13 February 23
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Italy’s far right has misguidedly claimed the medieval poet as one of its own for more than a century.
For Giorgia Meloni, the first prime minister since World War II to lead a party rooted in Italy’s fascist past, Dante has become a patron saint. In one video from early in her run for office, she intoned three verses from the Divine Comedy, gushing about the author as “authentically Italian, authentically Christian.” Dante, she declared, was no less than“the father of our identity.” Others in her coterie agree. The newly appointed Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano who, like Meloni, once belonged to a now-defunct neofascist party, said in a recent interview that he viewed Dante as “the founder of right-wing thought in our country.”
The far right didn’t bring Dante out of obscurity. He has, of course, been one of Italy’s most revered literary figures for centuries. But to understand how his veneration reached a new level, one must look to Meloni’s historical predecessors, the original fascists. It was their obsession that kicked off the current Dante craze, and the reasons behind it are threefold: a straightforwardly chauvinist claiming of the man long acknowledged as Italy’s national poet (a little like if an extreme-right British party raised the banner of Shakespeare); a belief that Dante foretold in his work the rise and necessity of a dictatorial figure; and a reading of his political and social writing through a reactionary lens.
In 1921, a year before the march on Rome that resulted in Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, some 3,000 fascist militia members, supporters of Mussolini, launched a “march on Ravenna,” during which they occupied Dante’s tomb, and eventually the whole city. The Fascist Party’s official hymn boasted about having brought to life “Alighieri’s vision,” while Mussolini’s government made the Divine Comedy a compulsory read in all Italian high schools and encouraged propaganda that compared the leader to the poet. The regime even planned the construction of a monument called the Danteum, though it was never built.
The idea of Dante as a father of the Italian nation gained traction in the 19th century, when intellectuals began to harbor aspirations of a united country for the then-divided peninsula. “Italy had a weak identity; it needed a unifying figure, and Dante was ideal,” Stefano Jossa, a fellow in Italian studies at the Royal Holloway University, in London, told me. Nineteenth-century nationalists, who were at the time resisting Austrian rule, were drawn to Dante, he said, because they saw in him a persecuted rebel, a reflection, they liked to think, of themselves. (Dante had held office in his native Florence from 1295 to 1302, even serving in the city’s top governing body, until his faction lost and he was exiled.)
Jossa also noted that nationalists saw Dante as the father of the Italian language. He was part of a group of poets who popularized writing in Italian (or Volgare, as it was then called) rather than in Latin. The poet even expressed a genuine, if vague, sense of Italian identity in his writing: In the Divine Comedy, he refers to “abject Italy, you inn of sorrows” and “that fair land where sì is heard.” According to Jossa, Dante was already “part of a national mythology … and fascism appropriated this.”
But fascists, unlike 19th-century nationalists, didn’t think of Dante just as a symbol of national identity; they saw him as an oracle of their authoritarian rule. In the last canto of “Purgatorio,” Beatrice prophesies the coming of a savior, whom fascists interpreted as Il Duce. And in an essay called “On Monarchy,” Dante supported the idea of a Christian nation united under a secular monarch, which greatly appealed to fascists, according to Nicolò Crisafi, a professor of Italian literature at Cambridge and an expert on Dante.
The Divine Comedy was also weaponized by Mussolini in pursuit of some of his most nefarious policies. When his regime approved the Racial Laws, legislation that persecuted Jews and stripped them of their civil rights, it cited two verses from “Paradiso” in its anti-Semitic propaganda. The lines “be men, and not like sheep gone mad, so that / the Jew who lives among you not deride you!” were printed on the cover of the propagandistic journal La Difesa Della Razza in 1939. (Less than a year ago, Meloni referred to one of this journal’s editors, Giorgio Almirante, as “a great politician,” although she denounced the Racial Laws.)
To the relief of many of Dante’s admirers, scholars tend to agree that fascists’ attempts to use him for their political agendas were more a matter of projection than based on any truth about the great poet. According to Crisafi, although Dante ascribed to certain conservative beliefs, on other issues, “he was rather progressive, at least for his time.” Crisafi believes, for instance, that Dante saw homosexuality as a “redeemable sin,” given that, in the Divine Comedy, the sodomites could end up in purgatory, not necessarily just in hell. And the verses of “Paradiso” fascists used to justify their anti-Semitism are generally interpreted as an exhortation to Christians against moral decline, and not really as an attack on Jews.
As for Dante’s explicitly political writing, reading it through a totalitarian lens is manifestly disingenuous. What was perceived in Mussolini’s time as Dante’s longing for a single, divinely appointed ruler doesn’t map onto the modern notion of the strongman leader. Dante lived at a moment of upheaval, in an Italy that was “torn by constant war,” Crisafi told me. His yearning for a powerful leader was actually a desire for “universal peace.” Reading Dante as a symbol of nationalism is misleading, too, as the very concept of a nation as we know it would have been alien to Dante, according to Jossa, who put it this way: “He lived in an entirely different historical period and cannot be assimilated to any contemporary political ideology.”
In the years since World War II, Italy’s far right has adopted other literary heroes. Julius Evola, a fascist philosopher who supported Mussolini but wasn’t particularly influential under his rule, became a favorite of neofascists in the 1950s, and is today experiencing a resurgence among far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere. Ezra Pound, the American poet and a staunch supporter of Mussolini, was also a hero for these postwar reactionaries. Alongside these cultural touchstones, one should also add J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In the 1970s, the book became a source of inspiration for younger members of the neofascist party born after World War II, who found Tolkien’s anti-modern, traditionalist perspectives and his clear delineation of good and evil appealing.
But as Meloni began to establish herself as a political leader, around 2019, her far-right movement needed a cultural north star that was less niche—and less politically extremist—than Pound and Evola. It also sought a figure who, unlike Tolkien, was Italian. So, betraying a certain lack of imagination, the faction simply reverted to Dante. “The appropriation of Dante stems from the lack of a strong culture on the Italian right,” Jossa told me. “They need symbols. It compensates for the absence of a real cultural project.”
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BP CEO Bernard Looney at a news conference in London in 2020. (photo: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
BP CEO Bernard Looney and Shell CEO Wael Sawan have been candid recently: If wind energy makes them money, great. If it’s not as profitable as fossil fuels, screw it.
BP—which made more money than at any point in its 114-year history last year—reportedly intends to scale back earlier plans to shave down its oil and gas output and boost green spending, citing lackluster returns. This has to do with BP’s performance relative to peers with less ambitious emissions-reductions plans; BP has made less money for shareholders than its competitors since Bernard Looney took over as CEO in 2020. Rather than reducing oil and gas output by 40 percent through 2025 as it previously pledged, BP is now aiming for a 25 percent reduction along the same timeline. “We’re going to be driven by value,” Looney said on an earnings call last week. “That’s what we’re going to be driven by. And if we see value, we’ll do it. If we don’t, we won’t.” Looney also indicated on the call that selling off more polluting, less profitable assets to less scrutinized companies—cleaning up BP but not the planet—will continue to be a major piece of its strategy for reaching net-zero emissions. “Portfolio high-grading is a natural piece of running a good business. And we will be doing this, energy transition or no energy transition,” he said, noting that BP aimed to sell off another $10 billion by 2025.
BP scaling back renewables investment amid record profits is a little ironic: The company has consistently argued against governments imposing a tax on its windfall profits on the grounds that such a tax could reduce its spending on the energy transition. Looney reiterated this point when asked about Britain’s modest windfall tax by an analyst last week—although he also added that the U.K., in his view, “needs more gas, not less gas right now.” Researchers at Common Wealth, a British think tank, have found that BP’s payouts to shareholders last year were more than 14 times what they spent on “low carbon” activities.
Shell similarly announced last week that it will not increase its low-carbon spending in 2023. Its preexisting investments in that arena have also come under scrutiny recently. Common Wealth found the company spent 7.5 times as much paying out shareholders as on “Renewables and Energy Solutions” last year. And the nonprofit Global Witness argues that most of the 12 percent of spending the company claims to devote to lower-carbon ventures is in fact going toward rebranded gas projects, with just 1.5 percent spent on wind and solar. On Shell’s earnings call last week, freshly minted CEO Wael Sawan—previously the company’s head of Integrated Gas, Renewables and Energy Solutions—was up-front about Shell’s priorities. Asked by Scotiabank analyst Paul Cheng about whether the company would continue to accept lower returns on renewables (now targeted around 8 to 10 percent) than can be gained from oil and gas investments, Sawan said, essentially, no:
I think on low carbon, let me be, I think, categorical in this. We will drive for strong returns in any business we go into. We cannot justify going for a low return. Our shareholders deserve to see us going after strong returns. If we cannot achieve the double-digit returns in a business, we need to question very hard whether we should continue in that business. Absolutely, we want to continue to go for lower and lower and lower carbon, but it has to be profitable.
What might be interpreted as a moral failing is perfectly rational. Multinational oil companies are not charitable organizations, after all. But this challenges the win-win story that policymakers have pitched—that token public investments can attract massive private cash to get the energy transition up, running, and profitable. The theory undergirding the Inflation Reduction Act is that if the state can make cleaner energy cheaper for consumers and businesses, then investment will follow. Tax incentives, by this view, can allow companies to overcome initial barriers to entry as the state shoulders the risks of newer industries en route to lucrative private-sector returns. Shell’s and BP’s recent candor about retreating from renewables suggests that policy model may be, at the very least, woefully incomplete.
Uppsala University geographer Brett Christophers presciently argued in an academic paper in 2021 that the key factor in whether wind and solar proliferate isn’t the price of renewables but the returns that companies can expect on their investments in them. With their traditional business now more profitable than ever, the gap between the internal rate of return, or IRR, on oil and gas (10 to 15 percent) is more than what they can make on wind and solar, which has an IRR between 4 and 8 percent. “That’s a massive difference from what they’ve been delivering historically,” Christophers told me by phone. “It makes total sense to me from a pure business perspective that they would continue to focus on their core business, especially if they think demand for their products is not going to be declining anytime soon.” That it’s easier to invest in wind and solar is part of the problem, since oil and gas companies have less of a competitive advantage over other firms.
“It’s comparing apples and oranges,” Christophers said. “Oil and gas are businesses of fuel extraction, refining and trade, whereas solar and wind farms are businesses of producing and selling electricity.” The price of electricity can swing even more wildly than the price of oil, giving investors little confidence in what sorts of returns they can expect over the medium and long term. Tax credits and subsidies can make those look more attractive in the near term but don’t create a less volatile spot market for electricity. Power-purchasing agreements with particular buyers of electricity, including states, can offer more reliable revenue streams. But often large-scale renewables projects will need to compete in more volatile power markets in the United States and abroad.
Barring a dramatic overhaul in electricity markets, Christophers said, “the world is stuck on these support mechanisms” that make renewables more attractive investments. This is not, of course, a novel development for energy systems: Fossil fuel companies rake in tens of billions of dollars’ worth of government support each year and benefit from heavy-handed state policies to spur production.
Electricity has never been a free market. So perhaps it’s time to stop pretending renewables will achieve a level of self-sufficiency that has never been demanded of coal, oil, and gas. One alternative to the current model would be a greater role for publicly owned power generation, premised on the idea that governments could develop energy themselves rather than indefinitely shelling out funds to coax corporations into doing so at a profit. The IRA did offer a small gesture in this direction, by making wind and solar tax incentives available to public power providers previously excluded from them.
Economist J.W. Mason suggests, however, that more direct mandates could move the needle more than IRA-style incentives will on their own. “If you just require something, then it might actually be profitable,” he told me. “If you just say no more gas heating hookups, that change is actually going to happen.… It’s kind of hard for companies internally to do something different than what they are accustomed to doing. They may need a mandate or requirement to overcome those barriers.”
The last two years have offered an object lesson in how unresponsive the fossil fuel industry, in particular, is to prices. As fuel prices skyrocketed, oil and gas companies restrained themselves from going on a spending binge to drill as much as possible. That’s not because they care about the planet but because they care about their bottom line: Frackers hemorrhaged cash over the last decade and routinely failed to make a profit in shale, as an abundance of new wells helped drive prices and revenues down. While the same companies can fetch higher fuel prices now, they’re keen to avoid past mistakes and focus on the longer term.
Balance-sheet sustainability and sustainability for the planet are very different things, though. Despite their soaring rhetoric about getting to “net-zero,” oil and gas companies will be in the oil and gas business for as long as they can make money in it, whatever the climate costs. No one should have expected the biggest losers of the energy transition to drive it forward. At least now they’re being honest about that.
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Sepehr Khosravi, left, and Nasrin Nav, right, shout slogans against the Iranian government during a rally outside Los Angeles City Hall on Saturday. (photo: Brian van der Brug/LA Times)
The decree by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, part of a yearly pardoning the supreme leader does before the anniversary of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, comes as authorities have yet to say how many people they detained in the demonstrations. State media also published a list of caveats over the order that would disqualify those with ties abroad or facing spying charges — allegations which have been met with wide international criticism.
Khamenei "agreed to offer amnesty and reduce the sentences of tens of thousands accused and convicted in the recent incidents," the state-run IRNA news agency said in a Farsi report. A later IRNA report carried by its English-language service said the pardons and commuted sentences were for "tens of thousands of convicts, including the arrestees of the recent riots in Iran." Authorities did not immediately acknowledge the discrepancy in the reports.
The reports about the decree offered no explanation for the decision by Khamenei, who has final say on all matters of state in Iran. However, prisons and detention facilities already had faced overcrowding in the country after years of protests over economic issues and other matters.
Activists immediately dismissed Khamenei's decree.
"Khamenei's hypocritical pardon doesn't change anything," wrote Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights. "Not only all protesters must be released unconditionally, but also it is a public right that those who ordered the bloody repression and their agents are held accountable."
Authorities also did not name any of those who had been pardoned or seen shorter sentences. Instead, state television continued to refer to the demonstrations as being a "foreign-backed riot," rather than homegrown anger over the September death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman detained by the country's morality police. Anger also has been spreading over the collapse of the Iranian rial against the U.S. dollar, as well as Tehran arming Russia with bomb-carrying drones in its war on Ukraine.
More than 19,600 people have been arrested during the protests, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that's been tracking the crackdown. At least 527 people have been killed as authorities violently suppressed demonstrations, the group said. Iran hasn't offered a death toll for months. It already has executed at least four people detained amid the protests after internationally criticized trials.
All this comes as Iran's nuclear deal has collapsed and Tehran has enough highly enriched uranium to potentially build "several" atomic bombs if it chooses, the United Nations' top nuclear envoy has said. A shadow war between Iran and Israel has risen out of the chaos, with Tehran blaming Israel for a drone attack on a military workshop in Isfahan last week as well.
Meanwhile, a long-detained opposition leader in Iran is calling for a nationwide referendum about whether to write a new constitution for the Islamic Republic.
Mir Hossein Mousavi's call, posted late Saturday by the opposition Kaleme website, included him saying he didn't believe Iran's current system giving final say to a supreme leader worked any longer. He also called for the formation of a constitutional assembly of "real representatives" to write a new constitution.
It remains unlikely Iran's theocracy will heed the 80-year-old politician's call. He and his wife have been under house arrest for years after his disputed presidential election loss in 2009 led to the widespread Green Movement protests that security forces also put down. However, he himself had supported and served in Iran's theocracy for decades.
In 2019, Mousavi compared Khamenei to the former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose rule saw troops gun down demonstrators in an event that led to the Islamic Revolution.
Separately, former reformist President Mohammad Khatami urged "free and competitive elections" after the release of political prisoners both imprisoned and under house arrest.
"Reformism at least has faced a ... dead end, so people have a right to be frustrated about it as they are about the ruling system," Khatami said in a statement circulated online.
Currently, hard-liners control all levers of power in the country. Reformists like Khatami and Mousavi previously sought to change and open up Iran's Islamic Republic while maintaining its system. But increasingly, protesters have demanded an end to theocratic rule in the country.
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An aerial view of the train derailment several days after the incident, on 8 February, in Eaast Palestine, Ohio. (photo: MediaPunch/Rex/Shutterstock)
The next derailment ‘could be cataclysmic’ if action isn’t taken after the incident near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, says expert
Thousands in East Palestine, a town of about 5,000 people, evacuated, and officials warned the controlled burn would create a phosgene and hydrogen chloride plume across the region. Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble, and was used as a weapon in the first world war.
Though no one died in the accident, the catastrophe serves as a wake-up call to the potential for more deadly freight rail derailments, public health advocates warn. By one estimate, 25 million Americans live in an oil train blast zone, and had the derailment occurred just a few miles east, it would be burning in downtown Pittsburgh, with tens of thousands of residents in immediate danger.
Ineffective oversight and a largely self-monitoring industry that has cut the nation’s rail workforce to the bone in recent years as it puts record profits over safety is responsible for the wreck, said Ron Kaminkow, an Amtrak locomotive engineer and former Norfolk Southern freight engineer.
“The Palestine wreck is the tip of the iceberg and a red flag,” said Kaminkow, who is secretary for the Railroad Workers United, a non-profit labor group that coordinates with the nation’s rail unions. “If something is not done, then it’s going to get worse, and the next derailment could be cataclysmic.”
About 4.5m tons of toxic chemicals are shipped by rail each year and an average of 12,000 rail cars carrying hazardous materials pass through cities and towns each day, according to the US Department of Transportation.
The latest accident comes after 47 people were killed in the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in 2013 when a runaway train exploded. In February 2020, a crude oil train derailed and exploded outside Guernsey, Saskatchewan, and an ethanol train in Kentucky derailed and burst into flames a week later.
The Pittsburgh region alone has seen eight train derailments over the last five years, according to the public health advocacy group Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh (RPPP), and about 1,700 annually occur nationally. The causes of the Pittsburgh accidents highlight the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. A crack in a track ignored by rail companies caused a 2018 derailment, while another train hit a dump truck at a crossing with inadequate safety equipment. A broken axle on a train car is thought to be the source of the East Palestine accident.
Up to 50% of volatile Bakken crude oil refined on the east coast currently runs through metro Pittsburgh, RPPP estimated, and about 176,000 Pittsburghers live in the derailment blast zone.
Rail traffic is projected to increase through the region as a new Shell plastic plant comes online and rail infrastructure, like tracks and bridges, are in a precarious state, said Glenn Olcrest, founder of RPPP.
“The railroads are playing Russian roulette with Pittsburgh,” he said. “We are a prime candidate for a major derailment and explosion.”
Still, the US transportation department (DoT) in 2020 approved a rule to allow liquified natural gas, or LNG, to be shipped via rail with no additional safety regulations. Trains can now run 100 or more tank cars filled with 30,000 gallons of the substance, largely from shale fields to saltwater ports.
The decision was opposed by local leaders, unions, fire departments and the NTSB.
“The risks of catastrophic LNG releases in accidents is too great not to have operational controls in place before large blocks of tank cars and unit trains proliferate,” the NTSB wrote in a comment on the proposed rule.
Just 22 train tank cars filled with LNG hold the same amount of energy as the Hiroshima bomb, a coalition of environmental groups wrote in comments to regulators opposing the LNG rail rule change in 2020. That is raising fears of a catastrophe if a proposed LNG port is built in New Jersey, which could take shipments from two 100-car trains daily that would run through nearby metro Philadelphia.
An LNG fire is extremely difficult for local crews to contain, and shipping it via rail is “an extremely dangerous practice”, said Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Kimberly Ong.
“We’ve been astonished by the effect that the spillage of five cars of vinyl chloride has had at the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, but that would be nothing compared to the effects of a similar derailment of LNG,” she added.
In Florida, plans to expand passenger rail service also seem designed to increase LNG shipment capacity by the company behind the effort, said Susan Mehiel, coordinator of the Alliance for Safer Trains. The public safety advocacy group fears higher-speed passenger trains sharing tracks with freight trains carrying LNG and other chemicals could ignite a disaster like that in East Palestine.
Eastern Ohio is less dense than most of where Florida’s lines run, Mehiel added. An LNG explosion in denser east Florida would likely be much more deadly, she said.
“There’s no evacuation because you’re dead, so it’s very frightening,” Mehiel said.
Under the Biden administration, the transportation department has proposed a suspension of the Trump-era LNG rule allowing the substance to be transported via rail and to replace it with a new rule. The suspension was supposed to be published by June 2022, but it and the new rule have been delayed twice, and are now supposed to be final in March, Ong said.
“I don’t know if this is a priority for DoT,” she added.
The Railroad Workers United pinned the threat on rail industry cuts to inspection staff and the elimination of safety protocol. The East Palestine train was hurried, the non-profit said in a statement, and though a cause hasn’t been fully determined, it appears the train was not properly inspected.
Rail companies laid off more than 20,000 rail workers during a year period in 2018-2019, representing the biggest layoffs in rail since the Great Recession, and the nation’s rail force has dipped below 200,000 – the lowest level ever, and down from 1 million at its peak.
“They have cut the hell out of the workforce, and there are big plans to cut it further,” Kaminkow said. “Just because the rail companies are profitable doesn’t mean they’re healthy.”
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George Santos and Ted Cruz. (photo: Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters)
George Santos is allowed to effectively solicit donations to… pay himself.
The Cruz decision, handed down in June, eliminated the previous $250,000 cap on loans candidates can recoup with money raised after an election. It drew swift condemnation from campaign finance reform advocates—as well as the Court’s three liberal justices—who saw it as an invitation to corruption.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the ruling “greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.”
Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at bipartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, told The Daily Beast that Santos is a “prime example” of why the decision poses a “major problem for democracy.”
“The ruling was egregiously bad as far as ‘the appearance of corruption,’ at a minimum,” Ghosh said, referring to one of the legal hurdles the Cruz case had to clear. “Before the Cruz decision, there’d be a limit on how much he could pay himself back after the election. But now there’s no limit, so the potential for corruption is enormous.”
That means Santos—and any other candidate—can solicit contributions that donors know will go not just to his campaign, but to his personal bank account.
“Santos can now literally tell donors, ‘I’m in office and need money to pay back loans, what can you do for me?’” Ghosh said. “The clear implication is that donors would see someone who is in Congress who they can give money to, knowing the money will end up in their pocket, so they might be able to get something in return. That’s a major problem for democracy.”
Santos has claimed that he loaned his campaign $705,000 from money he paid himself through his company, the Devolder Organization, specifying in a Newsmax interview last week that the funds came from “dividends.” (Santos’ most recent financial disclosure claims he received two forms of payment from the Devolder Organization—a $750,000 salary as well as between $1 million and $5 million in dividends, in each of the two preceding years.)
But questions linger about the true source of the money.
In fact, those questions even apply to Santos’ first campaign, in 2020. At the time, he loaned his political operation $81,250, FEC records show, while claiming an income of just $55,000 from LinkBridge Investors, with no other assets, according to that year’s financial disclosure. It’s not immediately clear how Santos could have made those loans. But in 2022, he upped the campaign loans to $705,000, along with $27,000 to his leadership PAC, while suddenly showing an income in the millions from the Devolder Organization. (Santos has so far repaid himself $25,000 from his leadership PAC and $31,200 from his 2020 campaign, in various small installments.)
In January, CLC, Ghosh’s organization, filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission arguing that, given the opacity surrounding the large amount of money Santos apparently made in very little time, the loans could have been part of a straw donation scheme. In other words, the “loans” could in reality be campaign donations from other people that Santos routed through his company, evading federal contribution limits.
The Daily Beast previously revealed four clients of the Devolder Organization, all of whom have ties to major Santos campaign donors. We identified a fifth major donor with Devolder ties earlier this month.
The possibility that the money wasn’t Santos’ to begin with adds another layer to the implications from the Cruz ruling—not just the potential for candidates to fully reclaim their investment, but to enrich themselves.
“When a candidate loans money to their campaign, it’s supposed to be theirs, or from a lending institution,” Ghosh said. “But we believe that Santos got that money from someone else. So one scenario here is that Santos could possibly enrich himself—basically laundering money through his campaign, and then putting that money back into his own pocket.”
Those 2022 loans came in three installments: $80,000 in June 2021; $500,000 on March 31, 2022; and $125,000 on Oct. 26, 2022.
The $500,000 donation came the same day that New York courts struck down a Democratic redistricting effort, a move that dramatically shifted Santos’ election prospects from long-shot to a strong favorite. (A Devolder Organization maxed out to Santos the same day, The Daily Beast previously reported.) And while the Cruz case wasn’t decided until June, it had been considered a fait accompli for the Court’s conservative majority months before Santos made that major loan.
But when it comes to the issue of corrupt candidate loan repayments, Santos’ case might be the exception that proves the rule. Because his extraordinary scandals have drawn national attention to his finances since his election—along with a federal investigation—he may have a hard time finding donors willing to put their name on contributions.
And two of his largest 2022 backers—entrepreneur Matthew Bruderman and insurance mogul James Metzger—have told The Daily Beast through representatives that they now condemn Santos, with Bruderman having already demanded a refund.
“Like so many other residents of the 3rd Congressional District, Mr. Bruderman and his family were fraudulently induced to support Mr. Santos. Mr. Bruderman has formally requested the return of all funds contributed by him and members of his family in support of Mr. Santos’ candidacy,” a Bruderman representative said in a statement. “He believes strongly that this kind of deceit is deplorable, undermines public trust in our institutions and Mr. Santos should have no place in public life.”
A representative for Metzger wrote that his contributions “were made in good faith,” and that “Mr. Metzger believes that the misrepresentations made by Mr. Santos to all who supported his campaign demonstrated his total lack of personal integrity.”
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Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, arrives for a closed-door briefing for Senators about the Chinese spy balloon at the U.S. Capitol Feb. 9, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Defense officials on Sunday night declined to identify what the three objects shot down over the weekend might be.
Defense officials on Sunday night declined to identify what the three objects shot down over the weekend might be, raising questions over the threat the objects could have represented to civilians across North America, what the purpose of the objects was, and why there has been a rash of detections and responses with fighter planes and guided missiles.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, said he was certain that the initial episode, the downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon off the U.S. East Coast on Feb. 4, “was clearly a balloon. These are objects. I’m not able to categorize how they stay aloft.” The general also declined to rule out any possibility, including whether the objects were extraterrestrial in origin.
After the general’s remarks, a Defense official who requested anonymity to speak about a developing situation said that there is “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
In terms of the Chinese balloon, said Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of Defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, “we had a basis and intelligence to know definitively that its point of origin was the People’s Republic of China.” No such certainty exists with the subsequent three objects.
After the initial episode, NORAD shifted its approach to monitoring the airspace over North America, Dalton added. That effort involves “more closely scrutinizing our airspace … including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we’ve detected over the past week,” she said.
The latest object was first detected on Saturday at 4:45 p.m. over Canada. It entered U.S. airspace a short time later, eventually falling off the radar over Montana and reappearing over Wisconsin. By that time, U.S. F-16 and Canadian F-18 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept it. One F-16 knocked it down with a Sidewinder missile over Lake Huron, where it likely fell into Canadian waters, VanHerck said.
President Joe Biden gave the order to take out the object based on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and military leadership, according to a Defense Department statement.
Although military officials did not assess it to be a threat to anything on the ground, the object’s path and altitude raised concerns, including that it could pose a risk to civil aviation, the officials said.
“Today, a high-altitude object was detected in U.S. airspace over Lake Huron. NORAD launched Canadian and U.S. aircraft to investigate and the object was taken down in U.S. airspace by U.S. aircraft,” Canada’s defense minister, Anita Anand, said in a statement. “We unequivocally support this action, and we’ll continue to work with the U.S. and NORAD to protect North America.”
Two U.S. House members from Michigan, Republican Rep. Jack Bergman and Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, confirmed earlier on Sunday that pilots from the Air Force and National Guard had taken out the object above Lake Huron.
“We’ll know more about what this was in the coming days, but for now, be assured that all parties have been laser-focused on it from the moment it traversed our waters,” Slotkin said on Twitter. She added in a later tweet: “We’re all interested in exactly what this object was and its purpose.”
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) tweeted: “I’m glad the object was neutralized over Lake Huron and I’ll continue pressing DoD for transparency.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking after receiving a briefing from national security adviser Jake Sullivan on the objects from Friday and Saturday, said on Sunday that U.S. national security officials believed them to be balloons.
“They believe they were, yes, but much smaller than the — than the one — the first one,” Schumer said on ABC’s “This Week.” Both objects shot down this week flew at 40,000 feet, so “immediately it was determined” they posed a threat to commercial aircraft, which fly at the same level, Schumer said.
A Pentagon spokesperson wouldn’t go as far as Schumer on Sunday.
“These objects shot down on Friday and Saturday were objects and did not closely resemble the [People’s Republic of China] balloon,” Sabrina Singh said. “When we can recover the debris, we will have more for you.”
Following criticism for moving too slowly in taking down the Chinese spy balloon that floated over the U.S. this month, the Biden administration downed an unidentified cylindrical object over Alaskan airspace on Friday, and — after discussion with Canada — shot down a separate object violating Canadian airspace Saturday.
Schumer continued to defend the Biden administration’s timing on shooting down the first balloon as a different situation. That balloon crossed North America before an F-22 downed it off the coast of the Carolinas.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last week that the first balloon “was above where flight operations happen, and so any debris would have passed through national airspace.”
“We got enormous intelligence information from surveilling the balloon as it went over the United States,” Schumer said Sunday, adding that the U.S. would “probably be able to piece together” the entire balloon to learn more.
Asked by host George Stephanopoulos whether China gained intelligence regardless, Schumer said, “They could have been getting it anyway, but we have to know what they’re doing.”
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, called for an aggressive stance on taking down airborne objects on Sunday.
“I would prefer them to be trigger-happy than to be permissive,” Turner said of the Biden administration, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But we’re going to have to see whether or not this is just the administration trying to change headlines.”
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he had “real concerns about why the administration is not more forthcoming.”
“My guess is there’s not a lot of information out there yet to share,” Himes said.
While such objects “at times” have gone through U.S. airspace, the current scale is unprecedented, Turner said.
“It’s certainly a new, recent development that you have China being so aggressive in entering other countries’ airspace and doing so for clear intentions to spy, with very sophisticated equipment,” he said.
U.S. radar sensors have primarily been concerned with threats that don’t look like balloons, but may find more now that they’re looking out for them, Himes said.
Turner said the episodes spoke to a larger issue of airspace defense for the U.S., including “inadequate” radar and a lack of an integrated missile defense system.
“This is a turning point where we need to discuss — this is a threat, and how do we respond to it?” he said.
READ MORE 
A mountain rises over the exposed bed of the Great Salt Lake. (photo: CNN)
When lake levels hit historic lows in recent months, 800 square miles of lakebed were exposed – soil that holds centuries of natural and manmade toxins like mercury, arsenic and selenium. As that mud turns to dust and swirls to join some of the worst winter air pollution in the nation, scientists warn that the massive body of water could evaporate into a system of lifeless finger lakes within five years, on its way to becoming the Great Toxic Dustbowl.
“This is an ecological disaster that will become a human health disaster,” warned Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. “We know about dust storms, we know about particulate pollution, we know about heavy metals and how they’re bad for humans,” she told CNN. “We see a crisis that is imminent.”
As a so-called “terminal lake,” Great Salt Lake is fed by rain, snow and runoff but with no rivers to take water to the ocean, salt and minerals build up over time. Only brine flies and shrimp can survive in the salty water, creating a unique ecosystem that supports 10 million migratory birds. With only sail boats and paddleboards navigating the lake, it is so peaceful, 80,000 white pelicans annually nest on islands without fish.
But as the water evaporates without replenishment, the yacht basin is all mud, predators can walk to the pelican nests and the bottom of the food chain is collapsing.
“You’ve got the lake shrinking, the habitat is drying up and what water is remaining is too salty for (algae and microbes) to survive,” Baxter said.
She came to Utah to study this biology 15 years ago and soon realized that the fate of the brine shrimp is directly related to the future of Salt Lake City. When she’s not teaching biology, she visits schools, retirement homes and farm conventions to spread the word that every drop of water counts – now more than ever.
“It’s not like scientists to be dramatic,” Baxter laughed, but said there was no hesitation among the nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists who released the frightening report aimed directly at Utah legislators that said the lake was on track to vanish in five years.
Others have since joined the call for emergency measures. A new partnership between university researchers and state officials overseeing natural resources, agriculture and food have formed a “Great Salt Lake Strike Team,” and released a report this week urging lawmakers to rewrite water law.
“We have to get more water to the lake,” said Steed, executive director of the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water and Air at Utah State University and a co-chair of the strike team. “For a long time, I don’t think that people were sufficiently talking for the lake. Now, I think that we have a lot of people interested, the governor of the state and the legislature.”
As a sign of the unifying power of water, he traveled to the campus of rival University of Utah where the rooftop lab of John Lin, professor of Atmospheric Sciences, measures just how closely air and water are related.
“Air quality is bipartisan,” Lin said. “We all want clean air and to do something about it.”
The more than 2 million people who live in Salt Lake City and along the Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo already suffer some of the worst winter air pollution in the country, with tiny particulates forming dense brown clouds. Further drying of the Great Salt Lake could lead to more pollution, Lin and Steed said.
As a cautionary tale, they point to California’s Owens Lake, which was notoriously drained by developers in the 1920s to build Los Angeles and inspired the watery, 1974 noir “Chinatown.” By 1926, the terminal lake was dry and producing billowing clouds of fine, toxic dust which became known as “Keeler fog” after it forced people in the town of Keeler to relocate.
A century later, every time an Angeleno pays a water bill, a portion goes to clean up the mistake with a dust mitigation program run by the city’s Department of Water and Power after the city took responsibility. After decades of moving water and gravel to control the dust, the bill for draining Owens Lake is $2.5 billion and rising.
“It was human choices that led to that catastrophic event,” Steed said of California’s painful lesson. “We’re looking at the Great Salt Lake in a position right now to where we can avoid that catastrophe, where we don’t have to spend those billions of dollars in remediation in the future if we make choices today.”
“Obviously, there’s fights,” he said, acknowledging the old “whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting” cliché. “But what gives me hope is that we’re seeing a lot more collaboration than I have seen in my lifetime, especially around something like the Great Salt Lake. There was a time that people thought that ‘Any water that makes it there, well, that’s just lost water.’ Now we’re seeing that the stuff that makes it there is actually really important to all of us here,” Steed said.
Moonshot proposals to save the lake include a plan to pipe water from the Pacific – a costly endeavor both in terms of money and planet-warming pollution.
“The carbon equation is enormous,” Baxter said, describing the amount of energy it would take to pump billions of gallons 750 miles. “The expense is enormous. And you would be bringing salt water here, which is actually not what we need. We don’t need more salt. We need less salt.”
“I think that the cheapest solution is for the state to buy some of the farmers out of their water rights and release some of this water in the natural system,” she said. “I know the farmers that I’ve talked to, they want to be part of the solution. They live here too.”
And while she waits for minds to change, Baxter can only hope for snow after recent storms raised the lake level by around a foot.
“But last year we went up a foot and down two and a half feet,” she shrugged. “The aquifers are dry so we’ve got to fill all of that first. So, the direct precipitation into the lake gave us a foot and that’s great. But the runoff in the spring might not bring as much water as we hope.”
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