04 January 23
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"Brazen" Fraud: David Cay Johnston on How Trump's Tax Returns Show He Fleeced US and Enriched Himself
David Cay Johnston, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020."
Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020. The newly released tax records give a long-overdue glimpse of Trump’s personal and business finances, which he refused to disclose during the 2016 presidential election, breaking with decades of precedent. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades, says the new documents show “absolutely brazen” tax fraud. “Donald Trump has been a criminal his whole life,” says Johnston.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
After years of legal battles between former President Donald Trump and Congress, the House Ways and Means Committee released six years of Trump’s tax returns Friday, including thousands of documents from the years he ran for president and was in office. The records reveal Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes during his first year in office in 2017. In his last year in office, 2020, he paid no federal taxes. They also showed the tax law Trump signed in late 2017 opened new opportunities for him, and disclosed income from a wide range of foreign countries, including Canada, Panama, the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, the Philippines, United Arab Emirates, China and Britain. Trump responded to the release in a video statement.
DONALD TRUMP: These tax returns contain relatively little information and not information that almost anybody would understand. They’re extremely complex. The radical Democrats’ behavior is a shame upon the U.S. Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, our next guest says the tax returns show Trump took tax losses he knew were fraudulent and that Trump knowingly committed brazen tax fraud. David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport, his most recent book titled The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family, also wrote Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else.
David, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Talk about what you found most significant, what you were most surprised by in these latest tax releases.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that Donald used a number of legal devices to reduce taxes is no surprise. But he did something absolutely brazen. And that requires we go back to 1984. That was the year Trump Tower was selling apartments like crazy and his first casino opened. So he had Amazons of cash flowing into his pockets. He filed a tax return that included something called a Schedule C. That’s what freelancers use. It’s what I use for my book writing business. And on it, he showed no revenue but over $600,000 of expenses. Auditors from the City of New York and the state of New York spotted that, disallowed it. Trump demanded trials. He lost both. The judges wrote scathing opinions about what he was doing.
So, what turns up in these six years of tax returns? Well, he filed 65 of Schedule Cs. Twenty-six of them had zero revenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses. There were a handful of others where the income and the expenses, exactly to the dollar, equaled out, which is impossible to believe is anything but manipulation. For those 26 returns, where he was on notice that it’s illegal to create a fictitious business and take deductions, he could easily be prosecuted, either by the federal government or Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, for cheating on state taxes the same way. And that, I think, is the most brazen thing in there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David Cay Johnston, for those people who are not familiar with these Schedule Cs, what are the IRS regulations about being able to have a business that has no income but has all kinds of expenses? And how long can that go on before the IRS normally has a red flag to go after you?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: You can start up a business and have expenses to start up, but you have to show that you were attempting to make a profit. If you go on for five years, the IRS will almost always declare that this is a hobby, and the taxpayers aren’t going to subsidize your hobby. But that Trump did 26 of these shows how determined he was to thumb his nose at the law.
And Trump has always done this. I mean, I’ve known Donald now for almost 35 years, and he’s always thumbing his nose at the law when he gets caught, as he has repeatedly in various civil and regulatory actions and some court cases, like where he cheated illegal immigrants, as he called them, who were brought into the country to work for him. He always somehow says, “Oh, no, this is a great victory for me. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s too complicated.” Nonsense. Donald Trump has been a criminal his whole life. He’s just very good at evading law enforcement.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And unlike, let’s say, a reporter like Maggie Haberman, whose recent book on Trump has gotten a lot of attention as a new expert on Trump, there are people like you and, of course, the late great Wayne Barrett who have been tracking — who were tracking Trump over decades. This whole issue of him actually during the six years of his running for president and being president actually having net losses, could you talk about that?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Donald reported net losses. We should think about that the way we talk about crime, reported crime. We don’t know the real level of that. So, Donald reported massive losses, so big that he had $150-some million of positive income — wages, capital gains, dividends, interest and pensions, $150 million-plus — but his tax returns show negative income of about $53 million. That’s a $200 million swing.
A lot of that was accomplished through laws that — a law that Donald Trump lobbied for in 1992 that allows real estate people, people who are big real estate investors — not mom-and-pop “I own one rental unit” people, but big real estate investors — to live pretty much tax-free, if their only income is from real estate and the rest of their income is modest.
Donald — I’ve been told by a number of retired IRS agents who have reached out to me that they’ve gone over the returns, and their fundamental conclusion — and these are people who don’t know each other; they know me — they all said the same thing: A lot of the numbers on the tax returns appear to be just made up. Of course, who ever heard of Donald just making something up?
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to 2016, one of these key presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with this exchange about Trump’s taxes.
HILLARY CLINTON: So you’ve got to ask yourself: Why won’t he release his tax returns? And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax. So —
DONALD TRUMP: That makes me smart.
AMY GOODMAN: “That makes me smart,” Donald Trump said in the background. And then, four years later, in the presidential debate with Joe Biden, with moderator Chris Wallace.
CHRIS WALLACE: I know that you pay a lot of other taxes, but I’m asking you the specific question: Is it true that you paid $750 in federal income taxes each of those two years?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’ve paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax. And let me just tell you, there was a story in one of the papers, I paid —
JOE BIDEN: Show us your tax returns.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I paid $38 million one year. I paid $27 million one year.
JOE BIDEN: Show us your tax returns.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I went — you’ll see it as soon as it’s finished. You’ll see it. You know, if you want to do, go to the board of elections. There’s a 118-page or so report that says everything I have, every bank I have, I’m totally underleveraged, because the assets are extremely good. And we have a very — we have a — I built a great company.
CHRIS WALLACE: Sir, I’m asking you a specific question, which is —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But let me tell you.
CHRIS WALLACE: I understand all of that.
JOE BIDEN: Release your tax returns.
CHRIS WALLACE: I understand all that. I’m asking —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But let me —
CHRIS WALLACE: No, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Go ahead.
CHRIS WALLACE: I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Millions of dollars.
CHRIS WALLACE: You paid millions of dollars.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Millions of dollars, yes.
CHRIS WALLACE: So, not $750.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Millions of dollars. And you’ll get to see it. And you’ll get to see it.
JOE BIDEN: When?
AMY GOODMAN: When will we get to see it? Well, we just got to see it, in 2022, at the end of the year. I wanted to ask you to respond to these, David Cay Johnston, to your allegation that just shows he committed tax fraud, which would mean he should end up in prison, and then, maybe he’s talking about the millions of dollars he paid in taxes not to the U.S. government, but to governments around the world.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah. The tax returns, Amy, show that Donald paid more taxes, income taxes, to foreign governments than to the United States. And Donald’s foreign entanglements as president should concern us a lot. You’ll recall in the 2016 campaign he said, you know, “The Saudis buy lots of apartments from me. They pay big prices. Why shouldn’t I like them? I like them.” That tells you that he’s influenced by people putting money in his pocket. And the president of the United States should not be. He should be insulated from that.
Everything you heard Donald say during the two debates, with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, was basically nonsense. In the case of paying taxes, there’s a tiny sliver of truth, because he paid overseas. The rest of it is absolute nonsense. And he knew it was absolute nonsense. But understand, Donald has no problem with lying through his teeth. He’s lied under oath in judicial proceedings. Donald essentially believes that whatever he says makes it so. So he just makes stuff up.
AMY GOODMAN: What about breaking the law?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, why didn’t auditors catch Donald Trump is a very good question. First of all, Congress has given the IRS for two decades — more than two decades — extra money to pursue the working poor and make sure they don’t cheat on their taxes. But at the top, the Republicans have ordered the cuts of audits of corporations and wealthy people. Almost 25,000 families make $10 million a year or more. In the most recent year we have data, 66 audits were closed. That’s nothing. That’s a fraction of 1% of those families.
Secondly, Donald knows that so long as he has loss carry-forwards — that is a tax deduction he couldn’t use this year, but he can use in future years — an auditor assigned to his tax return would quickly conclude that even if he found a whole bunch of bogus material, he’d still owe no taxes. So the IRS practice is generally to close such a file and move on to one that’s easier and will produce immediate revenue. We need to change that. I’ve asked the IRS and members of Congress now for decades to conduct a detailed study of people who report negative incomes, not once in a while because a business fails, but year after year after year, which is what Trump does. I think we’d discover —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David —
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: — some shocking things about our tax system. Yes, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: David, I’d like to ask you, in terms of this — going back to the Schedule C issue that you mentioned, you highlighted, in one piece you wrote about it, you said that you thought that this was the easiest case to make in terms of a potential criminal activity. Why is that? And why would a jury be more likely to find someone guilty just on the Schedule C violations than on the more complex legal issues that arise when you study Trump’s filings in depth?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah. Juan, first of all, that’s not the most important case to bring. The most important case are the human intelligence documents he stole and took to Mar-a-Lago.
But on the tax front, creating a fictitious business and taking tax deductions for it is a plain and simple thing ordinary people can understand. Many of the things Donald Trump has done with his taxes are esoteric. It took me years and years and years to learn how the tax system really works. We pay tax lawyers tremendous amounts of money, because our tax code, unnecessarily, is ridiculously complicated and involves very complex concepts involving accounting and depreciation and recognition of income and all sorts of terms that I’m sure most people watching are going, “What?” But this is simple and easy to prove. And remember, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, got 17 felony convictions on 17 charges against the Trump Organization and a subsidiary company, both 100% owned by Donald Trump, for much smaller tax fraud involving freebies that were untaxed to executives — cars, apartments, things like that.
Showing to people, “Here’s the tax return. There’s no evidence of a business that existed. He took these deductions. There’s no evidence of documentation, receipts and invoices and things that show actual business,” people will grasp that, I believe. And it would not — I think it would take a prosecutor at most three days to present the case.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, why was only one IRS agent charged with investigating and reviewing Donald Trump’s taxes when he was president? The significance of that kind of review not having happened, even though it’s the law, David?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right. Presidential tax returns and vice-presidential returns are supposed to be audited. Biden and Kamala Harris have been audited. Obama and Biden were audited. Donald Trump appointed the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and he appointed Charles Rettig, who until recently was the IRS commissioner. And while they say they had no idea that these audits weren’t being done, they’re responsible. Doesn’t matter if you didn’t know. The question is “Why didn’t you know?”
Assigning a single IRS agent to something this complex and refusing him access to specialists — the IRS employs specialists —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: — in everything, in all sorts of things — shows you that this is the lawlessness of the Trump administration. They were lawless.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Cay Johnston, we thank you so much for big with us, twice Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, co-founder of DCReport — he is passing the baton and stepping down from that — author of The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family and many more books, including Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — and Cheat Everybody Else. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) talks to reporters during a news conference following a GOP caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center Feb. 13, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
This Was Supposed to Be Kevin McCarthy's Moment. Instead, GOP Chaos Reigns
Domenico Montanaro, NPR
Montanaro writes: "This one had to hurt. 'Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn't someone who has sold shares of themself for more than a decade to get it,' Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Florida congressman, said on the House floor before nominating Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for speaker before a second round of voting Tuesday."
This one had to hurt.
"Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn't someone who has sold shares of themself for more than a decade to get it," Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Florida congressman, said on the House floor before nominating Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for speaker before a second round of voting Tuesday.
This was supposed to be Kevin McCarthy's moment, one he had contorted himself into political knots to get to.
The California congressman has wanted to be speaker — badly — for years. He seemed willing to do a lot of things to get the job, including burrowing into former President Donald Trump's good graces.
But none of it has been enough. Congress adjourned Tuesday without McCarthy — or anyone — as speaker after three ballots of voting, the first time the voting has gone beyond one round in 100 years. They are set to reconvene on Wednesday at noon, but there could be multiple rounds of ballots yet to come.
The House without a speaker cannot move forward, no other votes can be held, no legislation can be considered. How this gets resolved is an open question — either McCarthy somehow wins over the hard-right members who are steadfastly holding out against him or he bows out, clearing the way for someone else.
Who that is, however, also isn't clear.
It's an untenable position for the country. But how we got here is something of a Washington tragedy — for McCarthy and for governance.
From Benghazi to Trump
Republicans — and McCarthy — have been here before.
The rise of anti-establishment intransigence among a hard-right faction in the GOP can be traced with a straight line back to the Tea Party — and put on steroids by MAGA Trumpism.
In 2010, Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to win control of the House, but the cost was steep. Fights over raising the debt ceiling – something that had been routine and protected U.S. credit — and five years of an inability to get much of anything done, even with each other, frustrated John Boehner as speaker.
Back then, McCarthy was the expected successor. But that effort was derailed — by himself.
"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" McCarthy said on Fox News. "But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping."
Whoops.
The ostensible reason for the GOP-led Benghazi investigation was to find out what happened in an attack on an American embassy in Libya, where four people died — not to hurt Clinton. But Clinton, who was secretary of state in the Obama administration, was the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
McCarthy said the quiet part out loud.
It was a head slapper. He was contradicted by Boehner and others. McCarthy had to go back on Fox News and backtrack.
But the damage was done.
After all, the speaker of the House, in addition to conducting the House's business and being a key cog in the process of passing legislation important to people, is also a leader in party messaging.
McCarthy, someone the right was already skeptical of, was viewed as anything but a great messenger for the party.
Along came Trump
McCarthy, who was trying to claw his way back to the political limelight, hitched his wagon to the then-president.
"Where's Kevin?" Trump said at a luncheon days into his presidency. "There's my Kevin."
My Kevin.
It was a clear sign that McCarthy had gotten himself into Trump's good graces.
McCarthy knew Trump — and winning over the hard right, of which he is no founding member — was his path to power.
That's why McCarthy didn't believe he could stick to his criticism of Trump after Jan. 6, heading down to Trump's Florida home just weeks after the insurrection and posed for a photo with him.
The pair were able to use each other — Trump for normalizing what he did Jan. 6 and in the runup; McCarthy for the speakership.
Trump maintained his power with the base and endorsed scores of candidates in the 2022 midterms. They did well in primaries, but many lost in competitive swing districts.
There is a great irony to the fact that had there actually been a red wave and Republicans won more seats, McCarthy could have had enough votes to win the speakership and wouldn't even be in this position.
Over the last seven years, McCarthy has tried to court the hard-right faction in his conference
In the runup to the speaker vote, McCarthy tried everything. He tried to acquiesce to the hard-right's demands — even willing to give the faction the ability to remove him from the speakership if they didn't like the job he was doing.
At the 11th hour, he tried to play tough guy, threatening the defectors with stripping them of committee assignments. That appeared to have the reverse effect of what he and his allies were intending.
And that was all after years of placating these members and walking a tortured line as GOP majority leader in dealing with them.
But none of it worked. Even Trump hasn't been able to win over the Never Kevins.
There's some question how hard Trump actually tried. On the day of the vote, and in the days leading up to it, for example, he hadn't posted anything on his social media platform to boost McCarthy.
Trump did post several, however, Wednesday, implying he spoke with members Tuesday night and encouraged them to vote for McCarthy.
"[I]t's now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY," Trump said, in part, reserving his ire for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Trump added, "REPUBLICANS, DO NOT TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT … EMBARRASSING DEFEAT. IT'S TIME TO CELEBRATE, YOU DESERVE IT. Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB."
For all of McCarthy's contortions, backtracks and acquiescence, he's still short of what he needs to be speaker, the job he's wanted for so long.
The hard right has long been skeptical of McCarthy, and he — to this point — just does not have their trust.
The question now is — not just for McCarthy but for anyone with ambition and has to make choices between what they believe and what they're willing to compromise — was it worth it?
At the end of the day, the job of speaker isn't supposed to be about one person's ambition but what they can get done to fix problems in the country, and this is taking place at a time when people are already cynical about the intentions of politicians in Washington and what they are trying to accomplish.
For all the talk in Washington of "Dems in disarray," this is again another example of the chaos that continues to surround House Republicans. With just a four-seat majority, how can they govern if they're going through all this just to pick a leader?
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Workers at the site of a Russian missile and drone strike in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Sunday. (photo: Laura Boushnak/NYT)
Ukrainian Forces Grow More Adept at Defending Against Russian Drones
The New York Times
Excerpt: "They are lumbering and noisy and relatively easy to shoot from the sky. Over the New Year’s weekend, the Ukrainian military said it downed every single one of the 80-odd exploding drones that Russia sent the country’s way."
They are lumbering and noisy and relatively easy to shoot from the sky. Over the New Year’s weekend, the Ukrainian military said it downed every single one of the 80-odd exploding drones that Russia sent the country’s way.
“Such results have never been achieved before,” a Ukrainian Air Force spokesman said on Tuesday.
But beneath that result lies a question: How long can Ukraine sustain its effort when many of its defensive measures cost far more than the drones do?
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A rioter filming with an iPhone is seen in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/Redux)
How January 6 Brought Frontier Violence to the Heart of US Power
Mike Giglio, The Intercept
Giglio writes: "In the Cormac McCarthy novel 'Blood Meridian,'' a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion."
In the Cormac McCarthy novel “Blood Meridian,” a man called Captain White leads a mounted company of American irregulars into northern Mexico on a mission to plunder and lay the groundwork for further U.S. expansion. “We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” he tells his men. As they ride, White notices dust clouds on the horizon. Through his spyglass, he sees a massive herd of cattle, mules, and horses being driven toward the company by what he takes for a band of stock thieves. They seem to pay his men no mind as the herd rumbles past. Then, suddenly, hundreds of mounted Comanche lancers and archers appear:
A legion of horribles … wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners … one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador.
I first read those lines 14 years ago, in a hostel bunk bed amid the wanderings of my early 20s. I was in Naples, where my great-grandfather had boarded a ship to America, and though faces on the streets looked eerily familiar, I felt only a tenuous connection to the city. The novel’s lines about a distant frontier, in contrast, instantly resonated, though I struggled to understand why. There was shocking clarity in the violence: The attackers butcher the Americans, “passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads.” The description of their garish attire, with its funhouse mockery of the would-be conquerors, left me with a lingering sense of vulnerability.
These lines resurfaced in my mind after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an event whose meaning I’ve found myself continuing to interrogate as we approach its two-year anniversary. At the start of 2021, I was married, with one small child and another on the way, and living in a brick-house suburb of Washington, D.C. I’d covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine, then returned, in 2017, to report on the sort of militant-minded Americans who ended up storming Congress. I had traveled to pre-election meetings with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role that day, and I’d been at a previous “Stop the Steal” rally, in November 2020, watching pot-bellied Proud Boys march around like Catholic school kids in matching polo shirts. On the morning of January 6, however, I stayed home. I was sick of it all: the crowds, the Covid risk, the threats of violence. I’d seen my share of real war at the margins of the U.S. sphere of influence and couldn’t stand another day of listening to comfortable Americans talk about inflicting such violence at home. It wasn’t just them, though. It was also me. In the interludes between my trips around the country, contemplating America’s breakdown from the desk in my sunroom, I’d found I no longer understood what my role was supposed to be.
Then the riot commenced. The Capitol was breached. I thought, if this is something that will overturn the republic — if it’s a real revolution — then my path is clear again, and there will be time to get to the Capitol tonight, tomorrow, and probably for days.
I was right and wrong. The riot was over in a matter of hours. Congress reconvened to certify the election result that night. But I thought the attack had struck a deeper, psychological blow whose impact was hard to see clearly. I felt it in the reactions from friends and neighbors, in the hysteria in the news, and in my own unease. The answer seemed to lurk behind the nature of the freakout. Turning back to the passage from “Blood Meridian,” I reconsidered what was so unnerving about it and wondered if the rioters, perhaps without realizing it, had tapped into the same anxiety the scene had animated in me years earlier. It conjures a fear about the edge of empire that has always lurked in the American mind, in which the frontier is the place where the violence and suffering the nation has inflicted as the terms of its expansion and sustainment bend back on us, and we encounter our demons. There’s an air of reckoning as the legion descends on Captain White’s company. The first weapons they brandish against the Americans are “shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass.”
“They came dressed for chaos,” read the New York Times the day after the Capitol was attacked, “in red, white and blue face paint and star-spangled superhero outfits, in flag capes (American, yes, but also Confederate and Trumpian) and flag jackets and Donald Trump bobble hats. One man came as a patriotic duck; another as a bald eagle; another as a cross between a knight-errant and Captain America; another as Abraham Lincoln. They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear.” Other writers noted the “seditionist frontiersmen” and “revolutionary cosplayers” and “Confederate revivalists.” The ghosts were rising up from across the American centuries. Solemn-eyed Christians with their wooden cross. The gallows with its noose. Militants dressed like our modern Forever War soldiers. Some of them, indeed, had been those soldiers, and here they were in their battle attire. A writer for The Atlantic described spending time among a group of protesters that included two men in camouflage and Kevlar vests, along with a woman in a full-body cat suit. He was confronted by a sense of mystery. The event, he wrote, was “not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics.” No — the meaning lay in the subliminal. What these people were describing were their nightmares about the edge of empire, come to life, and massing in the heart of Washington, D.C.
The legion advanced holding up a mirror, and I looked at my reflection. It clarified the unease that had been troubling me at my desk. If that side had the aspect of barbarians ready to sack the Capitol, then my side might be manning the imperial gates.
Technophilia
Five days after January 6, a writer who uses the pen name John Mosby, after a famous Confederate guerrilla, posted an essay about the attack online. It began with a question he said a friend had asked him that day: “Ever see a government starting to totally lose control and just flail ineffectually?”
Mosby describes himself as a Special Forces veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, though he is guarded about specifics. His friend’s question was rhetorical: Part of the job of a Green Beret is to operate in the chaos of broken countries. One thing that serving in or otherwise witnessing recent U.S. wars can also show you, though, is America’s own weakness, laid bare in the yawning gap between what it promised in those wars and what it was able to achieve. For more than a decade on “Mountain Guerrilla,” Mosby’s blog and now Patreon page, and in survivalist and tactical guides that people in militant and prepper circles discuss with reverence, he has laid out an apocalyptic understanding of the world centered on the idea of America’s decline and eventual collapse.
Two aspects of Mosby’s post are striking in relation to January 6. The first is his starting point: America is an empire. Prominent U.S. thinkers once wrestled with this idea, with Mark Twain and others making the Anti-Imperialist League a political force during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. These days, the concept often seems relegated to the Noam Chomsky-citing hard left or pockets of the far right, but a shift in perspective can sharpen the picture. “To an outsider, the fact that America is an empire is the most obvious fact of all,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie, who spent 25 years in the U.S., wrote during the Vietnam era. America emerged from a revolt against an imperialist power, giving its citizens an aversion to “the mere suggestion that they may themselves be an empire,” Fairlie noted. “Call it, then, by another name … but the fact will remain.”
The modern blend of America’s economic might, military alliances, and borderless campaigns of surveillance, drone attacks, and commando raids makes its version of empire look different from those that preceded it — and from the blunter attempts at power grabs in Cuba and the Philippines that mobilized Twain and his allies. Mosby, however, also subscribes to the idea that the country itself is a patchwork of far-flung places tied together by conquest. The distance from London to Rome, he notes, is less than from Denver or Austin to the White House. So the U.S. decline Mosby sees is imperial decline, both at home and abroad. He derides the idea that America’s technological advances and the comforts of its globalized economy will help it escape the fate of every empire that came before it. In fact, he believes that the excesses of contemporary U.S. capitalism will only speed that fate along. He titled his post about January 6 “The Hubris of Technophilia.”
Secondly, in Mosby’s view, Donald Trump existed outside the true power structure of this crumbling empire even when he controlled the presidency. The real authority lay somewhere else. This was the authority that revealed its weakness on January 6. It wasn’t the breach of the poorly guarded U.S. Capitol that told him this. (“I could give two shits about that, and in fact, was surprised that we didn’t see smoke billowing out the windows.”) He saw it in the agitation of the politicians and talking heads and the panicked talk about insurrection in the news. It was in the frenzy of a kicked beehive.
What you’re watching, right now, is the mechanisms of imperial power — the government, the legacy media, and the oligarchs, of social media and big business — lashing out ineffectually, in the throes of panic, because the collapse of the imperial hegemony just became readily apparent to even the willfully blind … They’re NOT in control, and at their core, they know it. They’re not in control in Afghanistan. They’re not in control in Iraq. They’re not in control in Syria. … Hell, they’re not even really in control in Washington, DC.
If you ask me, Trump embodies the worst of U.S. empire and is exactly the fallout that critics of its runaway capitalism, militarism, and nationalism have predicted. He campaigned on stealing oil and indiscriminately bombing ISIS territory, and on demonizing Muslims, who for 20 years have been the state-sponsored enemy, as well as by fearmongering over migrants at the southern border. It wasn’t just talk: Trump ramped up drone attacks and embraced secret wars and loosened airstrike rules designed to limit civilian casualties. Large corporations and defense contractors raked in profits during his presidency. I recognize in the January 6 movement the same alliance between a supposedly anti-establishment grassroots and the super-rich that I remember from the tea party. My goal, however, is to look in the mirror, and Mosby’s writing shows how the Democratic side of the political divide can also be portrayed as aligned with the centers of entrenched power. After January 6, many liberals looked to Big Tech for more censorship and to financial institutions for help blocking funding streams. They embraced the government agencies that had managed the war on terror and pushed them for domestic remedies, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived disinformation board and a new law to give the FBI more tools and funding to counter domestic extremism. Maybe some of this was justified, given the stakes, but one goal in psychological operations is to get your opponent to act like the enemy you want to fight.
Mosby’s prescriptions seem somewhat apolitical: He sees America’s collapse as unavoidable and advocates a retreat into austere survivalism. There are plenty of people on the right, however, who are keen to harness the January 6 crowd’s momentum to enact radical change. This includes an expanding constellation of anti-democratic thought that can draw on similar notions of empire and the modern right’s place outside its hierarchies. Thinkers in this space have posited that liberal authority is so ingrained that America is already in or approaching a form of autocracy; this was the concept behind the former private equity executive Michael Anton’s 2016 case for Trump in his widely circulated essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which gave conservatives an ultimatum: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” Anton became a National Security Council official in the Trump administration and is now at the Claremont Institute, an influential right-wing think tank. Curtis Yarvin, a writer often cited as a favorite of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, has also deployed the declining empire frame. He has called for an “American Caesar” to rescue the country from its liberal masters. “Certainly, our choice in the early 21st century — if we have a choice — is one of two fates: the fall of the Roman Republic, or the fall of the Roman Empire,” he wrote. “Don’t let anyone hate on you for preferring the former — or being willing to learn from it.”
Freaks vs. squares
Let’s consider a different moment when protesters massed in the heart of Washington, D.C, the crowd stretching out by the tens of thousands. There are militants in helmets among them, along with the frumps and strivers of the middle classes in jeans. And then there are the freaks. They have come decked out in various costumes, including furs and animal skins. These are the legions of the anti-war left, assembled for their October 1967 march on the Pentagon.
In “The Armies of the Night,” his book about the march, Norman Mailer described the spectacle. “They came walking up in all sizes,” he wrote, “perambulating down the hill, many dressed like the legions of Sgt. Pepper’s Band, some were gotten up like Arab sheikhs, or in Park Avenue doormen’s greatcoats, others like Rogers and Clark of the West, Wyatt Earp, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone in buckskin.” He counted hundreds of hippies in Union blue and Confederate gray marching beside samurais, shepherds, Roman senators, “Martians and Moon-men and a knight unhorsed who stalked about in the weight of real armor.”
With this absurdist show of force, Mailer hoped the left had found the momentum to challenge not only the war in Vietnam but also what he called “the authority” behind the version of America that he called “technology land,” where the horrors of napalm, Agent Orange, and nuclear bombs were tied in some intrinsic way to all the stifling domestic corruptions.
Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority. … this new generation of the Left hated the authority, because the authority lied. It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority … were grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the walking American lobotomy.
The movement’s power, the book suggests, was born of a refusal to accept, at home, what America manifested overseas, and a determination not to lose sight of the immediacy of burned forests and dead civilians. It challenged the authority by refusing to play on its terms. This was the energy behind the idea of such a horde preparing to march, with no coherent plan, against the annihilating structure of the Pentagon, a building that encompasses 6.5 million square feet of office space and 7,500 windows. “[T]he aesthetic at last was in the politics,” Mailer wrote, rejoicing that “politics had again become mysterious.”
In the end, the marchers streamed across the Arlington Bridge and descended on the Pentagon, where some managed to break in and run amok for a while. Hundreds were arrested. The world seemed to spin on. Mailer felt, however, that a psychological blow had been dealt — because the event, he wrote, was one “that the authority could not comprehend.”
The protesters, it seems to me, were trying to reach into the subliminal reserve of guilt and fear that Americans keep buried, and in doing so, they took on the role of McCarthy’s legion of horribles. One essential tactic of the 1960s left, in fact, was to screw with the squares just by being their opposite: the freaks. The system was run and staffed by squares, policed by squares, and supported by squares, the unquestioning drones of empire. There was power in the ability to interrupt the programming, to jolt them with a sense of dislocation. It’s an ethos captured in miniature in Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” when he recounts standing in the men’s room of a popular nightspot and spilling LSD powder onto his flannel sleeve. A stranger walks in and begins to suck the powder from Thompson’s arm: “A very gross tableau,” he writes, that makes him wonder if a “young stockbroker type” might walk in and see them. “Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it’ll ruin his life — forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.”
During the protest at the Pentagon, the hippies held an exorcism, trying to levitate the building and drive out the demons within it. The new generation of the left, Mailer wrote, “believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution.” Now it’s the new right reaching for magic — black magic, maybe, but magic nonetheless. They believe in international conspiracies of pedophiles, in Satan worshippers, and Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. These are terrible, dangerous fantasies, yes, but they also contrast with a left whose anti-establishment impulses often seem to go corporate, like rock and roll and weed, and executives with hired shamans preaching psychedelic healing. One side believes in apocalypse and ivermectin horse paste, and God, and bleach. The other believes in grown-up generals and congressional committees, rules and norms, and the FBI.
How to destroy a democracy
I recently was reading one of the books to which liberals flocked in the Trump era — actually, even more on-brand, I was listening to the audio version while buying groceries in the middle of a weekday. It was “How Fascism Works,” by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale. Stanley details contemporary problems that can be understood as aspects of fascist politics: male chauvinism, unreality, the demonization of minorities, the glorification of an imagined race or ethno-centric history, attempts to divide people into “us” and “them.” He also expands the discussion to other traits of U.S. conservatism: being against abortion, for example, or paternalistically regressive. He writes that a 2016 tweet by Mitt Romney — in which Romney called Trump’s sexist comments on the “Access Hollywood” tapes “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters” — evokes the Hutu power ideology behind the Rwanda genocide, suggesting that Romney’s description of women “exclusively in traditionally subordinate roles” supports the paradigm of “the patriarchal family in fascist politics.” Academics who advocate for so-called “great books” programs centered on the works of white Europeans, he warns elsewhere, citing a “Mein Kampf” passage on the supposed dominance of Aryan cultural heritage, are at risk of finding themselves in the company of Hitler.
I breezed along with my shopping, until I thought I felt Stanley reach for me. Other key features of fascism, he writes, using Rush Limbaugh as a foil, are the undermining of “expertise” and attempts to create a climate in which “experts have been delegitimized.” Wait a minute, I thought, pulling out my earbuds. Which experts does he mean? (And is Stanley one of them?) Aside from calls to defend science and academia from right-wing onslaughts, he leaves the category mostly undefined. Limbaugh’s attacks on all sources of information that ran counter to his own hyperpartisan propaganda were transparent enough, and easy to disdain; this has also become part of the Trumpian playbook. At the same time, however, many among the sprawling class of elites and experts in America have used Trump’s specter to shield themselves from challenges to their authority that may well be justified. Whoever has been guiding the country through the three-plus decades of my lifetime, at least, hasn’t been doing a good job of it, and we clearly have more than just conservatives to blame. This is apparent in any statistical indicator that tracks the worsening of, say, climate change or economic inequality over time, the persistent discrimination faced by Black Americans, or their continued killing by our militarized police. However inadvertently, broad defenses of elites and experts support the status quo, while nurturing an increasingly dangerous American reverence for authority. Now more than ever, it seems, we should be leaning into the opposing tradition of vibrant skepticism as we seek to discern and constantly reevaluate which purported expertise is worthwhile and which we’d be better off dismissing.
The book dissects how problems from racism and inequality to inhumane treatment of immigrants have seeded the potential destruction of American democracy. It makes only passing mention, however, of an example of elite failure that’s essential to the discussion: the disaster of U.S. foreign policy. Nothing has bred hyper-nationalism like the post-9/11 wars, or inflamed a reactionary sense of cultural superiority, or fed the worship of violence and power, or eroded the rule of law, or indoctrinated people in a constant, searching fear of new threats and enemies, or encouraged them to turn, for relief, to industry, technology, and the security state. The wars and their knock-on effects, including surveillance and civilian casualties that continue to this day, have been supported by both political parties and sustained by a top-down culture of unreality based on encouraging people to look away. An edifice of official secrecy, staffed by experts and elites, has been built upon layers of classification, obfuscation, and denial that hide information we’d rather not see anyway, helping us avoid a full view of our own reflections.
Hannah Arendt, born in pre-war Germany, is widely considered one of the foremost scholars of that country’s descent into Hitlerism. She devoted a third of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which analyzed the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi and Soviet regimes, to imperialism. Tyranny deployed abroad, she noted, “could only destroy the political body of the nation-state,” and while imperialism alone didn’t spawn Hitler’s rise, it was essential to creating the right conditions. Arendt immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 and tracked the overseas adventurism that has defined the era of American dominance. In her 1971 essay on the release of the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics,” she observed that the Vietnam War was the province not only of flag-waving nationalists but also of seemingly well-intentioned experts and bureaucrats, the so-called problem solvers who’d helped to support the war and lent it a sheen of respectability. “Self-deception is the danger par excellence,” she wrote. The experts ended up living in the same unreality they foisted on the public. For all their acumen, they became gears in a machine that was grinding forward unthinkingly: “One sometimes has the impression that a computer rather than ‘decision-makers’ had been let loose in Southeast Asia.”
These decision-makers were taking direction from Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Some detractors saw the “problem solvers” and their technocratic counterparts across government as dangerous progressives. Some of the technocrats’ critics on the left, however, believed that, rather than truly changing the power structure, they were trying to alter it just enough to be comfortable in it — and that this applied more broadly to the Kennedy-Johnson coalition. In “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer wrote of his unease at a pre-march party at the home of an academic who was both against the war and, as Mailer saw it, one of the empire’s unwitting supporters.
If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame … [on] the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.
The enemies on the right were more obvious; here Mailer was concerned with the trickier battle within liberalism. He saw that you can’t start a revolution, which is what pulling down the edifices of empire would be, if the people on your side are so ingrained in the power structure that they can’t even see it.
A Meandering Energy
In June, I traveled to a town called Eureka, just shy of the Canadian border in the pines of northwest Montana, and stopped at a cluster of storage units off the main road. At the entrance to one of them, Dakota Adams, 25, the eldest child of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, took out a ring of keys and opened the padlock to the roll-up door. Inside, amid belongings piled halfway to the ceiling, were remnants of the many years his father had spent preparing for the revolution: rifle cases, old ammunition boxes, helmets, recruiting flyers, smoke grenades. Adams waded through the pile, dug around for a bit, and lifted up a camouflage vest heavy with bulletproof plates. “Ah,” he said. “My childhood body armor.”
Adams had been brought up in the militant movement, immersed in meetings and trainings hidden away in the surrounding pines. Then, recently, he’d broken from it and from his father as well, following a long process that he called “deprogramming,” during which he also changed his surname. All around were obscure and dusty books that had belonged to his father: “The Coming Battle,” by M. W. Walbert; “Firearms for Survival,” by Duncan Long; “Rawles on Retreats and Relocation,” by James Wesley Rawles; “Tracking Humans,” by David Diaz; “Boston’s Gun Bible,” by the pseudonymous Boston T. Party. Though Adams couldn’t find it, he was sure that “The Reluctant Partisan,” one of John Mosby’s books, was also buried somewhere in the clutter. The militant movement believes that it takes only a small vanguard to start the revolution, Adams told me, but its preparations for political violence have also been married to efforts to bring as many people as possible to its side. I found another type of book among the piles: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” and “How to Win a Local Election: A Complete Step-By-Step Guide.” The Oath Keepers, in the end, were just one of many pieces that came together on January 6, but Rhodes had been tapping for years into the momentum that fueled it. He’d recognized that “a meandering energy” is on the loose in America, Adams said. “People want structure and they want to feel a part of things.”
Maybe there’s no choice, at the moment, but to defend the system we have in hopes of staving off a much darker fate. That’s what Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest federation of labor unions, told me. He has been credited with helping to organize the liberal defense against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote, sounding the alarm for months ahead of time and then, when the coup attempt was on, playing a coordinating role in the response. That response involved mobilizing the grassroots left and institutional liberals alike — and yes, the retired security officials, tech and business executives, bureaucrats, experts, and elites who are part of the wealthy, educated demographic that increasingly votes Democratic. The larger effort to stop Trump from overturning the vote brought establishment Republicans and big corporations into the fold as well, Podhorzer noted; the AFL-CIO even released a joint letter with the Chamber of Commerce to support the election result. History has shown, he told me, that right-wing authoritarianism can only be defeated when all of civil society — including corporations and the center-right — is aligned against it: “The alternative is ending up with a system that’s even worse than what you have.”
This is probably true. It might even be heroic, in its own way. It also means manning the imperial gates. Our demons from the frontier are here, running rampant, and there’s no one left to turn to but the people who loosed them in the first place — to get in line with the squares. Nothing shows that a system has been victorious like the inability of even its opponents to imagine an alternative. I suffer from this fate. Even my critiques of U.S. empire, I often think, exist so comfortably within its confines as to make me just another part of it. It reminds me of a term I heard in countries I covered overseas: controlled opposition.
This was the dilemma that had been plaguing me over those long months of suburban comfort as January 6 approached. And it’s why, watching the chaos unfold at the Capitol, I felt, amid the dread, a hint of clarity, as if perhaps a fog were about to lift. If the coup happened, I’d be able to charge at last against the authority like the revolutionary I’d imagined I might be back when I was bouncing through hostels with a backpack full of books. The thought provided some comfort, but returning to the passage from McCarthy, I arrived at another set of questions. What if the battle between good and evil had already been settled in America? And if the latter had won, what would be the use in guarding the gates?
The protagonist in “Blood Meridian” is a nameless, wandering youth called “the kid,” who is traveling with Captain White’s company when it’s wiped out by the Comanches and survives by lying among the dead. Moving onward through the frontier’s netherworld, he falls in with a man who makes Captain White’s brand of violence seem quaint. The Judge is a towering figure, nearly seven feet tall, and apparently civilized; “this man of learning,” as he’s described, is well traveled and erudite, with an expansive knowledge of languages, history, science, and law. He also unleashes a machine-like violence capable of wiping out entire settlements of men, women, and children as they sleep. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the Judge says. “War endures.”
Eventually, belatedly, the kid revolts against him. “You’re the one that’s crazy,” he says weakly. The book ends in a violent hug, with the kid trapped in the Judge’s arms, smothered “against his immense and terrible flesh.” When I first read this in Naples, it left me confused. Now, though, I can feel the familiar embrace of patrimony.
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Adam Caprioli remembers how jail guards responded when he experienced a psychiatric crisis inside the Monroe County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania. Official records from the facility confirm he was subdued by four guards and shot in the back with a pepper ball launcher. (photo: Jeremy Long/WITF)
In County Jails, Guards Use Pepper Spray and Stun Guns to Subdue People in Mental Crisis
Brett Sholtis, NPR
Sholtis writes: "When police arrived on the scene, they found Ishmail Thompson standing naked outside a hotel near Harrisburg, Pa., after he had just punched a man. After they arrested him, a mental health specialist at the county jail said Thompson should be sent to the hospital for psychiatric care."
When police arrived on the scene, they found Ishmail Thompson standing naked outside a hotel near Harrisburg, Pa., after he had just punched a man. After they arrested him, a mental health specialist at the county jail said Thompson should be sent to the hospital for psychiatric care.
However, after a few hours at the hospital, a doctor cleared Thompson to return to jail. With that decision, he went from being a mental health patient to a Dauphin County Prison inmate. Now he was expected to comply with orders — or be forced to.
Thompson soon would be locked in a physical struggle with corrections officers — one of 5,144 such "use of force" incidents that occurred in 2021 inside Pennsylvania county jails.
An investigation by WITF and NPR looked at 456 of those incidents from 25 county jails in Pennsylvania, during the last quarter of 2021.
Nearly 1 in 3 "use of force" incidents involved a person who was having a mental health crisis or who had a known mental illness. In many cases, guards used aggressive — and distressing — weapons like stun guns and pepper spray to control and subdue such prisoners, despite the fact that their severe psychiatric conditions meant they may have been unable to follow orders — or even understand what was going on.
For Ishmail Thompson, this played out within hours of returning to jail from the hospital. Records show that when he ran away from jail staff during a strip search, an officer pepper-sprayed him in the face and then tried taking him to the ground. According to the records, Thompson fought back and additional officers flooded the area, handcuffing and shackling him.
An officer covered Thompson's head with a hood and put him in a restraint chair, strapping down his arms and legs, according to the records, and about 20 minutes later, an officer noticed something wrong with Thompson's breathing. He was rushed to the hospital.
Five days later, Thompson died. The district attorney declined to bring charges.
The DA, warden, and county officials who help oversee the jail did not respond to requests for interviews about Thompson's treatment, or declined to comment.
Most uses of force in jails don't lead to death. In Thompson's case, the immediate cause of death was "complications from cardiac dysrhythmia," but the manner in which that occurred was "undetermined," according to the county coroner. In other words, he couldn't determine whether Thompson's death was due to being pepper-sprayed and restrained, but he also didn't say Thompson died of natural causes.
Dauphin County spokesman Brett Hambright also declined to talk about Thompson, but says nearly half of the people at the jail have a mental illness, "along with a significant number of incarcerated individuals with violent propensities."
"There are always going to be use-of-force incidents at the prison," Hambright says. "Some of them will involve mentally ill inmates due to volume."
But the practices employed by corrections officers every day in county jails can put prisoners and staff at risk of injury and can harm vulnerable people who may be scheduled to return to society within months.
"Some mentally ill prisoners are so traumatized by the abuse that they never recover, some are driven to suicide, and others are deterred from bringing attention to their mental health problems because reporting these issues often results in harsher treatment," says Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who specializes in conditions in correctional facilities.
What records reveal about "use of force" in jails
Corrections experts say the use of physical force is an important option to prevent violence between inmates, or violence against guards themselves. However, records kept by correctional officers at the 25 Pennsylvania county jails show that just 10% of "use of force" incidents were in response to a prisoner assaulting someone else. Another 10% describe a prisoner threatening staff.
WITF found that 1 in 5 uses of force — 88 incidents — involved a prisoner who was either attempting suicide, hurting themselves or threatening self-harm. Common responses by jail staff included the tools used on Thompson — a restraint chair and pepper spray. In some cases, officers used electroshock devices such as stun guns.
In addition, the investigation uncovered 42 incidents where corrections staff noted that an inmate appeared to have a mental health condition — but guards still deployed force after the person failed to respond to commands.
Defenders of these techniques say they save lives by preventing violence or self-harm, but some jails in the U.S. have moved away from the practices, saying they're inhumane and don't work.
The human costs can extend far beyond the jail, reaching the families of prisoners killed or traumatized, as well as the corrections officers involved, says Liz Schultz, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney in the Philadelphia area.
"And even if the human costs aren't persuasive, the taxpayers should care, since the resulting lawsuits can be staggering," Schultz says. "It underscores that we must ensure safe conditions in jails and prisons, and that we should be a bit more judicious about who we are locking up and why."
"All I needed was one person"
For Adam Caprioli, it began when he called 911 during a panic attack. Caprioli, 30, lives in Long Pond, Pa., and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder. He also struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.
When police responded to the 911 call in the fall of 2021, they decided to take Caprioli to the Monroe County Correctional Facility.
Inside the jail, Caprioli's anxiety and paranoia surged. He says staff ignored his requests to make a phone call or speak to a mental health professional.
After several hours of extreme distress, Caprioli tied his shirt around his neck and choked himself until he passed out. When corrections officers saw this, they decided it was time to respond.
Prison staff often justify their use of physical force by saying they're intervening to save the person's life, says Alan Mills, an attorney who has litigated use of force cases and who serves as executive director of Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago.
"The vast majority of people who are engaged in self-harm are not going to die," Mills says. "Rather, they are acting out some form of serious mental illness. And therefore what they really need is intervention to de-escalate the situation, whereas use of force does exactly the opposite and escalates the situation."
After they saw Caprioli with his shirt around his neck, officers wearing body armor and helmets rushed into his cell.
The four-man team brought the 150-pound Caprioli down to the floor. One of them had a pepper ball launcher — a compressed air gun that shoots projectiles containing chemical irritants.
"Inmate Caprioli was swinging his arms and kicking his legs," a sergeant wrote in the report. "I pressed the Pepperball launcher against the small of Inmate Caprioli's back and impacted him three (3) times."
Caprioli felt the pain of welts in his flesh. Then, the sting of powdered chemicals in the air. He realized nobody would help him.
"That's the sick part about it," Caprioli says. "You can see I'm in distress. You can see I'm not going to try and hurt anyone. I have nothing I can hurt you with."
Eventually he was taken to the hospital — where Caprioli says they assessed his physical injuries — but he didn't get help from a mental health professional. Hours later, he was back in jail, where he stayed for five days. He eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of "public drunkenness and similar misconduct" and had to pay a fine.
Caprioli acknowledges that he makes his problems worse when he uses alcohol or drugs, but he says that doesn't justify how he was treated in the jail.
"That's not something that should be going on at all. All I needed was one person to just be like, 'Hey, how are you? What's going on?' And never got that, even to the last day."
Monroe County Warden Garry Haidle and Monroe County District Attorney E. David Christine Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.
Jails unequipped to cope with psychiatric pain
Jail is not an appropriate setting for treating serious mental illness, says Dr. Pamela Rollings-Mazza. She works with PrimeCare Medical, which provides medical and behavioral services at about 35 county jails in Pennsylvania.
The problem, Rollings-Mazza says, is that people with serious psychiatric issues don't get the help they need before they are in crisis. At that point, police can be involved, and people who started off needing mental health care end up in jail.
"So the patients that we're seeing, you know, a lot of times are very, very, very sick," Rollings-Mazza says. "So we have adapted our staff to try to address that need."
PrimeCare psychologists rate prisoners' mental health on an A, B, C and D scale. Prisoners with a D rating are the most seriously ill. Rollings-Mazza says they make up between 10% and 15% of the overall jail population. Another 40% of people have a C rating, also a sign of significant illness.
She says that rating system helps determine the care psychologists provide, but it has little effect on jail policies.
"There are some jails where they don't have that understanding or want to necessarily support us," she says. "Some security officers are not educated about mental health at the level that they should be."
Rollings-Mazza says her team frequently sees people come to jail who are "not reality-based" due to psychiatric illness, and can't understand or comply with basic orders. They are often kept away from other prisoners for their own safety and may spend up to 23 hours a day alone.
That isolation virtually guarantees that vulnerable people will spiral into a crisis, said Dr. Mariposa McCall, a California-based psychiatrist who recently published a paper looking at the effects of solitary confinement.
Her work is part of a large body of research showing that keeping a person alone in a small cell all day can cause lasting psychological damage.
McCall worked for several years at state prisons in California and says it's important to understand that the culture among corrections officers prioritizes security and compliance above all. As a result, staff may believe that people who are hurting themselves are actually trying to manipulate them.
Many guards also view prisoners with mental health conditions as potentially dangerous.
"And so it creates a certain level of disconnect from people's suffering or humanity in some ways, because it feeds on that distrust," McCall says. In that environment, officers feel justified using force whether or not they think the prisoner understands them.
In Chicago's jail, a new approach to mental health
To really understand the issue, it helps to examine the decisions made in the hours and days leading up to uses of force, says Jamelia Morgan, a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
Morgan researches how a growing number of lawsuits are responding to the problem. Lawyers have successfully argued that demanding that a person with mental illness comply with orders they may not understand is a violation of their civil rights. Instead, jails should provide "reasonable accommodations" for people with a designated illness.
"In some cases, it's as simple as having medical staff respond, as opposed to security staff," Morgan says.
But individual cases can be difficult to litigate due to a complex grievance process that prisoners have to follow prior to filing suit, Morgan says.
WITF and NPR filed right-to-know requests with 61 counties across Pennsylvania and followed up with wardens in some of the counties that released use of force reports. None agreed to talk about how their officers are trained or whether they could change how they respond to people in crisis.
To solve the overall problem, wardens will need to redefine what it means to be in jail, Morgan says.
Some jails are trying new strategies. In Chicago, the Cook County Jail doesn't have a warden. Rather, it has an "executive director" who is also a trained psychologist.
That change was one part of a total reimagining of jail operations after a 2008 U.S. Department of Justice report found widespread violations of inmates' civil rights.
In recent years, the Cook County Jail has gotten rid of solitary confinement, opting instead to put problematic prisoners in common areas, but with additional security measures whenever possible, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says.
The jail includes a mental health transition center that offers alternative housing — a "college setting of Quonset huts and gardens," as Dart describes it. There, prisoners have access to art, photography and gardening classes. There's also job training, and case managers work with local community agencies, planning for what will happen once someone leaves the jail.
Just as important, Dart says, jail leadership has worked to change the training and norms around when it's appropriate to use tools such as pepper spray.
"Our role is to keep people safe, and if you have someone with a mental illness, I just don't see how Tasers and [pepper] spray can do anything other than aggravate issues, and can only be used as the last conceivable option," Dart says.
Cook County's reforms show that change is possible, but there are thousands of local jails across the U.S., and they depend on the local and state governments that set correctional policies, and that fund — or fail to fund — the mental health services that could keep vulnerable people out of jail in the first place.
In Pennsylvania's Dauphin County, where Ishmail Thompson died, officials agree that the problem — and solutions — extend beyond the jail walls. County spokesman Brett Hambright says funding has remained stagnant amid an increase in people needing mental health services. That's led to an over-reliance on jails, where the "lights are always on."
"We would certainly like to see some of these individuals treated and housed in locations better equipped to treat the specificity of their conditions," Hambright adds. "But we must play the hands we are dealt by the existing system as best we can with the resources that we have."
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A Changpa herder with her Pashmina goats in far northern India. A military pullback from the contested Chinese border and the creation of buffer zones has restricted the Changpas’ access to winter grazing pastures. (photo: Shams Irfan/WP)
Age-Old Cashmere Trade Ensnared in Military Tensions High in the Himalayas
Shams Irfan and Gerry Shih, Washington Post
Excerpt: "As a young Indian herder growing up in the Himalayas, Tsering Angchok would let his prized goats graze on a meadow north of Pangong Lake’s crystalline waters — until China and India fought a battle there in 1962."
As a young Indian herder growing up in the Himalayas, Tsering Angchok would let his prized goats graze on a meadow north of Pangong Lake’s crystalline waters — until China and India fought a battle there in 1962. Today, the lakeshore is home to a Chinese military base and, U.S. experts believe, new radar facilities and a base housing artillery emplacements for the People’s Liberation Army.
Angchok, now in his 70s, lives about 50 miles north of the lake. Here, too, the feeding ranges where villagers take their goats in winter have recently been put off-limits. Since this summer, the area has become part of a two-mile-wide buffer zone between Indian and Chinese troops.
Two years after India and China clashed in a series of border skirmishes, the recent establishment of buffer zones in the Himalayan region of Ladakh has been hailed as a significant step toward containing tensions between the two giant neighbors. But India’s steady withdrawal from its historically claimed areas has taken precious pastures away from the Changpas, a semi-nomadic Tibetan people famed for producing Pashmina cashmere wool — the “soft gold” once favored by Mughal royalty and Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s wife.
Sitting in the last home in Phobrang, the last Indian village before the gravel road peters out into bleak plains, Angchok seethed. “We are ceding more and more land to the Chinese,” he said.
On Sept. 9, almost exactly two years after opposing soldiers fired on one another in an alarming spike of tensions, India and China announced a retreat from Gogra-Hot Springs, a campsite that was used generations ago by traders plying the Himalayan route between Kashmir and Xinjiang, in western China. The development was praised in New Delhi and Beijing — less so in Ladakh.
“Almost all our winter grazing areas now fall under newly agreed buffer zones,” said Konchok Stanzin, a local government representative in Ladakh. “Buffer zones were created out of our land only. China has not lost anything at all.”
For centuries, the Changpas have raised their Pashmina goats in these mountains, at elevations exceeding 17,000 feet. The hardy goats grow soft undercoats renowned for their extreme warmth and light weight, and the Changpas shear the wool and transport it down to the neighboring Kashmir Valley, where families of skilled artisans weave the raw fibers on wooden looms into shimmering shawls, garments and blankets.
Ever since the 1800s, these coveted exports have been shipped from Kashmir to eager buyers as far away as Paris and London. Today, cashmere — the English word derived from the region’s name — remains synonymous with the finest wool, even if most cashmere actually comes from producers in China, Mongolia and Afghanistan.
In the Indian regions of Ladakh and Kashmir, herders and weavers on either end of the wool trade say their difficulties are mounting.
Before June 2020, when a deadly clash between Indian and Chinese troops killed dozens of soldiers and led to the closure of areas that once sustained the Changpas’ herds, a kilogram of raw cashmere cost $120. Now it’s nearly $220, according to Showkat Ahmad Mir, 41, a third-generation Kashmiri who is part of a weaving cooperative in Srinagar.
“The supply of raw cashmere wool was disturbed,” he said. “If the conflict continues, there will be a huge decline in Pashmina goats.”
The lack of grazing land has required Indian officials to step in. Ravinder Kumar, the local government secretary for animal and sheep husbandry in Ladakh, said his office last year supplied about half a million kilograms of livestock feed to the Changthang region, home to the Changpas.
“Before June 2020, there was hardly anything supplied on a regular basis,” Kumar said in an interview. “Ample pasture land was available to the Changpas.”
Tsering Sonam, 61, a Phobrang resident who used to have over 500 goats and 50 yaks, was one of the herders feeling pinched.
In summers, Sonam would take his goats to the plains near Phobrang, where they ate grass on the banks of small, glacier-fed rivulets, he recalled. By mid-November, when the temperatures in Phobrang plummet to less than minus-22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-30 Celsius), Sonam and other herdsmen would hike with their goats and yaks for three days eastward, high into the mountains, toward China.
Eventually, herders would gather at Hot Springs and the Kugrang River valley, where fresh water and grass are found even in winter, the key breeding season for Pashmina goats. These days, those two areas are off-limits, part of new buffer zones.
Last year, Sonam said he had had enough. He sold most of his Pashmina goats, keeping just five.
Stanzin, the government representative, and other local leaders say herders have recently been denied access to yet another area, making them believe that the Indian army is preparing to withdraw from a vast expanse known as Patrolling Point 16, turning a 150-square-mile swath in the Kugrang River valley into a no-go zone for locals. If the valley were vacated, herders would be cut off from an even bigger area of nearly 400 square miles, according to the local leaders, who have been voicing their fears to Indian newspapers and on social media without eliciting a response from officials in New Delhi.
The Indian Defense Ministry declined to comment for this article.
While the desolate mountains contested by India and China hold few underground natural resources, they have tributaries of important rivers, including the Indus, and strategic heights that lead into Kashmir and Tibet — two politically restive and vulnerable regions in the eyes of New Delhi and Beijing, respectively.
Military officials and analysts in China, India and the United States — which has backed India with intelligence-sharing and supplies in its high-elevation confrontation — have warned that the border remains tense, despite the buffer zones. In November, Manoj Pande, the Indian army chief, told a conference in New Delhi that he did not see a “significant reduction” in Chinese troop levels near Ladakh. And on Dec. 9, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought with clubs and fists in Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state farther south and east along the 2,100-mile border.
In August, India announced it was deploying amphibious assault boats to Pangong Lake. Meanwhile, on the lake’s north side, where Angchok used to take his goats, China has built radar facilities and an army base, surrounded by trenches, that could serve as a command center for a division of 10,000 troops, according to a November report by satellite imagery experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Today in Phobrang, life has been upended by the frequent roar of lumbering army trucks carrying supplies for border troops. In the home of the village chief, Konchak Stobgais also groused about the changes.
As he spoke, a low-flying Indian fighter jet shattered the stillness, leaving a trail of white vapor that stretched across the cloudless blue sky before vanishing behind a barren mountaintop.
The Indian military “sees these areas as mere wasteland,” Stobgais said. “But for us, these mountains are our lifeline.”
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People walk on the exposed banks due to low water levels caused by drought, along the Yangtze River, in Wuhan, China, on Sept. 2, 2022. (photo: Ren Yong/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/AP)
2022 Was the Year of Drought
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "It was a year characterized by extreme drought. From North America to Africa to Europe to Asia, huge swaths of the planet were parched in 2022. Lakes and rivers in several countries shrank to extreme lows and dry conditions threatened crops and fueled destructive wildfires across the globe."
Lakes and rivers in several countries shrank to extreme lows, and dry conditions threatened crops and fueled destructive wildfires across the globe.
It was a year characterized by extreme drought.
From North America to Africa to Europe to Asia, huge swaths of the planet were parched in 2022. Lakes and rivers in several countries shrank to extreme lows and dry conditions threatened crops and fueled destructive wildfires across the globe.
As the world warms, climate change will exacerbate drought conditions on the planet. Research has shown that global warming worsens drought by enhancing evaporation, depleting reservoirs and drying out soils and other vegetation.
Here’s what drought this year looked like on four of the hardest-hit continents.
Asia
The world’s largest continent provided a dire blueprint in 2022 of the consequences of drought and extreme heat in a warming world.
In March, an early heat wave gripped India and Pakistan, causing at least 90 deaths as temperatures in some spots soared as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The scorching conditions ignited forest fires in India and fueled the rapid melting of glaciers in northern Pakistan, which led to catastrophic flooding and even wiped out a bridge in the country’s Hunza Valley. A study released in May by the World Weather Attribution group found that the punishing heat in India and Pakistan was 30 times more likely due to climate change.
Over the summer, prolonged heat waves in China created severe drought conditions for many parts of the country. Sections of the Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia, reached record low levels in August, with some areas almost completely drying up. Some 400 million people in China depend on the Yangtze River for drinking water and to irrigate rice, wheat and other crops, according to the Nature Conservancy. The waterway is also a major source of hydropower for the country and plays a key role in shipping and global supply chain management.
In the country’s southwestern Sichuan province, the most extreme heat wave and drought in six decades caused water flow to the region’s hydropower reservoirs to plummet in late August, prompting the provincial government to warn of “particularly severe” power outages, the South China Morning Post reported.
The following month, September, officials in the central Chinese province of Jiangxi declared a water supply “red alert” for the first time as Poyang Lake’s water levels fell dramatically due to drought. The freshwater lake is the country’s largest and is normally a flood outlet for the Yangtze River.
Drought conditions gripped central China over the summer months, with the Jiangxi province experiencing 60% less precipitation from July to September compared to the same time last year, according to the Jiangxi Water Monitoring Center.
In Anhui province, which neighbors Jiangxi, water levels at 10 reservoirs fell below “dead pool” status, when the reservoir is so low that water cannot flow downstream from the dam.
Africa
The effects of extreme heat and drought were also dire for parts of Africa in 2022.
The Horn of Africa, which encompasses the easternmost part of the continent, experienced its longest drought in 40 years in 2022, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The region experienced drier than average conditions as it suffered through its fifth consecutive failed rainy season. Humanitarian organizations warned that the prolonged drought is exacerbating food insecurity issues for more than 50 million people in the region.
Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia were among the hardest hit by drought this year. Guleid Artan, director of the WMO’s climate center for East Africa said in August that the three countries are “on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” because of rainfall deficits and ongoing drought.
The United Nations said severe drought and food shortages are likely to persist, which could lead to famine in parts of the Horn of Africa.
“Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the worst of this crisis,” Michael Dunford, the U.N. World Food Program’s regional director for eastern Africa, said in a Nov. 28 statement. “If you think 2022 is bad, beware of what is coming in 2023.”
In a report released in October, the United Nations and the Red Cross said certain regions of Africa and Asia will become uninhabitable within decades because of extreme heat.
“The impacts would include large-scale suffering and loss of life, population movements and further entrenched inequality. These impacts are already emerging,” the organizations jointly wrote.
Europe
Elsewhere in the world, conditions were similarly parched this past summer.
A preliminary report released in August by the European Commission found that Europe’s 2022 droughts were the worst in at least 500 years. Many regions were under drought since the beginning of the year, made worse by drier-than-usual conditions over the summer and a series of heat waves from June through October.
In August, almost two-thirds of the European continent was under either drought warning or alert conditions, according to the report. Low rainfall over the summer months and persistent dry conditions added stress to summer crops in parts of Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and Hungary.
In Italy, rivers and lakes dried up over the summer. Large sections of the country’s longest river, the River Po, ran completely dry, forcing officials in July to declare a state of emergency in five northern regions.
Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, also shrank to near-historic lows over the summer. Water from the lake was diverted to local rivers to help farmers across the parched north of the country, leaving Lake Garda 12.6 inches above the water table, which approached the lowest levels recorded in 2003 and 2007.
Waterways elsewhere in Europe were similarly impacted by drought and extreme heat. In August, Serbia’s Danube River shrank to one of its lowest levels in almost a century. The Loire River in France also fell to historically low levels over the summer amid record drought in the country.
North America
Parts of North America, such as the western United States, remained in the grips of severe drought this year. Dry conditions fueled dangerous wildfires in Arizona, Colorado, California, Oregon and Washington state.
A study published in February in the journal Nature Climate Change found that ongoing “megadrought” conditions in the southwestern U.S., which have persisted for the past 22 years, are the worst since at least 800 A.D.
Key reservoirs in the country shrank to alarming lows in 2022. In June, water levels at Lake Mead, which was created on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border, dropped to the lowest levels since the lake was filled in the 1930s. The historic low water levels carry enormous implications for water supply and the production of hydroelectric power for millions of people across Arizona, California, Nevada and parts of Mexico.
Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., was similarly affected by intense drought, with its water dropping to the lowest levels since it was filled in the mid-1960s, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
Lake Mead’s declining water levels also had unexpected consequences: In May, two sets of human remains were discovered as a result of the reservoir’s receding shoreline.
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