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That’s in his debt ceiling bill. And his delays have already cost taxpayers an additional $328 million as he preaches against excess spending.
Granted, it is true that the bill would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, reduce projected deficits by $4.8 trillion over 10 years. Doing that would necessitate, next year, a 27 percent cut in discretionary spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That’s assuming, as everyone does, that congressional Republicans will never apply these across-the-board spending cuts to the Pentagon. McCarthy blows a gasket every time President Joe Biden points out that his plan would require a severe reduction in veterans’ benefits. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, if McCarthy intends not to cut funding for the Veterans Administration, then discretionary spending on all other domestic programs next year will have to be cut not 27 percent but 33 percent.
It’s sheer fantasy to conceive that you can cut spending by anything close to this magnitude without doing severe damage to government functions and creating a public uproar. Even the tough-talking Freedom Caucus would never allow it to happen. McCarthy’s debt limit bill is a bluff that, as I’ve noted before, wouldn’t have won support from his own caucus without McCarthy’s assurance that the bill would never, ever become law.
But that isn’t what I invite you to think about today. Instead, let’s review how the GOP’s negotiating stance on the debt ceiling increases rather than decreases government spending.
Start with the debt limit bill itself. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island tweeted last week that 275 of the 317 pages of McCarthy’s debt limit bill are “devoted to giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.” For example, the bill would reduce royalty rates for drilling on federal land. The combined cost of these giveaways, according to the CBO, is $430 million.
The debt limit bill would also claw back $71 billion of the $80 billion Congress included in last year’s climate bill to boost funding for the IRS. That sounds like a spending cut, but rescinding that increase would cost the federal government $186 billion in lost tax revenue over the next decade, according to CBO, netting out to a cost of $115 billion.
You may protest that the previous two calculations are speculation. If the debt ceiling bill’s pledge to cut discretionary spending next year by 27 or 33 percent is a bluff, isn’t that same bill’s pledge to bloat the deficit by $115.4 billion also a bluff? Sure, OK. But congressional Republicans say they’re fighting Biden on the debt ceiling (“We owe it to our children”) because they want to halt runaway spending. That renders glaringly hypocritical individual examples where they propose spending increases. We do not “owe it to our children” to charge oil companies less for leases on federal land or to enable tax cheating by the rich.
Even setting aside McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill, don’t kid yourself that Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling is cost-free. The statutory debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion was actually reached way back on January 19. The only reason the United States didn’t go into default then was that the Treasury used the same “extraordinary measures” (i.e., accounting gimmicks) that it deployed during similarly dangerous debt limit games of chicken that congressional Republicans chose to play in 2011 and 2013. Republicans like to point out that congressional Democrats have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican presidents. That’s true. But only Republicans resort to full-on extortion that puts the country at serious risk of default. In 2011, when the GOP played a similar game, it managed to lower Standard … Poor’s credit rating for U.S. Treasury bills.
You’ve probably got some experience taking extraordinary measures in your own financial life. You can’t afford to pay all your bills this month, so you look them over and decide which to defer. That incurs a small penalty you’ll have to pay on your next bill. Or you pay only the minimum on your credit card and leave the remainder for next month, or the month after that. That incurs a bigger penalty. To employ these tricks is economically unwise because you end up spending more money. But your cash flow leaves you no alternative.
The federal budget operates on the same principle. When money is suddenly tight, either because of a government shutdown or because of a debt limit standoff, Uncle Sam does what you do: He calculates which bills to pay now and which bills to pay later. Only instead of shorting the gas bill or the electric bill or the Visa bill, he skips contributions to retirement funds for civil servants and postal workers and he suspends the issuing of certain securities.
Some question has been raised about whether this is entirely legit. Last week I wrote about an ingenious lawsuit brought by the National Association of Government Employees, or NAGE, arguing that any planning the Treasury undertakes for a possible default violates the Constitution because only Congress has power of the purse. NAGE has standing to sue because its own members’ pensions are getting shorted during the current round of “extraordinary measures.”
The federal government’s extraordinary measures will soon be all used up, possibly as early as June 1. At that point, the cost of Republican intransigence will be an economic recession, and that’s if we’re lucky. A protracted default would, according to the White House, push unemployment near or beyond 10 percent in the next quarter and cause a drop in gross domestic product of more than 6 percent. Even a brief default could lower the yield on Treasury bills by $750 billion over the next decade, according to economists Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner, writing for the Brookings Institution. That’s all speculation, because the United States has never experienced an across-the-board economic default before. The real cost is, “You don’t want to find out.”
None of this can be news to anybody besides that notorious deadbeat Donald Trump, who said of a possible default last week in his CNN town hall, “Maybe it’s—you have a bad week or a bad day.” Almost nobody of either major political party would agree with that trivializing statement.
But let’s get back to the cost not of outright default but of those “extraordinary measures” that an intransigent GOP has, since January, forced on the Biden administration. According to the White House, yields on Treasury bills have already been pushed up, increasing the cost of government borrowing, and credit default swap spreads (i.e., insurance premiums on U.S. debt) have nearly doubled over the past month.
It will be awhile before we have official numbers on what the extraordinary measures are costing the federal government. But a 2017 paper by four economists at the Federal Reserve concluded that these same accounting tricks cost the federal government $260 million in 2011 and $230 million in 2013 due to rising yields on Treasury bills. Let’s split the difference and set the price of extraordinary measures, conservatively, at $245 million in 2012. Eleven subsequent years of inflation increase that cost to $328 million.
GOP giveaways in the debt limit bill total $115.4 billion. Add in the $328 million we’re spending on extraordinary measures, and congressional Republicans’ holy war on government spending increases the federal deficit by nearly $116 billion. That means McCarthy will have to commit Biden to about $116 billion in budget cuts just to break even on what his bill proposes to spend plus what his theatrics have already cost the U.S. taxpayer.
If you prefer to calculate, more conservatively, based on the tab McCarthy has run up already, then that tab is $328 million. That may not sound like much in a federal budget that exceeds $6 trillion. But it ain’t nothing. It’s nearly four times what Biden proposes to spend next year to support state and local fair housing enforcement organizations.
It’s only slightly less than what Biden proposes to invest in the industry-led Registered Apprenticeship program. It’s about twice what Biden proposes next year in grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, and indeed one-third larger than NEA’s entire proposed budget for next year. It represents most of the $495 million Biden requested for the Peace Corps. It’s nearly four times the $87 million that the federal government will send this year to Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the federal government’s cash-welfare program (and it’s anybody’s guess how much of that will get to benefit recipients, given recent pretty outrageous scandals surrounding Mississippi’s allocation of those funds).
If a Republican member of Congress figured out how to cut $328 million from the federal budget, he’d send out a press release, right? But no Republican is going to send out a press release saying we could have saved $328 million had McCarthy not pissed it away refusing to let Congress pay its bills.
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The border wall in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Sasabe, Ariz., on May 12, 2023. (photo: Ryan Devereaux/The Intercept)
As President Joe Biden swaps one asylum crackdown for another, the border’s lethality endures.
The group was small. A man, two women, and two children, a boy and a girl. Their bright shirts made them easy to spot against the green and gold of the desert. The boy waved his arms above his head as I drove nearer, like a shipwreck survivor on a deserted island. I rolled down my window. He looked to be about 8 years old, maybe 9. Just tall enough to peek over my door, he said hello in English. The man beside him looked exhausted and desperate. I asked if they needed help. They did.
It was the morning of Friday, May 12. Roughly 12 hours had passed since President Joe Biden lifted a public health order known as Title 42, which had strangled asylum access at the border for more than three years. He replaced the measure with a new suite of border enforcement policies that would have much the same effect.
Across the country, the headline was chaos. The details didn’t matter as much as the perception. Title 42 created a massive backlog of asylum-seekers south of the border, and now it was going away. The president’s critics did the smugglers’ advertising for them, repeating ad nauseam the lie that the border was now open and Biden wanted the migrants to become Americans.
In a press conference earlier in the week, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, outlined the new enforcement framework. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences,” he said. Simply showing up at the nation’s doorstep was no longer enough. Asylum-seekers could download an app and to join an electronic line now. Those who failed to seek asylum in another country first would not get in. Deportations would be fast-tracked, and new tweaks to the asylum interviews were aimed at making them harder to pass.
How it would all play out remained to be seen. “I think DHS is just absolutely terrified and clueless,” a senior asylum officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, told me while Mayorkas spoke on Thursday. The administration had reason to be concerned: The estimated arrival numbers were historic, and Republicans clearly smelled blood.
By the time the first day was through, the headlines imagining chaos were replaced by reports of calm across the border. While that may have been true in some parts, on a far-flung strip of border road east of the tiny community of Sasabe, Arizona, the first 24 hours in post-Title 42 America offered a grim suggestion of the days to come. Heeding the call of the state’s right-wing political leaders, armed vigilantes stalked and harassed humanitarian aid providers during the day and by nightfall rounded up migrant children in the dark. The events followed weeks of rising tensions that included the arrest of a longtime aid volunteer by federal authorities. Caught in the middle, as ever, were desperate families facing a deadly desert.
An hour and a half southwest of Tucson, the beauty of the Buenos Aires refuge belies its capacity for lethality, and yet, people from around the world, kids included, cross the landscape in sneakers, without sufficient water or any real sense of where they are, all the time.
Over the past two-and-a-half decades, ever since the government began enlisting the Sonoran Desert in its war on unauthorized migration, the office of the Pima County examiner in Tucson has recorded more than 4,000 migrant deaths along the state’s southern border. Nationwide, experts put the minimum death toll at around 10,000, though all agree the true count is undoubtedly higher. Last year was the deadliest on record.
The refuge has seen its share of migrant deaths, the most recent known case an unidentified man whose skeletal remains were recovered on the road running parallel to the border wall, just west of Coches Ridge, last October. The medical examiner estimated he had been dead for at least six months, maybe longer. The cause was unknown.
The man’s bones were found not far from the spot where the boy stood outside my truck on Friday morning. As usual, I had come to report but knew, as anyone who ventures into the Sonoran Desert’s backcountry should, that such an encounter was possible. The man in the group told me they had no water, no phone, and they had been walking through the wilderness for three days. They were from Ecuador. I asked if they wanted me to call the Border Patrol. The man said yes. I gave him the jug of water I had brought just in case and drove off to find cellphone service and call 911.
The Border Patrol agent who came rumbling down the road was gruff. I told him the situation. He asked if I knew that I was trespassing. While I was on a public road on public land, I knew the Border Patrol had recently adopted some novel interpretations of the law when it came to U.S. citizens passing through the area. I guided the conversation elsewhere. The Ecuadorians reported being in the elements for three days, I explained. They all say that, the agent replied, before driving off to collect the migrants waiting down the road.
They all say that because it’s almost always true. A day earlier, I had spoken to Dora Rodriguez, a Tucson-based borderlands activist. In the summer of 1980, Rodriguez was among a group of 26 Salvadoran refugees who were abandoned by their guide in the unforgiving expanse of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 150 miles west of Buenos Aires. Thirteen of Rodriguez’s companions lost their lives that day. She was 19 years old. It was the deadliest event of its kind at the time.
Today, Rodriguez is the director of Salvavision, an organization devoted to Salvadoran migrants and deportees. She also volunteers with Humane Borders, an aid group that maintains large water tanks in areas where migrants are known to die, and she’s a co-founder of Casa de la Esperanza, a migrant shelter in Mexico southwest of Buenos Aires. She knows what migrants passing through the Sonoran Desert face as well as anyone.
“On the Mexico side, there is still two hours from the road to get to the border wall,” Rodriguez told me the day before Title 42 ended.
The more difficult the U.S. makes it to cross the border, the more demand there is among people who want or need to cross it, fueling an ever-expanding market of illicit service providers. The customers don’t choose where they’re crossed. The smugglers do, and in the region of northern Sonora that abuts the Buenos Aires refuge, that means a long walk through the wilderness before you even make it to the border.
In addition to powering a vicious cycle that puts vulnerable people in dangerous situations, the smuggling market is in constant dialogue with shifting policies and narratives in the U.S. In the small town in northern Mexico where she works, everybody knows the border is now open, Rodriguez explained. She hears it from the women who staff her shelter.
“It just boggles my mind how they say, ‘Oh, Dorita, the border is going to be open, so people are going to come.’ And I say, ‘Where have you heard that?’” she said. “If that’s their mentality, if that’s what they hear, I am sure that’s what the smugglers are telling our people.”
Of course, detachments from reality know no border. Last spring’s arrival of a group of QAnon adherents who set up camp along the Buenos Aires border road proved it.
With Bibles in hand, the vigilantes intercepted groups of migrant children, who they claimed were being sex trafficked. They targeted local humanitarian volunteers as the perpetrators, posting their targets’ names, photos, and home addresses online. Eventually, after they ran out of money and a New York Times story exposed their harassment, they left.
Soon after, humanitarian aid volunteers in the area began noticing unusual “no trespassing” signs along the border wall. Though attached to federal property on federal land, the signs cited a state trespassing statute. Nevertheless, it was Border Patrol agents who began warning the volunteers that they could no longer stop on the road to provide aid.
In the wake of the QAnon affair, the Border Patrol resolved to never again allow camping near the border road, John Mennell, a Customs and Border Protection supervisory public affairs specialist in Tucson, told me.
There is no federal law that directly authorizes Border Patrol agents — employees of an immigration enforcement agency with some drug interdiction authorities — to arrest U.S. citizens for trespassing on federal public lands. In Arizona, however, there is a state trespassing law that allows for the arrest of U.S. citizens who disobey law enforcement officers under certain conditions. There’s also a federal statute, the Assimilative Crimes Act, that allows federal authorities to enforce state laws on federal land when no federal version of that law exists; the resulting charge, though drawn from a state statute, is filed at the federal level.
Putting two and two together, the Border Patrol took the position that U.S. citizens could drive along the border wall, but if they stopped, they would be violating the state’s trespassing laws and subject to federal prosecution. “The farmers and ranchers can use the border road to get up and around on their property or things like that,” Mennell said. Beyond that, the road would be considered off-limits. “What they don’t want is what we had earlier,” Mennell said, “where we had people camping on the road.”
Jane Storey, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher, is among the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans’ most active members. She is also one of two Samaritans whose personal information the vigilantes posted online. “They used to harass me all the time,” Storey told me last week. She didn’t let it get it to her. “I don’t know,” she said, “when you’re 75, eh — it’s just like, don’t mess with an old woman. I’m not afraid.”
After moving to the border in 2018, Storey found a calling in aid work. She ditched her Prius for a used Subaru that could better handle the rough terrain of the region. She went to the wall as often as she could. “I started keeping track because I was finding people all the time,” Storey said. She tallied 193 people, mostly children, who she provided aid to up until March 17, the day the Border Patrol finally placed her under arrest.
According to her account, Storey had pulled over for a group of children who were approaching a gap in the wall, one of whom was holding a baby. A Border Patrol agent had been trailing her and got out when she did. She asked the agent if she could give the children water. No, he told her, she had been repeatedly warned not to stop by the wall. Storey asked if she was going to be arrested. The agent said yes. The volunteer handed her car keys and phone to two of her companions.
With flex-cuffs fastened tight around her wrists, the retired teacher was driven to Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson and placed in a cold, concrete cell. Having written her attorney’s phone number inside her shoe, she was able to place a call for help.
In a statement, Diana L. Varela, executive assistant to U.S. Attorney Gary M. Restaino, acknowledged Storey’s arrest and explained her office’s decision not to prosecute the case. “Charging the subject in those circumstances would have been a hasty solution,” she wrote. That did not, however, mean that federal prosecutors would never bring such a case. “The United States has clear jurisdiction to prosecute crimes, including state law trespass crimes, on the Roosevelt Reservation near the border,” Varela said, referring to the strip of land that runs parallel to the border wall. “Whether or not prosecution is justified depends on the nature of the intrusion into Border Patrol activities and the nature of the trespass activity.
“We will continue to evaluate potential charges for trespass on a case-by-case basis,” Varela added. “Because we cannot resolve border issues through prosecution alone, we are also looking for an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about Samaritan activities — and the adverse impact some of those activities can have on Border Patrol’s efforts to safely secure the border — with the leadership of the organization.”
Storey was released from her cell. A forest service officer drove her to a gas station on the southeast edge of Tucson. The officer parked behind the building and told her to get out. Storey had been unable to reach her family while she was locked up. She had no phone, the sun was going down, and she was more than 30 miles from home.
If Storey’s arrest hadn’t rattled humanitarian providers enough, the return of the vigilantes did. In the weeks leading to the lifting of Title 42, the volunteers repeatedly found their water tanks shot through with holes or drained at the spigot. “Almost every week, we have a tank that’s been shot,” Rodriguez said.
One of the prime culprits in the destruction is a man named Paul Flores, who made local news after verbally berating a group of birders as pedophiles. He has posted videos online claiming that the humanitarian aid groups were in cahoots with the Biden administration and “the cartel” in a plot to destroy the country.
Ahead of and after the end of Title 42 in Arizona, claims that the state is under invasion have only intensified. Pinal County Sheriff and Senate hopeful Mark Lamb has made the claim repeatedly in videos to his supporters. Rep. Paul Gosar, the ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist representing Arizona’s 9th congressional district, has taken it a step further, telling his constituents that “America is under a planned and sustained invasion — we must act accordingly.” On the other side of the state, the Cochise County Republican Committee has taken it further still, with chair Brandon Martin calling on residents to “build an army” and “repel the invasion.”
On Thursday night, with plans to visit the wall the next day, Rodriguez found herself worrying. Her concerns were not misplaced. The following day, Flores was back in the desert posting videos of himself emptying a Humane Borders water tank. Rodriguez and her fellow volunteers, meanwhile, were followed by truckload of well-known armed right-wing extremists, including a member of an Arizona Proud Boys chapter.
At one point in the day, the men pulled over to film a video of themselves harassing the humanitarian aid providers. Among the most talkative of the crew was Ethan Schmidt-Crockett, a bigot provocateur who was recently convicted of harassment-related charges. In multiple photos and videos shared throughout the day, Schmidt-Crockett appeared with a rifle over his shoulder.
By evening, the men were documenting themselves corralling a group of migrant children on the border road, purportedly an attempt to gather their biographic information. Despite complaining of Border Patrol “harassment” earlier in the day, the vigilantes managed to avoid arrest.
That the people who need refuge most are often the ones least likely to find it is an age-old border problem. That dynamic has now worsened, Randy Mayer, the pastor of the Good Shepherd church in Green Valley, told me the morning before Title 42 was lifted.
Mayer has spent more than two decades providing humanitarian aid on both sides of the border. He sees the administration’s CBP One app as a failing attempt to implement technocratic solutions for flesh-and-blood problems. The app is meant to allow migrants to schedule an appointment at a port of entry, now a prerequisite to requesting asylum.
“It’s just a crapshoot if you’re going to be able to get an appointment, and it’s really hard to get your whole family in,” Mayer said. Entering information for each person takes about an hour, he explained. “A family might get two people registered and then it’s shut down because all the appointments have been taken,” Mayer said. “So it’s separating families.”
It’s also creating a two-tiered system for refuge. A family with a laptop in Mexico City stands a far better chance of securing a place in line than does one relying on a beat-up phone that’s crossed three countries connected to dodgy Wi-Fi at an internet café near a border shelter, Mayer said. Most importantly, the app does not undo the conditions that cause people to flee their homes in the first place.
“I’ve talked to Guatemalan Uber drivers who’ve been robbed, their vehicles stolen by the gangs, they literally are fleeing intense danger. The gangs are after them. They’ve killed family members,” Mayer said. “They’re running for their life.”
The pastor, drawing from decades of personal experience, believes the present moment has a clear and predictable end state — one with dire consequences for potentially millions of people down the line. “They’re gonna end up coming to the desert,” he said. “You may not see that right away, but that’s where this is headed.”
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks on a book tour in Des Moines on March 10, 2023. (photo: Rachel Mummey/WP)
The move comes amid a larger conservative attack on higher education DEI programs, which DeSantis and others say reinforce racial divisions and promote liberal orthodoxy. Supporters of the programs say they are critical to serving the nation’s increasingly diverse student populations.
“If you look at the way this has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” DeSantis said at a news conference at New College of Florida in Sarasota. “And that has no place in our public institutions. This bill says the whole experiment with DEI is coming to an end in the state of Florida.”
Florida’s new law prohibits public colleges from spending state or federal money on DEI efforts. These programs often assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status.
The law also forbids public colleges from offering general education courses — those that are part of a required curriculum for all college students — that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics,” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.”
The Florida legislation has been met with backlash at both the state and national level, where higher education experts and First Amendment advocates say the state is trampling on academic freedom. “It’s basically state-mandated censorship, which has no place in a democracy,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
DeSantis said students who want to study “niche subjects,” such as critical race theory, ought to look elsewhere. “Florida’s getting out of that game,” he said. “If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley. Go to some of these other places.”
The governor held the signing on the campus of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, where the governor recently appointed a crop of conservative trustees. Eliminating New College’s DEI office was among the newly constituted board’s first orders of business.
The event drew protests, whose chants could be heard inside the bill-signing ceremony.
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Daniel Penny. (photo: Michael Santiago/Vice)
Just as they did with Kyle Rittenhouse, the right is lionizing Daniel Penny, who’s charged with manslaughter, hailing him as a “hero” and “a good samaritan.”
A crowdfunding campaign set up by the lawyers representing Daniel Penny, who is charged with killing homeless dancer Jordan Neely, has already amassed over $2 million in donations.
The fund was set up by lawyers Thomas Kenniff and Steven Kaiser last week, but exploded over the weekend after Penny handed himself into prosecutors in Manhattan on Friday. He was released on a $100,000 cash bail.
In total, over 40,000 people have contributed to the fund.
The top contribution to the campaign came on Monday morning when far-right podcaster Tim Pool donated $20,000 to the fund. “Penny is the Subway Good Samaritan and we are lucky to have brave souls like him who are willing to do the right thing,” Pool tweeted on Monday morning, confirming his donation.
Pool took the top spot from a pair of $10,000 donations, one of which came from Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign office confirmed the donation to VICE News.
Another of the top donations to the cause, this time $5,000, was listed as coming from musician Kid Rock, who used the donation as an opportunity to opine on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, leaving the message: “Mr. Penny is a hero. Alvin Bragg is a POS. Kid Rock.”
Meanwhile, a crowdfunding campaign set up to support Neely’s family has raised just $123,000.
Penny is charged with manslaughter after he restrained Neely, 30, on a subway train for several minutes on May 1. Penny has not entered a plea, but his lawyers claim the former Marine could not have known his actions would lead to Neely’s death.
From the very beginning, right-wing lawmakers and conservative commentators have sought to reframe the debate over Neely’s death as one related to Democrats being weak on crime. Neely, who was homeless, was in psychological distress at the time Penny “subdued” him, according to witness accounts. But Penny’s defenders tried to justify his actions by claiming that Neely posed a threat to passengers.
Now, just as they did with Kyle Rittenhouse, who was ultimately acquitted in the killing of two people with an assault rifle during a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, the right is lionizing Penny, who is white, and demonizing the Black unhoused man he killed.
“Jordan Neely was a violent criminal who should have been behind bars,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter on May 6, in a post that was liked by Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Greene was referring to a police statement that Neely had 44 previous arrests for offenses such as assault, disorderly conduct, and fare evasion.
After Penny handed himself into the Manhattan District Attorney and was charged with manslaughter on Friday, rightwing calls to defend him became much more vocal.
“We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine... America’s got his back,” Florida Governor and a presumed candidate for the GOP presidential nomination Ron DeSantis wrote in a post linking to Penny’s legal defense fund.
“The Marine who stepped in to protect others is a hero,” Greene wrote on Twitter, while Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted: “‘Subway Superman’ Daniel Penny is a HERO. Today, I will personally be donating to his legal defense fund on GiveSendGo.”
Away from Twitter, on more fringe message boards and platforms where far-right figures congregate, the comments also expressed support for Penny—but in much more racist and violent terms.
“One fewer n****r roams the streets causing harm. Good job soldier,” an anonymous 4chan user posted on Friday, while on the pro-Trump message board known as The Donald, a user suggested creating a campaign to spread lies about Neely.
“Since the left has arrested Daniel Penny for killing Jordan Neely we need to start memes on Twitter and wherever we can showing Neely was convicted of kidnapping a 7-year-old girl,” the user wrote. “We can destroy the left’s narrative fast by pointing out they want a pedo on the street kidnapping children.”
There is absolutely no evidence to back up these claims.
As well as supporting Penny, far-right commenters also expressed hatred towards Bragg, who has previously come under fire from the same group of people for his investigations into former President Donald Trump.
In response to a link to a story about Bragg charging Penny, one poster on The Donald wrote, “The only problem is finding a rope strong enough and a lamp post sturdy enough to hold his fat ass.”
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Posters of Turkish President and People's Alliance's presidential candidate Recep Tayyip Erdogan (top) and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, presidential candidate and leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP), on May 9, 2023, in Istanbul, Turkey. (photo: Aziz Karimov/Vox)
Could the opposition end President Erdogan’s 20-year rule?
Erdoğan has survived political challenges before — and he definitely could again — but an imploding economy, potential fallout from the government’s earthquake response, baggage of his decades-long tenure, and a fairly united opposition have turned this into a competitive election. Heading into Sunday’s first round of voting, polls show a tight race between Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the opposition candidate who leads the Republican People’s Party (CHP), one of six parties joined together in an opposition coalition. In some polls, Kılıçdaroğlu has the edge.
“These elections seem to be a life-or-death situation, in a way — meaning that a lot of people see this as the last chance to actually change the Erdoğan government,” said Ateş Altınordu, assistant professor of sociology at Sabancı University in Turkey.
Kılıçdaroğlu is something of an unlikely success story. He wasn’t the obvious favorite to lead the opposition: He’s a 74-year-old longtime politician who wasn’t seen as particularly inspiring or dynamic, especially to take on a political survivor like Erdoğan. But he has appealed directly to voters with his plainspoken videos and has tried to frame his candidacy as inclusive and welcoming — a kind of calm, predictable figure who could serve as Turkey’s transition from the era of Erdoğan to the next.
That outcome is far from guaranteed. Erdoğan has built-in advantages, including control of the media and state resources. He retains a staunch base of supporters loyal to him and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). And this is a leader who’s spent the past 20 years in power, and purged his perceived political opponents from government and judicial institutions. He has built up systems of cronyism and patronage that have benefited him and his allies — leaving him and the AKP exposed if out of power.
Which means Erdoğan could still win this election outright. And if he loses, it’s another question entirely whether he’ll go away quietly.
“I think all scenarios are out on the table as to how this election might go,” said A. Kadir Yildirim, a Middle East and Turkey expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute. Erdogan, again, could win. The opposition could win, and power could transfer peacefully. Or Erdogan could try to manipulate and rig the election, or simply refuse to go — and in either of those cases, how the opposition and the institutions respond could determine whether he’s successful.
If no candidate wins a clear majority this Sunday, the election will go to a runoff on May 28. But much is at stake for Turkey’s democracy, its economy, and its future.
“The social fabric of the country is at stake. Why do I say that?” said Sebnem Gumuscu, associate professor of political science at Middlebury College. “When you hear what these leaders have to say — and what they have to promise to the country, the people — you hear two very different Turkeys.”
Why Erdoğan is in real trouble ...
Erdoğan has dominated Turkish politics for most of this century. He served as prime minister from 2003 to 2014, until being elected president in 2014. The presidency used to be a mostly ceremonial role, but Erdoğan has moved the country from a parliamentary democracy to a strong presidential system. Erdoğan used a failed coup attempt in 2016 to accelerate his consolidation of power and to purge the civil service, the judiciary, and the military. He has cracked down on independent media, arresting journalists and other civil society members. Through referenda, he has expanded the powers of the presidency and removed many of the checks against that power.
Even as Erdoğan has become more of a strongman, he’s remained a pretty popular leader. His tough-guy persona has real appeal, especially when rallying fervor against certain groups he labels terrorists or picking fights with the West. He has raised Turkey’s profile internationally (though as a NATO member, Turkey has been a bit of a thorn in the alliance’s side).
But Erdoğan is facing some pretty big challenges in 2023. The big one is Turkey’s economy. Inflation is around 40 percent; people can’t afford basic necessities. The Turkish lira has crashed, which means Turks have far less purchasing power. Erdoğan has embraced a heterodox economic policy that has made things worse — specifically, he doesn’t believe in raising interest rates, thinking it will slow the economic growth.
Turkey’s economic situation has been getting worse and worse, which means Erdoğan’s promises for new infrastructure and growth are starting to sound a little hollow, and the pain is very real for ordinary Turks. “He’s never entered an electoral campaign where he cannot sell an economic message,” said Sinan Ciddi, associate professor of security studies at Marine Corps University. “As in, he’s never campaigned in a negative economic downturn.”
Meanwhile, Erdoğan has relied on systems of clientism and patronage for political and personal gain. None of this is exactly secret, but the devastating February earthquake in southeastern Turkey showed how deep that corruption and government mismanagement went. That quake killed around 50,000 people in Turkey, and anger erupted over the government’s handling of the disaster, though it’s not clear whether that will carry over to the polls.
Yaprak Gürsoy, professor of European politics and chair of contemporary Turkish studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said she expected the earthquake to be a bigger issue in the elections than it’s turned out to be. “That surprises me a bit, because I think it could have been something that the opposition could have really used to show the deficiencies of the government,” she said. “And they chose not to do that.” (There’s also some question about how easy it will be to vote in the earthquake-affected areas; people have been displaced, though both political parties and civil society organizations are trying to transport people to the polls.)
In the five years since he last won reelection, about 5 million new, young voters came of age. They’ve only known Erdoğan their entire lives. They see their economic prospects diminishing, especially compared to their cohorts in other countries, and their civil rights eroding. Many appear to want change, and so this population could be decisive in tipping the election toward the opposition.
... And why the opposition could win
Erdoğan is also facing surprisingly strong opposition. Months out from the election, the opposition was in complete disarray. In March, Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP leader, finally emerged and played a key role in uniting that fractured opposition into an electoral alliance that promised to restore Turkey’s parliamentary democracy and undertake pro-democratic judicial and institutional reforms.
The CHP is the biggest party within the six-party coalition. It is the party of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, and has traditionally been a staunchly secular party — compared with Erdoğan’s AKP, which promotes Islamic values. But Kılıçdaroğlu has helped soften the CHP’s stances and done outreach to Islamists to try to broaden the party’s appeal.
Kılıçdaroğlu himself has also defied expectations as a candidate. He’s been in politics and government for a long time, but even so, he’s largely seen as someone untarnished. “He is not an exciting kind of leader, he’s not a great politician, but he’s to be trusted and he’s the right person for this particular moment,” said Altınordu. He’s frequently described as “soft-spoken.” He’s been called Turkey’s Gandhi or “Gandhi Kemal” because of his manner, but also because he led a hundreds-of-miles-long justice march in Turkey in 2017, protesting the jailing of civil servants and activists.
Kılıçdaroğlu is an Alevi, which is a heterodox Islamic tradition that has faced discrimination and persecution in Turkey. There were some fears that the predominantly Sunni Muslim country might be reticent to vote for Kılıçdaroğlu because of this, but he candidly addressed his faith in a recent video, where he told the public, “I am an Alevi. I am a Muslim. ... God gave me my life. I am not sinful.” The video was widely viewed and was seen as breaking something of a taboo in Turkish politics.
Videos have been one of Kılıçdaroğlu’s main mode of communication. He delivers these low-key speeches from a kind of messy desk, or a kitchen table, directly addressing voters. His messages have tended to be hopeful and optimistic — a marked contrast from the guy he is running against. “He is not engaging with any of that combativeness or any kind of polarizing attitude,” said Gumuscu. “He’s much more at peace with his own identity, his views, his welcoming and inclusive rhetoric.”
That discourse, and that effort to appeal to a broad base of support of the country, may be what ultimately helps this kind of boring, older politician succeed on Sunday. Alongside youth voters, who could play a big role in this election, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has rallied behind Kılıçdaroğlu and the opposition. The HDP did not formally join the opposition coalition, but Kurds make up a sizable voting chunk in Turkey, and their support could be decisive.
Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu are the two real contenders Sunday; there were two other candidates in the contest, but one dropped out days before the vote. Though his name will likely still appear on the ballot, his departure is seen as giving another boost to Kılıçdaroğlu. Combine that with those voters disillusioned with Erdoğan, or deeply hurt by the economy, and the opposition sees this as its best chance to topple Erdoğan.
Will Erdoğan accept an election loss?
Before we get to that point: Erdoğan is an elections machine. Yes, the scales are tipped in his favor, the opposition doesn’t get much airtime on media. Yes, the economy is in shambles. But Erdoğan is still very popular with a very solid and reliable base, and experts and observers don’t underestimate that he could still win, as fair-ish and square-ish as you can get. “You’ve got six political parties huddled around one opposition candidate trying to defeat one guy,” Ciddi said. “It just shows how powerful Erdoğan is.”
Yet Erdoğan could also lose — though exactly how he will respond is an impossible question to answer. Experts and observers think a lot will depend on how big that loss is. If Kılıçdaroğlu comes away with a clear margin of victory — 5 percent, say — Erdoğan won’t have a lot of room to maneuver. Turkey does have a long tradition of respecting the ballot box, and if it’s not close, Erdoğan has “no option but to admit defeat,” Gürsoy said.
Things get a lot trickier, though, if the election is close, or if the contest moves to a runoff, allowing time for some antics. That is not a guarantee of some sort of malfeasance, but it does make it a greater possibility, because Erdoğan has a lot to lose if he steps aside — as do those with vested interests in Erdoğan staying in power.
But no one really knows what Erdoğan’s playbook could look like, or if it would succeed.
The government could try to disrupt the vote somehow, to preempt a loss, but civil society is strong and mobilized to watch the polls and ensure election integrity. “I have a lot of friends who are not going to be home the entire Sunday, because they are going to work as volunteers at the ballot boxes, and they are going to follow the process and they are there to make sure that the numbers are counted then are sent into the system in the right way,” Altınordu said.
Erdoğan could seek to contest or challenge the results. A lot here may depend on how the institutions respond — although the Supreme Election Council and the country’s top constitutional court will probably be the most important of those bodies. Yet Erdoğan controls the military; he controls the police. Loyalists fill the civil service. All of that is pretty helpful to a leader who, say, wants to find a way to stay in power.
Even so, some experts said that if it really seems as if Erdoğan is doomed, that loyalty may end up being a bit softer than it appears. Bureaucrats and officials may recognize continued support for Erdoğan is a losing proposition.
But that’s not guaranteed, either. Corruption runs deep, and there is an established system of patronage that many might want to keep intact. “Will those people accept Erdoğan’s departure? That’s the other thing; it is not just up to Erdogan, but a lot of people are benefiting from the continuation of the system. So will they want to let Erdoğan go?” Yildirim said.
There is also the question of how Erdoğan’s base reacts to any loss. At the same time, how the opposition and their supporters respond could also determine whether Erdoğan, if he attempts anything, prevails.
Even if Erdoğan is out, undoing his legacy will not be easy
Kılıçdaroğlu and his coalition have promised pro-democratic reforms, including a return to a parliamentary system, to revive an independent press, and to reestablish an independent judiciary.
If they succeed in these elections, and reclaim power, that feat may start to seem quaint compared to the task of governing. Erdoğan spent 20 years centralizing power in himself, and that has fundamentally changed the nature of institutions and government in Turkey. Unraveling that is going to be an almost unfathomably complex challenge.
Turkey’s 600-member parliament will also be elected this year, and it’s not yet clear how much support the opposition coalition will have in parliament to pass constitutional reforms. Plus, if Kılıçdaroğlu wins, he’ll come to power with the support of multiple parties — but keeping that coalition unified in government, with different personalities and ambitions, is not going to be easy.
At the same time, Kılıçdaroğlu will inherit the presidency that Erdoğan created, which means all that authority gets transferred to him. He will have unilateral powers like decrees that he could use to start implementing reforms if parliamentary politics slow things down. But that also will be fraught for a man who promised a return to a more democratic Turkey.
There are also questions of accountability, and how quickly a new government could empower an independent judiciary — and whether, and how intensely, it should seek to hold Erdogan and his government accountable.
And finally, there’s the mess Erdoğan made of the economy. Reversing his wild economic policies may start to revive the Turkish lira and lower inflation, but it will not be painless for the Turkish public.
All of which is to say Kılıçdaroğlu has a real chance of winning Sunday. The reward, though, is one of the toughest jobs in the world.
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Palestinians say the Nakba has been maintained and cultivated by the international community and their own leadership. (photo: Mussa Qawasma/Reuters)
Palestinians say the Nakba has manifested itself into an ongoing system of oppression that has made life ‘impossible’.
According to Palestinian experts, politicians and activists, the Nakba has been maintained by Israel with the support of the international community, and by the Palestinians’ own leadership.
From expanding illegal Jewish settlements to severely restricting Palestinians’ freedom of movement, taking Palestinian resources and arresting Palestinians on a near-daily basis – such policies have become a blueprint for successive Israeli governments.
Israel is taking over not just the land but also the names of towns and cities and is “appropriating the culture and our rights … this is ongoing,” prominent Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi told Al Jazeera from the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
On top of decades of Israeli efforts to rename Palestinian towns and villages, a more recent example of this erasure is Israel’s so-called nation-state law. The bill was passed in 2018 defining Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people while downgrading the status of Palestinians and their Arabic language.
The law – denounced by rights groups as an inherently discriminatory one – considers the expansion of Jewish-only settlements a national value, encouraging and promoting their construction.
Israel also uses religious ideology to justify “settler colonialism, land theft, and annexation – through a system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing”, she said.
The policies heavily affect Palestinians already fragmented by occupation, with some living as “second-class” citizens of Israel, some besieged in the blockaded Gaza Strip, and some subject to Israel’s annexations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Ashrawi added.
‘Guilty until proven innocent’
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank’s Hebron, where Jewish settlements eat up a significant proportion of the centre of the city, are particularly vulnerable to state-sponsored settler violence and Israeli surveillance.
Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist and founder of the Youth Against Settlements nongovernmental organisation, told Al Jazeera from Hebron: “I don’t feel safe in my house because of the Israeli settler violence and the Israeli army’s brutality.
“They use surveillance and cameras to violate our privacy and to monitor and watch and spy on us all the time.”
Settler attacks against Palestinians and their property are a regular occurrence. From physical attacks to arson and vandalism, many of these incidents often take place under the protection of or in coordination with the Israeli army.
Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israeli settlers live in more than 250 illegal settlements and outposts across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israeli settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to areas it occupies.
Israel has entrenched its occupation through the settlements ever since it seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. Successive Israeli governments have invested “significant resources” in constructing and expanding the settlements, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, in terms of land they occupy and population.
Palestinians living under the power of Israeli forces and settlers backed by armed troops are deprived of basic services, including ambulances, roads, electricity, and water.
International law bans an occupying power from transferring its population to territory it occupies, yet the status of settlers has remained unaffected. Separate legal systems in place allow settlers to be subject to Israeli civilian law, while Palestinians are governed by Israeli martial law.
“There are double standards … it means we are guilty until proven innocent,” Amro said. “You live in a jail without protection, we call it the continuous Nakba.”
In spite of the many UN resolutions urging Israel to review its discriminatory policies, the international community has failed to deliver justice to the Palestinians for a variety of reasons, according to the interviewees.
Israel is an “extension of the Western colonial system in the region,” Ashrawi said.
“The West sees it as fulfilling its own economic and military security purposes,” she added.
Dana El Kurd, a non-resident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, agrees. She believes international institutions and organisations are “largely Western focused and US driven”.
The United States wants to maintain a “staunch ally in the form of Israel” to protect its interests in the region, El Kurd told Al Jazeera.
Even as public opinion moves towards more understanding of the Palestinian plight, El Kurd said that “does not immediately get reflected at the level of leadership or policy”.
There is also an inherent sense of “hypocrisy and racism”, Ashrawi said. International law applies if you are “blonde and blue-eyed – but somehow, Palestinians … do not have the same rights,” she said.
Palestinians like Amro believe that unless the international community holds Israel accountable for its crimes, nothing will change.
They should act “according to their principles … not according to their interests”, he said. “Israel will not be able to continue its occupation without the blind support it gets from the international community.”
Israel has enjoyed unwavering financial and political support from countries such as the United States – which has labeled itself as an honest broker in negotiations with the Palestinians – with Israel remaining among the top US military aid recipients in the world.
Arab countries including the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have also normalised relations with Israel, breaking years of consensus among most Arab states that have said any official recognition of Israel is conditional on the end of the occupation of Palestinian territories and establishment of the two-state solution on the 1967 borders.
Among Arab public opinion, Palestine remains a “core issue, an issue of conscience,” Ashrawi said. But there is no “collective will” among various Arab states to support the Palestinian cause because of different regimes and interests, she added.
‘Persist and resist’
Palestinians say their temporary government, the Palestinian Authority (PA), born out of the Oslo Accords, has done little over the years to alleviate their mounting suffering.
A series of brokered peace talks with Israel have so far failed and there has been no real progress towards implementing a two-state solution.
In fact, the PA has played a role in maintaining the occupation, Palestinians say. El Kurd refers to the PA as “a subcontractor of occupation”.
“The PA took a national liberation movement and turned it into a caretaker quasi-governance project that has distracted Palestinians away from their main objective of self-determination,” El Kurd told Al Jazeera.
The PA has always been under scrutiny, in particular for its security coordination with Israel, which has repeatedly silenced dissent, whether against the occupation or the PA and its policies.
The perceived failures brought about by the status quo so far have pushed some young Palestinians to take matters into their own hands. With Israel carrying out near-nightly incursions into Jenin and Nablus, arresting dozens, and killing with impunity, new groups of youths fighting the Israeli occupation have now emerged, unhappy with the perceived failures brought about by the status quo.
“A great deal of research has shown that support for armed resistance is increasing,” El Kurd said.
These new armed groups are “not structured around the traditional political movements, and are very localised, and include members from a variety of political backgrounds,” she added.
Among them is the Lions’ Den – an armed group comprising of young men that has become known for attacks against Israeli soldiers. The group is cross-factional and looks beyond factional disputes to fight the occupation.
But Palestinians remain politically and geographically fragmented, El Kurd said, partly due to the role of the PA.
“To continue to exist, the PA has had to play a polarising and demobilising function, which has been very damaging to Palestinian society,” she said.
Among the PA’s most criticised practices is “security coordination” with Israel. The controversial policy includes sharing intelligence information with Israel about any armed resistance to the occupation and helping Israel thwart attacks. The practice has cost many Palestinians their lives, including 34-year-old Basil al-Araj who was killed in an Israeli raid in Ramallah.
When asked what Palestinians need from their leadership today, Ashrawi said: “We need a change.”
Starting with a new electoral law, Ashrawi believes elections are needed despite them being inevitably “tainted by the occupation”.
“If you want to create a system of governance, it has to be democratic and representative,” she said. “The last thing we need is to oppress our own people.”
Only by revitalising and reshaping the political system will young Palestinians be able to “drive people forward”, she said.
Ultimately, she said, the goal is to remain on the land, and to “persist and resist”.
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A sheep herder herds sheep on federal land near Atomic City, Idaho, in 2014. Under the Biden administration's proposed rule, conservationists could lease federal land to restore it. (photo: Allen J. Schaben/LA Times)
The proposed rule would allow conservationists and others to lease federally owned land to restore it, much the same way oil companies buy leases to drill and ranchers pay to graze cattle.
The proposal would allow conservationists and others to lease federally owned land to restore it, much the same way oil companies buy leases to drill and ranchers pay to graze cattle. Companies could also buy conservation leases, such as oil drillers who want to offset damage to public land by restoring acreage elsewhere.
Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the proposed changes would address rising pressure from climate change and development. While the bureau previously issued leases for conservation in limited cases, it has never had a dedicated program for it, she said.
“It makes conservation an equal among the multiple uses that we manage for,” Stone-Manning said. “There are rules around how we do solar development. There are rules around how we do oil and gas. There have not been rules around how we deliver on the portions of (federal law) that say, ‘Manage for fish and wildlife habitat, manage for clean water.’”
The pending rule also would promote establishing more areas of “critical environmental concern” due to their historic or cultural significance, or their importance for wildlife conservation. More than 1,000 such sites covering about 33,000 square miles (85,000 square kilometers) have been designated previously.
By comparison, about 242,00 square miles of bureau land are open to grazing livestock.
But more than a century after the U.S, started selling oil and gas leases, the conservation idea is stirring debate over the best use of vast government-owned property, primarily in the West.
Opponents including Republican lawmakers are blasting it as a backdoor way to exclude mining, energy development and agriculture from land controlled by the BLM.
The bureau has a history of industry-friendly policies for the 380,000 square miles (990,000 square kilometers) it oversees, an area more than twice the size of California. It also regulates publicly owned underground minerals, including oil, coal and lithium for renewable energy across more than 1 million square miles.
Those holdings put the 10,000-person agency at the center of arguments over how much development should be allowed.
On Monday night, senior agency officials were scheduled to host the first virtual public meeting about the conservation proposal. Another virtual event is slated for June 5 and public meetings are planned for May 25 in Denver; May 30 in Reno, Nevada; and June 1 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who tried to block Stone-Manning’s 2021 Senate confirmation, says the proposed rule is illegal.
Earlier this month he berated Interior Secretary Deb Haaland over it during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, saying she was “giving radicals a new tool to shut out the public.”
“The secretary wants to make non-use a use,” said Barrasso, the ranking Republican on the committee. “She is ... turning federal law on its head.”
Stone-Manning said critics are misreading the rule, and that conservation leases would not usurp existing ones. If grazing is now permitted on a parcel, it could continue. And people could still hunt on the leased property or use it for recreation, she said.
Former President Donald Trump tried to ramp up fossil fuel development on bureau lands, but President Joe Biden suspended new oil and gas leasing when he entered office. Biden later revived the deals to win West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s support for last year’s climate law.
Biden remains under intense pressure from Manchin and many Republicans to allow more drilling. Such companies currently hold leases across some 37,500 square miles of bureau land.
Environmentalists have largely embraced the idea of conservation leases, characterizing the proposal as long overdue.
Joel Webster with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of conservation groups and hunting and fishing organizations, said the administration’s plan would set up a process to ensure landscapes are considered for conservation without forcing restrictions.
He cautioned, however, that administration officials must ensure a final rule doesn’t have unintended consequences.
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