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Free-market zealots like Friedrich Hayek and others on the Right love claiming George Orwell as their own. That requires ignoring Orwell’s entire body of work defending democratic socialism — and denouncing the right-wing worldview of figures like Hayek.
Later in the story, a cryptic exchange between Winston and O’Brien obscures things as much as it clarifies them:
“You have read it?” said Winston.
“I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.”
“Is it true, what it says?”
“As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. . . .”
Notwithstanding its status within the narrative, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that Orwell intended the text of the Goldstein manuscript as a broader commentary on the question of totalitarianism. To an even greater extent than the rest of the novel, it therefore doubles as an interesting Rorschach test, alternatively recounting the story of an elite counterrevolution against popular democracy or offering a warning about where the socialist version of democracy will inevitably lead. Thanks to its rather ambiguous construction, Orwell’s fictional treatise serves up ample fodder for a variety of interpretations.
From its text, we learn that the state ideology of Oceania is officially socialist and that the party has come to power using socialist rhetoric. “INGSOC,” on the other hand, is merely one of several totalitarian doctrines in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, each of which “grew out of older movements” and pay lip service to their respective ideologies, despite being functionally the same.
“By the fourth decade of the twentieth-century,” Orwell writes in the Goldstein manuscript, “all the main currents of political thought [had become] authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.” Brought together “by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government,” the ruling caste of each totalitarian superstate consists of technocrats less motivated by avarice or individual self-interest than the pursuit of power and control as ends in themselves.
The internet era has predictably yielded a deluge of bad writing on Orwell, much of it consisting of intellectually lazy attempts at appropriation from the Right. Some conservatives who cite Nineteen Eighty-Four, in fact, appear to do so in genuine ignorance of its author’s socialist convictions.
Recent examples include Donald Trump Jr declaring of his dad’s suspension from Twitter on January 6, 2021: “We are living in Orwell’s 1984. Free speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what’s left is only there for a chosen few.” Elsewhere, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, in protest at the cancellation of his book contract by Simon & Schuster, similarly invoked Orwell while complaining of a “Left looking to cancel everyone they don’t approve of.”
In the vernacular of the contemporary right, the adjective “Orwellian” has become a floating signifier for left authoritarianism — and, by extension, is now regularly shoehorned into right-wing grievances of every kind.
Misconceptions about Orwell, however, ultimately have a deeper lineage in the conservative imagination going all the way back to one of its foundational modern intellectuals, Friedrich Hayek. In a volume of essays paying tribute to the influential Austrian philosopher and economist, no less than William F. Buckley wrote of “an age swooning with passion for a centralized direction of social happiness and economic plenitude” that would “lead us down the road to serfdom, into that amnestic void toward which, Orwell intuited, evil men were for evil purposes expressly bent on taking us.”
Hayek himself seems to have shared something like the same view, seeing in Nineteen Eighty-Four an affirmation of his famous thesis in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that the likes of economic planning and nationalization of industry represent the beginnings of an inevitable march toward totalitarianism. Speaking to the Mont Pèlerin Society in the early 1980s, he even remarked that “[Orwell] has contributed much more, than The Road to Serfdom has in its original form, to cause the reaction to totalitarianism of which the history of this Society is of course a very important element.”
“A Tyranny Probably Worse”
The most obvious rejoinder to Hayek’s interpretation, and others like it, is simply Orwell’s own words. In a 1949 letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Auto Workers, the author explained his intentions in Nineteen Eighty-Four and explicitly rejected the claim it had been written as a critique of socialism:
My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.
Several years earlier, Orwell had in fact engaged Hayek’s ideas directly in a review of The Road to Serfdom published by the Observer newspaper on April 9, 1944. Written with characteristic concision, he summarized the book’s principle claim as follows:
Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.
Frustratingly, Orwell refrained from offering any further commentary on Hayek’s absurd characterization of socialism’s influence in Nazi Germany. Rather generously, he even granted that “in the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth.” “Collectivism,” Orwell continued, “is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.”
As to Hayek’s normative prescriptions, however, he was visibly unconvinced:
Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.
The conclusion of the review makes evident Orwell’s dual anxiety about the dangers posed by either an overbearing state or an all-pervasive capitalist marketplace. He also, critically, departs from the core of Hayek’s thesis in the Road to Serfdom by endorsing the notion of economic planning:
Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.
Taken on its own, Orwell’s call for a politics reoriented around basic morality might be criticized for its vagueness. In context, though, his conclusion is explicitly a declaration of support for democratic socialism.
Orwell was certainly under no illusions that the mere fact of state ownership is synonymous with democracy or human flourishing. Collectivism — as he rightly observed in both his review and communicated in his fiction — is not inherently democratic and, as the history of the twentieth century attests, the centralized state can indeed be a formidable instrument of oppression. But Orwell equally recognized the violent and anti-democratic features of capitalism — features he associated with war, social deprivation and, finally, the inevitable concentration of power among a small handful of elites.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere, the problem for Orwell is not the state as such but whether its ethos is meaningfully democratic. Unlike Hayek, he saw no necessary contradiction between a national government assuming ownership of coal production and a state managed by the same government respecting civil liberties or freedom of the press. Had he believed otherwise, it is doubtful he would have canvassed for the Labour Party in 1945 — whose manifesto ironically drew inspiration from the very document that had first motivated an anxious Hayek to write The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek’s own understanding of freedom, which remains influential on the Right to this day, was very different. In reviewing The Road to Serfdom, Orwell had been adamant that market tyranny was “probably worse . . . than that of the State” and further impressed that welfarism and public ownership would likely continue to expand “if popular opinion has any say in the matter.” Economic freedom, as he saw it, could potentially be enhanced by economic planning so long as intellectual freedom was protected. Hayek, for his part, was so dogmatic in his admiration for markets that he once defended the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet by arguing it remained preferable to even democratic encroachment on property rights:
As long term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. . . . Personally I prefer a liberal dictatorship to democratic government devoid of liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.
Orwell and Freedom
Running throughout much of Orwell’s published writing is a deep mistrust of overly centralized power in any form. In certain respects, the anti-fascism that inspired his participation in the Spanish Civil War ran parallel to his anti-Stalinism and espoused belief — expressed in the preface of one 1947 edition of Animal Farm — that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.”
He was rightly concerned about the enforcement of orthodoxy by the state, but just as worried about the threat posed by capitalist monopoly to freedom of conscience and speech, once writing in the pages of Tribune: “Technically, there is great [press] freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few people [means that it] operates in much the same way as state censorship.” In the same article, he also wrote that the police “have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they regarded as the defenders of private property.” Contra Hayek, this was not intended as a compliment.
Contradictions can certainly be found in Orwell, and ample terrain exists from which to criticize him.
The internationalism and anti-colonialism of texts like Homage to Catalonia and Shooting an Elephant are obviously in tension with his writings defending patriotism and his long-standing fascination with Englishness. Though the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is lushly imagined and described, its essentialist conception of power could also be questioned in detail. Do ruling classes really pursue domination for its own sake? Can the authoritarian lust for regimentation and social control ultimately be separated from ideology? Was its author excessively deterministic in his understanding of language and technology?
As the Polish Marxist writer and historian Isaac Deutscher quite fairly wrote in 1955:
In [the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four] it is the collective cruelty of the party . . . that torments Oceania. Totalitarian society is ruled by a disembodied sadism. . . . In Orwell’s party the whole bears no relation to the parts. The party is not a social body actuated by any interest or purpose. It is a phantom-like emanation of all that is foul in human nature. It is the metaphysical, mad and triumphant, Ghost of Evil.
At the end of his life, the author’s ferociously anti-communist instincts enabled him to enter into an odious collaboration with the British state (despite its security apparatus having monitored him for decades). As historian Scott Poole explains:
In the final months of [Orwell’s] life, he . . . made the fateful decision to write up a list of thirty-five names of Stalinist sympathizers and bourgeois liberal apologists for Stalin’s “show trials.” It should be noted that Orwell hoped the British government would use this primarily for propaganda; this was not the type of “list” so familiar in the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunts in the United States. Still, it was an indefensible decision for a dying man who himself had a hefty MI5 file that detailed his “communist” activities and associates.
Notwithstanding these issues and questions, the Right’s abiding misconceptions about Orwell are instructive about its wider blind spots toward the Left and, ultimately, its fatally flawed understanding of human freedom. With few exceptions, the modern conservative views markets and property rights not only as bulwarks of liberty but, in many cases, has come to value them more than popular democracy.
In the Hayekian sense, “economic freedom” means the freedom of those with money and capital to impose their wills on others and satisfy their desires, big and small, absent any constraint. For Orwell, it implied something radically different, and in no way at odds with the welfare state or democratic control of industry.
Ironically, though also revealingly, the long-standing effort to appropriate Orwell for the Right has occasionally been aided by practices that are nothing short of Orwellian. A 1954 film adaptation of Animal Farm, which recast the story as an anti-socialist parable and rewrote revolutionary proxy characters Snowball and Old Major to make them less sympathetic, was financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. To this day, the introduction to the most popular American edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four quotes the late Orwell’s now famous declaration that “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.”
Omitted are the words that originally followed: “. . . and for democratic socialism.”
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The U.S. Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2023. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP)
If its spirit were more rigorously enforced.
But money does shape ideas in Washington. In 1997, House Republicans implemented a “truth in testimony” rule that required congressional witnesses to divulge US government funding they or their group had received connected to the topic of the hearing. The idea was, well, transparency.
The New York Times revealed in 2014 that foreign government funding had influenced the research and policy recommendations of Washington’s preeminent think tanks, whose experts are regularly called to testify before Congress. In response, a bipartisan group strengthened the truth-in-testimony rule to include an organization’s foreign funding, with dollar amounts for the past three years. More recently, the form also includes a section, depending on the committee, to indicate whether the expert is a fiduciary to “any organization or entity that has an interest in the subject matter of the hearing” or has registered as an agent of a foreign government.
But experts consistently evade the spirit of the truth-in-testimony rule. Democratic and Republican staffers both complained to me that think tank experts flout it, often by filing as an “individual” to avoid mentioning their organization’s funding.
Take, for example, last week’s hearing at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on “Expanding the Abraham Accords,” the normalization deals between Israel and Arab states shepherded by the Trump administration. If an expert’s organization had received donations from, say, the United Arab Emirates, a powerful, repressive petro-state party to the accords, that would have been related to the hearing’s topic.
But one of the experts appearing there did not disclose their organization’s UAE funding.
Daniel Shapiro, a former ambassador to Israel who runs an initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank focused on Israel’s normalization with Arab states, said on his form that he was speaking as an individual and did not report the UAE’s funding to the think tank. He provided a link to a general list of donors to the Atlantic Council, but House staffers and ethics experts say that’s an insufficient answer and clearly not what the question is asking. “As the Truth in Testimony form noted, Ambassador Shapiro was speaking for himself as the Atlantic Council does not adopt or advocate institutional positions on particular matters,” Richard Davidson of the Atlantic Council wrote in an email.
A representative for the House committee, in a statement, said that “witnesses are responsible for the content and accuracy of their truth in testimony responses.”
Of the other two experts testifying, one belatedly filed an amendment to his form to include funding from the UAE and several other sources, as first reported by Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton, while the other works at a Middle East-focused think tank that says it does not take foreign funding.
The UAE’s undisclosed support for the Atlantic Council “creates a conflict of interest because the UAE absolutely has an interest in the subject of this hearing,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “These forms perfectly illustrate the problems with the truth-in-testimony rule: It is way too narrow, failing to ferret out a witness’s conflicts of interest, and giving the false impression of transparency,” she told me.
And this hearing was far from the first. The inadequate rule is inviting undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Truth in testimony, and how it’s skirted
On the truth-in-testimony form, which is uploaded to the House of Representatives’ document repository online, experts can check a box whether they are representing themselves or their organization.
It’s what Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, calls the Choose Your Own Adventure problem that leads to incomplete and misleading answers. “Anyone who pays attention to this knows that people will often file under themselves as an individual as a way of avoiding having to disclose the conflicts of interest that they might face,” Schuman told me.
It leads experts to say, as he puts it, “‘I’m Daniel Schuman. I’m paid for by Demand Progress Education Fund, Demand Progress Action. But I’m testifying on my own behalf.’ Which is nonsense. You can’t separate out that stuff.”
The next issue is the lack of enforcement mechanisms.
“It’s not really clear who is responsible for policing this or what the consequences are,” one Democratic congressional staffer told me, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk with the media. “If you’re a staffer on the Hill, who do you raise this with?”
I heard a variety of answers: the parliamentarian; the Rules Committee; maybe even the Ethics Committee, though that tends to relate to members, not non-government officials; and, of course, the chairs of the committees where people are testifying — but there are few incentives for staffers to speak up. “Keep in mind this is rarely going to come from the majority who invited these witnesses,” says Donald Sherman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Ultimately, this ends up being within the prerogative of the committee to enforce.”
All of this is compounded by the tight timeline in which congressional hearings tend to happen, with the planning taking place over the course of a week or less. No one wants to embarrass witnesses, and the gentlemen’s agreement among members of Congress is that it’s uncouth to call out another party’s witnesses, for fear that there will be a callout in kind to one’s own witness. Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it “the corruption that everyone in DC agrees to pretend isn’t corruption.”
When it works, the truth-in-testimony rule helps give a better picture of not just an individual expert’s potential conflicts of interest, but how Washington works.
Watchdogs have welcomed it because it’s given insight into the funding of dark-money organizations — that is, research institutions that don’t post their donors or foreign funding online.
It’s also useful in that it shows important items from one’s bio that are sometimes omitted. In early March, former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger testified before the House Select Committee on China, and he noted in his forms that he is a fiduciary at the strategic consulting firm Garnaut Global. It was a useful breadcrumb because the firm’s website is essentially blank and contains no mention of Pottinger. The role had not been listed in his bio anywhere, but from other publicly available information it is clear that Garnaut Global is relevant to the hearing. The firm “advises select global asset managers, technology companies and allied government agencies...to navigate the opaque world of Chinese elite politics and anticipate China’s actions and impact on the investment landscape,” according to its founder’s bio elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Joe Votel, a retired general who is a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, did not note in his initial filing for the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the think tank receives foreign funding. That he amended it on the morning of the hearing — to include the institute’s grants from the US government and funding from Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — shows the importance of truth-in-testimony forms in giving a more complete picture of an expert’s recommendations. “MEI’s scholars retain complete intellectual independence, and their work, including testimony, represents their own views,” says Rachel Dooley of the think tank.
For its part, the Atlantic Council has received more than $1 million a year from the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. The program Shapiro runs, the N7 Initiative focused on Israel and Arab states, is underwritten by separate private donors. He noted in his forms that he was representing himself, though the Atlantic Council posted his testimony online.
“Our practice of posting transcripts from our experts’ testimony before Congress on issues relevant to the Council’s work in no way signals an endorsement of their positions,” emailed Davidson of the Atlantic Council. “The funding we receive from the UAE is for general support and is not allocated to fund our N7 initiative or our work on the Abraham Accords.”
But Clark says this individual-organization distinction skirts the spirit of the rule. “The scandal here is what the rule allows,” she told me. “The grant could have been about grasshoppers in the United Arab Emirates; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Atlantic Council has significant funding from a foreign government that is actually a party to the Abraham Accords, but you wouldn’t know that from this disclosure form. ... What matters is that the source has an interest in this, in the subject of the hearing.”
By contrast, the president of the German Marshall Fund think tank testified last year and thoroughly documented all of the organization’s US government and foreign funding. It was refreshing to see.
What reforms could lead to more transparency
The fact that there is the House online repository — so that when committee leaderships change parties, the documents don’t go poof — is an improvement that shows more transparency is possible. The site docs.house.gov was expanded in January 2013 to include these types of forms. The next step would to be make them even more searchable, readable, and accessible.
While committees require disclosing all of an expert’s fiduciary roles, a more ambitious idea would be legislation requiring clients to be listed in public financial disclosures.
One idea of how to beef up truth in testimony would be to institute policing mechanisms to review and evaluate the forms. The Government Accountability Office, for example, does a random audit of lobbyist registrations under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which ensures compliance. “You could have a random auditing process that provides a form of quality assurance,” Schuman told me.
Something even more straightforward, as the Democratic congressional staffer I spoke with suggested, is clarifying frequently asked questions that lays out what should or shouldn’t be disclosed on the forms. Last year, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) introduced a bill to further strengthen the rule by clarifying some of the details that are often overlooked, but it didn’t go far under the new House.
“I don’t want my facts influenced by Saudi Arabia, or my facts influenced by Russia or my facts influenced by China,” a Republican congressional staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me. “If we fix this in Congress, and we actually get testimony that’s uninfluenced by such agendas, we’re going to get better laws, we’re going to get better policy, we’re going to get better hearings.”
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Former president Donald Trump holds a pie as he greets patrons at the Machine Shed restaurant on Monday in Davenport, Iowa. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
Key Facts
Citing anonymous sources, the Guardian reports federal prosecutors in New York expanded their criminal probe into Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Trump’s Truth Social platform, at the end of last year to scrutinize the $8 million in payments.
The payments were reportedly made in two installments, with $2 million being paid to the company in December 2021—when the Guardian notes it was on the “brink of collapse” after its planned merger with DWAC got delayed—and another $8 million was paid two months later.
The payments came from Paxum Bank, which is registered in Dominica, and ES Family Trust, and the Guardian reports Paxum Bank is partly owned by Anton Postolnikov, an apparent relation of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who worked for Putin’s government until 2017 and now runs the Russian-controlled maritime company Rosmorport.
Investigators were reportedly tipped off about the payments in October 2022 by whistleblower Will Wilkerson, a former executive at Trump Media, who told the Guardian the payments initially “caused alarm” at Trump Media and executives considered returning the money but decided not to, in part because they couldn’t afford to lose it.
Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr., was reportedly aware of at least the first payment coming through, the Guardian reported, quoting an email sent to him about it to “keep [him] in the loop,” but the outlet noted it’s unclear if Trump—Trump Media’s chair—was aware of the payments and their origins, saying he “did not seem to be particularly interested in managing the day-to-day running” of the company.
Trump Media and the Justice Department have not yet responded to requests for comment.
What We Don’t Know
It’s still not clear how much legal exposure Trump Media faces for the $8 million payments, the Guardian notes, and under federal money laundering rules prosecutors would have to show they were the product of “unlawful activity” and Trump Media actively tried to conceal the source of the payments. Prosecutors are also reportedly interested in the payments because Paxum Bank finances businesses related to pornography and sex work, which are also at a higher risk of money laundering. The reported money laundering allegations and the payments’ “potentially unsavory sources” could also hamper Trump’s 2024 campaign even if they don’t result in any criminal charges, the Guardian notes, particularly after his 2016 campaign already faced investigations over its alleged Russian ties.
Key Background
Trump Media was formed soon after Trump left office in 2021, as the ex-president planned his own social network Truth Social in the wake of being booted off traditional social platforms following the January 6 riots. The company has faced turmoil over its planned merger with DWAC, first announced in October 2021, which would give the media company an influx of capital and allow it to trade on the stock market. While SPACs like DWAC are not allowed to have any mergers planned when they file their IPO, DWAC was allegedly in talks with Trump about acquiring Trump Media months before the merger was formally announced, the New York Times reported in October 2021, potentially violating securities laws. That drew the scrutiny of federal investigators, and both DWAC and Trump Media reported in the summer of 2022 that they had received grand jury subpoenas as part of the probe. The investigations have threatened the merger between the two entities, which faces a deadline of September 2023 to be completed after DWAC shareholders agreed to delay the merger in November.
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Bernie Sanders speaks at a protest in front of the supreme court this week. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP)
"Let's be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed," Sanders wrote in a statement on Sunday.
Sanders was referring to the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in May 2018.
The bill was seen as a significant rollback of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. At the bill signing, Trump commented on the previous banking reforms, saying "they were in such trouble. One size fits all — those rules just don't work," per The Washington Post.
Trump also said at the time that the Dodd-Frank regulations were "crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide."
Signing the bill into law meant that Trump was exempting smaller banks from stringent regulations and loosening rules that big banks had to follow. The law raised the asset threshold for "systematically important financial institutions" from $50 billion to $250 billion.
This meant that the Silicon Valley Bank — which ended 2022 with about $209 billion in assets — was no longer designated as a systematically important financial institution. As such, it was not subject to the tighter regulations that apply to bigger banks.
Sanders wrote in his Sunday statement that the Trump administration had disregarded all the lessons it should have learned from the 2008 Wall Street crash and the Enron scandal.
"Now is not the time for US taxpayers to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. If there is a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, it must be 100 percent financed by Wall Street and large financial institutions," he wrote.
Sanders added that the US "cannot continue down the road of more socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else."
"Let us have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, repeal the disastrous 2018 bank deregulation law, break up too big to fail banks, and address the needs of working families, not the risky bets of vulture capitalists," Sanders wrote.
For his part, Trump has claimed without substantiation that the Silicon Valley Bank run should be blamed on the "economy."
"With what is happening to our economy, and with the proposals being made on the LARGEST AND DUMBEST TAX INCREASE IN THE HISTORY OF THE USA, TIMES FIVE, JOE BIDEN WILL GO DOWN AS THE HERBERT HOOVER OF THE MODRRN AGE," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"WE WILL HAVE A GREAT DEPRESSION FAR BIGGER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN THAT OF 1929," Trump continued. "AS PROOF, THE BANKS ARE ALREADY STARTING TO COLLAPSE!!!"
A Trump spokesman told Insider that "out of control Democrats and the Biden administration have continued to pathetically try to blame President Trump for their failures with desperate lies, such as the CCP spy balloons, the train derailment in East Palestine, and now the collapse of SVB."
"This is nothing more than a sad attempt to gaslight the public to evade responsibility," the spokesman told Insider.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation shut down the Silicon Valley Bank on Friday following a catastrophic bank run. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has now become the largest bank failure in the US since the 2008 financial crisis.
The FDIC insures deposits for up to $250,000 per depositor, per institution, per ownership category. However, startups with money in Silicon Valley Bank exceeding $250,000 are now in danger of not being able to make payroll next week.
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Daniel Kelly, the conservative candidate for the Wisconsin supreme court, speaks at a training session for local Republicans in Waukesha in 2019. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
‘An organized group of insurrectionists’ is seeking to swing a vote with big implications for voting rights, redistricting and abortion
The contributions, in support of the conservative candidate Daniel Kelly, come amid a race that has broken national campaign spending records. According to a campaign finance tracker by the Brennan Center for Justice, political ad orders for the liberal county judge Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Kelly have reached at least $20m in anticipation of the 4 April general election.
The Wisconsin supreme court is currently made up of three judges who lean liberal and four conservatives. Whoever replaces the conservative retiring justice Patience Roggensack will determine the ideological composition of the court, which has been dominated by the right wing for 15 years. At stake in the Wisconsin supreme court race are redistricting, abortion rights, and voting rights and elections policy. And these decisions go beyond the state: Wisconsin has been a critical swing state in recent presidential elections, so its voting policies affect more than just state residents.
Among the election-denying funders behind Kelly’s run are anti-abortion thinktanks and Super Pacs, conservative billionaires and a constellation of groups funded by the Wisconsin shipping supply tycoon Richard Uihlein.
Meanwhile, prominent election denier Charlie Kirk of the rightwing Turning Point USA has voiced support for Kelly’s campaign. Kirk has been blamed for funding the travel of a large number of the Capitol rioters on January 6.
“There is an organized group of insurrectionists who are trying to actively fund candidates for elected office, including judgeships,” said Jeremi Suri, a professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas-Austin.
The funding comes after prominent election deniers lost their efforts in the 2022 midterms to oversee elections in swing states including Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“I don’t think the insurrectionists have given up,” Suri said. “They’re still looking for candidates, and they’re particularly interested in someone like Kelly, who, if he can get on the supreme court, will have a 10-year term and will be pretty much unaccountable.”
Looming behind the biggest campaign splurges is Richard Uihlein, heir to the Schlitz beer fortune and founder of Uline, a shipping supply company based in Wisconsin. Uihlein has gained notoriety for his financial support of groups involved with the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot and thinktanks that stoked unfounded fears of election fraud during and following the 2020 election – including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Federalist Society.
Campaign finance reports show the group Fair Courts America, Inc, which is largely bankrolled by Uihlein, spent at least $1.5m in independent expenditures on pro-Kelly television ads before the 21 February primary. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Fair Courts America has booked more than $3.9m in ads scheduled to run by 4 April.
Uihlein’s influence in the Wisconsin supreme court race extends beyond Fair Courts America. Restoration Pac, a funding vehicle that Uihlein has poured millions into, finances other pro-Kelly groups, including Women Speak Out Pac. Reports show Women Speak Out Pac has spent more than $100,000 on the primary and general election so far.
American Principles Project Pac, which has reported contributing more than $66,000 on pro-Kelly digital advertising before the primary, is also funded by Restoration Pac.
Although Uihlein dollars figure prominently in the Wisconsin supreme court race, the billionaire is one of multiple mega-donors behind Restoration Pac. The Florida private equity billionaire John Childs contributed at least $800,000 to the Pac in 2022, according to filings with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). Childs has also contributed to America First Action, the Super Pac that supported Trump’s 2020 run for office.
The Texas billionaire Brett Hendrickson, who has contributed to the campaigns of the Missouri congressman Eric Burlison, Senator Ted Budd of North Carolina and the Illinois congresswoman Mary Miller, has also contributed to Restoration Pac. Burlison, Budd and Miller have all aligned themselves with Trump in questioning the results of the 2020 election.
According to campaign finance filings, the Federalist Society chairman, Leonard Leo, contributed $20,000 to Kelly’s campaign – the maximum amount an individual donor can contribute to a supreme court campaign in Wisconsin. In addition to his work with the Federalist Society, Leo has ties to the Concord Fund and the 85 Fund, groups that have pushed the widely disputed independent state legislature theory that claims state legislatures have full jurisdiction to conduct federal elections.
Also donating the maximum $20,000 to Kelly’s campaign was Diane Hendricks, chairwoman of the multibillion-dollar building company ABC Supply. According to the FEC, Hendricks has also donated at least $4m to Trump’s 2020 America First Pac, and more than $500,000 to Trump Victory and Make America Great Again, Again! Inc.
The deluge of cash from the same groups that financially supported election denialism and Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election also played an outsize role during the 2022 elections. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Trump-allied conservative strategist Larry Ellison, for example, reportedly spent more than $40m during the 2022 election cycle.
A bombshell report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel raised questions about Kelly’s own participation in 2020 attempts to overturn the presidential election. Kelly, the report found, had provided special counsel to the Republican party, advising on the subject of fake electors. He has also been paid close to $120,000 for his work on “election integrity” by the Republican National Committee and state GOP.
Given that the winner of the supreme court race will help decide the future of legal abortion in Wisconsin, money has poured into the race on both sides of the abortion fight. Planned Parenthood Pacs promised more than $1m for Protasiewicz and the anti-abortion Women Speak Out Pac has spent at least $100,000 on pro-Kelly materials. The anti-abortion groups and funders behind Kelly’s campaign have also taken part in efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results – highlighting the common cause rightwing Christian activists have found with election deniers.
On a 21 February episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, Julaine Appling – president of the Christian, anti-abortion Wisconsin Family Council – endorsed Kelly while invoking fears of electoral fraud.
“Just take the ballot harvesting,” said Appling. “That was something that the liberals were pushing and pushing and doing these bizarre things during the 2020 election that were clearly outside the law.”
Wisconsin Family Action, Inc, which Appling also heads, has reported about $6,000 in independent expenditures to support Kelly’s election.
Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA and played a prominent role in mobilizing protestors for rallies that preceded the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, concurred.
“Dan Kelly is the best of all of them.”
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the floor the Knesset, Israel's parliament, as his coalition pressed ahead with a contentious plan to change the country's judicial system on March 13. (photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP)
Bill that weakens Supreme Court passes first reading, alongside a bill that would protect PM from removal, and another that would allow more settlements in northern Israel.
The Knesset took until the early hours of Tuesday morning to pass the first reading of the bill, which has been one of the main priorities of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his governing coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox religious parties.
Late on Monday night, in another win for Netanyahu, the parliament also advanced a bill that would make it harder to remove the prime minister over the corruption charges that still hang over him.
The bill would allow the parliament to declare a prime minister unfit to rule only for physical or mental reasons and would replace current law that opens the door for a leader to be removed under other circumstances.
Another bill that passed the first reading would allow more settlements in the northern occupied West Bank, which would lead to the legalisation of settlement outposts considered illegal even under Israeli law.
The vote comes only weeks after Israeli settlers rampaged through a Palestinian town last month, killing one man and setting fire to dozens of homes and cars.
Settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are already considered illegal under international law.
The bills voted on overnight require additional votes before being enshrined into law.
The steps were the latest in a series of moves by Netanyahu’s coalition to modify Israel’s legal system.
The prime minister and his allies say the effort is aimed at reining in an activist court.
Critics say the drive would upend the country’s checks and balances and concentrate power in the hands of Netanyahu and his parliamentary majority.
Netanyahu and his ultranationalist and religious coalition allies have pledged to plough ahead with the legal changes despite demonstrations by tens of thousands of Israeli protesters over the past two months.
Business leaders, legal experts and retired military leaders have joined the protests, and Israeli reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty if the change passes.
The new bill would require approval by three-quarters of the government, and could be overridden by the prime minister.
The proposed change to the rules overseeing the removal of a prime minister is of personal importance to Netanyahu, who returned to power late last year after Israel’s fifth election in under four years.
He is on trial on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes, and denies the allegations.
The proceedings have dragged on for nearly three years.
Good governance groups and other critics have called on the country’s attorney general to deem Netanyahu unfit for office.
Speaking to members of his Likud party on Monday, Netanyahu lashed out at the Israeli media, saying they are broadcasting a “never-ending tsunami of fake news” against him.
He reiterated his claim that the legal changes will strengthen Israeli democracy.
Opposition lawmaker Orna Barbivai said the bill was “a disgrace, which says the prime minister is above the law”.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up some 20 percent of the population, have been largely absent from the protests, in part because they suffer from discrimination in Israel and because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza Strip.
At least 70 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis this year under Israel’s new government, many of them during Israeli military raids.
It brings up the total of Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank over the past year to more than 220.
More than 40 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed in attacks by Palestinians during the same period.
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Sea ice in the Borebukta Bay on the northwestern side of Isfjorden in the Svalbard Archipelago of Norway. (photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP)
New research suggests the decline was a fundamental change unlikely to be reversed this century — perhaps proof the planet has passed an alarming climactic tipping point
The conclusion comes from three decades of data on the age and thickness of ice escaping the Arctic each year to the east of Greenland. Scientists at the Norwegian Polar Institute found a marked difference in the ice level before and after it reached an unprecedented low in 2007.
In the years since, the data shows, the Arctic has entered what the researchers called a “new regime” — one that brings with it a trend toward ice cover that is much thinner and younger than it had been before 2007, the researchers say. They link the change to rising ocean temperatures in the rapidly warming Arctic, driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
“Our analysis demonstrates the long-lasting impact of climate change on Arctic sea ice,” they wrote in the journal Nature.
Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, likened the 2007 low to a boxer who is delivered a knockout punch. All the punches leading up to it weaken the fighter, but that biggest blow is too much for the boxer to overcome.
That’s not to say Arctic ice is knocked out completely, but that it cannot quickly recover.
“You’re in a new situation, a new equilibrium, where you can’t easily get back to where you were,” said Meier, who was not involved in the new research.
The scientists’ analysis relies on data captured from the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago known as Svalbard through which sea ice regularly flows on its way to the north Atlantic. Underwater radar systems can detect the volume of ice flowing overhead, while satellites and buoys track the movement of ice and the length of time it spends in the Arctic.
They found a dramatic change occurred in 2007, when the ice research center in Colorado reported a record low sea ice cover that was 38 percent smaller than normal and 24 percent smaller than the previous record low, set in 2005.
Up until 2007, they observed sea ice at a variety of thicknesses and ages, often with bumps and ridges that come from older ice floes being packed together. But in more recent years, ice floes have been smoother and have more uniform thickness, an indication that they are younger and shorter-lived. That is a concern for a variety of reasons: sea level rise, a loss of habitat for Arctic creatures and a decline in the albedo effect, which is when ice reflects sunlight back into space. A less icy Arctic absorbs more of the sun’s heat.
Overall, ice floes are spending 37 percent less time in the Arctic before escaping through the Fram Strait to melt in the Atlantic, or about 2.7 years on average since 2007, the researchers found. The amount of ice thicker than 4 meters (about 13 feet) passing through the strait dropped by more than 50 percent after the 2007 record low.
The research reinforces past studies that show losses of nearly all of the oldest and thickest ice that once covered the Arctic, and that ice floes circulate around the Arctic and out through the Fram Strait more quickly as ice cover plummets.
The study articulates concerns scientists have harbored since the record low noted in 2007 (and since broken in 2012). At the time, some wondered if it was the beginning of an epic collapse. That didn’t happen, but there was no significant rebound, either.
Researchers have been reluctant to be too declarative on potential changes to the Arctic sea ice system as a whole because there is so much variability in ice cover from year to year, Meier said. The new study could change that, he said.
“They make a pretty good case and put together a lot of data to say, yes, there is a fundamental change and we’re in this new regime,” Meier said.
Some disagree, however, on one of the researchers’ conclusions.
“I’m not convinced that it’s irreversible,” said Harry Stern, a mathematician and sea ice researcher at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory. “If you reverse the conditions, you could reverse the changes in the ice thickness.”
The study’s authors said that would take a long time even under the most optimistic global warming and emissions reduction scenarios. Even if carbon dioxide emissions fell to zero sometime in the next 50 years, it would take decades more for the ocean to lose all the heat it has accumulated since humans began burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases.
“Since ocean heat content in the sea ice formation areas … has increased,” the authors wrote in an emailed response to questions, “we suggest that the changes are irreversible at least with current climate.”
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