29 May 23
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But that appears to be the case. In negotiations between the Biden White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republican caucus, one of the last sticking points was whether, and by how much, to tighten work requirements for food stamps and welfare.
In coming days, as Congress moves toward votes on the deal, political commentators will thoroughly masticate the question of whether Biden or McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) prevailed in this dealmaking and which of them will be hurt or harmed politically by the outcome.
That’s not a very interesting parlor game. (Personally, I’d go with the judgment of Timothy Noah of the New Republic, who thinks Biden emerges as the political victor and McCarthy’s days as speaker are numbered, thanks to the choler of his far right wing.)
More important is what the deal says about the principles of both camps. The granular details of the agreement were still murky Sunday, and it could still collapse because of objections from congressional Republicans or Democrats.
The deal, as reported, freezes discretionary federal spending — that is, most of the programs for which Americans depend on the federal government — at current levels for the next two years, with increases lower than inflation. That means an effective budget cut, relative to inflation. In return, the debt ceiling is suspended for two years.
But Biden managed to preserve the accomplishments of his presidency thus far from the GOP’s knives. He fended off their efforts to torpedo the support for renewable energy in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, their harshest proposed budget cuts, the rollback of student debt relief, and repeal of his budget increase for the Internal Revenue Service.
(Reports say that $10 billion will be shaved off the $80-billion 10-year IRS budget increase, but the money can be redirected to other programs.)
Biden rejected Republican demands to impose work requirements on Medicaid, but allowed some tightening of the rules for food stamps — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, which is what’s left of traditional welfare.
Make no mistake: No rich American will be harmed even a bit by this deal. Some may even be advantaged, if the carve-out from the IRS budget comes from the agency’s enforcement efforts; that would help the rich, who are the nation’s worst tax cheats.
The most vulnerable Americans, however, will bear the brunt of the deal points. Let’s take a look.
Start with work requirements. As I’ve reported ad infinitum over the years, work requirements on safety net programs accomplish nothing in terms of pushing their beneficiaries into the job market.
They are, however, very effective at throwing people off those programs; that’s what happened in Arkansas , where 17,000 people lost Medicaid benefits in 2019 after only six months of a limited rollout of work rules. A federal judge then blocked the changes.
The debt ceiling deal will tighten work requirements for SNAP by requiring able-bodied, childless low-income adults younger than 55 to work 20 hours a week or be engaged in job training or job searches. If they don’t meet that standard, their SNAP benefits end after three months. Current law applies to those adults only up to the age of 49. The change will expire in 2030.
This rule will do virtually nothing to reduce federal spending, which Republicans say has been the whole point of holding the debt ceiling hostage. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the change would reduce federal spending by $11 billion over 10 years, or $1.1 billion a year.
By my calculation, that comes to 17 thousandths of a percent of the federal budget, which this year is $6.4 trillion.
If it’s scarcely a rounding error in federal accounts, however, it’s critically important to the recipients of food aid. The CBO estimated that about 275,000 people would lose benefits each month because they failed to meet the requirement.
Biden’s negotiators did get the Republicans to waive SNAP rules for veterans and the homeless, which will probably lower that figure and limit the reduction of federal spending.
Work requirements for safety net programs have been a Republican hobby horse for decades. It’s based on the Republican image of low-income Americans as layabouts and grifters — the “undeserving poor.”
Sure enough, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), one of McCarthy’s debt-ceiling negotiators, couldn’t resist slandering this vulnerable population during the talks. “Democrats right now are willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work,” he said during a break.
Of course, it was Republicans who showed willingness to default on the federal debt. Nor is there a smidgen of evidence that any sizable percentage of this target population is “refusing to work.”
The vast majority of SNAP recipients already work, but they’re in low-paying jobs that are so unstable that they often drift in and out of employment. According to the Census Bureau, 79% of all SNAP families include at least one worker, as do nearly 84% of married couples on SNAP.
In other words, the GOP insistence on work requirements is nothing but the party’s typical performative malevolence toward the poor. If they really cared about getting SNAP recipients into the job market, they’d fund job training programs and infrastructure projects. They never do.
In any case, the only cohort of beneficiaries that tends to move into the job market at all are younger recipients — not those in their 50s. All that work requirements accomplish is to erect bureaucratic barriers to enrollment in the safety net. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
The work rules for TANF are managed somewhat differently — they’re directed at the states administering the program, which have been required to ensure that a certain percentage of beneficiaries are working or looking for work. How the debt ceiling deal applies to that program is unclear.
In the next week or so, before June 5 — the putative date at which the Treasury Department says the government runs out of money to pay its bills without a debt ceiling increase and thus flirts with an unprecedented default — Biden and McCarthy will hit the hustings to claim victory.
But there’s really only one way to think about the exercise we’ve just gone through. It was a supreme waste of time.
Republicans showed they were willing to crash the U.S. economy to make some bog-standard complaints about the federal deficit, most of which they created themselves through the 2017 tax cuts they enacted for the wealthy. Their initial negotiating stance was so extreme that they must have known it could never gain Democratic votes in the House or pass the Democratic Senate.
The Democrats held reasonably firm. They agreed to some modest budget constraints for two years, moved the next debt ceiling cabaret off to beyond the next election, and saved millions of Americans from serious economic pain.
As I’ve written before, if Republicans were really serious about restraining federal spending, they wouldn’t have voted for the tax cuts and budget increases that that contribute to the deficit.
Instead, they said the only way to control spending is to refuse to pay the bills they ran up, by refusing to increase the debt ceiling. They lied, and every thinking American knows they lied. So tell me, why did we go through this again?
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A small vigil set up across the street from a Tops grocery store on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, where a heavily armed 18-year-old White man entered the store in a predominantly Black neighborhood and shot 13 people, killing ten, Saturday, May 14, 2022. (photo: Matt Burkhartt/WP)
White supremacy and Trumpism are not in retreat — but with our somber spring holiday comes hope and inspiration
Dates and rituals and remembrances are even more important for the heirs to the Black Freedom Struggle and other impaired citizens; they help us to locate ourselves in the continuities of history and to draw continued strength and wisdom from it. Our history and its truths and lessons take on even more importance when the likes of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and the other Republican fascists are literally trying to erase them.
I reread Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" each year on that day.
Likewise, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday I read several of his speeches and essays. I always finish with "I've Been to the Mountaintop" for its lessons and example about how best to meet one's destiny.
On this Memorial Day, I will continue with my tradition of reading about how newly freed Black people established that holiday in 1865 by burying war dead of the Union Army. The Washington Post explains:
Memorial Day developed from many springtime rituals, known interchangeably as either Decoration Day or Memorial Day, created to commemorate the Civil War dead. Although many towns across the United States from Arlington, Va., to Waterloo, N.Y., claim to have held the "original" Memorial Day, the holiday probably had dozens or hundreds of origins and diffused across the country.
One possible "first" observance of the holiday was the ceremony organized by the recently freed Black community of Charleston, S.C., in 1865. As historian David Blight documents, Black Charlestonians organized a burial of Union prisoners of war who had died in a Confederate war prison. They built an enclosure for the burial ground, established rows of graves and set an archway over the entrance gate inscribed "Martyrs of the Race Course." Ten thousand people attended, mostly formerly enslaved people. They sang hymns and the national anthem, read Bible verses and decorated graves with flowers, followed by speeches, picnics and Union troop marches that included Black units. As Blight wrote, Black Americans who celebrated Memorial Day "converted Confederate ruin into their own festival of freedom." Over time, some of that celebration of emancipation may have been subsumed by Juneteenth, the anniversary of slavery's end in the United States.
A Time Magazine article adds further details:
About 10,000 people, mostly black residents, participated in the May 1 tribute, according to coverage back then in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune. Starting at 9 a.m., about 3,000 black schoolchildren paraded around the race track holding roses and singing the Union song "John Brown's Body," and were followed by adults representing aid societies for freed black men and women. Black pastors delivered sermons and led attendees in prayer and in the singing of spirituals, and there were picnics. James Redpath, the white director of freedman's education in the region, organized about 30 speeches by Union officers, missionaries and black ministers. Participants sang patriotic songs like "America" and "We'll Rally around the Flag" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." In the afternoon, three white and black Union regiments marched around the graves and staged a drill.
The New York Tribune described the tribute as "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before." The gravesites looked like a "one mass of flowers" and "the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them" and "tears of joy" were shed.
What Black Americans did on Memorial Day 1865 in Charleston, reflects a much larger history of our gifts and sacrifice and generosity toward a society and country that for much of its history, viewed us as subhuman property. Instead of responding with hatred and violence, Black Americans instead "built a nation under our feet," not just for ourselves but for the benefit of all. Black people in America have been singled out for white violence and other assaults precisely because we are both symbols of America's democratic potential and also its most stalwart defenders.
Memorial Day 2023 takes on even more power and poignancy (and resonates so very loudly and uncomfortably) because it marks a year of resurgent and escalating white supremacist violence and anti-Black hatred in a society where the Trumpist, fascist fever dream continues to endure no matter how many commentators (most of them overly optimistic white people) declare it all but vanquished.
Last May, a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo. During the year since Buffalo, Republican fascists and their forces have continued to escalate their attacks against the civil and human rights of Black and brown people.
So-called conservatives are imposing Orwellian thought-crime laws across red states and even in other parts of the country. These laws are targeting books written by Black, brown, LGBTQ, Muslim and other marginalized writers that are deemed to be "unpatriotic," "divisive," "pornographic" or "woke." The real problem, of course, is that books that confront the complex and often painful realities of America's past and present offend the sensibilities of some white people.
As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, when the Confederate battle flag was triumphantly carried through the halls of the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump's terrorists, the Republican fascists and larger white right are leading a revolutionary project to end multiracial democracy, and nothing about that project has slowed down. If anything, it has been accelerated with the Republican Party's control of the House of Representatives, the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous state and local governments, as well as with Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump, DeSantis and the other leading Republican fascists may be conducting a power struggle among themselves, but they have also become even bolder in their embrace of white supremacy and racial authoritarianism. This campaign of right-wing radicalization has proven highly effective: For example, public opinion polls show that a majority of Republican and Trump voters actually believe in the false "great replacement" conspiracy theory and its absurd claims that white people are the real victims of racism and discrimination in America, rather than Black and brown people.
Undeterred by the $787 million settlement in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, and by what it revealed about the network's inner workings as a propaganda operation, Fox News and the larger right-wing echo chamber continues to circulate and amplify white supremacist messaging. America's police continue to kill unarmed and innocent Black and brown people. The massive protests of 2020, in response to the police murder of George Floyd, have not resulted in substantive police reform. American society is so sick with racism and white supremacy that one of the worst recent high-profile incidents of political thuggery against a Black person was committed by a group of Black police officers in Memphis.
The FBI, DHS and other law enforcement and national security agencies continue to warn that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists represent the greatest threat to America's domestic safety and security.
Several weeks ago, President Biden issued this warning during a commencement speech at Howard University, the nation's most prestigious historically Black university:
White supremacy … is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland. … And I'm not just saying this because I'm at a Black HBCU. I say this wherever I go. … Fearless progress toward justice often means ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces…. That's because hate never goes away. … It only hides under the rocks. And when it's given oxygen it comes out from under that rock. And that's why we know this truth as well: Silence is complicity. We cannot remain silent.
Before this weekend, a cadre of Republican fascists sought to hold Biden and the American people hostage by threatening to default on the country's debt payments. We still do not know the details of the alleged compromise Biden has made with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but whatever budget cuts have been extracted are nearly certain to disproportionately affect Black and brown people and other vulnerable Americans. Such an outcome is not coincidental. It is an act of structural violence as well as systemic racism.
The cycle of white supremacist terrorism and violence continues: Approximately a year after the white supremacist attack in Buffalo, an apparent neo-Nazi killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas.
On Memorial Day, I continue to feel battered and weathered by America's enduring and undefeated white supremacist culture. I know that I am not alone in these feelings of frustration, exhaustion and growing futility. Where are we to find hope to keep on fighting?
A few weeks ago, we lost a titanic hope warrior in Harry Belafonte, a legendary singer, actor, activist and truth-teller. I few days after his death, I asked the writer Jeff Sharlet, during an interview for Salon about his new book "The Undertow," what he had learned from his conversations with Belafonte. "Today is a poignant day to explore that," Sharlet said, noting that his book begins with Belafonte:
I opened the book with him, even knowing that it would cost me readers and sales. Harry Belafonte? To start a book on the Trumpocene? Huh? I needed to start the book with some beauty and some hope. We needed to explore the beauty of the man and the beauty of his anger — and that endures.
The hope that Belafonte gives is not some type of cheap grace. We are not going to beat Trumpism at some appointed time that is close in the future. That is not how the real world works; the struggle is going to be long.
Harry Belafonte, 96 years old, on his death day, knew that he got defeated. Harry Belafonte knew and understood that, more than most people, he was a man who was so essential to the civil rights movement. He hated the Hollywoodization of the movement. He would tell me, "We dreamed of some things, we fought, and they killed a lot of us." When I was talking to Mr. Belafonte, he would address Martin Luther King, in the present tense, like a ghost that was with him.
The struggle is long. Too many people want a happy ending.
Nope.
I also recently asked biographer Jonathan Eig what he had learned about hope and progress, resistance and struggle, from writing his epic new biography of Dr. King. In the full historical analysis, did King win or lose his long battle? Eig cautioned that the answer is not yet clear:
It sure looks like he got [beat]. But we don't know because history changes. History is a living thing. And right now, it feels like everything he warned us about, he was right. We are more divided than ever. Income inequality, racism, antisemitism, they're all terrible right now. But we don't know what King's final impact is, because it's ongoing. It's up to us to continue the story.
Activists and historians speak of the "long" Black Freedom Struggle for a reason. On this Memorial Day we are reminded by its origins among Black Americans at the end of the Civil War that democracy must be an active verb, not a passive noun. It is something we do and something we must fight for. America's multiracial democracy is now, as it has always been, a work in progress. It is contingent and vulnerable — a thing dreamed of, but not yet achieved.
The 15th annual Miami Beach Pride Parade took place on Sunday, April 16, 2023, in Miami Beach, Florida. (photo: Sean Drakes/Vox)
Regressive laws, waning corporate allyship, and threats of violence stoke fear and confusion.
Though LGBTQ people and by extension Pride have won important rights and gained fairly widespread acceptance in US political and social life in recent decades, right-wing politicians, religious leaders, and talking heads are creating a renewed environment of animosity and uneasiness for queer people throughout the country.
In Los Angeles, an ostensibly liberal city with a large LGBTQ community, the Los Angeles Dodgers disinvited — and then re-invited — the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to a June 16 event honoring the group for its activism after complaints from conservatives. The SPI is an activist group and nonprofit that accepts members of all identities and backgrounds to raise money for LGBTQ causes. In Florida, the cities of Port St. Lucie and St. Cloud canceled Pride events due to uneasiness and fear in the wake of anti-LGBTQ bills signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In Fayetteville, Arkansas’ queer mecca, Northwest Arkansas Equality canceled events at the Walton Arts Center due to its ban on drag performances in front of minors.
The status of multiple Tennessee pride events was uncertain after that state passed a vaguely-worded bill— widely understood to be targeting drag performances — limiting “adult cabaret” shows in March. Events in both Knoxville and Murfreesboro seemed to be on track despite earlier concerns. Organizers of both events did not respond to Vox’s request for comment by press time. And previous reports of Tampa’s Pride festivities being canceled may actually have more to do with the management and finances of the group running those events than a climate of fear in Florida, according to reporting from Axios.
Regardless, the number of anti-LGBTQ laws passed over the last year combined with growing anti-LGBTQ antagonism and very real threats of violence mark an alarming shift away from equality and inclusion.
The legislation of hate and threats to safety from extremist groups
In the past year, several states have passed bills targeting medical care for trans youth, teaching LGBTQ history or discussing queer sexuality in public schools, and restricting drag performances, causing confusion and fear for queer people throughout the country.
Florida and Arkansas have both passed laws targeting LGBTQ people, including prohibitions on discussing gender and sexuality for certain age groups in public schools. Florida’s legislation made headlines as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and was recently expanded to prohibit discussion of LGBTQ sexuality in all grades, not just through third grade. Florida, like Tennesee, has passed a bill limiting drag performances, though restaurant chain Hamburger Mary’s is suing the state to block the law, saying it infringes on the First Amendment.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders also jumped on the anti-drag bandwagon shortly after she started her tenure in January, endorsing legislation to classify drag as “adult-oriented performance.” “I think we have to do everything — I’ve been very clear and talked about this pretty extensively — to protect children,” Sanders said in a January interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “I think that’s what this bill does.”
Furor over drag performances — and the fear that such expression will somehow harm children — seems to have originated with drag story hours held at libraries across the country since 2015. Even in New York City, where the nonprofit Drag Story Hour is located and which has long been a nexus of queer activism, performance, and acceptance, protesters recently disrupted a story hour event hosted by New York Attorney General Letitia James, just blocks away from the Stonewall Inn.
The theme of “protecting children” runs through anti-LGBTQ legislation and rhetoric, as Vox’s Nicole Narea and Fabiola Cineas reported in April.
It’s become a means of proving conservative bona fides to GOP primary voters, including right-wing evangelicals, and it’s coming from the top down: Former President Trump announced earlier this year that, if reelected, he would “stop” gender-affirming care for minors, which he said was “child abuse” and “child sexual mutilation.” He also said he would bar federal agencies from working to “promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
As Narea and Cineas point out, several states have already approved anti-trans legislation. DeSantis earlier this month signed a bill prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, and Sanders signed a bill in March making it easier to file a malpractice suit against medical providers giving gender-affirming care to trans kids. That’s in addition to a law already on the books banning hormone treatment, gender-affirming surgery, or hormone blockers for trans youth, which is currently being held up in court. Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama are among the states seeking to limit care for trans youth or restrict trans people’s ability to participate meaningfully in society, whether that’s through so-called bathroom bills, bans on trans athletes, or making it difficult for people to change their sex on official documents.
There’s also the very real possibility of violence against queer people this Pride; as Insider reporter earlier this month, the extremist group the Proud Boys has pledged to hold its largest-ever anti-LGBTQ “Proud” events this year. The “Western chauvinist” group has interrupted and protested at drag story hours in the past, and although their specific plans reported by Insider haven’t thus far included plans for violence, the group is known for inciting chaos and fighting at its events.
“I don’t see how we don’t end up having more violence next month,” Heidi Bierich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Insider. “It’s frankly getting a little out of control.”
Anti-LGBTQ sentiment evokes Pride’s roots in activism
The present milieu has set back progress for queer people all over the country, not just in states that have passed anti-LGBTQ legislation. Violence against queer people — whether that’s via legislation, social exclusion, or outright brutality — has never stopped in the US. As LGBTQ people won rights and recognition through collective action and protest, such violence became less socially acceptable.
But as the right has leveraged anti-LGBTQ backlash as an electoral strategy, the risk that queer people will be even more of a target for violence than they already are increases.
The concept of stochastic terror — that violent rhetoric and communication by influential people allow their followers to see violence as a viable political tactic, even without explicit instruction, thereby increasing the chances that at least some people will commit targeted violence — echoes Bierich’s concerns leading up to Pride month.
The risk has already borne out in recent months; in November, a man entered Colorado Springs’ Club Q and opened fire, killing five people and wounding 17 at a drag queen’s birthday party. He has since been charged with hate crimes.
On a consumer level, institutions like Target, Anheuser-Busch, and the Dodgers have responded to criticism and threats from conservatives by walking back pro-LGBTQ products and statements, rather than standing in solidarity with a marginalized community. Target said its employees faced harassment over Pride merchandise, specifically a “tuck-friendly” swimsuit intended for trans adults, thus its decision to pull some products from its shelves.
The anti-LGBTQ atmosphere brings into focus the real history of Pride — as a celebration, but also as a protest. Though politicians, celebrities, and corporations have adopted the rhetoric of allyship in recent years, acceptance and visibility blunted the necessity of activism. AIDS is no longer a death sentence with proper treatment, and gay marriage is the law of the land. RuPaul’s Drag Race has found international success, and huge corporations sponsor floats at Pride parades in major cities; socially and politically, queer people have largely become part of the fabric of American life.
But despite massive progress in the decades since Pride officially started in 1970, life for many queer people in the US is still dangerous and difficult. The high rates of homicide, violence, and harassment against trans people, and particularly trans people of color is just one critical issue facing the LGBTQ community; with the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ legislation and the right’s ability to stoke anti-LGBTQ sentiment for political gain, the threat to the queer community increases.
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A woman rests next to anti-abortion posters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Intercept)
Reporters are parroting — and spreading — sentimental falsehoods.
When I read this phrase in the New Yorker, referring to Texas’s first abortion ban, I shot off a letter to the editor. “This is misleading,” I wrote. “There is no heartbeat at six weeks because the fetus does not yet have a heart. As San Francisco OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Kerns told NPR: ‘What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart.’” I noted that “a six-week fetus is about the size and shape of a baked bean.”
If the vaunted New Yorker copy desk could let this bit of anti-abortion bunk stand without comment, what was going on? I combed the media. Not just the National Review—which calls corrections like Dr. Kerns’s “mendacity”— or the Catholic press but also mainstream local and national news outlets including CNN, The Associated Press, Reuters, U.S. News … World Report, and PBS were parroting the same descriptor of the inaccurately — and of course strategically — named “fetal heartbeat” laws being debated or enacted in states from Idaho to Iowa, Georgia to New Hampshire.
The chorus resounded from websites, television, and radio from coast to coast: South Carolina was debating a law that “bans most abortions after early cardiac activity can be detected in a fetus or embryo, which can commonly be detected as early as six weeks into pregnancy”; in Georgia, a “law banning abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically around six weeks”; Nebraska’s legislature made an “unconventional move … after conservatives failed to advance a bill that would have banned abortion once cardiac activity can be detected — generally around six weeks of pregnancy.”
A number of the reports got it half right, adding that when the so-called heartbeat is first detected, many women do not even know they are pregnant.
Maybe it’s correction fatigue, brought on by Donald Trump’s 35,500-plus lies and the subsequent atrophy of truth in politics and media. In any case, there are signs of increasing credulity — or laziness. In May 2021, the AP published an in-depth piece headlined “‘Fetal heartbeat’ in abortion laws taps emotion, not science,” by staff reporters Julie Carr Smyth and Kimberlee Kruesi. A year later — the week the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson came down, upholding Mississippi’s 15-week ban and nullifying the constitutional right to abortion — Smyth was tasked with penning a Q…A explainer of current heartbeat laws.
Like the previous article, this one put “fetal heartbeat” between quotes every time. Unlike the first, however, the explainer toggled between truth and fiction. In the second paragraph, Smyth hit the “fetal heartbeat” shortcut key: “Such laws, often referred to as ‘fetal heartbeat bills,’ ban abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which can happen around six weeks into pregnancy.” This deception by omission — there is no cardiac activity without a heart — is repeated at paragraph 8. At paragraph 12 comes the caveat that the widely used legislative language of unborn humans and beating hearts “does not easily translate to medical science” — there’s a link to the previous year’s piece — “because at the point where advanced technology can detect that first visual flutter … the embryo isn’t yet a fetus, and it doesn’t have a heart.” Paragraphs 16 and 22 refer again to “cardiac activity.”
But the other side also fiddles with the facts, notes Smyth. Abortion rights proponents often call these laws six-week abortion bans. “That, too, is misleading,” she writes, because the texts “make no mention of a particular gestational age after which abortion is illegal.” Ecce balance.
Always better at propaganda than its opponents and, also unlike its opponents, instinctively sentimental, the anti-abortion movement was quick to appropriate the heart as both the metaphor of love and compassion and the critical sign of life itself.
Even before Roe, the opponents of abortion had conflated science and religious morality through language, transforming a blob of disorganized embryonic cells into an “unborn child.” “To take the life of an unborn child, regardless of the number of days it has been forming, is murder,” read a 1967 pamphlet called “Abortion: Yes or No?” But it was in 1983, a decade after Roe, with virtually no anti-abortion victories to show — 88 of 96 abortion bills introduced in state legislatures and Congress were defeated, and public opinion stuck heavily in support of abortion rights — that a fortunate stroke of political instinct matured into strategy.
That year, a banner headline in the National Right to Life News proclaimed: “Science: The Pro-Life Movement’s Emerging Ally.” The next year came “The Silent Scream,” a 28-minute film that the Right to Life Committee called the “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the pro-life movement,” and rightfully so: It is probably the most influential piece of propaganda in the history of the abortion debates. Narrated by the late abortion doctor turned anti-abortion spokesperson Bernard Nathanson, the film presents the sonographic record of a 12-week vacuum aspiration abortion as visible testimony to the alleged pain and distress of the “little person” at the moment of its destruction.
New technologies “have convinced us that beyond question, the unborn child is simply … another member of the human community,” intones Nathanson, “indistinguishable in every way from any of us.” Deftly moving between technical explanations of sonography and embryology, and emotionally charged descriptions of abortion and the alleged suffering of the preborn “child,” “The Silent Scream” epitomizes the movement’s dominant rhetorical strategy going forward: serving up scientific bullshit generously sweetened with sap.
In 1992, the strategy was refined: The heart became the synecdoche for the body and soul of the unborn. Right to Life launched a media campaign with the tagline “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.” The accompanying graphic, reproduced on flyers and political buttons, was an EKG zigzag flatlining across a red valentine-shaped heart.
Then in 2011, veteran antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ+ activist Janet Folger Porter transformed rhetoric into legislation. The former legislative director of Ohio Right to Life and founder of Faith2Action (“formed to WIN the cultural war for life, liberty, and the family”) conceived and lobbied indefatigably for the first state “fetal heartbeat” law, which Ohio enacted in 2012. Porter fueled the campaign with heart-shaped balloons, teddy bears, and red roses. Its slogan fused science and sentiment: “If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.”
The idea spread quickly. National Right to Life released a one-minute video. Its images are intrauterine closeups; its opening soundtrack is a rumble resembling the background noise of a Weather Channel hurricane report, with a woman’s voice above it: “You are listening to the sound of the heartbeat of a living unborn baby.” Within a decade, more than a dozen states had adopted the language of Folger’s bill almost identically.
There are exceptions to the press’s rote adoption of right-to-life language, New York Times’ coverage among them. For its part, the reproductive justice movement is finally upping its rhetorical game, renaming the heartbeat legislation “forced pregnancy” or “forced motherhood” laws. But the forced motherhood movement is constantly, often quietly, escalating the discursive battle. The “unborn baby” has now been promoted in legislative texts to the “unborn human individual.” If babies in utero are at least dependent on their mothers for protection and sustenance, a “human individual” can be construed as a person separate from and equally deserving of rights as its mother.
Anti-abortion propaganda is making its way into the legal record. It was a triumph for the antis when Justice Samuel Alito, in the Dobbs opinion, repeated soundly disproven claims as “legitimate interests” justifying the revocation of the constitutional right: that abortion is unhealthy and unsafe (presumably more so than pregnancy, which it isn’t); that it is a “particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedure” (which it isn’t); and, the fantasy promulgated by “The Silent Scream,” that abortion causes fetuses pain.
In ruling for the plaintiffs and against the Food and Drug Administration in its approval of mifepristone, Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk further enshrined antiabortion rhetoric in legal precedent by calling a pharmaceutically induced pregnancy termination a “chemical” abortion. The antis’ derogative sounds more painful and harmful, and creepier, than the mainstream usage, “medication” abortion.
Will the media fall in line? On the website of Wyoming Public Radio in March, a news item began this way: “Wyoming recently became the first state to explicitly ban the use of pills for abortion. The new law comes as chemical abortion is in the national spotlight due to a legal battle over a specific medication in Texas.” Throughout the text, “chemical abortion” is used interchangeably with “medication abortion,” without qualification or quotation marks.
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Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago. (photo: Southeast Chicago Historical Society)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As Memorial Day weekend begins here in the United States, we end today’s show looking back at the largely forgotten 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when police in Chicago shot at and gassed a peaceful gathering of striking steelworkers and their supporters, killing 10 people, most of them shot in the back. It was a time like today, when unions were growing stronger. The workers were on strike against Republic Steel. The police attacked them with weapons supplied by the company.
The tragic story is told in a new PBS documentary, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried. It based on book with oral histories of eyewitnesses of the attack. The film begins with the great radio broadcaster Studs Terkel.
STUDS TERKEL: This is 1937, and the labor battles are going on. The CIO is being organized. And the steelworkers and the packing, they’re all being organized. And the Big Steel, the big steel companies, finally agreed. They recognized the union. But there’s one company in Chicago, Republic Steel, Tom Girdler: “I will not recognize the union.”
And so there was a strike. Memorial Day 1937. And there was a picnic. Strikers and their wives and kids are on the grounds of Republic Steel in South Chicago. Someone threw a stone, and cops were there at the behest of Girdler. And they shot down 10 people, killed them, in the back.
JOSH CHARLES: In the days that followed, newspapers from coast to coast portrayed the incident as a riot provoked by a dangerous mob, which left police no choice but to open fire, with 10 dead within days. However, the key piece of evidence, the only film of the tragedy, remained buried. Paramount News created, then suppressed, a newsreel airing the footage. When the hidden footage was finally screened, the shocking images drew national attention, with vital lessons for today.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the opening to the new documentary, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried. This is another clip, when an eyewitness describes how the police attack unfolded. We hear from reporter Harold Rossman and Mollie West, who was a teenager when she attended the Memorial Day gathering in support of the striking workers.
MOLLIE WEST: We just walked. And people were talking and holding hands, and the children were being carried by their fathers on their shoulders. And everybody was laughing, and it was a joyous thing. And as we came closer to the mill, the walking slowed a bit. It seemed like the entire police force of the city of Chicago was out there. But that didn’t deter. We were still going to go over to the mill and just conduct a peaceful mass picket line.
HAROLD ROSSMAN: I could see a few objects through the air. I could see some things being thrown. Not much. It wasn’t a lot of stuff, maybe a couple of rocks. There was a dry, crackling kind of a noise. It took me a moment to figure out what it was, and I realized it was gunfire. And by that time, the people were falling. And they were turning and trying to run, and the gunfire continued. It was clear that a whole number of these people had been shot in the back. They were trying to flee, and they were still being fired at.
MOLLIE WEST: And then a whole number of people were piled up on top of me, and I could barely breathe. Also, there was tear gas. People finally began to get off, get on their feet. And when I finally stood up, and I — total bewilderment. I looked around, and I saw a battlefield.
AMY GOODMAN: The new PBS documentary, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, which just aired on PBS, is now online. It’s the latest project from longtime author and journalist Greg Mitchell, who’s written 12 books and made many films about U.S. politics and history.
Greg, welcome back to Democracy Now! This is a devastating documentary about a story very few people today know, what happened 86 years ago in Chicago. Take it from where we have just heard these eyewitness descriptions. How did this happen?
GREG MITCHELL: OK. Well, I’m happy to be here.
Yes, the police, in fact, shot 40 people, the vast majority in the back or in the side. Ten would die, within days. And then, they — as the film shows, they waded through the crowd, beating people over the head, sometimes with ax handles provided by Republic Steel. And so, there were another 50 people who were injured enough to be hospitalized. And then, again, as the film shows, the injured, instead of getting any medical treatment, were actually arrested and shoved into paddy wagons and taken to jail or taken to distant hospitals.
And this is all on the Paramount News footage, which was suppressed. So, we know the step-by-step things that happened. And you can watch —
AMY GOODMAN: Greg, your film is so good —
GREG MITCHELL: — almost all the Paramount footage.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg, your film is so good, I want to go back to another clip from Memorial Day Massacre.
JOSH CHARLES: A disturbing new account of the death of one man emerged. A photo of Earl Handley being carried by police, seemingly for medical attention, had appeared in newspapers earlier. Now the full story came out.
Handley, a 37-year-old carpenter, had been shot in the thigh, so a worker tied a tourniquet on his leg to stop the bleeding. The Paramount footage showed him being hauled to a worker’s car for a quick trip to the hospital. After the camera stopped rolling, however, police yanked him out of the car and carried him to their paddy wagon, as his tourniquet slipped off, and he bled to death.
A doctor who treated some of the wounded presented autopsy reports proving that nearly all of the dead had been shot in the back or in the side.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from Memorial Day Massacre about how progressive Senator Robert La Follette subpoenaed the suppressed footage of the attack. This was the first time film was shown as evidence in a Senate hearing.
JOSH CHARLES: Senator La Follette announced that the footage would be screened at both regular speed and slow motion. Pointedly, he asked the top Chicago police officials to take a seat to view the film. This was reportedly the first time film footage had ever been introduced as evidence in Congress.
The reaction in the hearing room: gasps, some tears, but stony silence from the top police officials. The slow motion revealed a murderous new detail. Much of the press coverage the next day now flipped to blaming the police, although many news outlets now claimed that the camera could indeed lie.
NEWSREEL: What happened at South Chicago, Memorial Day, 1937.
JOSH CHARLES: Also the following day, Paramount, after burying the first two newsreels, at last released a film based on its footage.
NEWSREEL: The following pictures, made before and during the trouble, are shown exactly as they came from the camera, without editing — as presented before the United States Senate committee in Washington.
JOSH CHARLES: The newsreel claimed that the footage was not edited, but this was false. Actually, it omitted this crucial footage: the deadly first 15 seconds. So Paramount was still withholding evidence from the public.
AMY GOODMAN: Another excerpt of Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, the director, Greg Mitchell, with us. I mean, this story of what the public understood happened, with 10 people killed, talk about the role of the media, and the police working with it, whether the camera was shut off, as we saw in that first clip, or Paramount suppressing this, Greg.
GREG MITCHELL: Yes. The importance of it was, to me, the mass media, right up to The New York Times, was supporting the police story, that they had no choice but to open fire on this mob. And Paramount had the footage, had the evidence. They created a newsreel, and then they decided not to release it. They created a second newsreel and didn’t release that. And it took the being subpoenaed by the La Follette hearing, and the screening on Capitol Hill then forced Paramount to release a third newsreel. And even then, city officials in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Massachusetts banned its showing. So, even in its final form, it was not released in full.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Greg, in this last minute, why is Paramount so significant? People might not understand that today. And what is the most important lesson to take of what took place?
GREG MITCHELL: Well, you know, as you know, the movies were incredibly popular then. This was before television, so most people got their — certainly their visual news from these newsreels, which were shown in every movie theater at every movie showing.
I think the lesson, among other things, is the importance of visual evidence when there’s police shootings and police brutality, as we see today. That’s why there’s such a focus on releasing bodycams and dashboard cams.
Of course, another lesson is, with the great labor activity today, that they stand on the shoulders of the people from the past who sacrificed so much. And that’s why I’m happy people can watch this film right now on PBS.org, everywhere in the country. And, of course, the book has the oral histories of all eyewitnesses and many of the activists who were wounded.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Mitchell, director of Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried.
And that does it for today’s show. Thanks to Tia Potenza Smallwood and Susan Hughes here in Cambridge. Also thanks to Denis Moynihan and Hany Massoud. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
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A man sells bananas at a market during a cease-fire in Khartoum, Sudan, Saturday, May 27, 2023. Two U.N. agencies are warning of rising food emergencies including starvation in Sudan due to the outbreak of war and in Haiti, Burkina Faso and Mali due to restricted movements of people and goods. The four countries join Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen at the highest alert levels. (photo: Marwan Ali/AP)
The four countries join Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen at the highest alert levels, with communities that are already facing or projected to face starvation or otherwise risk a slide “towards catastrophic conditions.”
The report by the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization calls for urgent attention to save both lives and jobs. Beyond the nine countries rating the highest level of concern, the agencies said 22 countries are identified as “hotspots” risking acute food insecurity.
“Business-as-usual pathways are no longer an option in today’s risk landscape if we want to achieve global food security for all, ensuring that no one is left behind.” said Qu Dongyu, FAO Director-General.
He called for immediate action in the agricultural sector “to pull people back from the brink of hunger, help them rebuild their lives and provide long-term solution to address the root causes of food insecurities.”
The report cited a possible spillover of the conflict in Sudan, deepening economic crises in poor nations and rising fears that the El Nino climatic phenomenon forecast for mid-2023 could provoke climate extremes in vulnerable countries.
The report warns that 1 million people are expected to flee Sudan, while an additional 2.5 million inside Sudan face acute hunger in the coming months as supply routes through Port Sudan are disrupted by safety issues.
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain warned of “catastrophic”consequences unless there is clear action to “help people adapt to a changing climate and ultimately prevent famine.”
“Not only are more people in more places around the world going hungry, but the severity of the hunger they face is worse than ever,” McCain said.
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Old mine. (photo: iStock)
As a 20-year ban on mining in the Grand Canyon passes its midpoint, Indigenous nations look to continue protections indefinitely.
The proposed Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument would convert 1.1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park into a National Monument, providing significant protections to tribal water sources, delicate ecosystems, and cultural sites, while curtailing the impacts of uranium mining — a proposal tribes in the area have been fighting for since 1985. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam” in the Havasupai language, I’tah Kukveni translates to “our footprints” in Hopi.
The region has high concentrations of uranium and mining has been a feature of the landscape since the 1950s. When mining first began in the area, uranium was used primarily for nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.
In 2012, then-Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, placed a 20-year ban on uranium mining on more than a million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon in order to protect surface water from radioactive dust and mining waste. Without increased federal protections, tribal leaders say mining claims can be made at the end of the 20-year-ban, re-opening the Grand Canyon to uranium exploration.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, mining in the area disturbs underground vertical rock formations called “breccia pipes” — formations that often hold hydrothermal fluid or extremely hot water heated by the earth’s mantle and filled with various gasses, minerals and salts, including uranium. When disturbed, those breccia pipes can release their contents into aquifers and eventually, larger water systems.
In 2016, the Pinyon Plain Mine pierced an aquifer flooding mineshafts, and draining groundwater supplies. Between 2016 and 2021, the Grand Canyon Trust estimated that more than 48 million gallons of water had flooded Pinyon’s mineshafts, and the National Parks Conservation Association has consistently reported uranium levels in that water exceeding federal toxicity limits by more than 300%.
When ingested, uranium can cause bone and liver cancer, damage kidneys, and affect body processes like autoimmune and reproductive functions.
In 2016, tribal leaders brought the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni proposal to the Obama administration, but were rejected. Now, the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition, made up of 12 tribes with ties to the area, hope Secretary Haaland will encourage the Biden administration to protect the region.
“We can’t wait until the accident happens,” said Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai elder and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “We are trying to prevent the catastrophe before it happens.”
The Havasupai reservation is an eight mile hike below the rim of the Grand Canyon and one of the most isolated communities in the United States.
But Tillousi says that while stopping uranium mining will be a major goal of the proposal, ongoing contamination issues must be addressed. The Pinyon Plain Mine continues to contaminate the Havasupai’s sole water supply, the Havasu Creek. Pinyon has been operating since 1986, and while the 2012 uranium mining ban stopped the construction of new mines, Pinyon is exempt due to its pre-approval. As of 2020, 30 million gallons of groundwater tainted with high levels of uranium and arsenic have been pumped out of the mines flooded shaft and dumped in an uncovered pond.
“We’re a small tribe, our tribe is made up of 765 people,” said Tillousi. “We need to protect our village and homes.”
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