Chrissy Teigen's Trump diss takes center stage at House hearing meant to discuss Hunter Biden The first of the GOP's planned witch hunts against tech executives and President Biden's son took an unexpected and deeply embarrassing turn when House Democrats flipped the script and began examining how Twitter worked with Donald Trump to protect his fragile ego — including attempts to delete a Chrissy Teigen tweet calling Trump a "p**y ass b*tch," which is now an official part of the congressional record for the rest of time. Truly a legacy he can be proud of.
Missouri bill goes even farther than DeSantis' "Don't Say Gay" law GOP extremists in the Show Me State are showing us just how far they're willing to take their hateful, performative anti-LGBTQ crusade by banning all discussion of gender ideology or sexual orientation in any way for all age groups and by anyone who isn't a licensed medical practitioner.
White Republican Mississippi lawmakers move to strip majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi, residents of key voting rights The Mississippi House's white Republican supermajority passed a shocking bill stripping power from majority-Black Jackson's duly elected judges and giving it to unelected judges and prosecutors appointed by an all-white cast of state officials to oversee the capitol district. It is yet another power grab by white lawmakers in a historic hotbed of horrifying racism, disenfranchising the Black people of Jackson and placing their governance in the hands of unaccountable, unelected white appointees.
DeSantis, surrounded by diapers, responds to Trump's groomer accusations In a truly bizarre scene, surrounded by piles of diapers and gas stoves, DeSantis defended himself against groomer accusations leveled by the disgraced ex-president in a preview of the shitshow that awaits GOP voters in 2024.
GOP bill bans the teaching of scientific theories in Montana schools We — come on. Are we really doing this again? Banning scientific theories? What year do you think it is, freshman state Senator David Emrich from Great Falls? Why do we have to have the same stupid fights over and over again? Have you ever had an original thought in your entire life? Can you define "governance" for the class? This bill better be scratched out onto vellum with a large feather by candlelight.
Republicans are coming for ALL our rights Free & Fair Democracy PAC:Abortion rights. Gay marriage. Contraception. Our votes. Even the books our children read in school are under attack by GOP extremists. The Free and Fair Democracy PAC is working overtime to take back the House and elect Democrats who will protect our rights from Trump and his radical cronies. Can you chip in to support their critical mission?
GOP leaders defend members calling President Biden a "liar" during State of the Union After MAGA minions disgraced themselves at the State of the Union, the top two House Republicans spent the day on TV defending their asinine behavior. It's the clearest sign yet that the GOP is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and white nationalist extremists.
TV journalist giving live report at Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine press conference arrested for criminal trespassing NewsNation correspondent Evan Lambert was in Ohio covering the fallout and recovery effort from last week's devastating train derailment when law enforcement abruptly ended his live broadcast and arrested him for disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing. It's a good thing those brave cops got this dangerous, hardened criminal off the streets of East Palestine, Ohio. There's no telling what he might've clearly and calmly enunciated on camera next!
Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh publishes report accusing the United States of covertly bombing the Nord Stream pipeline Hersch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, has published a report claiming that a covert US naval action was responsible for planting and remotely detonating C4 bombs that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that pump Russian natural gas into Europe. The United States has flatly denied the accusation.
The Satanic Temple opens the "Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic" Activists at the Satanic Temple have opened up a new online abortion clinic in New Mexico that offers counseling and medication abortion to those who need it. They've named it after the mother of Samuel Alito, the Catholic radical Supreme Court justice largely responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade, because "in 1950, (Alito's mother) did not have options, and look what happened."
Today’s Action: Register voters for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election in April!
Abortion rights are taking center stage once again, this time in Wisconsin, where progressive voters have a chance to flip control of the state Supreme Court and help restore equitable access to reproductive healthcare. Securing Democratic seats on the state’s high court could spell the end of the current, near-total abortion ban that’s been on the books since 1849. And since Republican gerrymandering in Wisconsin is some of the most egregious in the country, this may be our best chance at restoring reproductive rights for marginalized people currently being denied equitable access to care.
While progressives have managed to deliver a string of recent statewide abortion-rights victories in the wake of last summer’s disastrous SCOTUS ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, we must be steadfast in our pursuit to restore and preserve access to abortion care to the millions of folks living in Republican-dominated red states. The battle for reproductive healthcare is raging, and we must stand ready to fight.
Rep. Chip Roy makes his way to the House Republicans candidate forum in the Capitol Visitor Center on November 14, 2022.TOM WILLIAMS / CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES
As Republicans prepare to wage a war on crucial anti-poverty programs when they take control of the House, using the debt limit and major risks to the economy as a weapon, some members of the GOP are threatening to vote against raising the debt limit no matter what.
According to CNN, several Republicans are saying that they will still vote against a bill raising the debt limit even if Republicans get all of their fringe demands – namely, cuts to social programs, among other things — put into the legislation. “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that’s going to be able to convince me to raise the debt ceiling,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona).
Failing to raise the debt limit before the expected deadline of the first quarter of 2023 would have disastrous consequences for the economy. The U.S. would be at risk of defaulting on its payments, which would ruin the nation’s credit worthiness and could trigger a recession at a time when the state of the economy is already precarious, especially for the working class.
Other Republicans are saying that they will only vote for the legislation if it includes cuts to popular social programs that keep tens of millions of people above the poverty line each year. This could apply to programs like Social Security, Medicare and SNAP. Some Republicans have suggested cutting COVID spending and boosting funds for Donald Trump-era energy and immigration policies.
One GOP lawmaker went so far as to disparage social programs as “garbage.”
“There’s a lot of fat and garbage that’s way off the mission that we can cut,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), answered “hell no” when asked if he would support a package that didn’t cut federal discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicare.
The fact that not raising the debt limit comes with such huge risks is precisely why Republicans are planning to use it as leverage to force through their priorities, as they’ve been threatening to do for months now. It would be especially politically expedient for them to do so with a Democrat in the White House who they can use as a scapegoat. Cutting extremely popular social programs under Joe Biden could also be a weapon for the party to use against Democrats later, bending the truth to make it seem as though Biden was responsible for the cuts.
Though Republicans often say that they refuse to raise the debt limit because they oppose spending bills, this line of reasoning is based on a false premise. The debt limit does not authorize new spending; rather, the debt limit is raised in order to accommodate spending that has already been promised by the government. Some progressives argue, as a result, that the debt ceiling should be abolished altogether in order to prevent future standoffs that could potentially wreck the economy.
Cutting social programs would be devastating for beneficiaries and would have ripple effects across the entire economy. Social Security and Medicare are among the country’s most effective anti-poverty programs, while SNAP is the country’s most potent federal anti-hunger program, providing access to food for tens of millions of residents in the U.S. Since Republicans are generally opposed to programs that help the working class — while supporting absurdly high budgets for things like the Pentagon — cutting social programs like Social Security has been on the party’s priority list for many years now.
Republicans could have a chance to do so if Democrats don’t take action to prevent the GOP’s threat of economic brinkmanship. Senate Republicans have laid out a plan to use the debt limit, which must overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold to pass, to force cuts to social programs, viewing the legislation as an “opportunity” to do so.
In previously unreleased video from 2010, Republican Senator Mike Lee tells constituents that the Federal Government should be completely out of the "entitlements business", and doing so would assist in mitigating the "immigration problem" in the country.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) discusses the past suspension of her Twitter account during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
TWEETSTORM — Even a power outage on Capitol Hill today couldn’t stop House Republicans from pursuing one of their top priorities — investigating President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
The House Oversight Committee conducted a hearing — partly in the dark after the lights went out briefly in the committee room — to focus on Twitter’s suppression of an October 2020 New York Post story. The article focused on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, which allegedly contained business correspondence, sexually explicit photographs and videos and notes from meetings, among a lot of other data, though forensic analysts have been unable to authenticate much of its contents.
Twitter temporarily suspended the Post’s official account and tried to block the link being shared by users due to their policy on sharing hacked materials, which they later amended after a public outcry, noting it was difficult to ascertain dangerous versus contentious speech during the heat of a campaign. Former high-ranking Twitter officials Vijaya Gadde, Jim Baker and Yoel Roth all testified today and admitted mistakes in the handling of the controversial story.
The high-profile hearing was an airing of social media grievances, featuring props and lawmakers grousing about their personal interactions with Twitter or even their own temporary bans from the site. Nightly spoke with POLITICO’s Rebecca Kern , a tech policy reporter covering the hearing, about today’s events and what’s next now that House Republicans can set the agenda. This conversation has been edited.
Set the stage for us on today’s Twitter hearing. Why is this taking place?
It’s the first in a series from the House Oversight Committee, trying to investigate the Biden family and alleged government influence and or collusion with large tech companies to stifle free speech. The committee brought in three former Twitter executives, who all have left the company, to testify about their role in removing Hunter Biden laptop reporting from the New York Post in October 2020. House Oversight Republicans are trying to assert that there was some government pressure from Biden’s campaign or FBI to censor the story. Although, all of the executives, when asked ‘did you have contact from the FBI before removing the story,’ said no. They say they removed it because it violated a hacked materials policy, because they thought at the time the story was not authentic. They reversed that decision 24 hours later and have since apologized; all of the executives started the hearing saying it was a mistake to take it down.
But, we’re also getting a taste of where Republicans priorities are when it comes to going after the Biden family and Hunter Biden. That’s why they held the hearings.
What points have Oversight Committee Democrats and Republicans tried to make, and how much of the hearings today were taken up by political theater?
Some of the theater we saw today was from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whose personal Twitter account was banned for a year for violating Twitter’s Covid misinformation policies. She spent her five minutes telling the witnesses that since she couldn’t talk for a year, she wouldn’t let them talk. A lot of Republican lawmakers brought large printouts of tweets that they say were removed because there was conservative bias against them.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) tried to move the topic to extremist content on Twitter leading up to January 6. He brought in a witness, a former Twitter employee on the trust and safety team who had previously testified on January 6 issues, to say that rhetoric that incited the event was allowed to fester on Twitter without being taken down.
Both sides spent the day trying to score political points; Republicans saying that these platforms censor conservatives, whereas Democrats said they actually don’t remove enough extremist content.
What did we learn today from the hearings that we didn’t know before?
I do think maybe Republicans thought there’d be more fireworks, and that these executives would defend their actions more. But they really were pretty humble, and said that after reviewing the New York Post’s reporting, it didn’t seem to violate their policy, so they reinstated that. Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, said clearly in her opening statement that it was a mistake to block the Post’s Twitter account for two weeks, which is what they did. She said that thinking back, she would have reinstated them immediately; that was new, I hadn’t heard that. But, because all of the witnesses were former Twitter employees, they didn’t have access to any internal files from Twitter anymore that could have told us more.
A lot of the discussion at the hearing centered around Hunter Biden. How much was the discussion around Twitter’s content moderation a way in to talk about him?
I think it is the way in. Republicans are starting a Hunter Biden family investigation into his business dealings with Burisma [the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served, ultimately triggering the series of events leading to President Donald Trump’s first impeachment] and overseas businesses. So, they’re trying to use this as a smoking gun. But Raskin has argued that the FBI has had Hunter Biden’s computer, if there was anything that needed to be investigated, they would have done it, or we would have that answer already. So, the White House is calling it a political stunt.
Did either side get what they hoped out of the hearing? Was either side successful in making a strong argument?
The Twitter executives said that they did not have correspondence with the FBI or the Biden campaign, so I don’t know if Republicans were successful in that argument. They’ve been more successful with arguments that, in having certain conservatives being removed, social media companies are acting like they are the government when they’re not elected.
I don’t think one side convinced another, but I don’t know if that was their goal — I think they were maybe talking to their bases.
How much more investigation into Hunter Biden can we expect going forward?
In Congress, I think this is a top priority for Republicans. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of House Oversight, has said investigating Hunter Biden, his family and big tech collusion is a top priority.
Tomorrow morning six governors are in the POLITICO hot seat at our The Fifty: Governors event. Will New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu run against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024? What are Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s plans for the national stage, after signing an assault weapons sales ban, expanded abortion coverage and guaranteed paid leave laws in 2023?
We’re talking to leaders in toss-up states like North Carolina and Minnesota, and will dive into issues from clean energy to cannabis, and abortion to police reform, and how these state dynamics might impact the 2024 presidential cycle. Register here to watch from 9:15 a.m. EST .
WHAT'D I MISS?
— DeSantis on Trump’s attack: ‘I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis today responded to Trump’s latest attack, saying he won’t “smear” fellow Republicans . Speaking at a press conference in Ocala, Fla., the GOP governor and prospective 2024 presidential candidate was responding to questions on Trump’s latest broadside. On Tuesday, Trump, who already announced he’s running for president, reposted a message on social media sarcastically insinuating DeSantis is grooming teenage girls. “I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden — That’s how I spend my time,” DeSantis said. “I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”
— Dems defect on traveler vax: Seven House Democrats joined with all House Republicans to approve a measure that would overturn a rule requiring most foreign travelers to have Covid vaccines prior to entering the country . The bill ultimately passed 227-201, though it’s extremely unlikely to move in the Senate. The list of defectors include Reps. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), Susie Lee (D-Nev.), Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and Dina Titus (D-Nev.).
AROUND THE WORLD
A girl searches a collapsed building in Hatay, Turkey, after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, followed by a 7.5-magnitude tremor, hit the region. The quakes caused widespread destruction in southern Turkey and northern Syria and were felt in nearby countries. | Burak Kara/Getty Images
TURKEY’S TWITTER BLACKOUT — Access to Twitter has been restricted in Turkey after it was struck, along with Syria, by earthquakes that left more than 12,000 dead as of this afternoon. The blockages have complicated rescue efforts and underscored growing efforts to suppress the flow of information, Nightly’s Ari Hawkins reports.
The internet monitoring firm Netblocks said Twitter, which boasts more than 16 million users in Turkey, is currently not accessible from two of the three main internet providers — TurkTelekom and Turkcell, while a third provider, Vodafone, allows access to Twitter, but at a slower speed.
The restrictions come amid growing frustration from the Turkish public as a result of the government’s response to Monday’s devastating earthquake. Rescue teams have struggled to cope across southern Turkey and northern Syria, where the damage is most severe, and some have voiced concerns over a lack of equipment.
Alp Toker , a web browser technologist and founder of NetBlocks, said the coordinated nature of Twitter’s blockage suggests the outage is the result of a government order.
“This is the 20th or so instance we’ve tracked showing government blackouts of information sources like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the region,” Toker told Nightly in an interview. “This type of information throttling and traffic filtering is the go-to method of communication obstruction during times of emergency. But this is the first time the government’s restrictions were implemented under the guise of a natural disaster.”
The government of Turkey has escalated its social media crackdown in recent months. Earlier today, Turkish police announced they had detained 18 people and arrested five more over social media posts about the earthquake. And President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan similarly advised the Turkish press “not to give an opportunity to those who give these provocations an opportunity."
On Tuesday, Erdoğan announced a 90-day emergency period which allows him to take swift security and financial measures in areas affected by the disaster.
The restrictions also come as Erdoğan stares down a May election, which is shaping up to be one of the toughest electoral races of his two decades in power.
Toker’s report matches descriptions from Twitter users in Turkey, who have used the social media to coordinate relief efforts after Monday’s devastating earthquake. And cyber security experts and human rights activists say that Twitter was the main source of communications for many people searching for survivors and coordinating aid delivery.
“Twitter has been absolutely central to the recovery, which itself has been mostly community led … At the same time, there’s a looming election, which certainly plays a role in how the government thinks about this type of dissent,” Toker said.
The Turkish death toll has risen to at least 8,574 with around 50,000 more reported injured, Erdogan announced in a televised briefing. In Syria, the total death count stands above 1,400, according to the “White Helmets,” a volunteer organization that operates in parts of Syria and rejects the ruling government.
The estimated total amount of pandemic unemployment benefits that were wrongly sent out in 2022 with a “significant portion attributable to fraud,” according to testimony from the Labor Department released earlier today to the House Ways and Means Committee. DOL Inspector General Larry D. Turner said the department now believes $30 billion more in unemployment benefits were improperly paid compared to its previous calculations — 21.5 percent versus 18.7 percent of the total last year, which was pegged at $163 billion. Federal officials have acknowledged that they cannot precisely identify how much federal aid was wrongfully set out related to unemployment benefits.
RADAR SWEEP
FAMILIAR FEELING — We all know the sensation. You walk into a place you’ve never been but are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity – but it’s a memory you can’t quite put your finger on. The term déjà vu, which means “already seen” in French, has traditionally been a difficult subject of study as the feeling seems to appear suddenly and dissipate quickly. But a growing number of researchers now say that the feeling could actually be providing a peek into how the human memory system functions and what it looks like when things go out of whack. In particular, researchers believe that the feeling might be what happens when parts of your brain recognize familiar situations, but aren’t activated appropriately. When that happens, another part of your brain checks the familiar feeling alongside your past experiences and when no actual matches are found, the result is a discomfiting sense of having lived it all before. Read Stephanie Pappas ’s full investigation into the changing researcher consensus around déjà vu for Scientific American.
PARTING WORDS
The 2022 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature went to "Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)." This year, among the nominees are two films. Of the five films shortlisted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for this year’s best documentary, one is about Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny and another is “A House Made of Splinters,” about a Ukrainian orphanage in the war-torn east of the country. The competition between the two has sparked a conflict between Ukrainians and the Russian opposition. | David Livingston/Getty Images
AND THE OSCAR GOES TO — The Oscars are wading into a Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical minefield, writes POLITICO EU’s Nika Melkozerova .
Of the five films shortlisted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for this year’s best documentary, one is about Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny and another is “A House Made of Splinters,” about a Ukrainian orphanage in the war-torn east of the country.
“Navalny,” directed by Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher and produced by HBO Max and CNN Films, tells the story of the opposition leader who led a growing political movement against Putin, was almost killed by a nerve agent and then returned to Moscow despite the threat of arrest; he’s now languishing in a Russian prison. The movie does touch on Navalny’s nationalist views and his dalliance with far-right forces, but it’s all too little for Ukrainians aghast at Navalny’s stance on the 2014 occupation of Crimea.
Ukrainians, deeply traumatized by the ongoing Russian invasion, see the documentary as an attempt to whitewash Navalny, who they accuse of still being a Russian nationalist despite his opposition to Putin.
Tetiana Shevchuk, a lawyer with the Anti-Corruption Action Center, complains that Navalny’s backers have been pressing for his release, but haven’t done much to protest the war.
“They were silent for 11 months of the war, but now that Oscar is on the horizon, they have become more active and imitate the anti-war movement. If the Academy awards them an award, it will be another tone-deaf gesture,” Shevchuk said.
Meanwhile, the website goldderby.com, which predicts Oscar winners, suggests that it’s likely neither will take home the prize — of the five nominated films, “Navalny” has the third-best odds at victory while “A House Made of Splinters” has the fifth-best.
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The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement
As racial justice protests broke out nationwide in the summer of 2020, a man driving a silver hearse became a regular at the demonstrations in Denver.
He was a paunchy 5-foot-7 with a ruddy complexion and wore military fatigues with patches on the sleeves. By activist standards, he was an old-timer: pushing 50 as he swaggered through crowds of teens and 20-something protesters, a cigar clamped in his lips.
“I didn’t know much about him, but he drove a hearse,” said Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, a Black activist in Denver. “Inside this hearse was a lot of guns: AR-15s and all other kinds of shit.”
The driver of the hearse filled with guns was Michael Adam Windecker II. He went by the nickname Mickey and boasted of having been a soldier for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force known most recently for battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He claimed to have traveled to those battlefields and trained antifascist activists there in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and explosives.
“He was just this badass dude talking about how he worked in a foreign military and how he was for the Black Lives Matter movement,” Hall remembered.
Denver was a hot spot during the summer of 2020, with protesters enraged not just by George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis but also by the senseless death of Elijah McClain, who was forcefully subdued by police in 2019 in Aurora, a Denver suburb, and injected with a lethal dose of ketamine.
Trey Quinn, a muscular Black activist with a beard and large-framed glasses, led some Denver protests. One night, after Quinn had addressed a group of demonstrators, several young activists introduced him to Windecker.
“Hey, this guy’s really, really dope. He’s legit. He knows his shit,” Quinn remembered being told by the fresh-faced activists. “You should let him sit in, and he could probably help you out.” Windecker was “really pushy,” Quinn told me, “trying to put himself at the forefront.”
Bryce Shelby, another Black activist, remembered seeing Windecker walking around the protests. He had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest, which Shelby initially thought was suspicious. “He de-escalated any type of suspicion because he would start flashing his prison badge,” Shelby said. “So yeah. You know what I mean? OK, he’s not a fed.”
But Shelby and many other activists in Denver were wrong about the man behind the wheel of the silver hearse. Windecker was a fed. The FBI paid him tens of thousands of dollars in cash to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.
For the last year, I’ve been investigating Windecker and his work for the FBI. I tell that story in detail in a new 10-episode documentary podcast, “Alphabet Boys,” from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts. As part of this investigation, I reviewed more than 300 pages of FBI reports and hours of FBI undercover recordings, as well as publicly available videos recorded by Denver demonstrators and by Windecker himself. I also examined dozens of court files related to Windecker’s past and interviewed more than three dozen racial justice activists who encountered Windecker during the summer of 2020.
The FBI declined to comment on Windecker and the investigation in Denver and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions I sent.
Windecker wouldn’t tell me much either. After I left a note at his old apartment south of Denver explaining that I wanted to interview him about his work for the FBI, he called me. “I do not work for the FBI,” he said. “I’ve never worked for the FBI. If you get proof of me working for the FBI, then I’ll say otherwise. But there’s no proof, because I didn’t work for them.”
I explained that I had FBI reports and recordings to the contrary.
“I don’t talk to the press, I don’t talk to politicians, and I don’t talk to police,” Windecker told me, before hanging up.
FBI payment receipt records signed by Windecker show that he was paid more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020, when the FBI aggressively pursued racial justice and left-wing activists based on nothing more than First Amendment-protected activities. The story of the bureau’s infiltration of racial justice activist groups is particularly relevant now, as House Republicans launch a new committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that seems exclusively focused on the FBI’s alleged targeting of right-wing groups.
The FBI’s work in Denver, with Windecker as its eyes and ears on the street, demonstrates the falsity of that narrative.
While on the FBI payroll, Windecker became an organizer of Denver’s racial justice demonstrations and ultimately undermined the social movement gaining momentum there by deploying the same controversial tactics the FBI used to devastating effect against Black political groups during the civil rights movement.
Until now, little has been revealed about the FBI’s actions in the summer of 2020. The Denver undercover probe involving Windecker provides the first look behind the scenes at how the FBI viewed and investigated racial justice groups during that turbulent summer.
“I Got a Song for You Guys”
Any accurate description of Windecker sounds like a cartoon. With tattoos all over his body, a scraggly goatee, garishly large rings on his fingers, and a soggy cigar in his mouth, Windecker was hard to miss as he drove the streets of the Mile High City in his silver hearse.
One rainy summer afternoon after becoming a paid informant, Windecker met with his FBI handler, Special Agent Scott Dahlstrom. The federal agent clicked on a hidden camera device.
“It is August 28, 2020, at approximately 4:02 p.m.,” Dahlstrom said into the FBI recorder before handing it to Windecker. The video is part of more than a dozen hours of FBI recordings I obtained documenting Windecker’s work investigating racial justice activists.
Dahlstrom asked Windecker if he remembered his tasking orders — which involved enticing a Black racial justice activist into committing a felony.
“Yep, I got it,” Windecker said. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.”
Windecker walked to his silver hearse, placed the camera on the passenger seat, and started the ignition. Dahlstrom and his FBI colleagues watched the live feed from their black sedan.
“I got a song for you guys,” Windecker said, looking into the camera lens and speaking directly to the FBI agents. He turned up the volume on the silver hearse’s stereo and played “America (Fuck Yeah!),” the theme song from the puppet comedy movie “Team America: World Police”:
America, America
America, fuck yeah!
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah!
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to
America, fuck yeah!
As the song ended, Windecker turned to the camera again, as if on a stage, confident that the FBI agents were watching him.
“America,” Windecker said.
The United States of America had become Windecker’s new employer, and the FBI was paying him to spy on activists that summer day as he barreled down the road. According to internal FBI reports I obtained, Windecker began attending demonstrations in May 2020. He witnessed firsthand what millions of Americans saw on their screens at home: protests turning violent, clashes between left-wing and right-wing activists, demonstrators and instigators setting fires and vandalizing storefronts.
Windecker offered to give the FBI information about protesters. In an internal report, the FBI claimed that Windecker’s motivation for becoming an informant was “to fight terrorists” and that he believed “people who participate in violent civil unrest are terrorists.”
In their report adding him to the bureau’s more than 15,000 informants, FBI agents described Windecker as something of a good Samaritan — a kind of volunteer Captain America. But that notion was undercut by other bureau documents, which detailed Windecker’s history as both an informant and a criminal, with prior arrests in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida for crimes including sexual assault.
When Windecker was 20, he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old he met at a roller skating rink. Windecker, who claimed he didn’t know the girl was underage, pleaded the case down to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.
In another case, for felony menacing with a weapon in 2001, Windecker stuck a gun in a woman’s face and claimed to be a police officer looking for a suspect. That incident resulted in a felony conviction, and Windecker served two years. While he was in prison, according to FBI internal reports, another inmate tried to hire him to murder someone; instead of committing the crime, Windecker became a cooperating witness and helped convict the people who’d sought to enlist him.
In addition to criminal charges, Windecker has had four protection orders filed against him in Colorado, the most recent in 2021. In a petition for a protection order filed in 2016, a friend of Windecker’s alleged that Windecker had presented a fake police badge and theatened to kill him and his family.
Windecker claimed to have been a fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force in Iraq. He often said he had diplomatic immunity in the United States due to his association with the Kurds. In 2015, the Daily Beast reported that he was disliked by other volunteer Peshmerga fighters. One American fighter was reported to have described him as “a compulsive liar.”
I spoke to several volunteers who were with Windecker in Iraq; few of them wanted to be publicly associated with him. One of those fighters told me that Windecker claimed to be a demolitions specialist. “Dude was going around literally cutting wires off of IEDs,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices, also known as roadside bombs. “So he could have gotten anybody killed in the vicinity.”
Alan Duncan, a Scottish volunteer fighter with the Peshmerga, told me that he hadn’t fought with Windecker but knew his reputation from the other fighters. Windecker was better known for taking pictures with dead bodies, long after the fighting was finished, than for engaging in combat, Duncan told me. “He was floating about taking a few photos with the Pesh,” Duncan said. “It’s easy to claim to be Peshmerga. But claiming to be Peshmerga and actually being Peshmerga are two different things.”
Cassie Windecker, Mickey Windecker’s third ex-wife, told me that during one of his tours with the Peshmerga, Kurdish fighters had contacted her online to say that he was vacationing more than fighting.
When they first started dating, she recalled, Windecker sent her a picture of thousands of dollars in cash spread over a bed. “Do you want to come home to this every day?” Cassie remembered Windecker asking her. She said that she never knew Windecker to hold down a job during their marriage, but he often had a lot of cash in his pockets.
Cassie had long suspected that her husband was secretly working for the police in some capacity. She said she’d seen him visit local police stations to meet with cops. “Why do you have so much money?” Cassie, who was an exotic dancer at the time, would ask him. “I bust my ass, literally, on a pole. What are you doing?” She told me that Windecker would never give her a straight answer.
In July 2017, after she and Windecker separated, Cassie went to the apartment they had once shared to pick up her mail. In the apartment, Windecker allegedly grabbed Cassie by the neck, slammed her down on a table, and stood over her holding a gun. Cassie screamed as she ran out of the apartment; police arrived and arrested Windecker. The responding officers were wearing body cameras, and I obtained those videos. “He slammed me on my back, on the table, like freaking WWE-style,” Cassie told the cops, her voice breaking with fear.
While in jail following that arrest, Windecker revealed his talents as an informant, according to the police body camera footage.
“One of the officers said that you had to speak to me about a murder?” the arresting officer said to Windecker, speaking through the jail cell door about two hours after the arrest.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Windecker replied matter-of-factly. He then offered information about a murder, and the arresting officer told him he’d have to talk to a detective.
“Hang tight, all right?” the officer said as he walked away. The body camera footage then ended.
While in the hospital for her injuries, Cassie said she received a text from Windecker: “Hey bitch, I’m out.”
Cassie said police officers were still taking her statement in the hospital when the text arrived. “And I showed them the text, and they were just like, ‘We don’t know how he’s out,’” she said.
There is no record in Colorado court files of Windecker being charged, and Cassie said she was not contacted by police or prosecutors following her discharge from the hospital.
Three years later, in the summer of 2020, Windecker approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice activists.
“We Don’t Investigate Ideology”
As protests broke out in cities like Minneapolis; Denver; and Portland, Oregon, the FBI’s second-in-command, David L. Bowdich, compared the demonstrations to the 9/11 attacks. “When 9/11 occurred, our folks did not quibble about whether there was danger ahead for them,” Bowdich wrote in a memo first obtained by the New York Times. “They ran head-on into peril.” Bowdich described the racial justice demonstrations throughout the country as “a national crisis” whose “violent protesters” were “highly organized.”
Agents suspected these demonstrators could fit into a domestic terrorism ideology the bureau had defined during the first year of the Trump administration as “Black Identity Extremism”: a controversial, widely criticized catchall label for any domestic extremist ideology that drew a Black following. (The FBI has since abandoned the term in favor of a new category called “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism,” which combines white supremacist violence with so-called Black Identity Extremism.)
What’s been publicly known about the federal government’s activity during the summer of 2020 is astonishing: The Justice Department charged hundreds of people for their roles in First Amendment-protected demonstrations; the Department of Homeland Security deployed more than 750 agents, dressed in military-style uniforms, to Portland and abducted demonstrators in unmarked vans; and the Drug Enforcement Administration, using surveillance powers intended to stop drug runners, spied on more than 50 racial justice groups nationwide, among them a peaceful group that held a vigil on a public university campus in Florida.
The official position of the FBI, whose undercover activities during the summer of 2020 have been largely unknown until now, is that agents do not open investigations based on First Amendment-protected activities. “We don’t investigate ideology. We don’t investigate rhetoric,” the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, told a Senate committee in 2019. “It doesn’t matter how repugnant and how abhorrent or whatever it is.”
But internal reports I obtained suggest otherwise. These documents show that Windecker’s information was about speech, and this apparently justified hiring him as an informant and launching the undercover investigation. He reported that one local activist, Zebb Hall, used incendiary rhetoric in conversations with other demonstrators, claiming that Hall said: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”
Windecker also secretly recorded a conversation in which Hall spoke vaguely of violent revolution and a desire to train for combat. Windecker encouraged Hall with fantastical claims of training antifascist activists in Iraq and Syria as part of what he called the “Red Star Brigade.”
“My type of training that I do is anything from, like, I teach how to shoot a gun to, you know—”
“Hand-to-hand combat?” Hall interrupted.
“Yeah, hand-to-hand combat all the way to blowing up fucking buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics and sabotage,” Windecker replied.
Windecker, secretly working for the FBI, quickly became well-known among Denver’s most committed activists.
“He came off as maybe being a [rookie], but really being into the movement,” Brian Loma, who livestreamed many of the area’s demonstrations that summer, told me.
One of Loma’s videos from July 2020 shows demonstrators marching down a street in Aurora. “Our streets!” they chant. “Our streets!” Windecker’s slow-moving silver hearse can be seen upfront in the video, clearing the way for the demonstrators.
By the next month, Windecker had become a leader of Denver’s racial justice movement. The demonstrators had given him a nickname: Drill Sergeant.
With his military-style jacket and trademark cigar, he’d strut confidently in front of a line of demonstrators, some dressed in homemade armor.
“I can’t hear you!” Windecker would yell.
“No justice! No peace!” the demonstrators would chant back loudly.
“They’re Preparing for a Genuine Battle”
In 1975, a Senate committee led by the late Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho investigated the FBI’s civil rights-era domestic surveillance program known as COINTELPRO. Among the FBI abuses documented by the so-called Church Committee was the practice of informants becoming leaders in the organizations they were surveilling, and then accusing the real leaders of being informants themselves — a subversive technique known as “snitch-jacketing.”
While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI. This is clear from the bureau’s investigation of racial justice activists in Denver during the summer of 2020.
As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants. These baseless accusations sowed mistrust and undermined some of the most effective organizers in the community.
Trey Quinn, the Black activist leading protests in Denver, was among the first to suspect that Windecker might be an informant. Quinn devised a way to test Windecker: Speaking in hypotheticals, he asked him about burning down a neighborhood. Could we get it done?
“And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I got the right guy for the job,’” Quinn said. “This is how he’s talking.”
Windecker’s enthusiastic response fueled Quinn’s suspicions, but he didn’t have proof, so he didn’t warn other activists then. But Windecker, appearing to view Quinn as a threat to his cover, started telling activists that he suspected Quinn was working for the FBI.
“Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”
Suddenly, Quinn found himself on the outside. His fellow activists stopped communicating with him. As Quinn was being marginalized, Windecker encouraged protesters to become more militant and go on the offensive against the police.
In late August 2020, Hall went to an apartment that served as a base for Windecker and the young allies he’d recruited. Inside, Hall saw a table covered with guns. “I’m like, ‘Holy fuck,’” Hall recalled.
Another activist, who was with Hall in the apartment but asked not to be named because she fears retribution for speaking publicly, confirmed Hall’s account. “There are guns, weapons, medical supplies, literally looking like they’re preparing for a genuine battle,” she told me.
From August 22 to August 29, 2020, a series of demonstrations in Denver morphed into assaults on police stations, with protesters carrying homemade shields and hurling rocks and fireworks at police. The demonstrators called one of these events “Give ’Em Hell.” More than 70 police officers were injured that week.
The police response was ferocious. Officers in riot gear broke bones and fired pepper balls and rubber bullets. One man was hit in the head with a lead-filled bag fired from a police shotgun. A stingball grenade exploded next to a woman, knocking out her teeth. In the first civil judgment awarded at trial for police brutality in response to protests triggered by the Floyd killing, Denver police were forced last spring to pay $14 million to 12 protesters.
According to more than a dozen activists I spoke to in the Denver area, Windecker, the FBI’s informant, helped organize and promote these protests, which quickly turned violent.
“You Need to Have an Objective”
A pervasive social media and cable news narrative in the summer of 2020 was that racial justice and antifascist activists were becoming increasingly violent and destructive.
“The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups,” President Donald Trump said. Right-wing news media reinforced and amplified that message. “Violent young men with guns will be in charge,” Tucker Carlson told his large audience on Fox News, adding: “You will not want to live here when that happens.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent, watched from his home in California as this narrative took hold. “It was frustrating for me to see how ably — usually that’s not a term that you use when you’re referencing former President Trump — but how ably he was able to make this boogeyman out of antifa,” German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told me.
According to FBI files and videos, Windecker’s mandate from the FBI wasn’t just to provide information about racial justice protesters — though his “intelligence” about activists filled dozens of reports — but also to try to set up protesters in a conspiracy that would have supported Trump’s claims.
On orders from the FBI, Windecker targeted two Black activists: Hall, whose incendiary rhetoric Windecker had first reported to his handlers; and Bryce Shelby, a slender man with a reputation for giving fiery speeches with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Windecker invited both men to lunch in late August 2020 at a barbecue restaurant. Windecker said he’d brought them together because they were “talking about the same shit,” by which Windecker meant the prospect of protests turning violent. Windecker told them he had a friend — “an outlaw biker buddy” — who could supply whatever they needed, including weapons.
“You need to have an objective of what you’re gonna do,” Windecker told the two men. “If Bryce is planning on like, ‘OK, I want to blow up a motherfuckin’ courthouse,’ I need to know what the game plans are.”
But Windecker’s operation in Denver failed to generate a headline-grabbing conspiracy. Hall declined to participate in a violent plot. Windecker introduced Shelby to his supposed outlaw biker buddy — an FBI undercover agent who went by the nickname “Red” — and together they drove to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s home. As a hidden camera recorded them, the undercover agent encouraged Shelby to commit to a plot to assassinate Weiser, and even suggested they could hire a hitman for as little as $500. Still, Shelby refused to move forward with any plans and immediately cut off contact with Windecker and the undercover agent. Although Shelby was not charged with a crime, local prosecutors used the FBI’s undercover recordings to convince a judge to seize Shelby’s guns under Colorado’s red flag law.
“I Was Just Afraid of Him”
A week after trying to rope Hall and Shelby into a violent plot, Windecker had drawn enough suspicion that an antifascist activist group in Colorado Springs, south of Denver, posted a Twitter thread detailing its concerns. “Be careful around this dude,” the group wrote on Twitter. “Probably wise not to let him in your protest space.”
Although the group didn’t have evidence that Windecker was an informant, the public allegation threatened to damage his cover. Activists in Colorado took the claim seriously.
“You heard through different groups: ‘Kick his ass on sight.’ ‘Fuck him.’ ‘Don’t let him around the groups,’” Hall remembered.
Windecker gathered his allies, including Hall, at the apartment in Denver where activists had seen the table covered with guns. Windecker wanted to record a video and post it to YouTube in response to the allegations. He created a stage for the video: a flag for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and an AR-15-style assault rifle propped against the wall behind him, and, on the table before him, a ball-peen hammer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“He had a cigar and was acting all tough,” Hall said.
Wearing a custom-made black Punisher T-shirt, Windecker stared into the camera.
“This propaganda shit you guys posted doesn’t mean fuck all to me,” Windecker said in his gravelly voice, sounding furious. “But understand this: I will be polite and professional, but I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be … If you’re trying to implicate that I’m a fucking snitch, check this out. Three things I ain’t: a punk, I ain’t a bitch, and I ain’t a fucking snitch.”
Watching as Windecker recorded the video, Hall was struck by how defensive he seemed. He finally accepted what he’d long thought impossible: Windecker, the activist leader encouraging everyone to become more militant, must be a secret government informant.
That created a problem for Hall. Windecker had given Hall money days earlier and asked him to buy a gun. Hall had agreed and bought a Smith & Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon. Hall didn’t think he had a choice in the transaction. He believed that Windecker, who made the looming prospect of violence part of his identity, would come after him if he refused. “I was just afraid of him,” Hall explained. “I was fucking terrified of this guy.”
After he made the video, Windecker and his silver hearse disappeared. In July 2021, nearly a year after he’d bought the gun for Windecker, federal agents arrested Hall. He pleaded guilty to a felony firearms violation — for buying a gun, with the government’s money, for the government’s informant — and received three years of probation. That was the extent of the plot Windecker and the FBI succeeded in engineering among the racial justice activists that summer.
Many of the activist groups in Denver have splintered or disbanded. There was a lot of distrust. Activists there told me they suspected government agents had infiltrated the groups to encourage the violence that occurred, but until now, they’d never had proof.
“The FBI caused violence here,” Hall said. “They don’t want people to know that.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, gave the Republican response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023. (photo: Al Drago/Getty)
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ furious, culture-warrior response matched the petty disruptions Republicans made during President Biden’s speech.
The official speech given in response to the State of the Union is usually a boring, flat, and careful speech where the politician who was suckered into delivering it gives a unifying message about their party’s alternate vision for the United States.
But that’s not what you get when you give former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders the mic.
Sanders, who was recently sworn in as Arkansas’ governor, refused to give the normal across-the-aisle platitudes and instead delivered a scathing speech obsessed with the Republican Party’s culture wars that showed the GOP is only becoming more furious in its politics.
She kicked off her speech by calling Biden a liar, before mocking his age and accusing him of surrendering his presidency “to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight,” she continued. “Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech. That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.”
This, to be clear, isn’t normal, even in the Trump era. Just last year, Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds gave a totally normal State of the Union response speech where she criticized Biden plenty but didn’t hit the Trump-level invective, and actually laid out a positive policy agenda. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott did the same in his official Republican response to Biden’s joint address of Congress in 2021.
But as the 2024 presidential race heats up, it’s clear Republicans are leaning even harder into the pugilistic, near-apocalyptic rhetoric and disrespect for normal politeness that Trump proved is beloved by the GOP base.
And this isn't just a one-off. Sanders was handpicked by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to deliver the address. And during the State of the Union itself, it’s clear a significant number of Republican lawmakers are in her corner.
Republican House members ignored McCarthy’s request that they behave and keep quiet during the speech and repeatedly booed Biden, leading McCarthy to visibly shush them like a frustrated kindergarten teacher on a field trip.
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly yelled out calling Biden a liar, while many others loudly interrupted to yell he was lying that some Republicans want to sunset Medicare and Social Security (that’s true) and blame him for the border. At one point, when Biden was discussing the tragedy of opiate overdoses from drugs coming over the U.S.-Mexico border, one Republican yelled “it’s your fault.”
And Sanders’ old boss, former President Donald Trump, delivered his own totally normal video response that showed this isn’t an anomaly.
“His administration is waging war on free speech, they’re trying to indoctrinate and mutilate our children, he’s leading us to the brink of World War III and on top of that he’s the most corrupt president in American history, and it’s not even close,” Trump claimed about Biden.
Giving the response to the State of the Union is a thankless job with little upside and a guarantee that you’ll be mocked if you screw it up. Kentucky Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear’s weird 2017 speech in a local diner was widely mocked online; Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio became late-night fodder for panickedly diving for a water bottle during his dry-mouthed speech in 2013; and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s stilted 2009 speech dealt a blow to his own presidential aspirations.
While Sanders’ speech certainly drew criticism from the left and center, she was met with praise from right-wing pundits, and likely only helped her national profile—and served as a potential audition to potentially be Trump’s running-mate if he wins the GOP nomination.
She and her team seemed particularly pleased with one line from the speech, retweeting clips of it numerous times afterwards:
"The dividing line in America is no longer between right and left — it's between normal or crazy,” Sanders said.
There was plenty of debate about which side was the normal one after her speech.
Thousands of messages on social media platforms appeal for earthquake rescues with some people pulled from the debris after posting. (photo: Karam Kellieh)
Thousands of messages on social media platforms appeal for earthquake rescues with some people pulled from the debris after posting.
Search-and-rescue efforts continue in southeastern Turkey as workers race against time to reach victims buried under debris after the region was hit by a series of powerful earthquakes.
The magnitude-7.8 and -7.6 quakes happened only hours apart on Monday and brought down entire apartment blocks in multiple cities. The death toll has exceeded 5,400 in Turkey and 1,800 in neighbouring Syria.
Following the disaster, throngs of trapped victims utilised social media to reach out for help and pinpoint their locations for rescuers.
Firat Yayla, a YouTuber known as Charmquell, was one of them.
He said in a video posted on his Instagram Stories early on Tuesday after the first earthquake he was stuck under the rubble in the central Antakya district of Hatay province, and pleaded with his followers to save him.
“Friends, we are stuck under the earthquake,” he said in the video shot in a dark space. “Mother! Are you okay? Mother! Tell me you hid somewhere. Please help!” he added before ending the video with his home address.
He updated his Instagram later saying he had been saved, but his mother remained under the concrete.
A young man in another video trapped under debris in Iskenderun district of Hatay shared his address and said, “If you love your God, please come and save us.”
The video was widely shared on Twitter.
Hatay is one of the Turkish provinces worst hit by the disaster. The airport is damaged and closed, making it harder for aid and rescue teams to reach the flattened city.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said 5,775 buildings had been destroyed in the quake, and more than 20,400 people were injured.
Rocked while sleeping
Boran Kubat, a 20-year-old who studies in Istanbul, was visiting relatives in Malatya city when the second earthquake hit his family home.
Kubat said they entered the apartment after the first quake, thinking it was safe, but were caught by the second while sleeping.
He asked for help in a video message posted on social media from under his fallen home where he was trapped with his mother, grandmother, and two uncles.
“Everyone who sees this please come and help us. Now, everyone come to help us!” he said, describing his address in detail.
He said friends immediately reacted and he and his family were rescued.
More than 12,000 Turkish search-and-rescue personnel are working in the affected areas, along with 9,000 troops. Some 70 countries and sending personnel, equipment and aid.
‘Still shaking’
A man with the Twitter handle Can Turker posted a message on Monday to followers while tagging Turkish government officials. He, his wife, and baby were stuck in The Liwan Hotel in Antakya.
“The stairs collapsed, we are stuck on the third floor. We are still shaking. Please help,” he pleaded.
Can Turker tweeted the next day saying he was saved by his friends without any help from rescue teams.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who called it the largest disaster to hit Turkey since a 1938 earthquake in the Elazig province killed more than 33,000 people – declared on Wednesday a three-month state of emergency in the 10 areas hit.
More than 8,000 people have been pulled from the debris in Turkey alone.
But tens of thousands of others are estimated to be stuck under masses of flattened buildings, and many in southeastern Turkey have complained rescue efforts cannot meet the scale of the disaster.
Although there have been lucky people who posted their situation on social media and were rescued, countless messages are still on the internet appealing for assistance – either for themselves under collapsed buildings, or for loved ones who cannot be reached.
It is difficult to know how the situation turned out for most.
Police stand guard between a group of anti-abortion protesters and a group of pro-choice protesters outside a clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas. (photo: Greg Smith/Corbis)
A Democratic federal judge suggests that banning abortion violates the 13th Amendment’s prohibition on “involuntary servitude.”
Last June, the Supreme Court said in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” Given that Dobbs tossed out a half-century of precedent, upended reproductive freedom in about half of the country, and effectively eliminated an entire constitutional right, you probably heard about this decision.
Nevertheless, on Monday, a federal judge in Washington, DC handed down a brief order suggesting that the Supreme Court may not have meant what it said in Dobbs. “The ‘issue’ before the Court in Dobbs was not whether any provision of the Constitution provided a right to abortion,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, wrote. “Rather, the question before the Court in Dobbs was whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided such a right.”
And that leaves open the possibility that the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” does forbid laws banning abortion. Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s order requires the parties to a criminal prosecution touching on abortion rights to brief whether the Thirteenth Amendment or “any other provision of the Constitution could confer a right to abortion.”
Unless the membership of the Supreme Court changes drastically, the Court is exceedingly unlikely to rule that any provision of the Constitution protects the right to an abortion. The Court’s GOP-appointed majority stridently opposes abortion rights. They didn’t just overrule Roe v. Wade. They established, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), that states can effectively immunize anti-abortion laws from judicial review by using bounty hunters to enforce those laws.
Simply put, these deeply committed opponents of abortion rights are not going to reverse course because a judge appointed by a Democratic president writes a clever opinion arguing that forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term is a form of involuntary servitude.
It would certainly be best if federal judges all engaged in good faith efforts to follow the law, including well-established legal precedents. But since we don’t live in that world, Kollar-Kotelly’s order raises an arresting question: Why should left-leaning judges unilaterally disarm? If Republican judges can play this game, why can’t judges who support abortion rights do the same?
The Thirteenth Amendment case against abortion bans, briefly explained
Among other things, these defendants are charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime to conspire to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Before Dobbs, this would have been a fairly straightforward case (assuming, of course, that the government can prove its factual allegations against these defendants beyond a reasonable doubt). Prior to Dobbs, cases like Roe established that there is a constitutional right to an abortion. So blocking an abortion clinic injured the right of that clinic’s patients to exercise a constitutional right.
After Dobbs, however, the case becomes more complicated. The government still has a strong argument that blocking an abortion clinic violates a federal statute that specifically prohibits using certain tactics to block access to an abortion clinic — and the government also charged these defendants with violating this statute. Nevertheless, the prosecution’s argument that these defendants violated the broader ban on injuring constitutional rights would be stronger if it could also argue that these defendants violated a constitutional right to an abortion.
Enter the Thirteenth Amendment. Kollar-Kotelly’s order cites two sources — a scholarly article by law professor Andrew Koppelman, which argues that this amendment “is violated by laws that prohibit abortion;” and a Tenth Circuit opinion that discusses a similar argument — to support the proposition that an abortion ban might qualify as “involuntary servitude.”
The argument that the Thirteenth Amendment protects a right to abortion is fairly straightforward. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the Supreme Court held that this amendment sought to abolish “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit, which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”
But wait, what about Dobbs’ statement that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion?”
Of course, one major problem with this Thirteenth Amendment argument is that Dobbs spoke in categorical terms about the right to an abortion — or, rather, the nonexistence of that right. Dobbs states outright that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”
To get around this problem, Kollar-Kotelly rests on a notoriously hard-to-pin-down distinction between a court decision’s “holding” and something known as “dicta.”
Briefly, the portions of an opinion that respond to the specific legal question before a court are considered the court’s “holding,” and are binding on lower courts that consider similar cases. By contrast, when a judge launches into a non-sequitur or otherwise opines on issues that are not relevant to the actual legal issue in the case, those portions of the judge’s opinion are considered “dicta” and are not binding.
The specific issue that was before the Court in Dobbs, Kollar-Kotelly notes, was whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects a right to an abortion, not whether any other provision does so. “That is why neither the majority nor the dissent in Dobbs analyzed anything but the Fourteenth Amendment,” she writes. Thus, the Court’s broad pronouncement that the Constitution as a whole “does not confer a right to abortion” can plausibly be dismissed as dicta.
Realistically, this argument is unlikely to persuade anyone on the Supreme Court who joined the majority opinion in Dobbs. The distinction between holding and dicta is notoriously slippery. And even if five justices were convinced that Dobbs’s broad announcement about the entire constitution is dicta, those justices would still have the formal authority to simply reject the Thirteenth Amendment argument for abortion rights on the merits.
The Supreme Court can only blame itself for Kollar-Kotelly’s order
Again, unless two Republican appointees on the Supreme Court unexpectedly leave the Court and are replaced by Democrats, the justices are about as likely to rule that the Constitution protects a right to an abortion as they are to move the Supreme Court’s building to Mordor, Asgard, or the Unseelie Court.
And, again, in a better world, judges would behave as servants of the law — rather than trying to stretch that law to serve their particular agenda.
But here in the actual world, lower courts do not always operate as loyal followers of the Supreme Court’s precedent. They often act as think tanks for new legal ideas that haven’t gained support on the Supreme Court, but that could at some point in the future. The Fifth Circuit more or less operates as a generator and legitimizer of right-wing ideas that are often, but not always, rejected by this Supreme Court. So do several federal trial judges that have become favorites among right-wing advocates seeking to move the law hard to the right.
Kollar-Kotelly’s order cannot really be defended as a serious attempt to convince this Supreme Court to change the law. But, at worst, it is simply the center-left equivalent of the kind of judicial entrepreneurship that routinely goes on at the Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court should not be surprised that, if it refuses to rein in egregious overreach by courts like the Fifth Circuit, Democratic judges will also start behaving like they have a free hand.
U.S. president Joe Biden speaks with border patrol officers as he walks along the border fence during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border to assess border enforcement operations, in El Paso, Texas, U.S., January 8, 2023. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
The DOJ, in a filing late Tuesday, told the Supreme Court that the administration’s move to end the Covid-19 public emergency on May 11 “would render this case moot.”
That is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order regarding Title 42 says the policy should end when the secretary of Health and Human Services’s declaration of a public health emergency from the pandemic expires.
The case, set to be argued on March 1 at the court, challenges the Biden administration’s plan to end Title 42, which allowed the United States to quickly deport migrants seeking asylum.
Title 42 had been implemented in March 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. Adopted under former President Donald Trump, it allowed the U.S. to boot more than 2 million migrants, most of them at the Mexican border.
In a case brought by asylum seekers trying to overturn Title 42, a federal judge ruled in November that the policy violated federal law and was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The Supreme Court in December ordered the policy to remain in place as it considered whether the states have the legal standing to sue over Title 42.
In its filing Tuesday, lawyers for the DOJ wrote, that question will no longer be “a live case or controversy” because of the automatic expiration of Title 42 that would occur once the public health emergency ends.
“The government has also recently announced its intent to adopt new Title 8 policies to address the situation at the border once the Title 42 orders end,” the filing said.
Following its failed crypto scheme, authoritarian president Nayib Bukele’s cash-strapped government is making moves to reverse El Salvador’s metal mining ban. Its reintroduction would be a disaster for the nation’s already contaminated water supply.
Unlike many Latin American countries that court extractive investments from transnational companies, El Salvador has no metal mining industry. This is unique in the region, the result of years of organizing by social groups, environmental organizations, and the Catholic Church. Under President Nayib Bukele, however, this mining prohibition is facing new threats.
On January 11, the Salvadoran government ordered the arrest of five prominent anti-mining activists and water defenders: Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega. These figures, who all played a role in lobbying for the 2017 mining ban, are accused of “illicit associations” and committing a murder during the country’s twelve-year civil war (1980–1992). In the context of Bukele’s increasing openness toward mining, however, some in El Salvador and around the world are questioning the true motives behind the arrests. Furthermore, the five organizers are being prosecuted by a specialized war-crimes team set up by Bukele, raising worries that the ruling may be dictated from above for political purposes.
The genesis of the war-crimes team itself points to a deeper injustice in Salvadoran society. Although the UN attributes 85 percent of the crimes committed during the civil war to the US-backed military, no military member has been prosecuted there. This had led people in Santa Marta, a community with a strong anti-mining legacy, to decry the attorney general’s double standards, as there are dozens of cases that have been started by survivors of military massacres that have not gone to trial. Three specific cases are those of the Lempa massacre (forty-three killed, 189 disappeared), the Los Planes massacre (twenty-seven killed), and the Santa Cruz massacre (up to one hundred killed). Additionally, Bukele refuses to open military archives related to the El Mozote massacre, in which the US-trained army murdered around one thousand civilians in and around the village of El Mozote, even though courts have ordered him to do so.
On January 20, 251 organizations from twenty-nine countries signed a statement calling on the Salvadoran government to drop the charges against the five water defenders or, at the very least, release them from prison to await their trial. Currently, they are being held at a judicial detention center in Soyapango with many limitations: they are isolated, unable to receive visits from family members, and their lawyers are only allowed to speak with them for a maximum of five minutes. The attorney general is looking for a permanent location for their detention, but due to the state of exception that has seen the Bukele government arrest 2 percent of El Salvador’s adult population, most long-term facilities are full. The defense lawyers also believe that, because the case is attracting international attention, no facilities want to take them.
The failure of Bukele’s cryptocurrency investments provides some context for his apparent interest in reintroducing mining to El Salvador. According to a statement by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Bukele government is searching for new ways to earn revenues “thanks in part to its ill-advised embrace of Bitcoin.” The Salvadoran government invested $150 million of its reserves into cryptocurrency, and it is known that the state has already lost at least $60 million on these investments due to recent crypto devaluation. This amount is not a large proportion of El Salvador’s finances — the country’s GDP is currently valued at around $25 billion, while its debt is around $20 billion. “But still,” said University of Georgia professor Julio Sevilla, “you cannot really afford to make bad investments when your finances are precarious to start with.”
“Water Is More Important Than Gold”
The Salvadoran mining ban was instituted in March 2017, after years of lobbying by scientists, environmentalists, labor groups, the church, and anti-mining locals affected by the unsustainable and often criminal actions of extractive companies. That year, the Canadian mining company OceanaGold had lost a lawsuit against the Salvadoran state, which it was suing at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for denying Pacific Rim, a subsidiary of OceanaGold, an exploitation license in the northern Cabañas department.
Pacific Rim had been maneuvering for years to receive exploitation approval from the central government as local communities organized resistance to the project. Four anti-mining activists were killed protesting the Pacific Rim project — including Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto, who was eight months pregnant. Ultimately, the company was denied the license on the grounds that it had failed to meet necessary regulatory requirements, and was ordered to pay El Salvador $8 million in legal fees.
Following the victory over the Canadian company, the anti-mining movement was empowered. It used its newfound strength to press lawmakers into passing the mining ban.
During the resistance to the Pacific Rim project, anti-mining activists organized around two key issues: water and health. In El Salvador, 90 percent of surface water has been contaminated by industry, agriculture, and underdeveloped sewage systems — it is, as Thomas McDonagh and Aldo Orellana López put it, “a water stressed country.” The mining industry puts even more pressure on the country’s water supplies. In 2013, Oxfam warned that the “development of large-scale metallic mining [in El Salvador] would further contribute to the deficiency of fresh water due to its release of acid mine drainage.”
Organized around the slogan “Water is more important than gold,” activists succeeded in getting the mining ban passed and thereby ensured the ecological integrity of their country in a region where states generally side with foreign investors over local demands, leading to potentially tragic conflict.
Such conflict is ongoing at the Cerro Blanco mine in neighboring Guatemala, which is owned by Canadian company Bluestone Resources. A recent referendum found that 89 percent of locals from nearby Asunción Mita opposed mining activity due to environmental concerns, but the Guatemalan state and Bluestone rejected their views and pushed for an injunction to annul the results. Events like these show the historic importance of the Salvadoran mining ban as well as the dangers that await if it is overturned.
Bukele’s Scheming
Unlike previous presidents, Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, has not condemned mining. In fact, the gains made by social movements have been increasingly targeted by the government as his administration appears to move toward reintroducing mining to the country.
Bukele and his most ardent supporters have been busy setting the stage for the reversal of the mining ban by attacking land and water defenders, as Omar Flores of the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining outlines:
Nayib Bukele utilizes a narrative of hate and stigma against human rights defenders, including environmental defenders, as they oppose his extractivist economic agenda. The use of hatred by the president is replicated by all the institutions of the state apparatus and has become the hegemonic narrative of all public officials. . . . Similarly, there is an army of anonymous internet trolls who also disseminate the messages of the government to deepen hatred against environmental and human rights defenders.
According to Luis Gonzales of the National Roundtable, the Bukele government “operates under a pro-mining logic.” This is evidenced by the fact that, under his administration, El Salvador has joined the Canadian government–funded Intergovernmental Forum on Mining and passed a law to create a Directorate of Hydrocarbons, Energy and Mines. Additionally, Gonzales and others report hearing testimonies from rural community members that representatives from mining companies are visiting their towns.
Locals in the region of Cabañas (including Antonio Pacheca, one of the five community leaders arrested on January 11) have reported the presence of unknown individuals offering to buy land and fund social programs, and two mayors in the region claim to have communicated with the president of PROESA, the Exports and Investment Promotion Agency of El Salvador, who told them that mining will soon be brought back. Finally, there are rumors that mining is on the negotiating table in ongoing free trade discussions between El Salvador and China.
Meanwhile, some Canadian companies have maintained an interest in El Salvador’s mining sector. Financial reports released in 2022 reveal that two of OceanaGold’s El Salvador-based subsidiaries, Bienstar and Dorado Exploraciones, remain active in the country. Since 2017, the year of the mining ban, OceanaGold has actually increased funding for Dorado Exploraciones.
Bukele’s scheming to reintroduce mining in El Salvador is part and parcel of his authoritarianism. While targeting anti-mining activists from the country’s mineral-rich northern region, the Salvadoran government is taking no steps to rectify the atrocities of the civil war era, the vast majority of which were committed against the rural poor by a right-wing military with US assistance. The return of mining will only continue to exacerbate these injustices.
At the same time, the Bukele administration apparently views mining as a way to bolster the country’s sagging revenues, which have created further incentive to make an example of prominent water defenders. Like elsewhere in the region, land and water defenders are being demonized and stigmatized, a strategy that will only intensify if mining is reintroduced. In a country whose water supply is so vulnerable to industrial pollution, this is extremely worrisome.
The reintroduction of metal mining into the Salvadoran economy would be a terrible idea. Those interested in environmental justice should watch the water defenders’ trial, and the broader debate around mining in El Salvador, very closely.
Rising population has led to increased human encroachment on natural habitats, but climate change is also pushing some animals closer to population centers, experts say.
Attacks on humans by carnivorous animals have increased steadily since 1950, as growing human populations in new areas make such incidents more common, according to a study published last week. According to other experts, climate change may also be contributing to increased human-wildlife conflict.
The report, which includes 33 contributors, was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Biology. Spanning 70 years, the collected attack incidents were compiled from personal datasets, published literature and news reports.
A contributor to the report, Vincenzo Penteriani, an ecologist at the Spanish National Research Council, said rising population has led to increased human encroachment on natural habitats — a probable cause for the purported uptick in attacks by wolves, bears and big cats all over the world.
Penteriani said that while the overall number of carnivore attacks has increased, such incidents are still relatively rare. The report found that Asia and Africa have had the sharpest increases.
“If you combine the reduction of natural habitat with the expansion and spreading of human settlements, it’s almost normal that the encounters between large carnivores and humans become more frequent,” Penteriani said. “It’s just a question of probability.”
Climate change that brings wildlife closer to humans may be another aggravating factor in human-wildlife conflicts, said Briana Abrahms, an assistant professor and wildlife ecologist at the University of Washington who did not work on the study.
Most carnivore attacks in high-income countries occurred during recreational activities such as hiking or camping. In low-income countries, carnivore attacks occurred more commonly among people engaging in livelihood activities such as hunting or farming. Globally, 32% of all attacks were fatal, according to the study.
Abrahms said that it is important to recognize all variables that affect human-wildlife interactions and that climate change is often missing from the discourse.
“We’re seeing the long-term impacts, such as the decline in sea ice in the Arctic, leading to increased encounters between polar bears and people,” Abrahms said. “But also, we’re seeing the more immediate impact of extreme climate events. The increasing frequency and severity of these events can drive conflict — for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, extreme drought frequency has been associated with increased carnivore attacks on livestock.”
Last month, a polar bear killed a 24-year-old woman and her 1-year-old child in the small village of Wales, Alaska. It was the first fatal polar bear attack in Alaska in over 30 years. Polar bears are spending more and more time on land, Abrahms said, as their hunting grounds on the ice shrink.
Penteriani said: “It’s difficult to predict the full impact of climate change on carnivores. But if at the end of the summer polar bears are unable to return to their habitat because of the lack of ice, they will have to remain closer to humans for longer periods. This automatically increases the possibility of more attacks.”
Wildlife behavior may be more closely tied to human activity than previously acknowledged. A recent study found significant differences in land use and behavior among several species in Glacier National Park in Montana during and after Covid closures.
Researchers found that hikers created a “landscape of fear” for cougars, wolves, black bears, grizzly bears and smaller mammals. When the parks were empty, the animals roamed freely. When hikers returned, several species used hiking trails less or disappeared entirely.
Generally, wild animals try to avoid contact with humans, said a co-author of the study, Daniel Thornton, an assistant professor at Washington State University studying carnivore ecology and conservation.
“When animals are forced into close quarters, when there’s not enough habitat or you have these climate-driven changes that are pushing animals and people together, that’s when conflict is more likely,” Thornton said.
Urban ecologist Christopher Schell studies how animals and humans are adapting to increased proximity in urban settings. His laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is an assistant professor, is home to research about urban human-coyote interactions.
With increasing global urbanization and human encroachment, it is inevitable that human-wildlife interactions will increase, Schell said. But those interactions do not need to be negative, he added.
“Something to consider are the relationships that already exist between people and the species in question,” he said.
Schell considers the urban tale of Carl the coyote a perfect representation of humans’ changing relationship with carnivores in cities. Carl was the beloved mascot of the San Francisco Bay area, Schell said. He was fed and doted on by the local unhoused population but eventually grew too accustomed to humans — after authorities deemed Carl was a threat, particularly to local children, he was shot in 2021, inspiring a citywide vigil.
“There are many species that are going to be urbanized, that are urbanized right now,” Schell said. “We know that wildlife is most likely going to be interacting with people more frequently, and we need to be prepared for it. How do we create spaces that allow for both wildlife and humans to coexist?”
