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Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she will travel to New York next week to protest the supposed injustice in person.
Immediately following the news of the grand jury vote, Donald Trump Jr. posted a video response in which he claimed that the mere act of his father being held to the letter of the law was exponentially worse than anything some of history’s worst dictators ever did. “Let’s be clear, folks,” Trump’s namesake told his viewers. “This is like Communist-level shit. This is stuff that would make Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot—it would make them blush. It’s so flagrant, it’s so crazed. When even like the radical leftists of The Washington Post are out there saying, ‘it’s not really based on fact, it’s not really based on the law, it’s not really based in reality, but it’s 100% based on politics’—when your enemies are saying that, it’s got to tell you everything you need to know about where we are as a country.”
Just as an aside, it’s not clear that The Washington Post has ever said the case against Trump is not “based on fact” or “based on the law.” Also, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, so we’re not sure that they’d look at Trump being indicted—for something he admitted to!—and be all “Whoa, whoa, this is a bit much.” Elsewhere, Junior has tweeted, “The ruling party is trying to jail the opposition leader like a third world dictatorship!” and “This isn’t just the radical left weaponizing the government to target their political enemies, this is them weaponizing the government to interfere in the 2024 election to stop Trump. The only solution is to shove it down their throats and put him back in the White House!!!”
Eric Trump has also been out on social media decrying the news. Among other things, he’s declared:
And:
He also told the Daily Mail that his father is being “ruthlessly” attacked because he “dared challenge the political elite. This is Exhibit A to the decline of American Law.”
On Friday, former first son-in-law Jared Kushner said: “As Americans, it’s very troubling to me to see the leader of the opposition party be indicted,” he said. “And I think that that shows obviously the fear that the Democrats have of Trump and the political strength that he has.”
More than 12 hours after the news broke, Ivanka Trump, who reportedly wants nothing to do with any of this, posted a restrained statement to Instagram Stories that read: “I love my father, and I love my country. Today, I am pained for both. I appreciate the voices across the political spectrum expressing support and concern.” Tiffany Trump does not appear to have issued a comment.
But what Trump lacks in full-throated defenses from his daughters he makes up for in cringeworthy rants from his supporters in the GOP. Elise Stefanik, who is said to be under consideration to be Trump’s 2024 running mate, has let people know, more than once, that she “stand[s] with Trump.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene—also on the short list as a potential VP pick—has opined that Stormy Daniels is too old for porn, and said that she plans to protest Trump’s indictment in New York.
And of course, Lindsey Graham, who will never leave Trump’s side, is extremely broken up about all this.
“If you got a pile of crap and you chop it up 34 times, it’s still a pile of crap,” the lawmaker from South Carolina said Thursday night. “It’s duplicitous charging. They’re trying to smear the guy…. This is literally legal voodoo.”
Nothing to see here, just a sitting member of Congress saying Trump should commit crimes on his way to being arraigned
TFW you think stealing a bottle of Tylenol is a worse crime than presidential candidates (allegedly) falsifying business records to cover up six-figure hush money deals
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A megaphone. (image: Elena Lacey/The Washington Post/iStock)
A Washington Post analysis found that accounts following dozens of Twitter handles pushing hate speech were subjected to an algorithmic echo chamber, in which Twitter fed additional hateful and racist content to users
According to a Washington Post analysis of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, accounts that followed “extremists” — hate-promoting accounts identified in a list provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center — were subjected to a mix of other racist and incendiary speech. That included tweets from a self-proclaimed Nazi, for example, a user the account did not follow.
Many were from users previously suspended by Twitter and let back on by new owner Elon Musk, who pledged to de-boost hate speech following his takeover of the site.
The tweets appeared on Twitter’s new “For You” page, which the company unveiled in January as part of Musk’s redesigned site. Twitter says the timeline includes “suggested content powered by a variety of signals,” including “how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it.”
In one instance, after an account created by The Post followed dozens of others labeled as extremist, Twitter inserted a quote and a portrait of Adolf Hitler — from a user the account did not follow — into its timeline.
In November, Musk — who had recently purchased the site for $44 billion — announced a policy of restoring previously banned accounts after saying earlier that the site had a new rule.
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” he tweeted. He said that negative and hateful tweets would be deboosted and would not be monetized.
“You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different than the rest of the internet,” he wrote.
But according to The Post’s experiment, Twitter is amplifying hateful tweets.
Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Twitter is in the midst of changing its curated feed and plans to make public its algorithm for recommending tweets at the end of this month, according to Musk.
The site was also set to implement a new “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach” policy before the end of this month, according to reporting from the news site Platformer. The policy appeared to be geared toward fulfilling Musk’s November promise to de-boost hateful content. It was not clear what direct changes Musk had made in the intervening months to fulfill his pledge.
But on a webpage explaining the “For You” timeline, Twitter wrote: “We recommend Tweets to you based on who you already follow and Topics you follow, and don’t recommend content that might be abusive or spammy.”
And this week, Musk said that beginning April 15, only “verified” users — those paying $8 a month for a Twitter subscription — will populate the “For You” feed, though he later clarified that accounts followed by the user will also appear in it.
Since Musk took over Twitter, he’s made sweeping changes to the site, including restoring the accounts of thousands of suspended users who had been previously booted for breaking the site’s rules, leaning heavily on a subscription model with features such as long-form tweets, and bringing back the banned account of former president Donald Trump. He also let go more than two-thirds of the company’s employees, something that has resulted in some problems with the site, including troubles addressing frequent outages.
Musk has touted his plan to make the site the default space to learn what’s going on in the world and weigh in, calling it the “de facto public town square.”
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, has described himself as a free speech “absolutist.”
But experts have warned that removing the guardrails Twitter previously had in place — which some critics, including Musk, have decried as censorship — could result in the platform becoming a cesspool of hate and threats of violence, as well as fomenting dangerous echo chambers showing users only content they agree with.
“It reveals how Mr. Musk’s goal for the platform is contradictory and self-defeating,” said Chris Bail, a Duke University professor who is director of its Polarization Lab, which examines political echo chambers in an effort to reduce the partisan divide. “You can’t have this sort of pure freedom of speech, and you can’t prevent freedom of reach, without some capacity to throttle or flag users. But producing such a list would be an inherently political act, and it would be pretty controversial.”
Even before Musk’s purchase of the company, Twitter was taking an ever-larger role in choosing the content to be shown to its users. Twitter’s feeds originally showed tweets from the accounts a user followed chronologically. Later, Twitter began showing tweets liked by or replied to by a followed account.
More recently but still before Musk’s takeover, Twitter began showing recommendations of tweets “You might like.” These sorts of insertions are sometimes marked with a label.
Twitter’s new “For You” page, introduced earlier this year, leaned into that model, taking Twitter further away from its roots as a chronological feed of events and reactions. Users complained after the site defaulted to the “For You” timeline, prompting Twitter to quickly roll out a change that remembered their preference.
To conduct its experiment, The Post created four brand-new “sockpuppet” accounts on Twitter, as well as two comparison accounts that followed mainstream users. For each sockpuppet, The Post followed a random 27 to 39 of the 91 members of the SPLC’s list of “concerning extremist or extremist-associated” accounts.
The Post then browsed the “For You” page feed for each sockpuppet, recording its findings. The accounts following the SPLC list members were each shown tweets from at least one other member of the list whom that account hadn’t followed. One account, for instance, was shown a tweet from a writer for an anti-immigrant group designated a hate group by the SPLC.
The algorithm did not merely surface accounts from the SPLC’s list of extremists and extremist-associated users or self-proclaimed racists. Those tweets constitute a small fraction of the tweets shown overall.
In all, many of the tweets fed to The Post’s accounts were from more-mainstream right-wing politicians and conservative influencers and some religion-related accounts. Examples included Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), podcaster Candace Owens and “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams — whose recent racist rant led many newspapers to drop the comic strip.
None of the accounts created by The Post followed Twitter’s second-most-popular user, Musk. But Musk showed up in users’ feeds anyway. The accounts following extremists and some of those following mainstream users were often shown posts from Musk, sometimes multiple times in a browsing session. (Musk officially became Twitter’s most popular user on Thursday.)
Many of the tweets that Twitter chose to show to The Post’s test accounts were from users that had been suspended from Twitter under its previous management.
One such user posted a quote about how immigration supposedly “dooms” Whites from a racist French novel popular among white supremacists. Twitter’s algorithms surfaced this tweet to two of The Post’s accounts, which were not following the user.
Another previously suspended account posted a complaint about “rootless globalists,” an antisemitic dogwhistle. Replies to the tweet attacked Jews explicitly.
The user posting the Hitler quote was marked as “withheld” in France and Germany, both of which ban certain Nazi symbols.
There is no sign Twitter is recommending extremism and hate speech to ordinary users. The Post’s test was an exercise to see whether extremist content is eligible to be fed to users via Twitter’s algorithms, but it may not reflect the real-life experience of anyone on the platform. Real extremist users might, for instance, follow non-extremists as well, in a way that would affect what the algorithm chooses to send to them.
Still, the echo chambers created could be harmful, experts said.
“On social media, when people are spoon-fed harmful content without context, history, or a countermessage, that’s just a recipe for further radicalization,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, the SPLC’s deputy director of research and analysis.
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Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and George Santos, R-N.Y., whose districts are on the Democrats' 'flip' list. (photo: AP)
In a list first reported by NBC News, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee laid out the House districts it’s aiming to flip next year.
The list, first reported by NBC News, is a blend of ultra-competitive districts in places like New York’s Hudson Valley and Long Island, including the seat held by Rep. George Santos; areas President Joe Biden won, like the Omaha-core seat held by Rep. Don Bacon; and conservative-leaning districts where the party sees an extreme and vulnerable GOP incumbent, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee executive director Julie Merz said in an interview that the party’s strategy is to present Biden and the Democrats as “team normal” against a chaotic band of “MAGA extremists” they say have taken over the House Republican conference.
They will contrast Biden’s legislative wins — mainly the $35 monthly insulin cost cap and lower drug prices for Medicare, manufacturing and new infrastructure projects — with a Republican majority Merz says is “all hat and no cattle” when it comes to delivering results.
“There are no more Republican moderates. They had an opportunity very early in the speaker’s vote to stand up to the most vocal MAGA extremists and say, ‘This isn’t OK. This isn’t the direction we want our caucus to go.’ And they folded,” Merz said.
The list of 31 districts, along with two open seats, is paired with a separate list of “front-line” members in competitive districts that Democrats must defend against Republican hopes of capturing those seats.
A suburban realignment and redistricting have made the battle for the House majority extremely competitive. In 2020, Democrats won a four-seat majority. Two years later, Republicans won an identical majority.
Now the map has narrowed, and the DCCC's list of 33 seats represents the outer limits of what the party can achieve. It’s not yet clear how heavily Democrats will spend in each of the districts — in crunch time, they’ll have to make tough decisions.
And the race for the House majority is full of unpredictable factors.
A big one is who the Republican presidential nominee will be. The current front-runner is former President Donald Trump, who was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury Thursday. Another is the condition of the economy in fall 2024. As the incumbent, Biden and his entire party could reap the benefits of a boom cycle or pay a price in a downturn or if wages fail to keep pace with inflation.
“If House Republicans want to spend their time in battleground districts defending their nominee’s criminal behavior on top of their own failure to govern and deliver anything remotely helpful for working families, that’s up to them,” Merz said.
The targeted districts include eight seats in California and six in New York. Merz said the majority could run through those blue states, arguing that Democratic “turnout challenges” in both states cost them seats in 2022, while a mix of “presidential year turnout” and “strong candidates” could turn their fortunes in 2024.
National Republican Congressional Committee communications director Jack Pandol said, “Extreme House Democrats lost the majority because they hammered families with crime, chaos and skyrocketing costs. Why would voters change their minds after Democrats spent their time in the minority coddling violent criminals and opposing relief?”
The two open seats on the Democrats list are being vacated by Reps. Katie Porter of California and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who are both running for the Senate. Republicans have targeted those seats as House pickups.
Merz said she’s not worried. “We have good benches in those districts,” she said. “And we’re already having a number of recruitment conversations.”
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Suzan DelBene of Washington will have to balance offensive moves with defending swing and red-leaning districts that Republicans consider ripe for the picking in 2024. In 2020, the campaign arm of House Democrats went hard on offense and took for granted a series of districts that they narrowly lost, contributing to their small majority.
Another tough decision for the DCCC, and a source of contention with progressive advocates in recent years, will be whether to meddle in primaries or let them play out. Merz didn’t close the door on getting involved in some races, but she said it’s not the congressional committee's aim.
“We never want to get involved in primaries,” she said. “There are scenarios like top-twos in California and Washington, where we have to ensure that there is a Democratic nominee and we aren’t locked out. But I think we are optimistic that primaries by and large are a healthy thing. We can let a lot of them play out and we want the people on the ground in these districts making these decisions.”
The other GOP-held seats on the committee's list are held by:
- Rep. Dave Schweikert of Arizona
- Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona
- Rep. Kevin Kiley of California
- Rep. John Duarte of California
- Rep. David Valadao of California
- Rep. Mike Garcia of California
- Rep. Young Kim of California
- Rep. Ken Calvert of California
- Rep. Michelle Steel of California
- Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida
- Rep. Maria Salazar of Florida
- Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa
- Rep. Zachary Nunn of Iowa
- Rep. John James of Michigan
- Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana
- Rep. Thomas Kean of New Jersey
- Rep. Nick LaLota of New York
- Rep. Anthony D'Esposito of New York
- Rep. Michael Lawler of New York
- Rep. Marcus Molinaro of New York
- Rep. Brandon Williams of New York
- Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon
- Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania
- Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania
- Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas
- Rep. Jennifer Kiggans of Virginia
- Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin
- Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin
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A DHL airplane taxis at Miami. DHL’s super hub at Cincinnati/North Kentucky airport is one of the largest air cargo airports in the world. (photo: Anadolu Agency)
Former manager says company managers referred to themselves as ‘wardens’ as they sought to frustrate unionization effort
The revelations come as DHL is at loggerheads with the Teamsters over a union election to represent workers at the site.
Ryan Doyen has worked at DHL for about five years and was promoted to a manager position as a ramp lead on the DHL Express Ramp. He said he resigned from management at the logistics company’s super hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky international airport (CVG) and returned to an hourly position after hearing the responses and attitudes of other managers toward his co-workers once a union organizing drive ramped up at the site.
“I kept hearing ill speaking of the hourly employees,” said Doyen. “Then one day I overheard a conversation between two managers that they needed to take back the hub, that they referred to as a prison, and that they are the ‘wardens’ taking back the prison from the ‘inmates’. On that note, I did not want to be a part of management any more because I couldn’t idly sit by and allow managers to speak ill of the people I called my friends and colleagues. It didn’t sit right with me as a human.”
After the incident, Doyen wrote a resignation letter from his managerial position. Afterward, he started speaking with union organizers and getting involved in the union effort, which he had not initially supported.
DHL employs about 3,000 workers at the CVG Global Hub, with 900 workers currently seeking to form a union with Teamsters Local 100. DHL and the union are still disputing the size and scope of the bargaining unit and an election date has yet to be determined by the National Labor Relations Board.
DHL opened the hub in 2013, one of the company’s three super hubs in the world, operating as the main hub in the US for DHL, one of the largest air cargo airports in the world.
Based in Germany, DHL is one of the largest logistics corporations in the world.
Through the union organizing campaign, workers have filed 17 unfair labor practice charges against DHL, alleging harassment, intimidation, surveillance and retaliation from management for union activities. The Teamsters have accused DHL of violating a neutrality agreement with the union and failing to live up to the company’s global declaration of workers and human rights by opposing the union.
The Teamsters already represent about 6,000 of the 10,000 workers at DHL in the US and workers criticized DHL for its response to the union drive at the hub given previous agreements with the union at other sites.
Doyen said workers were pushing to unionize at DHL for issues ranging from job security, representation at disciplinary hearings, improved pay and benefits, a voice on safety issues and working conditions.
Doyen described the work as dangerous and grueling, with workers subjected to extreme temperatures in summer and winter months, often without air conditioning or heating in vehicles. He claimed workers had to deal with old or poorly maintained equipment, and had to ask management to call off work due to safety concerns for weather such as lightning.
“We want to have a voice. We don’t have a voice right now,” added Doyen. “Ever since we filed for our election, they’ve delayed it for so long. We should have already had our vote and be at the bargaining table. DHL needs to stop delaying our vote so we can have our union.”
Steven Fightmaster, a third-shift leader on the domestic ramp at DHL for nearly two years, argued the push to unionize at the site came from the different treatment workers at unionized sites get compared with what they receive at CVG.
“Not only are they treated a lot better, but they’re also compensated much, much better than we are at the hub,” said Fightmaster.
He claimed that throughout the union campaign, management and DHL security or contracted security have harassed workers supporting the union, telling them they cannot wear union shirts or vests to threatening to call the police on workers speaking with other workers in the parking lot about the union effort.
“I’ve been followed off the property by DHL corporate security. I was followed to my home on one occasion, I was followed to a union meeting on another and it’s just the constant harassment and intimidation tactics used by both DHL corporate security and their security contractor,” said Fightmaster.
“As hourly employees, we’ve been referred to as inmates by managers. The phrase used was they are the ones taking back the ramp from the inmates. We’re just not respected out there. We don’t have the dignity and respect in the workplace that we deserve, and people are getting fed up with it.”
Asked about the “inmates” comments, a spokesperson for DHL did not directly address the allegation. “At the DHL CVG Hub, we prioritize treating our employees with the utmost respect. We deeply value the rights of our workers and always prioritize their safety and welfare, not just at our Hub but in all of our operations,” they said.
The spokesperson listed wage increases, increases in paid time off, and individual counseling offerings.
“We also provide training and orientation programs for all of our management levels to ensure that our core values are integrated into every aspect of our operation. We’re dedicated to creating a healthy work environment, both physically and emotionally, for all our employees,” they added. “Additionally, we recognize our employees’ right to unionize within the confines of the law and are fully committed to all agreements we have with our local, national and international labor partners.”
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The U.S. and Mexico's drug cartels. (image: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters)
Trump and Republicans want to bomb Mexico to fight the “invasion” of fentanyl. Apparently, no lessons have been learned from the failed war on drugs.
Political leaders have put forth a flurry of proposals to have the U.S. military launch a full-scale war against Mexican drug cartels to stem the fentanyl crisis.
“I’ve got legislation I’ll introduce soon to make drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Fox News this week. “We need to put our military into the game to stop this, we need to destroy these labs on the ground in Mexico… the law enforcement model’s not working, we are literally under attack—there are more Americans being killed by Mexican drug cartels than ISIS, al Qaeda, the Germans and Japanese combined on the homeland.”
Graham has said he will introduce a Senate version of an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Mexico—Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) has already introduced a version in the House of Representatives.
And on Thursday, news broke that former President Donald Trump has told his advisers to draft up “battle plans” to “attack Mexico” if he is re-elected.
Former Attorney General William P. Barr fired an early, prominent shot against cartels with a March 2 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
“America can no longer tolerate narco-terrorist cartels,” Barr contended. “Operating from havens in Mexico, their production of deadly drugs on an industrial scale is flooding our country with this poison. The time is long past to deal with this outrage decisively.”
Barr praised a Joint Resolution that had been introduced in the House of Representatives that would authorize the president to deploy the United States’ military against cartels inside Mexico. The danger the trafficking organizations pose to the U.S., Barr insisted, “requires that we confront them primarily as national-security threats, not a law-enforcement matter.”
“These narco-terrorist groups are more like ISIS than like the American mafia,” Barr wrote. He later confirmed that he wanted to use “special ops units” for missions in Mexico.
Barr wasn’t about to give Mexican officials a veto over the operation of foreign troops inside their country. “It would be good to have the Mexicans’ cooperation,” Barr told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “And I think that will only come when the Mexicans know that we’re willing to do it with or without their cooperation,” he added.
It did not take long for other militant drug warriors to embrace the latest policy panacea.
Just days after Barr’s op-ed appeared, Sen. Graham announced he would introduce legislation designating the Mexican cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and empower the president to use military force against them. Anticipating likely objections, another drug warrior, Rep. Mike Walsh (R-FL), stated a military offensive “wouldn’t involve sending U.S. troops to fight the cartels.” Instead, said Walsh, a U.S. military response likely would include “cyber, drones, intelligence assets,” and “naval assets."
These fits of rage will only exacerbate the overdose problem. The current scourge of fentanyl is just the latest manifestation of what drug policy analysts call “the iron law of prohibition.” The shorthand version of the iron law states, “the harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug.” Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes and divide into more units to sell.
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The iron law of prohibition is why cannabis THC concentration has grown over the years. It is what brought crack cocaine into the cocaine market. And it is why fentanyl has replaced heroin as the primary cause of overdose deaths in the U.S. It is why dealers are now boosting fentanyl with the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine (“tranq”), and might be in the process of replacing fentanyl with the more powerful synthetic opioid isotonitazene (“iso”). Doubling down on law enforcement guarantees we will be battling even more deadly drugs in the not-too-distant future.
But U.S. leaders have learned nothing. They have flirted with militarizing the anti-drug campaign in Mexico before. Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, Mike Esper, said his boss asked him at least twice in 2020 about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels.
Using the U.S. military against targets in Mexico was a bad idea then, and it is a bad idea now.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has already condemned the latest “irresponsible proposals” for U.S. military action against the cartels. Even if Washington ultimately can bully López Obrador into tolerating such an intrusion, angry pushback from other factions in Mexico is nearly certain. The likelihood of drone or missile strikes killing innocent bystanders (as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia) could create a crisis in bilateral relations.
American proponents of the military option cite Washington’s success in taking down the Cali and Medellin cartels in Colombia at the turn of the century. However, that episode proved to be a hollow victory.
The center of the illegal drug trade simply moved northward to Mexico and Central America. A similar hollow victory occurred later with the capture of “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of Mexico’s dominant Sinaloa cartel. A multiyear surge of violence has followed Washington’s alleged triumph, as new contenders vie to control the lucrative drug routes into America.
Our leaders speak of a fentanyl “invasion” or “epidemic.” But those are inapt metaphors. The drugs do not “invade” our country like predators seeking prey. Nor are they akin to viruses that infect and jump from host to host. The flood of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs is a response to strong demand for psychoactive substances from American drug users.
Governments cannot stop people from using these drugs. Governments can only make drug use more dangerous by driving it underground to an unregulated and deadly black market.
If policymakers want to get serious about reducing overdose deaths but lack the political will to end prohibition, they should at least refocus their energies on expanding harm-reduction strategies. This means repealing drug paraphernalia laws that make it illegal to distribute drug testing strips and equipment and clean syringes. It also means repealing 21 U.S.C. Section 856 (the so-called “crack house” statute), so the U.S. can join the rest of the developed world in allowing overdose prevention centers, which have been saving lives for nearly 40 years.
If the U.S. intervenes militarily in Mexico in a futile attempt to win the unwinnable drug war, the result will likely resemble the chaotic tragedy in Afghanistan.
Like water in a boulder-laden creek, the drugs will keep finding their way downstream to consumers despite Washington’s determined efforts. Further militarizing the drug war is a delusional fantasy that will wreck America’s relations with its southern neighbor.
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Brittney Griner. (photo: Ethan Miller/Cabra Sports)
President Joe Biden has urged Moscow to release Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who is being held on espionage charges the newspaper vehemently denies.
“Every American who is taken is ours to fight for and every American returned is a win for us all," said Griner, who was released in a high-profile prisoner swap after she was jailed in Russia for most of last year.
“Our hearts are filled with great concern” for Gershkovich and his family," Griner and her wife, Cherelle, said in a statement posted to Instagram late Saturday.
Russian security officials arrested the Wall Street Journal reporter, 31, last week, and plan to detain him for at least two months on spying charges that Gershkovich and the Journal vehemently deny. The newspaper and other media organizations have demanded his release.
His arrest came as tensions between Washington and Moscow deepen over the war in Ukraine and as the Kremlin cracks down on free speech at home. Gershkovich is the first journalist from a U.S. news outlet to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War.
President Joe Biden has urged Moscow to release Gershkovich, telling reporters Friday that his message on the arrest was simply: “Let him go.”
The Biden administration said Thursday it was working to secure U.S. consular access to Gershkovich. Speaking at a news conference in Lusaka, Zambia, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the U.S. was “deeply concerned” about the arrest.
“We will not tolerate — and condemn, in fact — repression of journalists,” Harris said during a weeklong visit to Africa.
In their Instagram statement, the Griners celebrated the Biden administration’s “recent successful efforts” to repatriate other detained Americans such as Jeff Woodke, an aid worker who was held captive in Niger for six years, and Paul Rusesbagina, an American legal resident and human rights worker who was imprisoned for more than two years in Rwanda.
The Griners called on their supporters to “encourage” the administration to do everything possible to bring wrongfully detained Americans home.
Griner, a six-time WNBA All-Star who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, spent most of last year in a Russian penal colony after she was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in February and jailed on drug charges after Russian authorities said they found vape cannisters and cannabis oil in her luggage.
She was released in December in a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, an illicit arms dealer nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” who had served 11 years of a 25-year sentence in the U.S.
But Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov ruled out any quick swap involving Gershkovich.
“I wouldn’t even consider this issue now because people who were previously swapped had already served their sentences,” Ryabkov said on Thursday, according to Tass news agency.
As Russia’s war effort in Ukraine continues, crackdowns on reporters and protesters at home have intensified. Days after the invasion, Moscow introduced a new law criminalizing any criticism of the Russian army and threatening prison for repeat offenders.
Gershkovich, whose parents were originally from the former Soviet Union, covered Russia, Ukraine and countries in the former USSR for The Wall Street Journal. If convicted of spying, he could face up to 20 years in a Russian prison.
In a statement Saturday, the Journal said it "demands the immediate release of our colleague," describing him as a "distinguished" and "fearless" reporter.
"Evan's case is a vicious affront to a free press, and should spur outrage in all free people and governments throughout the world," it said.
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Several of the derailed train cars in East Palestine, Ohio, in February were carrying petrochemicals derived from oil and gas. (photo: Xinhua News Agency)
The growing oil and gas industry means more incidents like East Palestine.
Philadelphia residents were on high alert after the Trinseo latex plant 20 miles from the city released at least 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymers into a tributary for the Delaware River on March 24. Those acrylic polymers were made up of compounds known as butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate; all are produced from fossil fuels.
Last month, East Palestine, Ohio, faced a Norfolk Southern train derailment with highly volatile toxic chemicals, including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride — which is also derived from oil. On March 28, 10 barges, including one containing 1,400 metric tons of methanol — yup, you guessed it, made from oil or gas — broke loose in the Ohio River in Kentucky.
Many other incidents don’t make national news: The Guardian reported that the US has averaged a chemical accident every two days so far in 2023. Every year, there’s an average of 202 accidental chemical releases at facilities, according to EPA data.
This adds up to a major threat to water quality. “In the US, chemical exposure probably is the biggest threat to water quality, particularly drinking water quality, whether that is direct chemical exposure from facilities like what happened in Philadelphia or chemical exposure from products,” said Joel Tickner, who is a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and leads the nonprofit Green Chemistry … Commerce Council.
All these events are usually lumped together in the vague category of a chemical spill, but it’s important to get more specific than that. Petrochemicals — as this class of compounds are known — are ubiquitous today, used to make some form of the plastic found in detergents, cosmetics, clothing, packaging, and more. (The Trinseo plant near Philadelphia, for instance, was basically making paint.)
There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.
But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.
Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.
From fossil fuels to plastics: The full life cycle of petrochemicals takes a dangerous toll
The final form of plastic you buy at the store may be relatively harmless, but the building blocks it’s made up of are often hazardous to human and animal health. “Oil and gas is the basis of most of our chemistry,” Tickner said. “We built most of our modern chemistry on these seven fairly toxic, challenging chemicals and then you essentially iterate off of those.”
Those seven basic chemicals are methanol, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, and xylene, and they can pose a variety of risks. Benzene, for instance, is a known carcinogen. Eventually, benzene may be transformed into something as benign as food packaging, but “that plastic that you have bought has a history somewhere else,” Tickner said. The manufacturing “might go back to a community in Louisiana that is highly exposed to benzene or ethylene oxide or some other material.”
There are more than 11,000 facilities that store, use, or handle hazardous materials in the US, according to the Government Accountability Office. But they tend to be concentrated in a few parts of the country, often in or near communities of color. Louisiana, the Ohio River Valley, and Texas have all seen expansion of petrochemical plants. The map below from Oil and Gas Watch shows the zoomed-out landscape for proposed and operating petrochemical facilities (yellow dots) and their pipelines (yellow lines) across the US:
It’s cheap oil and gas that has helped fuel the rise in chemicals manufacturing. Traditionally, most plastics have come from imported petroleum, but fracking and expanded drilling have given rise to a domestic petrochemicals industry. The 2010s were a decade of historically low natural gas prices, and the cheap fuel made plastics an even more attractive proposition.
These chemicals are produced in a variety of ways, but today the biggest proposed expansion in the US is in ethane cracker plants. These are facilities that use high heat capable of breaking (or “cracking”) the bonds in natural gas’s methane to produce ethane. That ethane is then used to create a huge array of plastics.
One of the products that come from cracking ethylene is vinyl chloride, the same chemical that the derailed train carried in East Palestine. It’s transported as a chilled liquid, but when exposed to the outdoors it becomes a highly explosive gas. The risk of an uncontrolled explosion led responders in East Palestine to vent the vinyl chloride and burn it, producing a black cloud of smoke over the town of 4,700. Residents now worry that the fallout from the smoke will lead to contaminated groundwater in the years to come.
Carnegie Mellon professor of green chemistry Terry Collins noted that the steady rise in petrochemicals nationwide is making it increasingly difficult to keep drinking water safe. Some plastics and petrochemicals mimic hormone molecules found in our bodies and can therefore interrupt growth and development, especially in children. “We’ve got this going on galore,” Collins said.
Everyday exposure to petrochemicals production is a reality for many
As the East Palestine incident highlighted, there’s no completely foolproof way to process and transport these highly flammable and corrosive chemicals. Trains can derail, and pipelines can rupture.
But controlled burns, like the one in East Palestine, happen regularly at petrochemicals plants.
Rachel Meyer, an Ohio River Valley field coordinator for the environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, has seen just how common it is for a facility to flare its chemicals to avoid any fires or explosions. She lives at the center of fracking operations and petrochemical plants in southwestern Pennsylvania. She is 20 miles from the Norfolk Southern derailment but also a few miles from a giant new plastics plant, Shell’s Monaca facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.
The giant Shell Monaca plant is less than six months old and, last month, the plant responded to malfunctioning equipment by flaring gas to avoid explosion. “It was so bright at nighttime,” Meyer said. “It was this reddish orange color. And I could see that on clouds all the way out where I am.” Residents have seen that glow from 17 miles away.
Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog environmental group, notes the facility has already had 14 records of violations and 34 malfunctions from its construction and operating phase, and the plant already exceeded its annual limits for smog-forming air pollutants within its first few months of operation.
The Shell Monaca plant is one of the largest ethane plants yet to open in the US. Smaller incidents tend to be self-reported by companies, often with a lag time so residents don’t immediately know the reason why the air may smell or there’s an orange nighttime sky.
There are many paths to protecting the public from petrochemicals’ harms. Of course, more work can be done to prevent accidents and promote train safety, while also taking risk management seriously. But safety also starts with rethinking our petrochemicals reliance entirely.
Train derailments, routine flaring, and equipment failures show a far darker side than the oil and gas industry usually lets on. From the industry’s view, plastics and petrochemicals will ensure demand for oil and gas for decades, even as the US transitions away from gasoline-powered transportation.
All these incidents showcase how the impacts from plastics seep into our lives long before they’re tossed into the trash.
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