05 February 23
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Putin’s purpose in going to Stalingrad was to connect the past war to the present one, and in doing so to rouse Russian pride and warn his enemies of their coming doom. “Unfortunately, we see that the ideology of Nazism in its modern form and manifestation again directly threatens the security of our country,” he declared in a speech to a military audience. “Again and again we have to repel the aggression of the collective West. It’s incredible but it’s a fact: We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks with crosses on them.”
To grasp the enormity of this lie—the foundational lie of Russia’s war against Ukraine—it helps to know something about the history of World War II. During Putin’s visit to Stalingrad, I was rereading the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, a CBS radio correspondent who had been based in Berlin in the 1930s. So it was fresh in my mind how Adolf Hitler, in his first move of conquest, annexed Austria in March 1938, claiming it as a historical part of the German Reich, and then held a plebiscite in which 99.75 percent of Austrians officially voted to join Germany. Putin’s first move in this war was to annex Crimea in March 2014, claiming it as a historical part of the Russian Empire, and then hold a plebiscite in which 97 percent of Crimeans officially voted to join Russia.
Next for Hitler in 1938 came the annexation of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, where local Nazis, on orders from Berlin, instigated phony pretexts for a German takeover. Relentless Nazi propaganda transformed Czechoslovakia, a progressive democracy, into a hellish aggressor, and charged its president, Edvard Benes, with a litany of made-up crimes. “It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny and Weltanshauung,” the Fuhrer roared. “To the interests of the German Reich belong the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure along our frontiers their political and spiritual freedom by their own efforts.”
It isn’t all that hard to replace the German Weltanshauung with Ruskiy Mir, or “Russian world”; Hitler the protector of oppressed German speakers with Putin the liberator of oppressed Russian speakers; Edvard Benes with Volodymyr Zelensky; the Sudetenland with the Donbas; Berlin-backed Sudeten Nazis with Moscow-backed Ukrainian separatists. In both cases, incidents in the breakaway regions were ginned up on orders from the neighboring empire, giving it an excuse to invade. In the Reich Chancellery then, as in the Kremlin now, every gesture toward peace negotiations was a sham to buy more time for war. Within six months of the September 1938 Munich Conference where the Sudetenland was surrendered to Germany, Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia—and he was just beginning. Eight years after starting a war in Crimea and the Donbas, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing destruction, murder, rape, occupation, annexation, deportation, threats of annihilation, and many more lies.
History doesn’t repeat itself; it rarely even rhymes. Putin’s claim that Russia is reliving the defense of Stalingrad shows how misleading and pernicious analogies can be. It’s generally wise to resist them—this one above all, for Hitler truly was unique. But as I made my way through Shirer’s 1,100-page book, resisting the analogies required much more effort than drawing them.
Putin raises the Nazi ghost as a way not just to discredit his enemies with a false charge, but to immunize himself from having a far more plausible charge flung at him. This is propaganda as projection—a common technique of demagogues. Hitler accused the Czechs and Poles of aggression against Germany as he prepared to invade; Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden of corrupting American justice as he turned the executive branch into an instrument of his personal interests. “No puppet!” Trump retorted in a debate after Clinton suggested how Putin regarded him. “You’re the puppet!”
In Stalingrad, Putin used the historical lie where he knew it would hurt most—against the Germans. The agony of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision, after months of hesitation, to send tanks to Ukraine reflected a genuine fear among Germans—not so much that Russia would retaliate with nuclear weapons, as Putin threatened in his speech, but that Germany’s Leopards are still Panzers, that their use in Ukraine might still evoke images of Operation Barbarossa, that the country can never live down its darkest history. I was in Berlin in 2014 during the months just after Putin began the war in Ukraine, and Germans were deeply divided, with a large percentage—though not a majority—sympathetic to Russia. Friends explained that the nightmare of another war with Russia still haunts Germany, but even more, the legacy of 27 million Soviet dead in World War II remains a source of almost transhistorical guilt. Putin, who served in Dresden, in East Germany, as a KGB officer, understands that he has only to say “Nazi” for the German soul to tremble.
I would like to hear Scholz, or Zelensky, or Biden, lay this ghost to rest by reversing the charge. Germany’s Leopards will be used, at last and much too late, to help Ukraine’s military defend the country against a far more numerous and heavily armed invader. The Germans were willing to lose entire divisions in the crucible of Stalingrad; the Russians are willing to do the same in Bakhmut, and they’re sending tens of thousands more troops for a new offensive in the Donbas, where cities and villages lie in ruins. Scholz’s belated decision should be seen not as a failure to learn from history, but as one more step in Germany’s long reckoning with its crimes. The Leopards are part of the same project of national atonement as the Holocaust Memorial, in the heart of Berlin. They won’t erase the past, much less, as Putin does, deform it. They will honor it.
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Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Memphis, Tenn., on Jan. 27, 2023. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
Chief Cerelyn Davis also led the first police department in the U.S. that swore off the exchanges.
Among the objections to policing that are being revived are criticisms of a controversial series of trainings and exchange programs for U.S. police in Israel. Scores of American law enforcement leaders have attended the programs, where they learned from Israeli police and security forces known for systemically abusing the human rights of Palestinians.
Some of the Memphis Police Department’s top brass, including current Chief Cerelyn Davis, participated in the programs. Davis, who previously helmed the police department in Durham, North Carolina, completed a leadership training with the Israel National Police in 2013. While an officer with the Atlanta Police Department, Davis also established an international exchange program with Israeli police and coordinated department leaders delegations to Israel, according to an old résumé.
“We know, without a shadow of a doubt, that what takes place during US-Israel police exchanges does nothing to keep our communities safe,” Eran Efrati, director of campaigns and partnerships for the progressive group Jewish Voice for Peace. “But the exchanges refine and enhance the militarization rooted in American policing with Israeli tactics and technology of occupation and apartheid that are being tested on Palestinians on a daily basis.”
By the time she became chief in Durham, Davis seems to have changed her tune on such programs. The apparent coolness on the police-Israeli relationships came following pressure from local activists and a national campaign to end U.S.-Israel police exchanges.
In 2018, Durham became the first city in the U.S. to ban police trainings and exchanges involving Israel’s military. At the time, Davis wrote in a memo that she had “no intention to participate or initiate an exchange with Israel,” which prompted two Israeli volunteer police officers to sue her and the Durham police department for discrimination.
A spokesperson for the Memphis police department did not immediately respond to a request to explain the chief’s changed position on the exchanges with Israel.
Davis wasn’t the only top cop in Memphis to have participated in the exchanges with Israel. One of her predecessors, Larry Godwin, also trained there as part of a Homeland Security International Conference.
Godwin, who is known for having introduced the Blue CRUSH predictive policing technology to the city, spoke about wanting to adopt some of the techniques he learned about in Israel in Memphis. As The Intercept previously reported, the Memphis Police Department has a long history of surveillance, particularly of Black activists.
“We’re going to try to incorporate some things here,” Godwin told reporters at the time. “We’re doing a lot of it, but there’s still some other things we can do, technology-wise. I picked up some very good information.”
Critics of the exchanges with Israeli security forces point out that the partnerships allow for a swap of “worst practices.”
“During these trainings in Israel, U.S. and Israeli officials visit checkpoints, prisons, airports — sites of well-documented human rights abuses against Palestinians,” said Efrati, of Jewish Voice for Peace. “Participants witness real-life examples of repressive violence, watching the Israeli military repress protests in the occupied West Bank, and joining Israeli police patrols in East Jerusalem and along the militarized fence blockading Gaza.”
Training — whether in Israel or at home — has done little to address the underlying problems of U.S. policing, or to prevent violent police killings like that of Nichols.
“Most people who call for more training as a response to abusive policing have little idea what that really involves,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and author of “The End of Policing,” told The Intercept. “The kinds of training police are given in Israel is actually part of the problem because it encourages a warrior mindset in police and exposes them to practices that would be unconstitutional in the U.S.”
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Civil Rights leaders. (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast)
They leaked the documents to the press and on March 24, 1971, The Washington Post ran a cover story on the vast program initiated by the FBI in 1956 to neutralize suspicious persons and organizations. Although initially formed to target the Communist Party U.S.A., it was quickly expanded to include a wide range of groups considered “subversive.” No segment had been as central to COINTELPRO operations as civil rights activists. A wider scope of the FBI’s actions, however, was not known until Congressional hearings five years later. What came to light was exceptionally chilling—seeped in its own racism, without any checks or balances, the FBI devoted more resources to harming the Civil Rights movement than any other task in its purview.
Fourteen years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Dr. T.R.M. Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in Mississippi. An advocate of civil rights, Howard provided resources and assistance for Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old kidnapped and murdered in that state in August 1955. Since Till’s family had received death threats, Howard secured them with a safe haven during the trial. When an all-white jury acquitted two white men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant in September, Howard denounced the verdict and widespread racial oppression and terror. Howard then traveled to other cities, including Montgomery, Alabama, where he spoke at the church of a 26-year-old new pastor, Dr. Martin L. King Jr. on Nov. 27, 1955. Like at other meetings, Howard detailed the great abuses, corruption and indignities regularly experienced by Black people. And Howard openly criticized the FBI for doing nothing to protect Black citizens in Mississippi. Local newspapers reported on these speeches and FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, incensed, wrote a rare open letter to Howard in 1956 denouncing him. Hoover also opened a file on Howard, putting him and the RCNL under COINTELPRO surveillance, along with communists groups (Howard was, however, virulently anti-communist). The FBI then recruited local Black citizens to spy on Howard and others. One of these included Ernest C. Withers, a celebrated photographer of the Black freedom movement who was granted access into intimate meetings and gatherings of civil rights leadership. He dutifully reported his observation back to the Bureau, where it developed schemes for disruption.
Hoover despised T.R.M. Howard, but the director’s contempt for the young minister whom Howard met in Montgomery would far surpass the contempt he held for almost any other public figure. Hoover’s special attention to King has been depicted in numerous movies, documentaries, books, and a wide array of articles—journalistic and scholarly. Hoover infamously claimed that the most prominent civil rights leader was the “most notorious liar in the country.” FBI agents were directed to spy on King’s personal life and professional life and disrupt both. Ultimately, the FBI, over the course of more than a decade, collected hundreds of pages of surveillance on King, hours of secret recordings, and a trove of his public work—writings, and speeches alike. It even attempted to tarnish his reputation months after he was assassinated. Under Hoover’s direction, in the months after the 1963 March on Washington and King’s most famous speech, FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, head of the Intelligence Division, reported to Hoover that effective exploitation of the information gathered on King, “if handled properly, [could] take him off his pedestal… the Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.”
King was not alone. Every major advocate for Black people in the country had been targeted by the Bureau. In fact, there was little differentiation between ideological lines and Black leadership. In a meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, Hoover said in reference to Black nationalist Malcolm X and integrationist King, “we wouldn’t have any problem if we could get those two guys fighting, if we could get them to kill one another off…”
The campaign against King is best understood as a continuum of government policies that pre-date King by decades. The FBI had been, like other American institutions, inextricably tied to the ideology of white supremacy. In the 1930s, everything from the military to restaurants officially discriminated nationwide. Challenges to that archaic and endemic belief were almost always considered subversive. The predecessor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), targeted the Universal Negro Improvement Association and its leader Marcus Garvey. It also spied on Garvey’s ideological antagonist, W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as the NAACP.
Hoover’s behavior is often viewed as paranoid and even exceptional, but he operated with the full sanction of the wider state. During the civil rights movement, three U.S. presidents: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all supported Hoover’s efforts which were codified to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” targeted organizations. This would be achieved through various and sundry tools, including illegal activities. COINTELPRO used informants, agent provocateurs, infiltrators, legal and illegal wiretaps, break-ins, false correspondence, and “bad-jacketing,” which was the act of making a legitimate member of a group appear to be a collaborator with the state. Psychological warfare included calling the parents of young civil rights activists to inform them that their children had been murdered or kidnapped.
FBI agents worked with journalists to plant stories in order to discredit leadership and organizations. Across the country, the Bureau collaborated with local police to repress targeted groups. Sharing resources and intelligence, activists were arrested, fired from jobs, expelled from schools and lost business contracts. COINTELPRO even used switchboard operators and postal workers to spy on citizens, with or without court order.
Though there was a special interest in civil rights groups, the FBI used its extensive resources to spy on and antagonize a wide range of communities. The Bureau established categories for various targets, which included everything from the anti-war and women’s liberation movements, to socialists, Black nationalists, student groups, journalists, intellectuals, non-violent integrations and revolutionary nationalists. They were separated into the “Agitator Index,” the “Rabble Rouser Index,” and the “Security Index.”
After King’s assassination in April 1968, the Black Freedom Movement took a turn toward the more radical permutations of Black Power, and no organization evoked Hoover’s rage and interest more than the Black Panther Party. Five months after the King assassination, Hoover called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” In internal memos, he encouraged “hard-hitting” ideas from agents to destroy the Party. The Bureau submitted anti-Panther ghost-written articles to the press, planted false correspondence between the Panthers and other organizations and used a classic “divide and conquer” tactic to foment hostility between the Panthers a Black nationalist group, the US Organization, in Los Angeles. This last effort culminated in actual shoot-outs, multiple beatings, at least one bombing, and four Panthers dead in Southern California by 1969. With excitement over the violence, the San Diego FBI office submitted in a report:
“Shootings, beatings, and a, high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”
Hundreds of Panthers were stopped, harassed and arrested by the police across the country. Hoover explained that the, "purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.”
The effectiveness of COINTELPRO was overwhelming. Many organizations were destabilized with arrests, raids, break-ins, and killings. The most famous raid of the Panthers occurred in December 1969 in Chicago when a 14-man police raiding party killed two Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Several other Panthers were injured in the pre-dawn attack. Nationally, the Panthers insisted that the FBI and local police were involved in a conspiracy to destroy them. Hoover denied it. The magnitude of these coordinated activities, however, were not known until the 1976 congressional hearings.
Analysis of the COINTELPRO documents revealed that the overwhelming majority of targets were not tied to the Soviet Union or any foreign power. They included many non-violent Black civil rights groups, but also organizations in other communities, including the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the National Lawyers Guild, and women’s liberation movement groups.
In 1976 the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee," released a detailed report that unveiled the magnitude of the FBI’s actions and the hubris with which it functioned. The Bureau had, “at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered.” In part, it states:
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that ... the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association….
The special attention to the Black Freedom movement is sobering. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan had files, but were significantly outnumbered by files on civil rights groups. There were only two files for right wing groups. For Black nationalists, the Panthers represented 233 of 295, (79 percent) of all operations in that category. The Congressional hearings found that the FBI devoted less than 20 percent of its intelligence efforts to disrupt organized crime or to solve crimes related to bank robberies, murders, rapes and interstate theft. By contrast, more than half of all FBI targets were political organizations. The FBI was less concerned with actual criminal enterprises, like mob families, than with organizations and people who dared attempt to realize rights promised them legally.
Forty years after the Church Committee Hearings, few Americans are as universally celebrated as Dr. Martin L. King Jr. As we enter the King holiday on the last days of the Obama presidency, it is remarkable how many people, across ideological lines, continue to find utility in his wisdom. Conservatives like Sean Hannity and progressives like Melissa Harris Perry quote King alike. Just last year on Jan. 18, 2016, FBI Director James Comey met with journalists, FBI leadership and various government officials at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to honor King’s life and legacy. “Special agents and intelligence analysts now visit the memorial during their training, where they study Dr. King as part of their curriculum.” The memorial, which opened in 2011, “serves as an example of constraint and oversight in the history of the FBI and Dr. King.” J. Edgar Hoover, however, may be turning over in his grave.
In the aftermath of the revelation of these sordid policies, COINTELPRO was officially dismantled, although similar surveillance efforts continue. Comey’s remarks suggest that the FBI views the program as a cautionary tale for forging a more professional agency not marred by such corruptive forces as racism. What is most instructive about this Orwellian tale, however, is the narrative of how one person (in this case Hoover) can be such a powerful force of institutionalized—and national—corruptive activity. With further attention, of course, we see that one person is rarely acting alone.
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Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Last six years among bloodiest in kingdom’s modern history despite push to modernise
Rates of capital punishment are at historically high levels, despite a push to modernise with widespread reforms and a semblance of individual liberties. Activist groups say the price of change has been high, with a total crackdown on the crown prince’s political opponents and zero tolerance for dissent.
Pledges by Prince Mohammed – who has consolidated extraordinary powers across the Kingdom’s business spheres, industrialists and elite families – to curb executions have not been kept, the new data shows, with each of the six years that he has led the country resulting in more state-sanctioned deaths than any other year in recent history.
Between 2015 and 2022, an average of 129 executions were carried out each year. The figure represents an 82% increase on the period 2010-14. Last year, 147 people were executed – 90 of them for crimes that were considered to be nonviolent.
On 12 March last year, up to 81 men were put to death – an all-time high number of executions, in what activists believe was a pointed message from the Saudi leadership to dissenters, among them tribal groups in the country’s eastern provinces.
The report – prepared by two organisations, the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights and Reprieve – says: “Saudi Arabia’s application of the death penalty is riddled with discrimination and injustice and the Saudi regime has been lying to the international community about its use.
“The death penalty is routinely used for non-lethal offences and to silence dissidents and protesters, despite promises by the crown prince that executions would only be used for murder,” it added. “Fair trial violations and torture are endemic in death penalty cases, including torture of child defendants.”
The kingdom is considered one of the leading exponents of capital punishment in the region, with only Iran thought to execute more people a year. In the last six years there have also been slight increases in numbers of executions of children, women and foreign nationals, as well as mass executions and executions for non-lethal offences. A moratorium on capital punishment for drug crimes was recently lifted.
Prince Mohammed has introduced extensive reforms across Saudi workplaces and society, giving women more access to gainful employment and changing social norms that had, for the four decades that followed the Islamic revolution in Iran, kept genders strictly segregated and enforced an ultra hardline interpretation of Islam.
But while there was already little room for dissent under the Kingdom’s absolute monarchy, Prince Mohammed has taken intolerance to new levels, with political and business rivals subject to mass detention and financial shakedowns, and family members of officials that have fled the country being detained for use as leverage to get them back to the kingdom.
The death penalty is seen as one of the new regime’s more visceral tools.
“It’s literally a sword that hangs over all of us, any one who dares to defy him,” said one Saudi royal in exile in Europe. “It’s either that, or being disappeared. Think Gaddafi. Think Saddam. That’s where we are now.”
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Representative George Santos is the subject of several complaints made to the House Ethics Committee. (photo: Kenny Holston/NYT)
The complaint was made by a man seeking work as a House aide, whose bid for a job was rejected because he faced criminal wiretapping charges in Ohio.
The man, Derek Myers, briefly worked in Mr. Santos’s office before his job offer was rescinded earlier this week, according to the letter.
Mr. Myers said in the letter that he was alone with Mr. Santos in his office on Jan. 25 when the congressman asked him whether he had a profile on Grindr, a popular gay dating app. Then, he said, Mr. Santos invited him to karaoke and touched his groin, assuring him that his husband was out of town.
Mr. Myers’s account could not be corroborated, but a spokeswoman for Representative Susan Wild, ranking member of the House Ethics Committee, acknowledged that his letter had been received by her office.
Mr. Myers said in an interview that he also filed a report with the Capitol Police, speaking to an officer over the phone. On Twitter, he said that he was making his complaint public for the sake of transparency.
“They are serious offenses and the evidence and facts will speak for themselves if the committee takes up the matter,” he wrote.
A day before making his complaint public, Mr. Myers received attention following the release of recordings he had secretly made of Mr. Santos and his chief of staff, Charley Lovett.
Mr. Myers was charged last year with wiretapping in Ohio, after a small newspaper he ran published audio of courtroom testimony that someone else recorded and sent to him. Journalism organizations rallied around him, calling for the charges to be dropped in the name of press freedom.
Mr. Santos told the news start-up Semafor on Thursday that his office had been in the process of hiring Mr. Myers, but had decided against it because of concerns over the wiretapping charges. Mr. Lovett confirmed the same to Talking Points Memo.
Mr. Santos, a Republican representing New York’s Third Congressional District, is the subject of numerous investigations into his business and campaign finances. Mr. Santos’s communications director did not respond to requests for a response, directing the matter to his personal lawyer. His lawyer declined to comment on Mr. Myers’s allegations.
Mr. Myers claimed that the alleged harassment occurred five days before he secretly recorded Mr. Santos. In that conversation, audio of which was published by Talking Points Memo, Mr. Myers declared his fealty to Mr. Santos, telling him, “We’re all George, this is how we got here. We’re just masters of the game.”
At another point, Mr. Myers says on the recording, “I will never lie to you guys. I have no reason to. But I will lie for you.”
“You shouldn’t,” Mr. Santos replies.
In his letter to the Ethics Committee, Mr. Myers said that he was told he would work in Mr. Santos’s office as a volunteer before his employment paperwork was processed.
He said in the letter that he now believed that such an arrangement violated the House’s ethics rules, and he asked the committee to investigate Mr. Santos for his use of volunteer labor as well as for sexual harassment.
It is unclear how the Ethics Committee will proceed. Tom Rust, the committee’s chief counsel and staff director, declined to comment, and the spokeswoman for Ms. Wild said that the congresswoman would not “make comments regarding potential or pending matters before the committee.”
The Capitol Police did not respond to messages requesting confirmation that Mr. Myers had filed a report.
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People gather to protest the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24 in Raleigh, N.C. (photo: Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
In North Carolina, GOP leaders say socially conservative Democrats could hold the key to a six-week ban
But in recent weeks hard-liners in Raleigh have launched a plan to override a future veto and ban abortions as soon as around six weeks of pregnancy.
At the center of the effort are a handful of Democratic legislators with a history of voting for antiabortion legislation and who could now provide the GOP with enough votes to override a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). That group, which includes two pastors of predominantly Black Baptist churches, is facing pressure from both sides.
“I lay down with it, I wake up with it,” said state Rep. Garland Pierce (D), who leads the congregation at Bright Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Laurinburg, N.C. “When you reach deep down you want to be sure you’re doing the right thing.”
The showdown in North Carolina reflects similar efforts underway in several conservative states that have become destinations for post-Roe abortion care. In Florida and Nebraska — where laws still allow the vast majority of abortions to continue — conservatives are also pushing for six-week bans, which, together with the same kind of ban in North Carolina, could dramatically reshape the national abortion landscape once again.
Legal abortions increased in all three states after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June, according to an October report from WeCount, a research project led by the pro-abortion rights Society of Family Planning.
North Carolina has emerged as a major abortion refuge, with a law that allows abortions at up to 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The state legislature’s unusual dynamics were apparent this week after the full Democratic membership signed onto a bill that would codify Roe into law. Democratic leaders had intended the legislation to be a show of unity on abortion, though nobody expects it to pass in the Republican-dominated legislature.
“The one thing that’s clear in North Carolina is that Democrats are united on protecting women’s rights and access to abortion,” said Morgan Jackson, an adviser to Cooper. “Republicans have been crowing for months that they have a path to abortion restrictions. The Democrats closed the door on that.”
But Pierce made clear that, despite the appearance of party unity, the door to an abortion ban remains open.
He told The Washington Post that he had been under enormous pressure and that he signed onto the bill with Democrats this week to “stop the bleeding.”
“Everybody changes their mind about things and we’ll see how it goes,” he said.
“The process has just started,” he added. “This is the first quarter.”
Democrats have little margin for error.
Republicans fell just one seat short during last year’s midterm elections of securing a veto-proof majority in the state House that conservatives had hoped would propel a new abortion law. If they can win over just one House Democrat, antiabortion leaders say, they are likely to have the votes to replace the state’s current 20-week limit.
Republicans already have enough votes in the Senate to override a veto. But the Senate leader, Phil Berger, has yet to endorse a six-week ban. Instead, he has publicly backed a less restrictive, 12-week limit.
NC Values Coalition, one of the leading antiabortion groups in North Carolina, has drafted a six-week abortion ban that it is offering to legislators “as a starting point,” said Tami Fitzgerald, the group’s executive director. She said the group is starting the process of contacting Democrats who have voted for previous antiabortion legislation.
While Fitzgerald declined to offer specific names, her group is likely targeting three Democrats who voted in 2021 to pass the Human Life Nondiscrimination Act, which would have banned abortions on the basis of the fetus’ race, sex, or a diagnosis of Down syndrome but was vetoed by the governor. That list includes Rep. Michael Wray, a small-business owner, as well as the two pastors — Pierce and Rep. Amos Quick, who leads the Calvary Baptist Church in Greensboro.
Wray and Quick did not respond to requests for an interview.
For Democrats who have voted with Republicans on abortion, the issue is often a deeply personal one, said James Gailliard, a former Democratic state representative who lost reelection in November.
“We don’t talk enough about this but some of your most conservative people are Black Christians,” said Gailliard, who counted himself among the Black pastors at the Capitol who fall to the right of their party on abortion. “It becomes a real struggle for those of us who are people of faith.”
Some Democratic leaders in the state say they understand that there’s still some question as to how the socially conservative Democrats will vote on upcoming abortion legislation.
“Signing onto this, I don’t think, precludes anybody from doing anything in the future,” said House Minority Leader Robert Reives, a Democrat. But he added that he’d be “very, very surprised” if any Democrats decided to support a bill banning abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected.
In Florida, the push for stricter restrictions could pit Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who indicated on Wednesday that he would sign a six-week ban, against the Republican leader of the state Senate, who has advocated for her party to move more slowly on abortion.
Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said at a November news conference that her hands were tied until the Florida Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of the 15-week ban passed last year, which has been in effect since the summer, a decision that may not come until after the 2023 legislative session concludes. Passidomo later told the Tampa Bay Times that she would support a 12-week ban with exceptions for rape and incest, adding in a subsequent news conference in December that she had not spoken with DeSantis about the abortion issue.
In a vacuum, Passidomo would prefer not to further restrict abortion in Florida, said Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book (D), who says she is close with Passidomo and says she speaks to her regularly about abortion.
“I know her heart on this issue. She has young girls,” Book said. While Passidomo ultimately voted for the 15-week ban, she pushed for the bill to include exceptions for rape and incest — and was angry, Book said, when it passed without them.
Passidomo’s office declined to make her available for an interview.
Despite her own preferences, Passidomo may struggle to stop a six-week ban if DeSantis throws his full support behind the measure. While some Republicans fear losing moderate voters if they embrace strict abortion limits, DeSantis faces a different calculation now that he has already won a reelection landslide and is said to be eyeing a White House run. Signing a six-week ban would likely help boost his standing with evangelical voters crucial in a GOP presidential primary.
“It appears that the governor and the House support a heartbeat bill,” said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, the state’s largest antiabortion group. “The question is will that pass out with or without exceptions.”
In Nebraska, a roughly six-week ban with exceptions for rape and incest has already been introduced by state Sen. Joni Albrecht, who identifies as a Republican in Nebraska’s unique legislature, where lawmakers are technically nonpartisan.
By Albrecht’s informal whip count, she is one lawmaker shy of feeling confident she can lock up the votes needed to overcome a filibuster and pass legislation representing a significant departure from the state’s current prohibition on abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy.
“I can’t say that I’m confident, but I am very hopeful that this is what the floor of the legislature will come to know as being what is right for Nebraska,” she said.
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People look at a dead gray whale at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, Calif., in May 2019, a year when 122 gray whales died in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last year, 47 of the whales died. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Since Dec. 1, at least 18 reports have come in about large whales being washed ashore along the Atlantic Coast, according to the Marine Mammal Stranding Network. The losses are hitting populations that were already under watch, due to ongoing rises in unexpected deaths.
"Unfortunately, it's been a period of several years where we have had elevated strandings of large whales, but we are still concerned about this pulse" in deaths that's now been going on for weeks, as Sarah Wilkin, the coordinator for the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, said on a recent call with journalists.
Scientists are particularly concerned about the recent spike in deaths, Wilkins said, because the increase is being seen in "a relatively tight geographic area," and over a short timeframe.
Here's a look at what's happening, and some of the possible reasons:
Which whale species are seeing spikes in deaths?
On the East Coast, two whale species — the humpback and the North Atlantic right whale — have each been suffering a spike in deaths over the past six or seven years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The agency declared an unusual mortality event, or UME, for both types of whale. It defines a UME as an unexpected stranding that "involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population" and requires an immediate response.
Since 2016, 180 humpbacks have been reported to be stranded on the coast of U.S. states from Florida to Maine. At least seven strandings have already been reported in 2023, including four in New Jersey — equaling the state's 2022 total.
For right whales, more than 20 percent of the population has been affected by the UME that's been documented since 2017, an alarming statistic for an endangered species that was last estimated to have 350 whales remaining. The UME figure includes whales that were found dead, injured, or ill.
On the West Coast, NOAA has been tracking a UME involving gray whales. Since early 2019, 303 gray whale strandings have been reported in the U.S. If Mexico and Canada are included, the overall number rises to 608. More than a third of those deaths occurred in the first year of the UME; the numbers have fallen sharply since.
All three of the whale species in question have previously been hunted close to extinction. And while the gray and humpback whales have rebounded, right whales remain an endangered species, with more deaths than births each year.
What about disruptions from offshore wind farms?
Even early in the unexpected humpback strandings, questions were being raised about the possible harm done to whales by wind farms. Those questions have grown during the current surge, as interest is surging in offshore wind energy projects that require using powerful devices to map the ocean floor.
The questions have only grown louder in the past two months, as crews perform surveys off of New York and New Jersey to learn details about the seafloor, both to learn where facilities could be located and where cables could be run.
The New Jersey-based group Clean Ocean Action has called for a halt to ocean wind projects and an investigation into the potential harm done to whales. Local and state officials have joined that effort, along with several members of Congress.
But officials from NOAA and other agencies are pushing back on suggestions that wind farms might somehow be contributing to whale deaths.
"There are no known connections between any of this offshore wind activity and any whale stranding regardless of species," Benjamin Laws, deputy chief for the permits and conservation division at NOAA Fisheries, said in a briefing call.
The kind of equipment being used in the area isn't as problematic as projects such as marine oil and gas exploration, said Erica Staaterman, a bioacoustician at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's Center for Marine Acoustics.
"Those in oil and gas are called seismic air guns, and they're specifically designed to penetrate kilometers into the seafloor. So they're very high energy, very loud sources," Staaterman said. In contrast, she added, the tools used to prepare for offshore wind sites are "high resolution geophysical sources, and they're typically smaller in the amount of acoustic energy they put into the water column."
"Many of them are used for very short periods of time with a long quiet time in between," Staaterman said, adding that some of the instruments also produce "a very narrow cone of sound," rather than blasting it in all directions.
"I just want to be unambiguous," Laws stated, "there is no information that would support any suggestion that any of the equipment that's being used in support of wind development [to perform surveys] could directly lead to the death of a whale."
So, what is killing the whales?
Overall, experts say that human interactions are a leading factor in whale deaths, through ship strikes or entanglements from ropes and other fishing gear.
That's a particular threat this winter, when animals that are typically the whales' prey have reportedly come close to shore, NOAA officials say. That shift leads humpbacks and other whales to follow along, creating more overlap where whales and ships share the same waters.
And as Wilkin notes, whale population growth could be a factor. "As whale abundance increases, we will get more whales in different places," she said.
For right whales, the agency says human interaction is the leading cause of death. Around half of the humpback whales that have died in the recent spike have had some level of necropsy exam, NOAA says. Of that number, about 40 percent showed evidence of a vessel strike or entanglement.
Causes of whale deaths can be determined in only a fraction of cases, partly because of the difficulty of examining a whale that dies in the wild, from their huge size to the various states of decomposition that might have occurred.
For the UME affecting gray whales in the Pacific Ocean, the cause is still undetermined, although researchers note that of the dead whales that were examined, several of them showed "evidence of emaciation."
One thing the ongoing UMEs on both sides of the coast have in common is their broad scale: While historically some UMEs have been very localized, tracking maps show that the humpback, gray and right whale strandings have happened up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.
That's a sharp contrast to previous clusters of deaths, like the 14 humpback whales that died from a biotoxin in 1987 — all of them in an area around Cape Cod, Mass. In that case, the deaths were attributed to saxitoxin, which is produced by red tide algae and can accumulate in mackerel — which the whales then eat.
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