatly admired, but he was not the past president,” says Nadell. “The American people didn’t put Ford at the head of the Ford Motor Company. But the American people put Trump at the head of the United States.”
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Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs speaks to supporters after defeating Kari Lake. (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty)
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, also the governor-elect, has gone to state court to force Cochise County to certify the election after its Republican-led Board of Supervisors failed to meet a Nov. 28 deadline while making debunked claims about the state’s voting machines.
In court papers, Hobbs’ office said that if the county refuses to certify by Dec. 8, the ballots of more than 47,000 county residents will not be included in the final tally.
That would flip the results of the race for Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, where Republican Juan Ciscomani holds a 5,232-vote lead over Democrat Kirsten Engel in unofficial results, as well as the race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction, where the Republican candidate has a narrow lead.
Read more: The Latest Threat to Elections: Local Officials Going Rogue
“The Board’s inaction not only violates the plain language of the statute, but also undermines a basic tenet of free and fair elections in this state: ensuring that every Arizonan’s voice is heard,” the lawsuit reads.
Arizona has been a hotbed of election denial, with failed candidates for governor, senator, secretary of state and attorney general who all cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who ran against Hobbs, has not conceded her loss, while Donald Trump has aired conspiracy theories about the state’s elections on social media.
The nonprofit Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans is also suing to try to force Cochise County to certify.
Elsewhere in Arizona, a county Board of Supervisors whose members had originally threatened to refuse to certify the results of the election ended up doing so just before the deadline. Though the Mohave County Board of Supervisors postponed the vote once, citing concerns about voting machines, it ultimately approved the results rather than risk being charged with a felony.
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A loan that Liliu Ross secured to build a new house on her Hawaii Island lot fell through in 2014 over concerns about unexploded ordnance. She and her son, Kealii Ross, continue to live in a shack that they have spruced up on the property. (photo: Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the remediation effort, has been plagued by shoddy work and multiple regulatory disputes, according to an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica
So, in 2014, Ross secured a loan under a special program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help Native Hawaiians build or purchase homes on Native lands. An architect created drawings for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house, complete with energy-efficient appliances and a covered lanai. And she even picked the location for the new home.
Within months, though, her plan collapsed. Ross learned in a phone call from her builder that HUD had imposed a freeze on federal housing funds throughout the region. As it turned out, her property had been part of the Waikoloa Maneuver Area, a 185,000-acre site that was used by the U.S. military for live-fire training in the 1940s. Troops had fired an unknown number of grenades, mortars and other munitions that failed to explode, and many of the potentially deadly weapons remained, hidden beneath years of soil and vegetation buildup. Federal authorities wanted to ensure the land was safe to use.
But the funding freeze had sweeping consequences. Other prospective borrowers on Native lands soon found they could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages, the only type available on such properties. The freeze also meant that local and state governments could not tap the main sources of federal funding to develop affordable housing in the region — a critical need in a state with one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. The action effectively thwarted a century-old promise by the federal government to return Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands.
Money would flow again, HUD decided, after the military removed any unexploded ordnance, or UXO, and state regulators vouched for the land’s safety.
Eight years later, though, Ross is still waiting. The now-64-year-old farmer continues to live in the same shack. She is one of hundreds of Native Hawaiians who are unable to secure housing on lands that the government set aside for them in a trust. Many have already waited years — and sometimes decades — for the opportunity to build homes, farms and ranches.
“People are getting old, people are dying,” said Mary Maxine Kahaulelio, a prominent Native Hawaiian activist who lives near the UXO zone. “This is another form of delay for Hawaiians.”
No one can say for sure when relief will arrive. In one area, the state initially projected that the construction of 400-plus homes would be completed by next year. It paved streets, poured sidewalks, erected street lights and installed fire hydrants and road signs. But in 2015 it halted construction amid the federal funding freeze; not a single home has been built. Today, weeds and other vegetation are slowly overtaking the empty lots.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the remediation effort, has been plagued by shoddy work and multiple regulatory disputes, according to an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. In one case, after state regulators raised concerns, the Corps rebid a contract to assess the UXO risk on the largest Native parcel in the region, prolonging a process that is years behind schedule.
The previously unreported details, laid bare in interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public records requests, provide further evidence of how government agencies have bungled the timely return of Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands. The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported in 2020 and 2021 how the state was largely bypassing low-income and homeless Hawaiians because of the pricey homes it developed and how the federal government effectively circumvented a reparations law, depriving the program of prime properties suitable for housing. Today, more than 28,000 beneficiaries — the term for people who are at least 50% Hawaiian — are currently waiting for lots statewide, including nearly 6,000 seeking housing on the Big Island.
For its part, Army Corps officials said they are committed to clearing the Native lands as soon as possible. “Keep in mind we’re trying to help,” said Loren Zulick, who until recently served as the Corps’ program manager for Waikoloa, in an interview. But, he added, “our driving factor is to clean up contamination and protect human health and the environment.” In a written response to the news organizations’ findings, the Corps said it is “committed to getting the remediation done right to ensure these areas are safe” and that every acre that goes through the process “is a success toward restoration of lands.”
HUD also defended its Waikoloa policy, saying in a statement that it was developed “to ensure the safety of all occupants of HUD housing, including Native Hawaiians.”
Local leaders, however, say the government needs to move faster to fulfill its obligations to Hawaii’s indigenous people.
“It’s just common sense, common courtesy, basic values everyone is taught as children: If you break it, fix it,” said Robin Danner, chair of the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the largest beneficiary group in the state. “We have the most powerful military on the planet. It’s just unacceptable that the UXO debacle is still ongoing, truly hurting families, keeping them from using our land.”
A Deadly History
After World War II broke out, the U.S. used large swaths of undeveloped land in the Waikoloa region for so-called live-fire exercises, in which Marines trained in battle-like conditions with artillery shells, rockets, grenades, tank rounds and other arms. It was one of several places in Hawaii that the military used for such training. Officials estimated that about 10% of the munitions failed to detonate during the Waikoloa maneuvers, so before leaving in 1946, the military conducted a cleanup operation. Technicians methodically walked the grounds looking for unexploded arms and debris, which were then destroyed or hauled away.
But over the years, there have been a handful of accidents. In 1954, two ranch workers were killed and three colleagues injured when an old mortar shell exploded near them. The accident prompted another round of cleanup, but that effort failed to catch many remaining munitions too: In 1983, two more people, soldiers involved in a military exercise, were injured when an old shell exploded.
Despite the risks, development marched forward throughout the region. The UXO status of the lands was hazy in those early decades, before the Corps took on a formal role. Many property owners assumed that the prior cleanups made their land safe to develop, and those who were unsure hired UXO experts to guide construction. Coastal resorts, shopping centers, residential subdivisions, parks and other developments gradually popped up.
Among the developers was the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which manages nearly 12,000 acres within the UXO zone as part of the land trust. It was set up in 1921 by Congress to help a people then headed toward extinction. The state took over management in 1959 as a condition of statehood. Under the program, anyone who is at least 50% Native Hawaiian is entitled to lease land for $1 a year and either build or buy a home on it. Over the years, scores of beneficiaries did so within Waikoloa. Both the state and federal governments, as overseers of the trust, are legally bound to ensure the program’s success.
Government remediation efforts picked up again in the 1990s, after federal legislation resulted in the Army Corps being given responsibility for clearing former defense sites such as Waikoloa. And building continued without controversy until 2014, when a Native Hawaiian beneficiary in Puukapu, the same community where Ross lives, applied for a home loan to renovate his residence, as others had before him. This time, though, the lender rejected his application, largely because an appraiser noted that the property was in a UXO zone.
The loan denial alarmed local HUD officials, whose agency had provided millions of dollars each year to DHHL for lot development and housing assistance, including loans to eligible Hawaiians to purchase or build homes on trust land. Federal officials told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that they were previously unaware of the unexploded ordnance issue, which local and state environmental reviews had not adequately addressed. DHHL said it conducted such a review before starting construction on a nearby subdivision in 2012, but that it didn’t uncover any UXO. Nevertheless, once HUD learned of the potential contamination problem in the region, it imposed a freeze on funding and HUD-backed mortgages until safety concerns were addressed.
To comply with the policy, DHHL began putting UXO disclosure provisions in the new land leases it awarded to Native Hawaiian beneficiaries. The designation prevented those leaseholders from obtaining government-insured mortgages until the UXO problem in their specific community was resolved. In fact, some lenders had already stopped lending on Native lands in the Waikoloa area.
Regulators Raise Red Flags
Hundreds of Native Hawaiians looked to the Army Corps to step up its work so the freeze could be lifted. Months, however, turned into years. “My balloon is deflated,” said Leolani Kini, 65, whose plans to build a home on the Big Island are on hold. “It’s heartbreaking for me every day.”
Kini and other Hawaiians were counting on the Army Corps to review two key areas.
One was Puukapu, the mostly rural area where Ross lives and Kini wants to move. It’s the largest trust parcel in the UXO zone and includes nearly 450 lots leased by beneficiaries. The other area was Lalamilo, the location of the unfinished 400-home subdivision.
Given the limitations of technology and other factors, all parties acknowledge, it’s impossible to remove all munitions from the UXO zone. Hawaii’s rugged terrain and high iron levels, for instance, interfere with the digital equipment used to search for buried bombs. Instead, the cleanup goal is to reduce the UXO risk to “negligible.” But over the past several years, state health department documents reveal its regulators have raised significant questions about how the Corps performed its assessments in both areas.
In Puukapu, the department issued a scathing response to an initial Corps report, saying “there appears to be intentional efforts to omit and obscure relevant data.” Regulators also objected to the Corps’ finding in the 2018 report that the UXO risk was acceptable and no further action was needed.
“They basically were saying, ‘Hey, we’re done,’” said Sven Lindstrom, the health department regulator who oversees the Corps’ remediation work. “And we were like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, we need to talk about this more. You need to allay our concerns that there might still be hundreds of munitions items at this site.’”
The Corps took two years to respond, and after that it had to hire another contractor to help complete the report, which still isn’t finished.
In Lalamilo, regulators questioned the effectiveness of new technology the Corps is using to detect munitions, as well as the reliability of its past sweeps of the area. The skepticism was driven by a series of discoveries by workers in other parts of the UXO zone that the federal agency had previously designated as clear. In 2018, for example, they discovered large fragments on the ground and a foot-long projectile just steps away from a low-income apartment complex. The old shell, which still had the potential to explode, was buried just three inches below the surface.
To allay concerns, the Corps analyzed nine past sweeps of the area that includes Lalamilo. The results, however, were far from reassuring. As it did in Puukapu, the agency backed away from its initial assessment, telling the state it had low confidence in the effectiveness of its prior work. The Corps is now doing a new, more comprehensive sweep of Lalamilo, using state-of-the-art equipment, and is discussing the data with regulators as the work progresses. The technology dispute, however, remains unresolved.
Meanwhile, Native Hawaiian beneficiaries regularly drive by the subdivision site, just off the main road into Waimea. About a dozen told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that they often wonder when the project will get back on track. The site’s 2012 groundbreaking sign, which is still standing, touts the name of Gov. Neil Abercrombie. He left office eight years ago.
In response to questions from the news organizations, the Corps acknowledged that the remediation process is time-consuming. But the agency won’t sacrifice quality for speed, according to Lt. Col. Ryan Pevey, who heads the Corps’ Hawaii operations. “At the end of the day, it’s about the safety of the people of Hawaii and the environment,” he said in an interview. The Corps said it is highly confident that the Puukapu assessment, once completed, will allay the state’s concerns and show that hundreds of UXO will not be left in the ground.
The trust lands have been getting special attention in recent years, officials added. “It is a priority for us to try to help the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands with their needs for people who are trying to get loans on their properties,” said Zulick, the former Waikoloa program manager.
The Corps said Lalamilo is currently ranked No. 1 among its Waikoloa priorities and Puukapu is third, designations that direct resources to expedite the UXO work. Just a few years ago Puukapu was No. 22 — a reflection of the fact that the area had not been used as intensively for live-fire training as other sectors, according to the Corps. Some beneficiaries believe no remedy is needed in Puukapu. They say people have worked the land there for decades without incident, and many express frustration that the Corps is taking so long to assess a site they believe is safe.
William J. Aila Jr., who oversees DHHL and the 203,000-acre land trust, reflected on the balance that must be struck to successfully resolve the UXO problem. “Obviously, we would like to see this effort proceed faster, but we understand the Army Corps has a process, and we want them to do a thorough job,” Aila said in a statement.
Native Hawaiians Pay the Price
Native Hawaiians are paying the price for the delays — sometimes, quite literally.
Shirley Gambill-De Rego, a Big Island mortgage manager, recalled the case of a man who, after learning of the UXO delay, paid a private company $25,000 to sweep his mother’s land in Puukapu so he could get a loan to replace her aging home. Given that his mother was elderly, the man concluded that he couldn’t afford to wait for years for the Army Corps to do its job, said Gambill-De Rego, who ultimately helped the family get financing for construction. The new home was completed about seven years ago. The mother has since died.
Others have also had to dip into their own pockets.
Rocky and Kamala Cashman moved to Puukapu with designs for a new home in 2014. The retirees, who were in their 70s at the time, set up shop in a temporary trailer, expecting to live there for a year at most while workers constructed their new prefabricated home. But just before building began, their bank canceled the loan because it was no longer insurable due to the UXO problem. Other lenders subsequently turned them down as well. As a result, the trailer became their home for the next five years.
The rented camper, which measured 240 square feet, had just enough room for a king-sized bed, a bathroom and a small refrigerator. The couple made meals with a toaster oven, microwave, electric frying pan and rice cooker. While the living situation was cramped, Kamala Cashman said, it was offset, in part, by the natural beauty of their five-acre lot, which featured expansive mountain views. “We made it work,” she said.
The financial cost, though, was significant. On top of renting the trailer, the Cashmans paid to lease two shipping containers to hold their household belongings and a third to store the wood and other materials for their new home. Their total five-year rental tab came to about $60,000.
Then, in 2019, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, an advocacy organization for Hawaii’s indigenous people, stepped in. The group agreed to lend the Cashmans $300,000 through a program designed to assist Hawaiians unable to get more conventional financing. The council approved the loan even though the UXO assessment in Puukapu was still ongoing.
“I knew if we didn’t step in and help, this family would still be in the trailer,” said Kuhio Lewis, the council’s chief executive officer.
The Cashmans moved into their new home in 2020. The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath cedar-and-redwood residence spans about 2,500 square feet of living space — more than 10 times the size of their rented trailer — and features a dome-shaped great room and a wraparound balcony facing Mauna Kea.
“It’s sad that it took five years for us to move into something that should’ve happened in a few months,” said Kamala Cashman, who is now 81.
“That shouldn’t be happening at their age,” added Noe Aiu, Cashman’s daughter.
The HUD freeze is impacting Native Hawaiians in other ways too.
Those who have wanted to sell their homes in the region have had to look for all-cash buyers because of the unavailability of financing. And some have been unable to refinance existing mortgages, which prevented the homeowners from taking advantage of record-low interest rates in 2021. Rates have since rebounded to two-decade highs.
The result, advocates say, has been that Native Hawaiians have been deprived of building financial equity during a period in which Hawaii real estate values have soared. If any other group were denied such an opportunity, government officials would “move mountains to turn that faucet back on,” said Rolina Faagai, vice chair of Hawaiian Lending … Investments, a beneficiary-run organization that helps Hawaiians obtain mortgages on trust lands. “Not for our community. Why is that?”
A Plea for Help
Given how long beneficiaries have suffered under the freeze, Native Hawaiians and their advocates are now calling for the Corps and the state’s congressional delegation to expedite remediation.
“They’ve got to prioritize this,” said Lewis, head of the Native Hawaiian advocacy council, citing the state and federal governments’ long-standing legal duty to beneficiaries as overseers of the land trust. “This is a trust obligation to Native Hawaiians, an obligation that is being unfulfilled, unmet.”
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reached out to Hawaii’s four members in Congress about the Waikoloa cleanup process. Just two responded: U.S. Sens. Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz.
Hirono did not answer the news organizations’ questions but issued a general statement saying more needs to be done to ensure the governments’ trust obligations are fulfilled.
Schatz was more specific. In written responses, he said he would push for more funding to speed up the cleanup effort to help ensure no one waits longer than needed. “It’s a dangerous job that understandably takes time,” he said of the remediation work. “But for beneficiaries, every delay in the process has a real impact.”
In recent years, Congress has approved additional monies for Waikoloa, according to Schatz, who sits on the Senate’s appropriations committee. A decade ago, the project was getting about $10 million annually. This year, the total hit more than $18 million, a record, Schatz said. Much more, however, is needed. The Corps estimates $375 million will be required to finish the job.
Danner, the beneficiary leader, urged DHHL to help supplement the remediation effort. “If the lots were good enough to issue to our families, then they are good enough for DHHL to spend resources to clear the lands for safety,” she said. But the department, which received a record $600 million from the state this year to boost the Native Hawaiian homesteading program, said the federal government is obligated to pick up the tab and should.
For now, Ross continues to wait. Several years ago, she added a second room to her shack and now has running water and a power generator. But she is losing hope that she’ll ever see an actual house.
“There’s a lack of concern for the Hawaiian people,” she said. “So we’ll just continue to be successful on our trust land.”
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