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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
According to the reports, Thomas also accepted a set of red, white, and blue face paints from the same donor.
A combative Thomas told reporters that the fur pelts and horns she received were not luxury items but were derived from budget-priced rabbit and bison.
She said that she would “not let this latest tempest in a teapot interfere with all the good work I am doing on the United States Supreme Court.”
Her husband, Clarence Thomas, had no comment.
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Artem Hutorov, center, and Maksym Marchenko, second from left, after their journey from Russia to Ukraine in March. (photo: Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times)
Making a nerve-wracking 3,000-mile journey from Ukraine, into Russia-occupied territory, and back again, a group of mothers managed to recover their children from the custody of the Russian authorities.
Then came a phone call.
“Mom, come and get me,” said her son, Artem, 15. He had remembered his mother’s phone number and borrowed the school director’s cellphone.
Ms. Zhornyk made him a promise: “When the fighting calms down, I will come.”
Artem and a dozen schoolmates had been loaded up by Russian troops and transferred to a school farther inside Russian-occupied Ukraine.
While Ms. Zhornyk was relieved to know where he was being held, reaching him would not be easy. They were now on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed.
But months later, when a neighbor brought back one of her son’s schoolmates, she learned about a charity that was helping mothers bring their children home.
Since it is illegal for men of military age to leave Ukraine now, in March Ms. Zhornyk and a group of women assisted by Save Ukraine completed a nerve-wracking, 3,000-mile journey through Poland, Belarus and Russia to gain entry to Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to retrieve Artem and 15 other children.
Then they had to take another circuitous journey back. “Come on, come on,” urged Ms. Zhornyk, as a cluster of children, laden with bags and suitcases, emerged hesitantly through the barriers at a border crossing from Belarus into Ukraine. She had crossed with her son just hours earlier and pushed forward impatiently to embrace the next group.
“There are no words for all the emotions,” Ms. Zhornyk, 31, said, describing her reunion with Artem. “I was full of emotion, and nervous, nervous.”
In the 13 months since the invasion, thousands of Ukrainian children have been displaced, moved or forcibly transferred to camps or institutions in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, in what Ukraine and rights advocates have condemned as war crimes.
The fate of those children has become a desperate tug of war between Ukraine and Russia, and formed the basis of an arrest warrant issued last month by the International Criminal Court accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, of illegally transferring them.
Once under Russian control, the children are subject to re-education, fostering and adoption by Russian families — practices that have touched a particular nerve even amid the carnage that has killed and displaced so many Ukrainians.
Ukrainian officials and human rights organizations have described these forced removals as a plan to steal a generation of Ukraine’s youth, turning them into loyal Russian citizens and eradicating Ukrainian culture to the point of committing genocide.
Months of Fear and Anxiety
No one knows the full number of Ukrainian children who have been transferred to Russia or Russian-occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,000 children that it says have been forcibly transferred or deported, but those working on the issue say the real number is closer to 150,000.
Russia has defended its transfer of the children as a humanitarian effort to rescue them from the war zone, but it has refused to cooperate with Kyiv or international organizations in tracing many of them. After the I.C.C. issued the arrest warrant for Ms. Lvova-Belova, she said that relatives were free to come and collect their children but that only 59 were waiting to go home — a claim that Ukrainian officials have dismissed as absurd.
For the thousands of children who have been transferred, some from broken homes and disadvantaged families, being away from home so long has been an ordeal. Some are in tears when they call home and cannot speak freely, their parents said.
The parents, already living through the trials of Russian occupation, displacement and bombardment, have had to endure months of anxiety, fearful that their children will be sent farther away or given up for adoption in Russia.
And then there is the guilt. Some sent their children to summer camps in the Crimean peninsula, having been assured they would return in two weeks. Others simply yielded to pressure from officials and soldiers to let their children be taken. They all blamed themselves when they were not returned.
“I felt completely lost, I gnawed away at myself,” said Yulia Radzevilova, who brought her son, Maksym Marchenko, 12, home in March after he spent five months in a camp in Crimea. “No one supported me. Family, parents, friends started accusing me.”
But other children were transferred without warning or, like Artem, just disappeared.
Artem had traveled to his school in Kupiansk on Sept. 7 — just as Ukrainian troops were driving out Russia’s occupation — to retrieve documents he needed for college. No bus returned that day, so he remained overnight. The next day, Russian troops turned up and loaded him and other students into military trucks.
“They were Russian,” Artem said in an interview. “In camouflage, with Kalashnikovs.” He thought of fleeing over the back wall of the school, he said, but the teachers made sure all the children climbed on board.
When he did not return home, his mother tried to go to Kupiansk to find him, but turned back under heavy shelling. For three weeks there was no electricity or phone service in her village because of the fighting. With no word of his whereabouts, she registered him as missing with the police.
Then came Artem’s phone call. He said that he and his schoolmates, aged 7 to 17, had been taken to the town of Perevalsk, in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, where they were left in a boarding school.
He was only a few hours away by car but in territory closed off by the war.
“It was hard,” she said, shaking her head, “very hard.”
Searching for a Child With Autism
Across the country in southern Ukraine, Olha Mazur faced an even more daunting search. Her son, Oleksandr Chugunov, 16 — Sasha for short — lived in a residential school for disabled children in Oleshky, across the Dnipro River from the city of Kherson where she lived. Sasha is autistic, and cannot talk, she said.
She last saw her son in the summer. Kherson was still occupied and a Russian director had been placed in charge of his school. Then the bridge across the Dnipro was bombed and she could no longer travel to see him. In November, she saw a list online naming him among children transferred to Crimea by the Russians.
She was relieved and worried at the same time. “I am grateful that he is alive,” she said, but the school never informed her what they were doing, and Sasha had no way to communicate with her.
Parents of children in a variety of summer camps and schools began learning through phone calls with their children that the schools would let them go home, but only if their parents came to collect them in person.
Few, if any, of the mothers had the wherewithal to manage such a trek. But there are several charity groups helping to do just that, and Ms. Zhornyk had heard about one, Save Ukraine.
Founded after Russian forces attacked in 2014, the group was created to move children and their families from occupied areas and places of intense fighting to shelters or new homes. After children became stranded in Russian-occupied territory last fall, the group began to organize rescue missions. The mothers set off on that 3,000-mile journey through Poland, Belarus and Russia and on to Russian-occupied Ukraine and Crimea.
They had to navigate hostile border and police checks along the route, which included a flight from Belarus to Moscow, including nine hours of questioning from immigration officers at the airport. From Moscow they drove more than 1,000 miles to Crimea. Ms. Zhornyk split off to go to Perevalsk for Artem. Then the whole group traveled back the way they came, and back into Ukraine through Belarus.
A Debilitating Experience
There were hugs and tears when the mothers and children arrived back in Ukraine last month. And some surprises.
The children were full of stories that went unsaid in phone calls home. Many of the teenagers were able to make daily calls home. Others, like Artem, had to beg to borrow someone’s phone. There were frequent punishments, as well as pressure to sing the Russian anthem, bullying and name-calling by other students, the children said.
There was also mounting stress: The children were told that if their parents did not collect them by this month, six months after their arrival, they would be sent to foster homes or put up for adoption.
“He no longer had any hope that I would come,” Ms. Radzevilova said of her son. “Because I said I didn’t know how, I didn’t have the money.”
Ms. Mazur was even more critical of Russian behavior. Her autistic son had deteriorated in the time they were separated, she said.
“He was never like this,” she said. “When he leaves the car, he is afraid of everything.”
She worried for the other disabled children from Sasha’s original care home in Oleshky, some of whom were wheelchair-bound or bedridden. There was no record of where they went, she said, and she was haunted by the comment of a Russian administrator who told her the Ukrainian children had been cast away “like kittens.”
Of the 13 evacuated from the Kupiansk boarding school last September, only two have returned to Ukraine, including Artem. Another went to Poland. Four children moved to somewhere in Russia, possibly with their parents. Five children remained at the school in Perevalsk, including two girls in first grade. They were in class when Ms. Zhornyk collected her son; he left without saying goodbye.
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Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones gestures during a vote on his expulsion from the state legislature at the State Capitol Building in Nashville on Thursday. (photo: Seth Herald/Getty)
We speak with Justin Jones, one of two Black Democratic lawmakers expelled by a Republican supermajority in the Tennessee state House of Representatives Thursday for peacefully protesting gun violence in the chamber last week as thousands rallied at the Capitol to demand gun control after the Covenant elementary school shooting in Nashville. A vote to expel their white colleague who joined them in solidarity failed. “They thought by expelling us they would silence us, they would silence our movements that we’re part of, but in fact they’ve amplified it, because the nation can see how racist they are. The nation can see how retaliatory and absurd and authoritarian they are,” says Jones.
We also feature some of the dramatic exchanges that unfolded on the House floor, which Jones calls “a public lynching” targeting the two youngest Black lawmakers in the Legislature.
Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis are both African American and from Tennessee’s two largest cities. They were part of the Tennessee Three, but the vote to expel their white colleague, Gloria Johnson, who joined them in solidarity, narrowly failed.
In a minute, we’ll speak with Jones, but first we bring you some of the historic scenes that unfolded as Justin Jones and his colleagues defended themselves, and supporters looked on from a packed gallery but stayed quiet so they could witness the proceedings. This is Representative Jones facing questioning from his Republican colleague and laying out his defense.
REP. JUSTIN JONES: I was shocked to have the speaker of the House condemn mothers and children and grandmothers and parents and concerned citizens, clergy, lie on them and say that they were violent insurrectionists. And I think that he owes the people of Tennessee an apology, because at no point was there violence. At no point did we encourage violence. In fact, what we were doing was calling for the end of gun violence, that is terrorizing our children day after day after day, and all we offer are moments of silence.
It is in that spirit of speaking for my constituents, of being a representative of the people, that I approached this well on last Thursday, breaking a House rule but exercising moral obedience to my constitutional responsibility to be a voice for my people, to be a voice for the Tennesseeans who you choose not to listen to because of those NRA checks that are so hefty in your campaign funds. There comes a time where people get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
REP. RYAN WILLIAMS: One of the questions that keeps coming back to my mind, that I hope maybe you can answer, is when you say, “No action, no peace,” what do you mean? What does Representative Jones mean by “no peace”? Thank you.
SPEAKER CAMERON SEXTON: Representative Jones?
REP. JUSTIN JONES: Thank you. I would invite my colleague from Putnam County to join any protest, where that is a very familiar chant, that it usually goes, “No justice, no peace.” And I believe the roots of it are — lie in something that Martin Luther King stated, that true peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice. That’s what I was saying, is that until we act, there will be no peace in our communities.
In addition, I would like to read some context about that chant, that comes from Jeremiah 6:14. I’ll read the New Living Translation. It says, “They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wound. They give assurances of peace when there is no peace.” I’ll go to the New International Version: “They dressed the wound of my people as though it was not serious. 'Peace, peace, peace,' they say, where there is no peace.”
That’s what the chant means, is that we have no peace, and that until we act, there will be no peace for the thousands of children who came here demanding that we act, who are afraid that if they’re in school, they will be gunned down, because you have passed laws to make it easier to get a gun than it is to get healthcare in this state. You’ve passed laws to make it easier to get a gun than it is to vote in this state. And so that there will be no peace in Tennessee until we act on this proliferation of weapons of war in our community. That is the peace I was talking about. That is what I was saying, Representative Williams. Thank you for your question.
AMY GOODMAN: After his questioning by Republican Ryan Williams, Tennessee Republican lawmakers gave Representative Justin Jones five minutes before their vote. This is how he concluded.
REP. JUSTIN JONES: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my colleagues on the others out of the aisle, I want to say that you have the votes to do what you’re going to do today. But I want to let you know that when I came to this well, I was fighting for your children and grandchildren, too. And to those who here will cast a vote for expulsion, I was fighting for your children, too, to live free from the terror of school shootings and mass shootings.
When I walked up to this well on last Thursday, I was thinking about the thousands of students who are outside demanding that we do something. In fact, many of their signs said, “Do something,” “Do something,” “Do something.” That was their only ask of us, is to respond to their grief, to respond to a traumatized community. But in response to that, the first action of this body is to expel members for calling for commonsense gun legislation. We were calling for a ban of assault weapons, and the response of this body is to assault democracy.
This is a historic day for Tennessee, but it is — it may mark a very dark day for Tennessee, because it will signal to the nation that there is no democracy in this state. It will signal to the nation that if it can happen here in Tennessee, it’s coming to your state next. And that is why the nation is watching us, what we do here. My prayer to you is that even if you expel me, that you still act to address the crisis of mass shootings, because if I’m expelled from here, I’ll be back out there with the people every week demanding that you act. … I pray that we uphold our oath on this floor, because, colleagues, the world is watching.
SPEAKER CAMERON SEXTON: Pursuant to Article II, Section 12, of the Constitution of the state of Tennessee, I hereby declare Representative Justin Jones of the 52nd Representative District expelled from the House of Representatives of the 113th Assembly of the state of Tennessee.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Speaker Cameron Sexton announcing the expulsion of Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones from the state House Thursday in a party-line vote. Republicans also voted to expel his fellow freshman, another 27-year-old, Black Democratic Representative Justin Pearson, who also faced questions as he defended himself. This is part of Representative Pearson’s exchange with Republican Representative Andrew Farmer.
REP. ANDREW FARMER: That’s why you’re standing there, because of that temper tantrum that day, for that yearning to have attention. That’s what you wanted. Well, you’re getting it now. So I just advise you, if you want to conduct business in this House, file a bill. Be recognized, stand there and present it, and pass it. All you’ve got to do is pass a bill.
SPEAKER CAMERON SEXTON: Representative Pearson?
REP. JUSTIN PEARSON: Now, you all heard that. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? We’re not talking about politics. We’re not talking about even gun violence. How many of you would want to be spoken to that way? The reason that I believe the sponsor of this legislation, of this resolution, spoke that way is because he’s comfortable doing it, because there’s a decorum that allows it. There’s a decorum that allows you to belittle people.
We didn’t belittle nobody. What we said was that we cannot be beholden to gun lobbyists, to the NRA. We can’t be beholden to organizations that don’t want to see us make progress on gun violence. We can’t be beholden to folks who don’t want to see us help save our communities and protect them.
But there’s something — there’s something else I think that the sponsor of this resolution has alluded to, and there were a few things here that you said that I want to address. He called a peaceful protest a “temper tantrum.” Is what’s happening outside these doors by Tennesseans who want to see change a temper tantrum? Is Sarah, whose son Noah was at The Covenant School — he survived. He’s 5 years old. And she showed up here demanding that we do something about gun violence. Is that a temper tantrum? Is elevating our voices for justice or change a temper tantrum?
But there’s something in the decorum of this body that makes it OK to say that folks who are exercising their First Amendment right to speak up for the hundreds of thousands of people collectively that we represent, that there’s something in the decorum of this body that says it’s OK to call that a temper tantrum, to call people we disagree with on the issues — to say that all they wanted is attention.
But I’ll tell you what: I don’t personally want attention. What I want is attention on the issue of gun violence. But instead, we’re here with a resolution you put up talking about expelling me for advocating for ending gun violence in the state of Tennessee. I’d much rather be talking with you about legislation to protect Shelby County and to protect our communities than talking about why we don’t deserve to have our representation lost because we came to the House saying we’ve got to do something. That’s what I would like to be doing.
And so you brought attention or tried to bring attention to me, but I want to turn the attention to the people, the people who will never be able to throw a temper tantrum for gun violence — you know, the Larry Thorns, the Katherine Koonces, the Mike Hills, the Cynthia Peaks, the Evelyn Dieckhauses, the Hallie Scruggs, the William Kinneys, who will never have a chance to throw what you call a temper tantrum, for justice, for gun reform, for the ending of gun violence. They will never have a chance, because we haven’t taken our oath seriously, because we don’t take people who we disagree with seriously. We tell them, “You just are throwing a temper tantrum.”
AMY GOODMAN: Ultimately, Tennessee Republicans voted to expel Democratic Representative Justin Pearson from the House, as well. At one point during his final remarks, the official TV feed for the Tennessee House continued to wrongly identify him as his colleague Justin Jones as he was giving his final statement. Pearson ended by saying the struggle had just begun.
REP. JUSTIN PEARSON: Oh, we have good news, folks! We’ve got good news that Sunday always comes. Resurrection is a promise, and it is a prophecy. It’s a prophecy that came out of the cotton fields. It’s a prophecy that came out of the lynching tree. It’s a prophecy that still lives in each and every one of us in order to make the state of Tennessee the place that it ought to be. And so I’ve still got hope, because I know we are still here, and we will never quit!
SPEAKER CAMERON SEXTON: Out of order.
AMY GOODMAN: During the votes, thousands of supporters rallied in the halls of the state Capitol and outside. When a reporter asked Democratic Representative Gloria Johnson why she thought there was a difference between her outcome — she was not expelled, but her colleagues were — this was her response.
REP. GLORIA JOHNSON: I will answer your question. It might have to do with the color of our skin.
AMY GOODMAN: Representative Gloria Johnson was a teacher at Central High School in Knoxville, that faced a school shooting more than a decade ago. At the end of the night, the lawmakers, now known as the Tennessee Three, stood together again, and Johnson vowed to work to get her expelled colleagues back in the House.
REP. GLORIA JOHNSON: And I just cannot say enough about how proud I am, always and forever, to stand with these two brilliant young men, who connect with their community, who really listen and understand the voters in their districts and across this state, who can tell everybody in the most powerful way — they speak — they spoke to our members. They won’t admit it, I don’t think, but they spoke to those hearts. I could see it on faces. But still, what’s the difference, where I made it through and these two young men did not make it through?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: We know!
REP. GLORIA JOHNSON: I think you’re right: We know.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: We know why!
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Racists!
REP. GLORIA JOHNSON: We know. But here’s the difference. I think we might have these two young men back very soon. And it is my — it is my promise to fight like hell to get both of them back.
AMY GOODMAN: Representative Gloria Johnson, standing next to the Justins, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who had just been expelled by the Tennessee state Legislature. Well, we’re joined right now by Justin Jones, expelled Democratic Tennessee state representative of Nashville.
Welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us again after this marathon day. Your feelings yesterday as you stood with such passion, yet composure, dressing down your colleagues who were questioning you, then expelling you, Justin Jones?
JUSTIN JONES: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me again, Amy. It’s good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, your feelings right now? How is that possible? I mean, it’s not like you were hired to work at a store, and then you were fired. You were elected by the people of Nashville. So, how is it that a Republican supermajority can fire you, can expel you?
JUSTIN JONES: Got you. Sorry, I couldn’t hear your other question. But, I mean, I’m feeling — you know, when it happened, it didn’t feel real. I didn’t — you know, it I didn’t know what happened to me, I would think it was 1963, not 2023, that a predominantly, almost entirely white Republican caucus expelled the two youngest Black lawmakers, not for any unethical or criminal behavior, but for our First Amendment activity and for standing and doing our job to speak up for our constituents, and to speak up particularly for young people who are terrified of these weapons of war on our streets. And so, I’m feeling I’m tired, but more so I’m tired of the injustice that rules the state Capitol.
But I think that what they’ve done, though, is the complete opposite, that they may have won yesterday, but they have not won the moral narrative as we go forward, that they thought by expelling us they would silence us, they would silence our movements that we’re part of, but in fact they’ve amplified it, because the nation can see how racist they are. The nation can see how retaliatory and absurd and authoritarian they are. And so I think that is what gives me hope, is that they tried to kick us out, but, instead, they’ve put a spotlight on themselves for their shameful policies, that made it easier to get a gun than it is to get healthcare in this state.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, we spoke to you a few days ago. I was going to say “Representative Jones.” But you are Representative Jones. The question is: Will you be just immediately reinstated next week? They’re talking about your behavior as you spoke out from the well of the House of Representatives in Tennessee. But I wanted to ask you about Republican state Representative Justin Lafferty — we showed this a few days ago, as well — of Knoxville, who pushed you and grabbed your phone as you filmed the interaction. He attacked you. Can you talk about — was he disciplined for violent behavior?
JUSTIN JONES: Not at all. I mean, Representative Lafferty, the same representative who tried to justify the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution a couple years ago, I mean, he can act, you know, out of decorum, out of rules, act violently, and he’s welcome within his party. I mean, that’s what we brought up yesterday, is that we’ve had so many instances of behavior. You had the Republican Caucus chairman get upset at his son’s basketball game and pull down the pants of the referee. That, you know, does not merit any type of sanction. You had a member who admitted to being a child molester, Representative David Byrd. He sat there without being expelled. You have David Hawk, you know, who was guilty of domestic violence. I mean, these things happened, and there was no accountability.
But, for us, for exercising our First Amendment activity, for saying that, you know, we took our oath seriously to protest against and dissent from any legislation that is injurious to the people — Article II, Section 27, of the state Constitution, we took that seriously — they expelled us, the most serious measure taken against us. And it’s wrong. It’s shameful. And what it really was about was about trying to silence the voices of the 78,000 people each of us represent, in the most diverse districts in the state.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you tell us — and this is an absolutely key point. You represent the largest and most diverse cities in Tennessee. The local governing bodies, for example, of Metro Nashville, could reappoint you immediately?
JUSTIN JONES: That’s what we’re hearing. The question will be: Will the Republican supermajority seat us? And so, I mean, we would have to still run in a special election. And will the speaker seat us back in the body, or will this be a legal battle, just like Julian Bond? You know, they refused to seat him in Georgia when he was a young man who ran for the Legislature during the civil rights movement. And so, we don’t know what to expect.
I mean, I don’t think the nation — what happened yesterday was unprecedented, and it should alarm us all, that if it can happen in Tennessee, it can happen anywhere. And so I hope that people are paying attention. I hope that people realize that this is authoritarianism, that this is ousting of opposition voices from a legislative body, and it’s authoritarianism. This is not democracy. I know I’m on Democracy Now!, but this is definitely not what democracy looks like. And we’re on a very scary path toward fascism, toward authoritarianism, toward autocracy in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
AMY GOODMAN: And let’s remember the significance of this week. I mean, this is the week of April 4th. April 4th, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down. And we’re also here talking about gun violence, that began this protest —
JUSTIN JONES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — you were involved with, Justin Jones. But so, there was the Tennessee Three: you, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson. You both are 27; she’s 60 years old. You are both Black; she is white. She made no bones about this. She said the reason she is — was not expelled, and you two were, was the color of your skin. At the end, I was watching — walking through the streets of New York, watching on my phone what was happening. And when Justin Pearson gave his final comments, the Tennessee feed from the House of Representatives called him Justin Pearson, like they couldn’t tell the difference between the two of you.
JUSTIN JONES: Yeah, they called him — they confused his name — Justin Jones — with mine, Amy. That’s the thing —
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, sorry, called him Justin — called him Justin Jones, your name.
JUSTIN JONES: Yeah. I mean, that is it, is that they just — they saw two young Black men who speak up on the House floor, you know, speak up in committees, and challenge this dominant narrative of white supremacy, of plantation capitalism, of patriarchy. And that terrified them, that we were the two youngest lawmakers — I’m 27, Pearson is 28 — and that, you know, we represent the future of the state. And that is what they’re trying to stop, is that they want to hold on to this old South, and we’re trying to bring a renewed South that uplifts human rights and democracy, multiracial democracy, and social justice.
And so, what we saw yesterday was a public lynching, let’s be real, and it was meant to set an example. But we did not bow down. And that’s what I think has them, you know, really upset, is that we didn’t — you know, we didn’t break. We didn’t bow down. They want us, you know, to feel broken, but we left with our fists up in the air, because we knew that this was not the end, that they may expel us, but they can’t expel our movements. And that’s what terrifies them.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Justin Jones, I want to thank you for being with us. Of course, we’ll continue to follow this. A major protest is planned for Monday, I know. Will you be out there?
JUSTIN JONES: I definitely will. I’ll be outside of that chamber with these young people, showing up every week until we take action to take these weapons of war off our street, and until we honor the victims of Covenant elementary school by acting.
AMY GOODMAN: Justin Jones, expelled Democratic Tennessee state representative, representing Nashville, author of The People’s Plaza: Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance, with a foreword Bishop William Barber, thanks so much for being with us.
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Elon Musk during a press conference on Feb. 10, 2022, near Brownsville, Texas. (photo: GDA)
The social media giant’s copyright infringement claim against GitHub shows that websites can be compelled to violate users’ privacy.
However, Twitter appears to have revised its DMCA notice, essentially a claim of copyright infringement, the same day it was filed to request not only information about the uploader, but also “any related upload / download / access history (and any contact info, IP addresses, or other session info related to same), and any associated logs related to this repo or any forks thereof.” In other words, Twitter is now seeking information not only about the alleged leaker, but also about anyone who interacted with the particular GitHub repository, the online space for storing source code, in any way, including simply by accessing it. Trying to strong-arm GitHub into revealing information about visitors to a particular repository it hosts via a request for a subpoena is a move reminiscent of the Justice Department attempting to compel a web-hosting company to reveal information about visitors to an anti-Trump website.
DMCA: The Doxxing and Censorship Tool of Choice
This isn’t the first time that corporations have tried to use DMCA subpoenas to identify leakers. A Marvel Studios affiliate recently petitioned for DMCA subpoenas to force Reddit and Google to reveal information about someone who uploaded a film script to Google and posted about it on Reddit before the movie was released. DMCA claims also have a sordid history of being used in doxxing attempts. False DMCA claims can be filed to lure a targeted user to then file a counterclaim, which necessitates that they fill in their name and address, which in turn gets passed on to the original filer. At other times, the DMCA is used simply to censor content, whether to muzzle members of civil society or for reputation management.
No Subpoena Required?
GitHub has seemed all too willing to provide information about both its repository owners and its visitors, even without a subpoena. When the owner of another, unrelated repository recently asked GitHub to provide access logs of users who had visited it, GitHub appears to have readily complied, obscuring only the last octet of the visitor IP address, with the unredacted portion still potentially revealing information such as a user’s internet service provider and approximate location.
There are also any number of public ways to extract user information from GitHub, such as email addresses associated with a particular GitHub account. Ironically, some scripts hosted on GitHub are designed to automate the exfiltration of a GitHub user’s email address. Once an email address is learned, the process of requesting a subpoena for further information about a particular user may be repeated in an attempt to obtain yet more sensitive data.
Musk’s Bag of Tricks
Aside from claiming to use watermarking methods to catch leakers, Musk’s other companies have also sought subpoenas to force service providers to reveal information about leakers. For instance, when Musk zeroed in on (and subsequently harassed) a suspected leaker who provided internal documents to a reporter about large amounts of waste being generated at Tesla’s “Gigafactory,” Tesla moved to subpoena Apple, AT&T, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Open Whisper Systems (the organization formerly behind the secure messaging app Signal), and WhatsApp. The proposed subpoenas “commanded” their targets to preserve any information about the suspected leaker’s accounts, as well as all documents that the suspected leaker “has deleted from the foregoing accounts but that are still accessible by you.”
In addition to proposed subpoenas, Tesla has reportedly tried to identify leakers by reviewing surveillance footage to see who had been taking photos (the original Business Insider story that prompted the Tesla investigation mentioned that the source had provided images to corroborate their claims of waste at the factory). The company has also checked file access logs to see who had accessed data that was provided to the news outlet.
Following identification of the suspected leaker, Tesla reportedly engaged in an extensive surveillance campaign, including hacking the suspect’s phone; requesting that the suspect turn over their laptop for an “update” that was, in fact, a forensic audit; deploying a plainclothes security guard to monitor the suspect on the factory floor; and hiring private investigators to conduct further surveillance.
Takeaways for Leakers
Given the lax approach to divulging user information by service providers, coupled with the aggressive tactics employed by companies to reveal sources, the takeaway for would-be leakers is clear: Do not trust service providers to protect any information they may have about you. Websites may reveal information about the leaker, intentionally or not, and whether legally obligated or of their own accord. Leakers would do well to avoid using their home or other proximate internet connection and to further obfuscate it using tools such as the Tor Browser. Additionally, it’s best to ensure that any information required to set up a particular account, such as an email address or phone number, not be traceable to the leaker.
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Chicago's Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson celebrates with supporters after defeating Paul Vallas after the mayoral runoff election late on Tuesday. (photo: Paul Beaty/AP)
Victories in Chicago and St Louis, plus a key judicial race in Wisconsin, argue against tacking to center, leftwingers say
As they took their victory lap, progressives made clear that they viewed the wins as merely the beginning of a broader trend in America’s elections.
“It’s a multicultural, multi-generational movement that has literally captured the imagination of not just the city of Chicago but the rest of the world,” Johnson said in his victory speech. “Let’s take this bold progressive movement around these United States of America.”
Several lessons can be learned from Tuesday’s results, progressive leaders say. They hope their victories send a message to Democratic party leaders about the enduring resonance of abortion access, the popularity of progressives’ message and the importance of long-term grassroots organizing. The wins also come at a vital moment for progressives, who have criticized Joe Biden’s recent move toward the political center on issues such as energy and crime.
“We’re building a project all across this country, and that project is ascendant,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families party. “It’s both a culmination of years of organizing, and it’s a validation of the popular appeal of that project.”
Abortion as ‘a winning issue for Democrats’
Reproductive rights appeared to weigh heavily on the minds of Wisconsin voters as they went to the polls on Tuesday. Wisconsin has an abortion ban dating back to 1849 on the books, and anti-abortion advocates have argued that the policy should be enforced following the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade last summer.
The question of enforcing the 1849 ban is expected to soon come before the state supreme court, and the policy seems likely to be thrown out following Protasiewicz’s win.
“We think that there’s a very great chance now that we’ll be able to get this ban off the books and restore access to folks in Wisconsin,” said Ryan Stitzlein, senior national political director of the reproductive rights group Naral. “This is life-changing for folks.”
Protasiewicz made the end of Roe a central focus of her campaign, emphasizing her personal support for legal abortion access and attacking her opponent, conservative Dan Kelly, over his past work for the anti-abortion group Wisconsin Right to Life.
“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of abortion in this race. Judge Janet led with her support for reproductive freedom,” Stitzlein said.
Protasiewicz defeated Kelly by 11 points. The result was extraordinary for the battleground state of Wisconsin, which Biden won by less than one point in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump carried the state with 47.2% of the vote compared with Hillary Clinton’s 46.5%.
To Stitzlein, Protasiewicz’s decisive win should dispel any lingering questions over whether abortion access continues to resonate with voters nearly a year after Roe was overturned. Before the 2022 elections, some Democratic strategists suggested abortion would not sufficiently move the needle with midterm voters, but progressive activists firmly rejected that reasoning.
“I actually feel strongly that the longer these bans are in place, the more energy and more anger that’s going to be out there because there’s going to be more people that are affected by it,” Stitzlein said. “This is a winning issue for Democrats, for folks that support abortion access because support for abortion access is not partisan, as was demonstrated on Tuesday.”
‘Not an overnight coalition’
For progressive organizers in Chicago and St Louis, the victories on Tuesday were years in the making.
When Johnson turned his attention to the mayoral race in Chicago, he drew crucial support from his longtime progressive allies. He received hefty assistance from the Chicago Teachers Union, where he has worked for the past 10 years as the organization pushed for progressive reform. And when Johnson ran for the Cook county board of commissioners in 2018, he received an endorsement from the United Working Families, an affiliate of the Working Families party.
“Brandon is not an overnight sensation; the coalition that he built is not an overnight coalition,” Mitchell said. “This was a coalition that had been measured and patient and consistent over years, slowly aggregating the power to be able to seize the victory on Tuesday.”
A similar story unfolded in St Louis on Tuesday. The progressive mayor, Tishaura Jones, and the board of aldermen president, Megan Green, endorsed a slate of candidates who were able to flip three seats on the board. Green, who became board president last year, served as a convention delegate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign.
“It’s something that’s seven, eight years in the making,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution. “We’re seeing the fruit of organizing over multiple election cycles.”
Our Revolution made 100,000 phone calls and sent 130,000 texts to supporters in St Louis as part of its organizing efforts there, and the group contacted each of its 90,000 Chicago members an average of three times in connection to the mayoral race. The victory in Chicago was particularly meaningful for progressive groups like Our Revolution given that Johnson was outspent nearly two to one on television advertising.
“The fact that we were able to out-organize big money with people power, I think, is significant because that usually does not happen,” Geevarghese said. “I think it really speaks to the growing sophistication of the progressive movement as a political force.”
‘Another existential election’ on the horizon
As Democrats look ahead to 2024, when they will attempt to maintain control of the White House and the Senate while flipping control of the House, progressives say there are some important takeaways to learn from Tuesday’s results.
“There’s something poetic about the victories in Chicago and Wisconsin taking place because there is a through line there,” he said, “both around what people want – which is responsive government, which is an expansion of their freedoms – and also what the opposition was saying.”
Mitchell saw “fearmongering” being deployed as a weapon in both Wisconsin and Chicago, particularly around the issue of crime. Vallas, Johnson’s opponent in the mayoral race, received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police and pledged to “make Chicago the safest city in America”, as he attacked Johnson over his past support for the defund the police movement. In the end, Johnson won the race thanks in part to the support of voters living on the city’s South and West sides, which report some of the highest levels of violent crime.
Geevarghese argued that Johnson’s win should prompt some reflection for prominent Democrats, including Biden, who seem fearful of attacks over being “soft on crime”. Progressives expressed dismay last month after Biden signed a Republican bill overturning recent changes to the criminal code of Washington DC.
“We were able to talk about a broader vision of community safety, which is having good schools, which is having investment in mental health, which is making sure there’s good jobs,” Geevarghese said of Johnson’s win.
Even before the 2024 elections, progressives will have additional opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of their message. Philadelphia will hold its mayoral race in November, and every state legislative seat in Virginia will also be up for grabs this fall. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has called for a 15-week abortion ban.
“I think 2024 is an opportunity for us to learn from this coalition that we built and hopefully replicate it in other places, in other states,” Mitchell said. “We’re going to be faced with another existential election on the federal level in not too much time.”
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Thousands of demonstrators protest outside the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, 2011, in opposition to Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill, which essentially eliminated collective bargaining rights for state workers. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
For more than a decade, Wisconsin Republicans have taken a battering ram to labor and democracy itself. The resounding victory in the Supreme Court election this week finally opens up space for reviving a working-class politics that can benefit the majority.
As a rule, Wisconsin judicial elections — “nonpartisan” contests held in the spring, often awash in vague platitudes about respect for the rule of law rather than concrete campaign promises –– rarely attract the kind of attention and voter turnout seen in races up the ballot. The same could not be said for Tuesday’s election.
By all accounts, the contest between Protasiewicz and Kelly proved to be the most expensive judicial election in US history, attracting a level of voter turnout that shattered state records for off-cycle elections. The investments in ads — including the Kelly campaign’s shot-for-shot remake of the infamously racist “Willie Horton” commercial from the 1988 presidential election — as well as significant statewide field operations gave the race the flavor of a pitched battle for the governorship, if not the presidency.
It is not difficult to see why. By securing a four-three liberal majority on the state Supreme Court, Protasiewicz has done more than loosen conservatives’ ideological grip on the court. In a state that critics describe as a “democracy desert” — largely, though not exclusively, because its gerrymandered legislature hamstrings the ambitions of electoral majorities — her victory provided voters with a long-awaited sense of possibility. “The ground just shifted,” Milwaukee-based journalist Dan Shafer wrote in his postmortem of the race.
The court’s seismic potential will hinge not only on the opinions of its new majority. Rather, as Protasiewicz’s election victory itself shows, creating new political possibilities in Wisconsin depends just as much on what happens off the bench.
The Wisconsin GOP’s Decade-Long Assault on Majority Rule
The story of Protasiewicz’s election victory begins not with the start of campaign season, but with a sharp right turn in Wisconsin politics that began more than a decade ago. After consolidating control of the legislature and governorship in the “red wave” election of 2010, the state’s Republicans — led by Governor Scott Walker — unleashed a systematic assault on the institutional foundations of Wisconsin’s democracy.
The opening shot was pointed at organized labor. In 2011, Walker signed the now-infamous Act 10 into law, which decimated public sector workers’ collective-bargaining power. Together with the passage of “right to work” legislation, the anti-labor move slashed Wisconsin’s unionization rate in half within a few short years.
Republicans then opened a second front in the electoral arena. Within a year of Act 10’s approval, the legislature had enacted one of the strongest partisan gerrymanders in the country — ensuring that the GOP would retain control of both Assembly and Senate chambers, even when Democrats won a majority of votes in legislative elections. Still not content, Republicans then enacted measures like a new voter ID law, aimed at raising the costs of participating in elections.
By the middle of the 2010s, the state legislature had disbanded the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, praised by one legal observer as a “worthy model for other states considering alternatives to partisan election administration at the state level.” Their reason was obvious: the board’s recent investigation into the alleged unlawful coordination between the Club for Growth and Walker’s campaign during the 2012 recall election.
Republicans were no less assiduous in heading off threats to their political supremacy. When Democrat Tony Evers eked out a victory in the 2018 midterms, legislative leaders introduced a package of lame-duck bills constraining the authority of the state’s executive branch and expanding their own power to block rules that the Evers administration created. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the GOP-dominated legislature passed another suite of measures that gutted state public-health authorities. When the term of a Walker appointee to the state Natural Resources Board expired, Republicans simply refused to appoint a replacement. (The appointee — a dentist and hunter from the town of Wausau — refused to resign, holding on to his office for over a year after his term expired.)
At the same time, state Republicans undercut the prerogatives of counties and municipalities. Under the Walker administration — and a legislature controlled by Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos, a landlord and erstwhile popcorn-factory owner — Wisconsin became a leader in the state preemption of local measures like minimum-wage hikes and fire-safety regulations. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation would later find that the nullification of local tenant protections contributed to a surge in avoidable electrical fires, killing hundreds of people statewide.
At every turn, Republicans could rely on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to back their bare-knuckle tactics. The conservative majority dutifully endorsed the GOP’s gerrymandered state legislative maps, ratified Act 10, and authorized a lame-duck power grab. No matter how absurd the legal argument, the court’s conservatives returned the correct result, sometimes with florid quotations of Eminem.
Wisconsin voters have therefore been forced to watch as surrounding states adopt a variety of broadly popular reforms, ranging from free school lunches to Medicaid expansion to the legalization of recreational marijuana, that would simply be dead on arrival in the state legislature. Republican legislative leaders appear to take glee in their crushing of majority will. When the state’s all-powerful Joint Committee on Finance holds field hearings around the state during the annual budget cycle, its members now flatly refuse to even visit Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city.
The Judicial Election
If there is one obstacle to Republicans’ plan to weaken Wisconsin’s democracy, it is statewide elections. Because Wisconsin does not allow voters to introduce legislation at the ballot box, the only hope for a majority locked out of power in the legislature is to use its voice in elections for governor, top executive-branch officials, and the state Supreme Court judges. And as the legislature has squeezed the executive branch, the court — paradoxically — has taken center stage as the primary actor capable of combating the GOP’s counter-majoritarian machinations.
This is not to say that the opposition party has always understood the assignment. In 2017, conservative Supreme Court justice Annette Ziegler ran for office unopposed. In 2019, the ostensible liberal candidate, Lisa Neubauer, ran a lackluster campaign for an open Supreme Court seat that distanced the race from political struggles over the stark consequences of unchecked Republican power. Her opponent, Brian Hagedorn, built a more starkly ideological campaign with strong ties to the antiabortion movement. (He still won by less than 1 percent.)
The laughable pretense that judicial elections with tens of millions in outside spending can somehow remain above politics still colors the elite discourse in America’s Dairyland. Yet in recent years, liberal candidates for the court like Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky have proven that it pays to respect voters’ intelligence about such matters. In 2020, Karofsky beat the Walker-appointed Daniel Kelly by a whopping 11 percent. Protasiewicz won by a similar margin on Tuesday, running up significant numbers in large population centers.
For a liberal Supreme Court candidate running in 2023, there were several “built-in” advantages. Chief among them was that Kelly seemed intent on reprising the same campaign that lost him reelection three years ago — a fact that seemed to escape him as he delivered a hissy concession speech, declaring that he had faced an “unworthy” opponent. In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — which revived Wisconsin’s abortion ban, originally passed in 1849 — Kelly did nothing to untether himself from the antiabortion movement. In fact, he pulled the straps tighter; on election eve, Kelly flew around the state on a plane owned by some of the most zealous antiabortion activists.
Kelly’s appearance on the April ballot was hardly guaranteed from the outset. His opponent for the conservative lane — a state circuit court judge named Jennifer Dorow — had recently made a name for herself when she presided over the trial of Darrell Brooks, the man responsible for killing six and injuring dozens more at a Christmas parade in the city of Waukesha. The trial elevated Dorow’s status as a contender for the state court and netted her endorsements from state Republican officials and police associations. Yet Dorow lacked not only Kelly’s familiarity with running a statewide campaign, but also the millions of dollars from Richard Uihlein, owner of Uline, the Wisconsin-based packaging-material company. While Kelly proved to be a horrible candidate in the general, he had the one quality Uihlein evidently desired: he was a reliable right-wing vote, even if his judicial opinions were so incoherent that other conservatives on the court felt compelled to write concurrences clarifying them.
Yet while Kelly had the ear of the state’s most powerful donors, a look at endorsements from state and local party leaders reveals deeper divisions on the Right. Key state party leaders, as well as conservative Supreme Court justices, split their support between Kelly and Dorow. By contrast, Protasiewicz quickly consolidated backing from the moderate and progressive wings of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Of the unions that endorsed in the primary, all but one favored Protasiewicz. Her competitor in the center-left lane, Everett Mitchell, attracted only a handful of endorsements, largely from progressive groups and party officials concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee.
By the time Protasiewicz advanced in the February 21 primary, this unified bloc was poised to benefit from a wave of voter enthusiasm. If the results of last year’s abortion referendum in Kansas were any indication, even in deep-red territory, voters rout attempts to limit abortion access when given the chance. According to a 2022 Marquette University Law School poll, 55 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe. An identical share oppose barring abortion either in all or most cases. Republicans’ response to this was to introduce legislation that left the state’s 1849 abortion ban in place and provided exceptions only in the cases of rape or incest. The governor quickly announced he would veto it.
Not only did the Protasiewicz-Kelly election crystallize for voters the issue of abortion restrictions — the abortion issue itself served as the most visceral and powerful reminder of the deleterious state of Wisconsin’s democracy. While Kelly’s ideological commitments were plainly visible to voters, in public forums, he maintained the pretense that judges should not, and indeed could not, talk about their beliefs or biases. Protasiewicz largely dispensed with this conceit, talking explicitly about her support for abortion rights and her opposition to partisan gerrymandering. She linked Republicans’ assault on abortion rights to their assault on democracy.
And the message worked. When compared to other off-year, down-ballot elections, the 2023 vote for Supreme Court broke all statewide turnout records. The “most important election nobody’s ever heard of,” in short, became both a means of ensuring abortion rights and a counteroffensive against Republicans’ long struggle to insulate themselves from political competition.
A Prerequisite for Rebuilding the Left
Protasiewicz’s victory will have its most immediate effects on the state’s grotesque 1849 abortion ban. Soon after the Dobbs decision, Wisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, filed a lawsuit aiming to strike down the ban as unenforceable because it conflicts with other statutes passed over the last hundred years. The first oral arguments in the case will be heard in the Dane County Circuit Court next month and may reach the Supreme Court soon afterward.
Where redistricting is concerned, the impact of a flipped court will take longer to materialize. Even assuming the court rejects the state’s egregious partisan gerrymander, the opening of political possibilities will not be automatic. Wisconsin has a political geography that naturally advantages Republican control of the state legislature, since Democratic voters are “inefficiently distributed” throughout the state. What fairer maps will do is create the possibility for political competition where none currently exists. Seizing on that opportunity will require recruiting and vetting high-quality candidates who can speak to working-class voters spread across Wisconsin’s disparate political geographies — no mean feat.
In recent years, Wisconsin has become synonymous with the concept of “rural resentment,” a shorthand for small-town voters’ attribution of their own economic disempowerment to people in the cities. This animus has allowed conservative candidates for statewide office to consolidate the nonmetropolitan vote in recent elections. As long as suburbs can be counted on to swing to the right, galvanizing rural resentment has been a recipe for electoral success.
Yet recent election cycles have seen the opposite. Affluent Milwaukee suburbs have leaned Democratic. Between his first and second elections to office, Governor Evers saw his support jump by more than 20 percent in municipalities like Wauwatosa, River Hills, and Mequon. In the April 4 election, Protasiewicz flipped nine Milwaukee metro-area municipalities that gave a majority of their votes to conservatives in the primary, including Greendale, Franklin, and Waukesha. Statewide, she also followed the trend seen in Karofsky’s 2020 Supreme Court victory, picking up close to a dozen counties that went for the conservative Hagedorn in 2019.
Crucially, the demolition of a conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court raises the chances of reversing Walker’s devastating offensive on labor. During her campaign Protasiewicz repeatedly argued that Walker’s union-busting Act 10 was unconstitutional. Paradoxically, she also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she would consider recusing herself should the issue come before the court because she participated in protests against the measure.
Given the political stakes of undoing Act 10, a recusal seems unlikely. What appears almost certain is that Republicans will try to identify one or more opportunities to retaliate against any politically significant decision. On Tuesday, Republicans won a special election for a vacant seat that gives them a two-thirds majority in the State Senate. The winner of that contest, Dan Knodl, has suggested that this new threshold would allow the GOP to remove sitting justices from office, and that he would consider impeaching Protasiewicz.
Even if Republicans manage to overcome (or simply ignore) the many legal constraints on their ability to do this — hard, but not impossible, to imagine — the legislative math here is dubious. It would take a two-thirds vote of the State Assembly to impeach, and another two-thirds vote in the Senate to remove. Still, Wisconsin Republicans have demonstrated an increasing allergy to electoral competition and a taste for political hardball. Should they decide to pounce, it would be an opportunity for a statewide political mobilization not seen since the Act 10 protests.
All of this illustrates an important point about Tuesday’s election. While the end of the conservative majority is a crack in the edifice of the undemocratic regime Republicans have built up over the last ten years, seizing the opportunity to reconfigure Wisconsin politics will take an extraordinary amount of creativity.
The state Supreme Court is an inadequate vehicle, by itself, for such a transformation. Litigation is hardly efficient or expedient. Plaintiffs must be found, briefs filed, appeals made, oral arguments heard, and lengthy decisions written. Still, whereas the federal judiciary was born out of an explicit distrust of majoritarian democracy, Wisconsin’s political institutions were designed with the opposite principle in mind. Delegates to the state’s first constitutional convention argued explicitly that an elected judiciary would fulfill “an axiom of government in this country, that the people are the source of all political power, and to them should their officers and rules be responsible for the faithful discharge of their respective duties.” Over the last ten years, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has played a pivotal role in undermining this very tenet. A new majority will have to make it their mission to restore it.
In any case, the work of resuscitating Wisconsin’s democracy will require a prodigious amount of collective action outside the Supreme Court chamber. A legal support structure will only help reconstitute Wisconsin politics in the interests of the many if it has a strong working-class political movement providing the key catalytic power. Building such a movement will require going well beyond appeals to voters in affluent suburbs. Instead, it will require speaking directly to both rural and urban residents who, while driven apart by Walker’s “divide and conquer” politics, have all found themselves on the losing end of Republican policies.
Protasiewicz’s victory may have moved the earth in Wisconsin. But it’s time to map the new terrain.
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A dead ponderosa pine tree in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. (photo: iStock)
From 2012 to 2015, a megadrought and an infestation of western pine beetles caused massive die-offs of ponderosa pine trees in the Sierra Nevada. During this time period, experts estimated that around 129 million trees of varying species, including the ponderosa pines, died out.
This meant the carbon stored in these trees, which are an important carbon sink, was then released as the trees died and decayed.
Forest regeneration for pines in this area would be difficult, as researchers described in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science. Climate change makes future infestations more likely, so if the forest recovered, there could be an increased chance of another major die-off from the western pine beetles.
These beetles are more likely to take over the Sierra Nevada forests as climate change makes more favorable living conditions for bark beetles. According to the USDA, bark beetles like the western pine beetle can experience faster larval development and better survival rates when temperatures are warm (but not overly hot). Further, drought conditions put stress on the trees, making them easier targets for the beetles to take over.
For now, the diminished forests leave the bark beetles with no hosts, making another major infestation and another large die-off event less likely.
“Some carbon loss won’t be resequestered in trees, but fewer trees on the landscape dampens the severity of western pine beetle outbreaks,” Zachary Robbins, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the study, explained in a statement. “The forest seems to reach an equilibrium at a certain point.”
While forests can sequester over 10% of emissions in the U.S., the researchers warned that carbon budgeting must consider bark beetle outbreaks and other stressors, like drought and wildfires, that impact forest regeneration. Plus, with ongoing climate change, we could expect to see similar effects to the damage during the 2012-2015 megadrought in a shorter timespan.
“In the past, a three-year drought would have substantial impact on tree mortality,” Chonggang Xu, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory study co-author said. “But in a warmer future, a two-year drought could have similar consequences.”
While this research was specific to California and ponderosa pine forests, the problem is likely to be replicated across forests in the western U.S. The authors suggested active forest management to minimize risk of major beetle outbreaks and massive tree die-offs in the future. In a 2022 study by Robbins, Xu and additional researchers, the team found anticipated that up to 40% more ponderosa pine trees could die off from beetle infestations for every degree Celsius increase of global warming.
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