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FOCUS: 'Everything Changed': The War Arrives on Russians' Doorstep
04 June 23
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With cross-border strikes, residents of the Russian region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horrors of war being waged at their doorstep.
He had heard the thud of explosions in distant villages in the past, he said, and in October shelling damaged a nearby shopping mall. But nothing like this.
“Everything changed,” he said.
Fifteen months after Russian missiles first roared toward Kyiv, residents of the Russian border region of Belgorod are starting to understand the horror of having war on their doorstep.
Shebekino, a town of 40,000 six miles from the border, has effectively become a new part of the front line as Ukraine has intensified attacks inside Russia, including on residential areas near its own borders. The spate of assaults, most recently by militia groups aligned against Moscow, has sparked the largest military evacuation effort in Russia in decades.
“The town became a ghost in 24 hours,” said Ruslan, 27, who evacuated on Thursday after a sustained campaign of shelling.
In the last several days, The New York Times interviewed more than half a dozen residents of the border region to get a sense of the deepening anxiety among Russian civilians. Like Ruslan, most insisted on being identified by only their first names, citing a fear of retribution for speaking about the war.
“Shebekino was a wonderful, flowery town on the border with Ukraine filled with happy, neighborly people,” said Darya, 37, a local public sector employee. “Now only pain, death and misery live in our town. There is no power, no public transport, no open businesses, no residents. Just an empty, shattered town in smoke.”
The hardship is familiar to Ukrainians, who have seen cities like Bakhmut obliterated and others ravaged by civilian casualties. So are the sleepless nights; Russian missiles targeted Kyiv at least 17 times in May. But many Russians had not expected something similar to happen on their home turf.
Explosions are audible, too, in the city of Belgorod, the regional capital 20 miles to the north of Shebekino, and residents there have increasingly begun seeking access to basements that can be used as bomb shelters. People who had previously tried to go about their daily business suddenly discovered they could not.
“We are at a turning point right now,” said Oleg, a businessman in the city. “When this all started,” he said, referring to the war, “the people who opposed it here were a minority. Now after four days of being shelled, people are changing their minds.”
Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 2,500 residents had been evacuated and taken to temporary shelters in sports arenas farther from the border. Thousands more left on their own accord, residents said in interviews.
Mr. Gladkov said nine residents had died from shelling over the past three days. It is unclear how many Russians in the border region have been killed overall, but this was almost surely the deadliest week for the Belgorod region since the start of the war.
Flare-ups and cross-border shelling between Ukrainian and Russian forces have occurred regularly throughout the war. The recent attacks on Belgorod were undertaken by two paramilitary groups made up of Russians fighting for Ukraine’s cause; they have claimed that they target only security infrastructure, and portrayed their fight as one for liberation from President Vladimir V. Putin’s rule.
But their claims have clashed with accounts of widespread residential destruction described by witnesses and seen in videos posted on social media and verified by The Times. One of the two groups, the Russian Volunteer Corps, has also acknowledged shelling Shebekino’s urban area with “bouquets of Grads,” a Soviet-designed multiple rocket launcher that covers a large area with explosives.
As footage of that shelling filled Belgorod’s public chat rooms, citizens volunteered to drive affected families to safety, donated money and opened homes to refugees. In doing so, they underlined what they said was the inadequacy of the local government’s response, and the growing realization that they had only themselves to rely on.
It was a sign of spontaneous social organization that Mr. Putin has systematically undermined in recent years as he tightened control. The arrival of the war on Russian soil is rekindling a grass-roots civic spirit borne of necessity, with as yet unpredictable consequences for the country’s politics.
To some in the region, the assaults on Shebekino, the most sustained attack on a Russian town since the start of the war, made clear Moscow’s lack of concern for their fate. In social media posts, they used the hashtag #ShebekinoIsRussia, a cry for attention from the wider public across the country, which has largely carried on with daily life. In interviews, some in Shebekino expressed anger at how state television anchors struggled to pronounce the town’s name, even as they lauded the evacuation efforts.
“It seems that in Moscow they don’t understand what we have going on here,” said Ruslan, the English teacher. Citing explosions over the Kremlin last month, he said: “When drones flew to Moscow, there were immediately big stories, it was all over the news. And here people have been under fire for months, and nothing.”
Despite an uptick of attacks on Russian soil, only one in four Russians is following the war closely and most likely going beyond state media to seek information about it, according to a May poll conducted by the independent Moscow-based public opinion firm Levada Center. Almost half of respondents said they don’t follow the conflict at all, or only cursorily.
Levada’s director, Denis Volkov, said it was too early to say whether the escalation of border attacks would rally Russians around the flag.
“We have a very disjointed society,” he said. “No one has much interest beyond their own nose.”
But the violence is causing residents of Shebekino to re-evaluate their apathy or support for the war, and the disruption of the last week is breeding resentment against authorities who they believe have failed to protect them.
“People are disappointed that it has gotten to this stage, that this was permitted to happen,” said Elena, a Belgorod resident who volunteered to evacuate people from Shebekino.
Darya, the public sector employee, described a chaotic evacuation. As the sounds of explosions grew near, she said, her family gathered necessities and waited for the official transport promised by regional authorities. When it didn’t arrive, they called an evacuation help line set up by the governor and were told to wait, in vain.
They eventually left the town in their private car, leaving behind an older relative who could not be easily moved.
“We saw many Shebekino residents sitting on the side of the highway in their cars, because they had nowhere to go,” she said.
Evacuation did not always bring safety. Two women died near Shebekino after their car was hit by a shell on the side of the road on Thursday, according to Mr. Gladkov, the governor. His claim could not be independently verified.
There is also the realization among border residents that there is no end in sight to the war.
Russia has annexed parts of four Ukrainian regions that it has occupied, and is planning to hold elections there in September, despite the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at wrestling back territory from Moscow’s forces.
“I don’t understand the point of these annexations, I don’t even know where they are,” said Alina, 31, a social media manager in Belgorod.
“This is just some kind of farce.”
In the city of Belgorod, with a population of 340,000, the pain and confusion of the war is made more acute by historical ties to Ukraine. It is only 25 miles from the border, and only 50 miles from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
Before the war, people from Belgorod traveled to Kharkiv to shop, or even just for a night out. Many have relatives living across the border.
Ruslan, the English teacher, said that he was always opposed to the war, and that his position hasn’t changed with the destruction of his city. But his feelings toward Ukraine have.
“I thought I was able to empathize, but when it comes to your home, it’s a completely different feeling,” he said.
“I understand that it’s all because of Putin, but at the same time I have a slightly different attitude toward the Ukrainian armed forces,” he continued.
“Now I think, maybe they are no different from ours.”
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FOCUS: Daniel Ellsberg Is Dying. And He Has Some Final Things to Say.
04 June 23
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The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps.
“I’m very put off by the word. It always throws me for a loop,” Ellsberg tells me when I ask him recently what he believes his legacy will be as one of America’s most iconic whistleblowers. “I didn’t plan on a legacy. I don’t know what a legacy is.” Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer at age 92, says one reason he doesn’t think he’s really leaving any legacy is that the act he is famous for — leaking the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago — was highly unusual, if not unique. Despite the government-shaking magnitude of his revelation, he was one of the few whistleblowers who got away with exposing deception and wrongdoing in high places without turning the rest of his life into one long misery.
At the time, Ellsberg says, he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison for handing over copies of the 7,000-page top-secret history of the lies and self-deceit that drew America into the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from [President] Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home near Berkeley, Calif. on May 8. “There was no way to predict that.”
Nor did leaking the Pentagon Papers, by itself, do anything to shorten the war, which was his intention, Ellsberg admits. What did happen is that Nixon erupted in outrage over the leak and created the “Plumbers” unit to discredit Ellsberg. The Plumbers’ first break-in was to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but that led later to the Watergate burglary, Nixon’s resignation and the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg on grounds of “improper government conduct.” Thus, indirectly, Watergate may well have prevented further escalation and shortened the war because it “undermined Nixon’s authority,” as Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and the war ended in April of that year with total victory by North Vietnam.
So Ellsberg has some parting advice to future whistleblowers: “Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” This is especially true, he says, now the government is zealously prosecuting under the Espionage Act, which was first used in Ellsberg’s case. (Barack Obama later deployed it eight times, more than any other president, despite pledging to run “the most transparent administration in history.”)
Even if they escape prosecution, whistleblowers in high places face long odds against success in changing government policy — and yet at the same time Ellsberg says they are more necessary than ever. “I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”
Ellsberg, snowy-haired but energetic despite the cancer — renowned for his eloquence, he still speaks in perfect paragraphs — was calm, even jovial, during what his son, Robert Ellsberg, said would be his last interview. Based on his experience in the covert world, Ellsberg sees a direct line between the deceptions and lies that led to the Vietnam War — and 58,000 American deaths — and the deceptions and lies that justified the Iraq war. This high-level deceit, Ellsberg says, extends to America’s current drone war policy around the world, in which the government has allegedly covered up the number of civilian deaths it causes.
“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”
For many whistleblowers and their legal defenders, Ellsberg remains an inspiration, not just because of the Pentagon Papers but for his later actions revealing how nuclear strategy during the Cold War had been secretly based on war plans that would have left hundreds of millions of civilians dead, and how dangerous the nuclear threat remains today.
“For me and my generation, Daniel Ellsberg was the defining whistleblower,” says Scott Horton, a prominent human rights attorney who has defended whistleblowers going back to Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov in the 1970s. “The striking thing about him was that his position within the national security establishment was a prominent one. He realized there was something wrong with the whole way the Vietnam War was being justified, that this process was corrupting the way decisions were being made about national security affairs, and the system was so self-sealing that really the only way you could puncture that was presenting the public with the truth.”
At the same time, Horton believes that Ellsberg, like other whistleblowers, occasionally sees conspiracy and government perfidy when the evidence is scant. During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”
“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.
I respond by saying those were all Cold War policies, if covert ones, and ask him whether he thinks anything has changed since. In announcing the complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example — as the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of the country — Biden declared that the United States was “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”
Ellsberg doesn’t believe it. “Democrats in this area are as shameless as Republicans,” he says. “Our elections in the realm of foreign policy and defense policy and arms sales, I have come to understand, are essentially between people vying to be manager of the empire.”
Even his most fervent admirers say that sometimes Ellsberg, haunted by his experience in the covert world, occasionally goes too far in seeing dark designs in U.S. policy. “He’s really serious about conspiracy theories,” Horton says. “I would contrast what he did during the Vietnam era to some of the more recent things where he’s really not on the inside anymore and doesn’t have that access to information.”
Christian Appy, a University of Massachusetts historian who is currently working on a book about Ellsberg based largely on his papers, says he doesn’t believe Ellsberg is a conspiracy theorist but adds: “I do think he sometimes speculates on things that I myself think are improbable.”
Even so, Appy says, Ellsberg is not entirely wrong in asserting that since World War II the U.S. has been effectively running an empire. “I think he is more careful than some people. In the last 10 years he has placed more stock on the military-industrial complex underpinnings of U.S. power, that they really do have huge influence on sustaining this huge imperial footprint around the world. And after all, we still have 800 military bases on foreign soil, and we conduct exercises in 25 countries.” (The current number of U.S. bases abroad is closer to 750.)
Louis Clark, the CEO of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower legal advocacy organization inspired by Ellsberg, says his influence has been titanic over the decades. “There’s been a tremendous sort of cultural change from the time he came forward, an acceptance of whistleblowing.” Unfortunately, that in turn has incited use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, a 1917 law that was intended for use against spies for foreign governments.
“People need to know what they’re getting into, especially with the abuse of the Espionage Act. These people are obviously not spies. There needs to be at a minimum a public interest kind of defense, which you can’t do under the Espionage Act,” says Clark.
In the interview, Ellsberg agrees not all leaks are created equal, and that it’s sometimes difficult to tell a real whistleblower from a fantasist, like the mysterious Q of the QAnon conspiracy, or someone who seems mainly interested in self-promotion. He believes Jack Teixeira, the National Guardsman who recently leaked a raft of classified documents by posting them on a gaming site, fits into the latter category.
“He’s invented a new form of leaking. It is not easy to understand why he thought he would get away with it,” Ellsberg says. “But there’s a big difference between whistleblowing and just leaking. Leaking is part of the way the system works. It has nothing to do with revealing wrongdoing. It’s much more about how great our weapons system is compared to the other one.”
No one ever sets out to become a whistleblower.
Most whistleblowers start out as patriots or devoted company people, often passionate ones. And there is a pattern to their behavior: Most of them try at first to address wrongdoing within the system; going to the media is a last resort. Ellsberg describes himself as a Harvard-educated U.S. Marine who in the beginning completely bought into the Cold War struggle against communism, including the Domino Theory. When he went to work for the Defense Department and Rand Corp., he says, “I very much accepted the idea that we were a force for democracy in the Third World, as in Korea, and the former colonial world, and for self-determination, for sovereignty, for peace. We were the good guys.” Initially, he wanted to divulge the Pentagon Papers to Congress, but few people in Congress seemed interested, he says. Ellsberg only reluctantly agreed to go to the media when he began “hearing from contacts in the Nixon administration that Nixon was planning to escalate the war,” says Robert Ellsberg, who as a 13-year-old helped his father secretly copy the Papers.
In a later era, a number of people who turned into whistleblowers were inspired by 9/11 to help their country. Among them: Ian Fishback, the dedicated U.S. Army captain who revealed that the torture practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were systemic, not isolated incidents, only to suffer criticism, mental illness and die years later in a charity hospital; and Reality Winner, who was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking details of Russian infiltration in the 2016 U.S. election. Other whistleblowers who have served time include Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier who disclosed military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks, and Daniel Hale, who is currently imprisoned in Illinois after being convicted of giving classified material about drone operations to the media. Edward Snowden, who leaked massive amounts of information about surveillance by the National Security Agency, is in permanent exile in Russia.
Whistleblowers often end up bitter and incurably self-righteous. Like Ellsberg and Snowden, they are variously called “hero” or “traitor” for the rest of their lives. Or in the case of Frank Serpico, the famous cop, a “rat.” Not long before Ellsberg exposed the Pentagon Papers, Serpico was testifying to the Knapp Commission in 1970 about endemic graft in the New York City Police Department, which later became the subject of a book and a classic film. Like Ellsberg, Serpico tried for years to register his complaints inside the system — in his case the police department and the city government — before finally going to the New York Times in frustration. To this day, Serpico says, he is viewed as an outcast by the NYPD.
“It’s pretty lonely out there,” says Serpico, who is 87 and lives in a wooded tract outside Albany, N.Y. “It doesn’t end. Dan is the unforgiven and I’m the unforgiven.”
Still, in a phone interview in May, Serpico adds: “Whatever you do, no matter how small, it makes a difference … And you have to keep struggling. That’s what whistleblowers are doing: They’re struggling to keep the system from going under.”
Whistleblowers, it must be said, often do seem to be a different breed of human — and more alike than different, no matter what they are exposing. They are motivated by a moral outrage that often leads them to take on an entire system they were once part of and even loved with little hope of changing that system. Nor are they welcomed back into their organizations or industries, much less promoted. Certainly, they get no reward — with the exception of some financial whistleblowers who revealed illegal corporate gains.
“It’s not just a question of awarding an act which from almost every point of view, social and personal, is irrational, in the sense that it’s likely to be extremely personally risky and I think there will be no change to that,” Ellsberg says. “You can’t change the fact that when you tell secrets that your boss or your old area of industry is anxious for you to keep, you can’t escape retribution for that. I was very much an outlier on that. You might almost say Frank Serpico is the other absolute end of that. He got shot in the face.”
In the last half century, Ellsberg amassed a huge amount of hate mail calling him treasonous, Appy said. As Kerry Howley describes it in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey through the Deep State, her new book about Reality Winner and other whistleblowers, they often just don’t understand why others fail to see the world the way they do, why most people just go along even with what they think is a bad or unjust system. “Most of us are good at not looking,” she writes. “People who feel they must confront the nature of reality, whom we call ‘whistleblowers’ or ‘traitors,’ tend to feel that the rest of us should do the same, which makes those people annoying, because not looking is a skill, and after a while you too might lose the ability not to look.”
As a result, whistleblowers often find each other, forming a loose band of exiled brothers and sisters — or, at the very least, a support group. After hearing about Ellsberg’s diagnosis, Serpico and Ellsberg recently spoke on FaceTime and “reminisced about old times,” as Serpico puts it, “what was going on back then and how both our situations were happening pretty much at the same time.” Serpico refuses most requests to have video conversations though he occasionally makes public appearances to support whistleblowing causes, but he says: “I couldn’t deny Dan. He wanted to see my face.”
And in the end, that is the legacy Ellsberg hopes to impart — the idea that whistleblowers are not alone. They are a team, and they need to become more effective by learning from each other.
“Here’s a very good piece of practical advice, which is don’t go through channels. Don’t go to the Whistleblower Protection Act. Don’t go to the inspector general as Tom Drake did, for example. That only serves to identify you as a troublemaker and someone who’s not with the system, somebody who whines about the fact that we’re killing people,” he says.
In 2005, Thomas Drake was working as a career intelligence official and employee of the National Security Agency when he grew worried that an NSA program code-named Trailblazer had turned into a boondoggle that cost more than a billion dollars and violated U.S. citizens’ privacy rights. Internally, Drake pushed for a more effective alternative program but when he was ignored, first by his superior, then by the NSA and Defense Department inspector generals, and even testified to Congress with no effect, Drake finally leaked to a Baltimore Sun reporter. He became the first official since Ellsberg charged under the Espionage Act and barely managed to avoid prison when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor. But his career was ruined.
Ellsberg also believes whistleblowers should try to remain anonymous if they can. “If you possibly can avoid exposing yourself, do that, don’t reveal yourself as I did, although I felt I had to do it and would do it again under other circumstances. Like Snowden and Chelsea Manning, we always felt we didn’t want other people blamed for what we had done. But if you’re not worried about that, the first thing would be to do it as anonymously as possible. In that respect there has been some improvement: a cipher system so whistleblowers can speak with the press.
“My biggest advice is, don’t do this unless you’re ready to accept the high risk of having your career destroyed and actually going to prison,” Ellsberg says. “Going to prison is a new one, starting under Obama, but it’s there now, very much so. Obviously, that really narrows the number of things worthy of whistleblowing considerably. I wouldn’t do it, for example, just for bribery or cost overruns. That’s not important enough to go to prison.”
“But the final thing I would say is there are lots of things having to do with preserving the Constitution, as in Snowden’s case, or shortening a war, or in stopping a massive assassination program, the drone program, as in Daniel Hale’s case, that do make it indeed quite worthwhile to sacrifice yourself in order to save the lives of lot of people,” Ellsberg says. “I would like to encourage people to ask themselves the question: ‘Am I willing to sacrifice my career, my life, to save these other lives?’ And most people will say no. That’s humanity. That’s the way it is. But definitely, if they ask that question as I was led to ask myself the question, you can very well look at it that way and you can say yes.”
When I asked whether whistleblowing has made government or corporate America any more honest, however, Ellsberg waxes gloomier.
“That’s easy to answer: No. The short answer is no. The long answer is no. It hasn’t changed the desire to keep secrets. People in all governments in all of history have been willing to take all actions necessary…to keep people from knowing what will lead to their being blamed for a mistake, for a lie, or a crime or for their incompetence. Talking about national security: Who exactly has had their career hurt by incompetence? Maybe some Russians have. They have fired some Russians. Walt Rostow [Lyndon Johnson’s hawkish national security advisor] had to go to the University of Texas, instead of back to MIT, for example. So that’s the level of accountability.”
Those aren’t very encouraging words, I reply.
“Despite all those odds there is a chance and that can make it worthwhile,” Ellsberg says. “When everything is at stake — I’m talking about nuclear war implicitly here but climate is the same. When we’re facing a pretty ultimate catastrophe. When we’re on the edge of blowing up the world over Crimea or Taiwan or Bakhmut. … From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect? And the answer is: Of course. Of course, it can be worth that. You can even say it’s obligatory.”
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'We Will Succeed': Zelenskiy Says Ukraine Ready to Launch Counteroffensive
04 June 23
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Ukraine’s president hints at concern over a possible Trump return in 2024 in Wall Street Journal interview
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, giving an interview to the Wall Street Journal, suggested that a significant attack could come soon and said he hoped a change in the US presidency would not impact military aid to Kyiv.
“We strongly believe that we will succeed,” Zelenskiy told the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, although he acknowledged he did not know how long the counteroffensive would take or how well it would go.
“To be honest, it can go a variety of ways, completely different. But we are going to do it, and we are ready,” Zelenskiy said, after months of troop training and significant arms donations from the west.
Ukraine has readied 12 brigades, an estimated 60,000 troops, to spearhead an attack it hopes to show it can force the Russian invaders, who total about 300,000, from its territory, some of which has been occupied since 2014.
Initial shaping operations, including long-range missile strikes on Russian military hubs, have already begun but the concern in Kyiv remains that many Ukrainian lives will be lost in an attack that is seen as politically and militarily necessary.
The president said he feared “a large number of soldiers will die” and that he still wanted more air defence systems to protect troops from the larger Russian air force, still largely intact 15 months after the Kremlin launched its full invasion.
However, echoing other western officials, the president said they had the equipment they needed for now, acknowledging “we can’t wait for months” – pointing to the likelihood of a significant attack in coming weeks.
On Friday, John Kirby, a White House national security council spokesperson, said: “We’re comfortable that we have met Ukraine’s needs to conduct their counteroffensive now,” adding: “When I say ‘we’, I don’t just mean the United States, I mean our allies and partners.”
Ukraine has been promised $37bn in military aid from the US, including Himars rocket launchers, making it the largest single western military supporter. Britain, the second largest contributor, has pledged £4.6bn and Germany €4.2bn.
There is considerable anxiety among Ukraine’s leaders about what could happen in the event that Joe Biden is defeated by Donald Trump or another Republican in the next US presidential election in late 2024.
Last month, Trump declined to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win, opting for an equivocal formulation. “Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” he said. “And I’ll have that done. I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”
That underlined the decision by Zelenskiy to speak to the right-wing Journal, in an attempt to persuade a wider Republican audience of the necessity of supporting Ukraine, and ultimately pressurise the party’s notoriously unpredictable leading candidate into following suit.
In the interview, Zelenskiy said a change in president could adversely affect the otherwise vital military support from the US. “In a situation like this, when there is support, you are afraid of changes,” he said.
Choosing his words carefully, he added: “And to be honest, when you mention a change of administration, I feel the same way as any other person – you want changes for the better, but it can also be the other way around.”
The Ukrainian leader also said he did not understand how Trump thought he could end the war in 24 hours, not least because he had not brought an end to the simmering conflict that followed Russia’s seizure of Crimea and occupation by separatists of parts of the eastern Donbas in 2014.
Zelenskiy also said “there is no point” in him attending the next Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania in July, unless Ukraine is given a roadmap to membership of the military alliance after the conclusion of the war.
Earlier this week the French president, Emmanuel Macron, warned that alliance members may not be able to reach a consensus at the summit itself, and Zelenskiy’s comments suggest he is willing to negotiate hard on the issue.
Missile attacks were relatively restrained overnight and Kyiv was not attacked for the first night in a week. One person was killed in shelling in the northern Ukrainian Sumy region, its military administration said.
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Members of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) stand guard in Leposavic.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry called for restraint and constructive dialogue to resolve a crisis that it said could harm regional security and stability.
"Our assigned unit (a commando battalion) is planned to be deployed to ... Kosovo on June 4-5," the ministry said.
A political crisis that has spiralled into violence in Kosovo's north has intensified since ethnic Albanian mayors took office in the region's Serb-majority area, which led the U.S. and its allies to rebuke Pristina. The majority Serb population had boycotted the April election, allowing ethnic Albanians to be elected.
In violence on Monday, 30 peacekeepers and 52 Serbs who protested against the installation of the mayors were injured. The violence prompted NATO to announce it would send additional troops on top of 700 already on their way to the Balkan country to boost its 4,000 strong mission.
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Police officers disperse people at the closed Victoria Park on the 33rd anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, in Hong Kong, China, June 4, 2022. (photo: Lam Yik/Reuters)
As restrictions in Hong Kong have snuffed out what were once the largest vigils marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, cities like London, New York, Berlin and Taipei are left carrying the candle to commemorate the June 4 anniversary.
Tens of thousands of people have left Hong Kong since a 2020 national security law came into force, many moving to Taiwan, Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia, which are expected to be the focus of events in at least 30 cities around Sunday's observance.
Hong Kong and Chinese authorities say the national security law was needed to restore stability to the financial hub after mass protests in 2019.
Residents of the former British colony, returned to China in 1997, increasingly fear retribution for broaching sensitive subjects like Tiananmen.
"There are many things Hong Kong people can't do anymore," said Steven Chow, who emigrated to Britain in 2021 with his wife and two children and will join a candlelight vigil in London's Kingston area. "Wherever there are such commemoration activities, I will take part."
In mainland China, any mention of the Tiananmen Square crackdown - where Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters, killing hundreds if not thousands, according to rights groups - is taboo and the subject is heavily censored.
China at the time blamed the unrest on counter-revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the Communist Party and has never provided a full death toll.
Asked about the incident and global vigils on Friday, foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the government "has come to a clear conclusion about the political turmoil in the late 1980s", without elaborating.
DIASPORA PRESSURE
Security in China tends to intensify in the run-up to June 4 every year. Authorities have imposed travel curbs on some activists, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
In the southern city of Zhuzhou on Saturday, activist Chen Siming was detained after he sent a tweet commemorating June 4, Human Rights Watch said.
Calls to the Zhuzhou public security bureau seeking comment went unanswered on Friday. Reuters could not reach Chen but confirmed the incident with a friend who said he remains in detention.
Asked about the report, China's foreign ministry said it was not aware of the situation, but added that anyone who breaks the law will be punished.
In Hong Kong, an annual candlelight vigil in a downtown park that used to attract tens of thousands was prohibited from 2020 to 2022 due to COVID restrictions.
No organisation applied to host a vigil this year. The park will host a Chinese food carnival on Sunday, organised by dozens of pro-China groups.
Hong Kong leader John Lee, asked this week if it was legal to mourn in public those killed in 1989, said, "Everybody should act in accordance with the law," without giving specifics.
Under Hong Kong law, police permission is required only for public processions of more than 30 people, or public meetings of more than 50.
The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organised the city's annual Tiananmen candlelight vigils, disbanded in 2021 after the arrests of its key leaders, including barrister Chow Hang-tung.
A Tiananmen memorial museum was reopened by overseas activists in New York this week after one in Hong Kong was closed in June 2021.
Three public sculptures marking June 4 have been dismantled in Hong Kong since 2021, and all books on the crackdown have been removed from public libraries over the past year.
Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot, whose "Pillar of Shame" was taken down in 2021 from the University of Hong Kong, installed a replica in a Berlin square this year.
"The Chinese people around the world who escaped China, they are being connected and make pressure for China to change the system," Galschiot said. "This is the only way we can change China in the end."
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Attendees raise their hands as they worship inside the tent during the ReAwaken America tour at Cornerstone Church, in Batavia, N.Y., on August 12, 2022. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
That’s still well worth doing at a time when the culture-war issues so closely associated with religious conservatives are red-hot topics in American politics, and of great importance to many of the most likely voters in the Republican presidential primaries. Clearly, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Tim Scott are particularly focused on letting conservative Evangelicals know how committed they are to the battle against legalized abortion, LGBTQ rights, “woke” corporations, and government impingements on “religious liberty.” These candidates are intensely determined to prove they are more faithful to the agenda of the Christian right than their front-running rival Donald Trump.
But there are two major problems with any sort of by-the-numbers effort to flip conservative Evangelicals against Trump. First, these voters have an abiding sense of gratitude for what Trump has already done for them. Second, Trump himself is deeply tied to the religious views of a growing subset of Christian Evangelicals.
As the 45th president frequently reminds conservative Christian audiences, he was the first Republican president to redeem decades of promises to secure the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights. And more generally, Trump discarded decades of embarrassed Republican efforts to downplay cultural issues in pursuit of upscale swing voters favoring moderation and compromise on topics that Evangelicals considered matters of eternal and immutable principle. He was firmly the enemy of the enemies of the people in the pews, and smote them hip and thigh unscrupulously. It will take more than a slightly higher rating on the latest set of litmus tests laid out by conservative religious leaders for mere politicians to match the founder of the MAGA movement in the esteem of voters who really do want to turn back the clock to a “greater” America.
The second element of Trump’s Evangelical primary firewall is the significant and rapidly growing subset of American Evangelicals whose view of politics and its relationship to religion cannot be captured by mere policy issues. Trump plays a larger-than-life role in a supernatural drama of good and evil that many of these believers embrace via the teachings of a new set of “prophetic” teachers and preachers, as religious scholar Matthew Taylor explains:
Trump’s most ardent Christian advocates are nondenominational Charismatic evangelicals, a group sometimes referred to by academics as Independent Charismatics or Independent Network Charismatic Christians.
Independent Charismatics emphasize a modern, supernaturally driven worldview where contemporary prophets speak directly for God; miracles are everyday experiences; menacing demonic forces must be pushed back through prayer; and immersive, ecstatic worship experiences bolster Christian believers’ confidence that they are at the center of God’s work in the world. These believers are country cousins to the more denominationally aligned Pentecostal evangelicals, though the lack of denominational oversight and the freewheeling nature of the independent Charismatic sector leaves them more vulnerable to radicalization.
Many Independent Charismatics have been radicalized by the passions unleashed by Trump and the conflicts he has engendered. Cultural warfare is for them spiritual warfare in which Trump is literally an agent of the divine will. Independent Charismatics are notably active in Trump-adjacent groups like the ReAwaken America Tour, in which pardoned former Trump lieutenants Roger Stone and Michael Flynn have been conspicuous participants, and a newer group called Pastors for Trump. The 45th president is an irreplaceable and heroic figure in the apocalyptic cosmologies of such groups, who aren’t about to replace him with some other Republican politician, no matter what more orthodox Evangelicals say or think. Specific political “issues” are very small in their reckoning of God’s destiny for America.
So within the legions of conservative Evangelicals engaged in American politics, Trump has charismatic shock troops whom he can count on to stick with him as though their lives — indeed, their souls — depend on it. If you add in the Evangelicals who uniquely trust Trump for keeping his promises to them and are grateful for his reshaping of the U.S. Supreme Court to make it a powerful allied force, you can see why he’s not as vulnerable to raids on this base of support as you might imagine from the boasts of his rivals that they are nearer to God than he is.
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Ron DeSantis’s soaring legal costs are reportedly at least $16.7 Million. (photo: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images)
Florida Taxpayers Pick Up Bill for Ron DeSantis's Culture War Lawsuits
Maya Yang, Guardian UK
Yang writes: "Since Florida's governor Ron DeSantis took office in 2019 and embarked on his culture wars, lawsuits from various communities whose rights have been violated have been stacking up against the far-right Republican."
Governor’s Disney battle and extremist policies are met with costly lawsuits covered by ‘blank check’ from Republican legislature
As DeSantis fights the lawsuits with what critics have described as a blank check from the state’s supermajority Republican legislature, the mounting legal costs have come heavily at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.
In recent years, DeSantis’s ultra-conservative legislative agenda has drawn ire from a slew of marginalized communities as well as major corporations including Disney. The so-called “don’t say gay” bill, abortion bans and prohibition of African American studies are just a few of many DeSantis’s extremist policies that have been met with costly lawsuits in a state where residents are already struggling with costs of living.
“The list of legal challenges precipitating from DeSantis’s unconstitutional laws is endless,” the Democratic state senator Lori Berman said.
“We’ve seen Floridians rightly sue many if not all of the governor’s legislative priorities, including laws that restrict drag shows for kids, prohibit Chinese citizens from owning homes and land in Florida, suppress young and Black and brown voters, ban gender-affirming care and threaten supportive parents with state custody of their children, and of course, all the retaliatory legislation waged against Disney for coming out in support of the LGBTQ+ community,” she said.
As a result of the mounting lawsuits against DeSantis, the governor’s legal costs, which the Miami Herald reported last December to cost at least $16.7m, have been soaring.
In DeSantis’s legal fight against Disney following the corporation’s condemnation of his anti-LGBTQ+ laws, it is going to cost the governor and his handpicked board nearly $1,300 per hour in legal fees as they look into how the corporation discovered a loophole in DeSantis’s plan to acquire governing rights over Disney World, Insider reports.
“Disney is a perfect example. It doesn’t hurt any Floridians. There is nothing. It’s creating a legal issue out of nowhere and now Disney sued so they have to respond and that is going to cost taxpayers’ money. The whole Disney case is just because of DeSantis’s ego and his hurt feelings,” the Democratic state senator Tina Polsky said.
“Taxpayers are paying to foot the bills to pass unconstitutional bills and to keep up with his petty vengeance,” she said, adding, “I don’t think they’re aware at all … They’re too brainwashed at this point that they wouldn’t even care.”
Meanwhile, in another case covered by the Orlando Sentinel, DeSantis’s administration has turned to the elite conservative Washington DC-based law firm Cooper & Kirk to defend the governor against his slew of anti-woke laws. The firm’s lawyers charge $725 hourly, according to contracts reviewed by Orlando Sentinel. As of June 2022, the state authorized nearly $2.8m for legal services from just Cooper & Kirk alone, the outlet reports.
With mounting taxpayer-funded legal costs against DeSantis’s legislative agenda, critics ranging from civil rights organizations to the state’s Democratic lawmakers have lambasted DeSantis’s policies as unconstitutional and mere political stunts designed to propel him to the frontlines of the GOP primary.
“DeSantis went to Harvard for his [law degree]. This is someone who should understand the constraints placed on him and the state by the United States constitution and the Florida constitution. He knows those constraints, but he doesn’t care. His goal is to intentionally pass unconstitutional laws and set up legal challenges in order for the conservative supreme court to overturn long held protections,” Berman said.
Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, echoed similar sentiments, comparing DeSantis to his main competition and current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, both of whom he said are cut “from the same cloth”.
“Ron DeSantis is a Harvard law school graduate. He is a lawyer. Whereas Donald Trump at least could make the argument, ‘I’m just the layperson, I don’t know’ if … something is deemed illegal or unconstitutional … DeSantis does not have that defense,” Jarvis said.
Nevertheless, DeSantis appears unfazed.
“DeSantis knows very well that … what he is doing is unconstitutional and illegal … Lawyers by training are very cautious so this is quite remarkable to have a lawyer-politician who not only knows better, but does not care,” said Jarvis.
To DeSantis, it does not matter whether he wins or loses the legal battles as he knows he “ultimately controls the Florida supreme court”, according to Jarvis.
“He is playing a ‘heads, I win, tails, you lose’ game. If he gets one of these crazy policies passed and they’re challenged and the court upholds him … he can say to the press and to the public, ‘I was right and the proof is in the pudding because the courts agreed with me,’” he explained.
“But even better for DeSantis when they rule against him … DeSantis is able to stand up and say, ‘These crazy judges want our children to watch drag shows, they want our children to be taught to be gay, they want Disney to be this terrible company. That’s why you need a strong governor and why you will benefit from having me as president because I will make sure to get rid of these judges and replace them with judges that have traditional American morals,’” Jarvis added.
As DeSantis continues to fight his costly legal battles, the state’s supermajority Republican legislature appears to encourage him wholly.
“We’re in a litigious society,” the state senate president, Kathleen Passidomo, told the Tallahassee Democrat while the senate budget chair, Doug Broxson, told the outlet: “We want the governor to be in a comfortable position to speak his mind.”
With Republicans rushing to DeSantis’s defense, perhaps the most glaring example of the legislature’s endorsement of his legal wars is the $16m incorporated into the state’s $117bn budget to be used exclusively for his litigation expenses.
Speaking to the Guardian, the state’s Democratic house leader, Fentrice Driskell, called the budget a “carte blanche” from Republicans and the result of zero accountability.
“The legislature is supposed to be a check on executive power. By giving him a carte blanche to go and fight these wars in court, it’s basically just saying that there are no checks and balances when it comes to the state government in Florida,” said Driskell.
“It’s a waste … They are just allowing this single person to impose his will on the state of Florida and they’re willing to waste taxpayer dollars to do it,” she said, adding, “Most Floridians can’t afford their rent and property insurance rates are through the roof. We could have redirected that money towards affordable housing.”
Driskell went on to describe Medicaid iBudget Florida, a waiver that provides disabled Floridians with access to certain services and which currently has a waitlist of over 22,000 residents.
“It’s very difficult for them to get off that waitlist because the Republicans underfund Medicaid. We could put that money towards funding the waitlist and getting people off of it. I think there’s only $2m that was put in the budget for that this year. If we added the $16m that was added for these culture wars, my goodness, that’s $18m. Presumably we could help get nine times more people off of the waitlist,” said Driskell.
As DeSantis remains embroiled in his legal woes at the expense of Floridian taxpayers, there is perhaps a single group of people that have benefited the most out of all the legal drama, Jarvis told the Guardian.
“The lawyers who got that $16.7m, that’s money from heaven. That’s money that fell into their laps … Anytime there’s a loser, and the loser here is the Florida taxpayer, there is a winner. The winners here are the lawyers who are collecting those enormous fees. The more that plaintiffs file lawsuits and the more they fight these crazy policies, you know that’s just money in the bank for these lawyers,” he said.
“DeSantis has been God’s gift to lawyers,” he added.
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Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin hosts the summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Baton Rouge, La., on July 8, 2022. Louisiana was the first state to pull out of ERIC, in early 2022. (photo: Matthew Hinton/AP)
With American flags draped from the stage, the topic of the night was democracy.
The state's chief voting official joked that he was competing with a former LSU Tiger great playing in the NFL playoffs the same night.
"I want to thank you all for coming out, competing with Joe Burrow is pretty tough!" Ardoin laughed.
But these were election die-hards.
The group hosting the event — We The People, Bayou Chapter — is one of hundreds of so-called election integrity groups that have popped up across the country since 2020, motivated by former President Donald Trump's lies about voting.
During the Q&A portion of the event, people asked about how to stop dead people from voting "to support the Democrats" and voiced a number of other popular election conspiracy theories.
"I think one of the reasons we had so much distrust from this past election was because all of a sudden either over the course of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, votes were discovered," said one man, repeating a common false claim about how votes were tallied in 2020.
But Ardoin wasn't just dropping by to talk about electronic voting machines or mail ballot fraud.
He was making an announcement: Louisiana would become the first state ever to pull out of an obscure bipartisan voting partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.
ERIC is currently the only system that can catch if someone votes in more than one state, which is illegal. And election officials widely agree it helps to identify dead people on voting lists.
But Louisiana was done with it.
"This week I sent a letter to [ERIC], suspending Louisiana's participation in that program," Ardoin said.
At the time, in early 2022, most Americans had never heard of ERIC.
But in Houma, it seems in large part due to a far-right misinformation machine, Ardoin's announcement garnered 15 seconds of applause.
It was the first of many times to come in which Republican officials would turn their back on this tool they once praised, in an effort to score political points with their base.
This NPR investigation, which found video of the Houma event posted to Facebook, is the first to report that Ardoin announced his ERIC decision to conservative activists.
And a deeper look at the red-state exodus that followed — eight states and counting have now pulled out of ERIC — shows a policy blueprint for an election denial movement, spearheaded by a key Trump ally, eager to change virtually every aspect of how Americans vote.
Even if it means making voter fraud easier to get away with.
"It's this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC," said J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, "that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish."
The far right finds a new target
The first crack in ERIC surfaced at the time in a press release.
On Jan. 27, 2022 — a day after the We The People event in Houma was publicized locally — Ardoin released a statement saying he was putting the state's ERIC membership on pause, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."
He declined an NPR request for an interview then, and again more recently, but his decision shocked the entire voting world, Republicans and Democrats alike.
"Everybody looked at this and said, 'This is insane, what are you talking about?' " said one state election official who has worked for Republican secretaries of state but did not have permission to speak publicly. "As soon as [Ardoin] did that — that created this pressure on the other Republican states that wasn't there before."
ERIC has been around since 2013, but up until early last year, it operated under the radar. It was mentioned at election conferences and almost nowhere else.
"Honestly, nobody knew what ERIC was," said Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw voting in Pennsylvania from 2019 to 2021 as secretary of the commonwealth.
The organization is a nonprofit voting partnership — completely voluntary — that allows member states an efficient way to share data to keep their voter rolls more up-to-date. It lets local election officials know when their voters move, die or illegally vote in more than one state in the same election.
"The little secret is that maybe more than 10 years ago, if somebody voted in Ohio, in Florida, in Arizona and Texas, you would have never known," said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, in an interview with NPR earlier this year. "With ERIC, we can compare our voter rolls to those states."
But in January 2022, the tool drew the ire of one of the most prolific misinformation peddlers on the internet: a website called the Gateway Pundit.
The right-wing website is known for pushing conspiracy theories, including the so-called birther theory about former President Barack Obama, and that survivors of the Parkland shooting in Florida were crisis actors. More recently, it published an article implying COVID vaccines were 98 times worse for people than the virus itself.
About a week before Louisiana's Ardoin made his reference to "media reports," the Gateway Pundit began targeting ERIC. The website published a series of articles that falsely said the bipartisan partnership was a "left wing voter registration drive," bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, aimed at helping Democrats win elections.
It's become clear the site ignited the election denial movement's fixation on ERIC.
NPR analyzed hundreds of thousands of posts on five alternative social media sites frequented by the far right — Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump's Truth Social — over the past two years, and found that conversation about ERIC really only began after the first Gateway Pundit article published.
The Gateway Pundit's initial article drew extensively on the writing and interviews of Adams, the conservative voting attorney.
In late 2021, Adams appeared on a conservative radio program and called ERIC "diabolical."
His voting advocacy law firm has sued a number of states for records related to ERIC. And he even wrote what's believed to be the first article ever alleging a connection between Soros and ERIC, back in 2016. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money previously to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped start ERIC, but Soros has never had any involvement in the organization.)
In an interview with NPR this year, Adams said he never intended his criticisms to lead to states actually leaving the organization.
"My view is that it's better to be in ERIC than not in ERIC," Adams said, because without it, "it's absolutely impossible to do cross-state checking to see who's voting twice in federal elections."
Adams took credit for being the first to criticize ERIC, citing concerns about transparency, but when asked how the debate turned from organizational tweaks into states leaving, he said people with more extreme views cherry-picked what they wanted to see in his work.
The far right served his critiques to a wider audience of people, primed since 2020 to believe there is a broad national effort to steal elections. ERIC's novel and complicated structure — a national organization that no regular person had heard of — fit perfectly into that false narrative.
"The citizens on the right have, after 2020, gotten highly engaged in election administration. They're not going away," Adams said. "They're not always doing harm either. It wasn't long ago that everybody on each side of the political spectrum was a fan of transparency, a fan of citizens being allowed to know what their government was doing. And that's what these individuals view themselves as doing: trying to get to the bottom of what ERIC is up to."
This is where Louisiana and groups like the We The People chapter in Houma come in.
Since 2020, Secretary Ardoin has found himself on a tightrope familiar to many Republican election officials.
He's an experienced voting administrator, having worked in the secretary of state's office for roughly a decade. But the majority of GOP voters still don't believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election legitimately, and they have little confidence in election officials, especially those in states that aren't their own.
Last year, Ardoin was gearing up to run for reelection himself, and facing numerous challenges from his right in a state Trump won by almost 20 percentage points. He was soon engaging with people who deny the 2020 election results in a way he had largely avoided previously.
He set aside speaking limit rules at a public meeting last year, for instance, so MyPillow founder and election denial influencer Mike Lindell could talk at length to a commission assigned with picking Louisiana's next voting system.
"[Ardoin] acknowledged to me that it had become very politically unpopular and that there had been a lot of heat politically about [ERIC]," said Ohio's LaRose, who said he spoke with Ardoin last year around the time he pulled his state out of the partnership.
LaRose ran for reelection last year in Ohio, and he said he noticed the issue bubbling up on the campaign trail too.
"You can see where somebody who's out there trying to prove their conservative bona fides in a primary, which is what you do, would read this [Gateway Pundit] article and say, 'OK, that thing is bad, let's get our state out of it,' " LaRose said. "But hopefully over time, the noise about this starts to die down and other states look to get back into it."
LaRose spoke with NPR on Feb. 17.
Exactly a month later, he announced Ohio was leaving ERIC as well.
How — and why — ERIC came to be
Fifteen years ago, David Becker got a bunch of election officials together in a room and asked them what he could do to help make voting better.
Becker is a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who was working at The Pew Charitable Trusts at the time.
"Every single election official we asked back in 2008 said voter registration," Becker said.
After the chaotic 2000 presidential election, Congress mandated that states start keeping computerized statewide voter registration lists. But keeping those lists up-to-date felt virtually impossible for government offices with limited resources, says Becker, who now runs a nonprofit that helps local elections officials.
"Our society is highly mobile," Becker said. "About one-third of all Americans move within any given four-year period."
That makes life tough for local voting officials, who are trying to plan precincts and communicate with voters, based on addresses that often turn out to be wrong. For voters, that can mean longer lines and mail ballots getting sent to the wrong places.
Becker worked with a data scientist named Jeff Jonas, who was working at IBM at the time, and who is known for developing widely used casino security technology.
They developed the framework for a novel organization that could do two things:
- First, it could securely pull in data from a variety of government sources in addition to each state's voter rolls, like the Department of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. Postal Service and the Social Security Administration.
- Secondly, and more importantly, Jonas designed software that could sift through the data, match records, and spit out reports that election officials could use to update their voter lists.
At one of their first meetings, Becker remembers Jonas putting a rough sketch of the technology on a screen.
"It was quiet in the room for about 10 to 15 seconds, and then you could hear a gasp," Becker said. "And that gasp was one of the election officials ... because she realized this could actually work and solve a problem they'd been dealing with since voter registration first began."
Other similar programs have tried to solve the same problem over the years, and been riddled with so many false positives on people with the same names that officials couldn't confidently use their data.
But ERIC was different. It could tell with confidence whether "John Doe in one state and John Doe in another state are the same John Doe," Becker said.
To join, states often have to pass new laws and get their state DMV primed to share data, which can be a long process. But over time, more and more states joined, which gave the partnership more value.
In 2013, with seven states participating, the program identified roughly 92,000 voters who appeared to have moved to different states.
In 2021, with 28 states and Washington, D.C., sharing data, that number rose to almost 3.5 million.
At its height, the partnership had 32 members, almost evenly split between the two major parties. The program helped officials clean up voter rolls and remove dead voters, which attracted Republican states like South Carolina, Utah and Texas.
"The ERIC program for us has been godsend," said Iowa Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, in an interview with NPR earlier this year.
It also required states to reach out to eligible voters who weren't registered yet, with a postcard explaining how to register. That helped attract Democratic states, like Connecticut, Oregon and, most recently, New Jersey.
"I had various conversations with my fellow secretaries, who gave positive and I want to say bipartisan feedback at the time," said New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way, speaking about how she learned of the program.
ERIC was widely considered a bipartisan success story. And growing.
Until Ardoin's revelation last January, which set off a chain reaction.
A primary promise
A week and a half after the move in Louisiana, a secretary of state candidate in Alabama made a promise: He would pull out of ERIC on day one if he won his election in November.
"Soros can take his minions and his database and troll someone else because Alabamians are going to be off limits — permanently," said Wes Allen, who served previously in Alabama's House of Representatives.
He said he heard about ERIC after Louisiana pulled out, and he remembers reading the Gateway Pundit article around the same time.
"We started hearing it on the campaign trail, too," Allen told NPR. "This subject matter came up and so we made the decision pretty quickly that, hey, we're not going to participate in ERIC."
Allen went on to win the state's Republican primary in June, and followed through on his ERIC promise after winning the state's general election.
But in the interview with NPR, he struggled to articulate the specific concerns he had with the partnership that led him to pull the state out.
On the false alleged Soros connection, for instance, Allen said he no longer cared whether the billionaire was actually involved with the program or not.
"I mean, it's maintained now by the states, but it really doesn't matter in my mind who funded ERIC," Allen told NPR. "You know, we're still not going to participate in it. It doesn't matter if it was a leftist group or a right group, whoever. We just feel and, you know, I heard loud and clear on the campaign trail that the people of Alabama want their data protected."
A vague concern about data privacy has become a key motivator for a number of states that have now pulled out of ERIC.
But there has never been any evidence of a data breach at ERIC, or any data being shared without a state's permission. ERIC uses a security process called one-way hashing to encrypt all the sensitive data (driver's license numbers, the last four digits of Social Security numbers) it receives from states, before it analyzes it.
Election officials also note that most of the data ERIC receives is already widely available as public record.
But Allen made clear to NPR he was making a political decision. He said he did not speak to ERIC staff or any election officials from member states other than Louisiana before withdrawing.
And his decision was especially striking, since Alabama's previous Republican secretary of state, John Merrill, is one of ERIC's biggest fans.
"ERIC has been one of the most effective tools that we have had in the area of election administration," Merrill said. "Nobody has ever been able to introduce any vulnerabilities, inconsistencies or irregularities related to ERIC or the administration of the ERIC system. Period."
When in office, Merrill noted that since 2016, ERIC had helped Alabama identify more than 19,000 records for voters who appeared to have died, and more than 222,000 records of voters who appeared to have moved out of state.
When Allen was asked by NPR how he would replicate that data, he indicated that he thought the services ERIC provided weren't useful.
"There's a misconception that we have a computer that we can use here in our office that we can just go check these other lists from other states," Allen said. "That's not the case at all. You know, we send the data. They run it through their algorithms in this private, out-of-state group."
NPR noted that seemed to be precisely the value of ERIC, using technology instead of staff to manually sift through millions of records, and Allen responded, "We recognize that keeping our voter rolls clean is of utmost importance ... it's going to be a good opportunity for us to maintain our oversight on our voter registration list here in Alabama."
He said he would not commit more money or hire more staff to work on the issue however.
For a while, it looked like the bleeding for ERIC might stop with ruby red Louisiana and Alabama.
But under the radar, a powerful pressure campaign was building on the right.
This spring, the dam burst.
Cleta Mitchell's growing influence
On a voting podcast called "Who's Counting," ERIC has become a frequent villain.
"ERIC is a very insidious organization," said the host, Cleta Mitchell, in one episode from last summer.
Mitchell is an influential Republican election attorney who was at the center of Trump's failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election. She was on the infamous phone call in early 2021 when Trump asked Georgia election officials to "find" votes.
And she's spent the time since building an election denial infrastructure.
Her podcast has become a central hub for stolen election narratives, and she's also started a coalition of grassroots groups across the country called the Election Integrity Network. These groups host trainings and meetings, aimed at helping local folks "unrig" the elections in their communities.
NPR's investigation found Mitchell and these sorts of groups to be central in the effort to discredit and dismantle ERIC.
Mitchell declined an NPR request for an interview, but told NPR in a text message that she first heard about ERIC when Ardoin pulled Louisiana out in January 2022. Shortly after that, the Michigan chapter of her election integrity network wrote about it on its website for the first time.
"It's supposed to be cleaning the voter rolls but it's not. It is a covert method of registering targeted voters," said Patrice Johnson, the leader of the Michigan group, when she appeared on Mitchell's podcast.
"I'm just thrilled you are working on ERIC," Mitchell replied. "We want more citizens to say to their legislators, 'Do not continue your membership!' "
The Michigan chapter published a "how to discuss ERIC with your state legislator" guide, and NPR found similar callouts all over the country.
One group called Protect Your Vote Florida published a page on its website called "How to Influence Florida Legislators to Suspend Contract with ERIC!"
"The STRATEGY is to run a campaign directed at key Florida legislators," wrote the group in the post, which included a list of the state's lawmakers and contact information. "Hand delivered letters, emails, phone calls, and social media activity will all be utilized to maximize impact."
Election officials say they felt the effects of those calls immediately.
"We saw an uptick in Republican legislators wanting to know more about ERIC, almost as if there was some sort of national effort to ask Republican lawmakers and secretaries of states to start asking questions and challenging it," said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat.
In Missouri, NPR acquired emails that showed Republican legislators and voters peppering the secretary of state's office with questions about the partnership.
"Can you shed any light on these concerns," wrote then-Missouri GOP Rep. John Simmons in a July email to the chief of staff for Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft. "Recent ERIC objections surfaced late in session. ... The sources are sometimes 'the sky is falling' worriers, but still want to [vet] the issue."
Simmons forwarded a Gateway Pundit link sent to him by a constituent.
"This is totally false," responded Ashcroft's chief of staff, Trish Vincent. "Again people spreading things out of fear."
In Texas, one election integrity group even claimed it helped write legislation that would take the state out of ERIC, as Votebeat first reported. That bill is now at the governor's desk.
And in Pennsylvania, a self described "open-source investigator" named Heather Honey took up the cause.
Honey worked on the widely discredited election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz., and last summer she and Mitchell began working together.
Mitchell declined to answer questions about her work with Honey, and Honey did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview.
But on June 17 of last year, Mitchell convened a secret ERIC summit with red-state lawmakers at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where Mitchell is senior legal fellow. There, Honey presented a 29-page report she put together calling ERIC a "threat to election integrity."
Secretaries of state from the first five states to withdraw from ERIC attended the four-hour event, according to an email sent to North Carolina state lawmakers by the head of a local election integrity group who says he attended the meeting.
The nonprofit investigative watchdog group Documented shared the email with NPR, along with an agenda from the meeting that showed that Honey presented there for an hour.
It's not clear whether Honey volunteered or was paid to produce her report, but it began circulating widely among conservatives, and she began speaking about ERIC with local election integrity groups too.
Documented obtained an audio recording of Honey presenting at a conservative activist conference in Pennsylvania earlier this year, and shared it with NPR.
"ERIC talking points, if you go out and talk to your representatives. ... Make sure that they know that this is an unnecessary sharing of highly sensitive Social Security number, driver's license data on all of us, including our children," Honey said. "We really have to fight to get out of there."
A Florida bombshell
As the anti-ERIC campaign intensified last summer, members within the organization started thinking about how they could stave off a mass exodus.
At that time, late last year, the only state to have actually left was Louisiana. Alabama's Allen hadn't even been elected yet.
But state election directors were feeling the pressure. So ERIC put together a working group to brainstorm updates the organization could make to try to satisfy its critics.
Around that time, Florida got a new secretary of state: a state representative named Cord Byrd, who was appointed to the role by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Byrd has previously declined to say Biden won the 2020 election. And he's an ally of Mitchell's. At an event in Orlando last spring before he was secretary, Mitchell introduced him.
"I do a Friday phone call every week with election integrity leaders from across the country ... and Cord signs on and chips in on those calls most of the time," Mitchell said, according to a recording of the event acquired by Documented and shared with NPR.
When Byrd appeared on her podcast later in the year, Mitchell noted how receptive he had been to the grassroots right.
"You've had such a great open door and willing to listen and you are very much appreciated," Mitchell said. "People know that [election integrity] is something that you have had near and dear to your heart even before you became secretary of state."
Byrd declined an NPR request for an interview.
But Florida's stance on ERIC shifted almost immediately after he got the job.
DeSantis had his state join ERIC in 2019, and he is on record as supporting the partnership as recently as last year.
The governor started a controversial elections police force, which in its first annual report said specifically that it relied on ERIC data to identify hundreds of voters who appeared to have voted in Florida as well as another state in the last presidential election.
But a few months after Byrd was appointed, Florida began blatantly breaking ERIC's rules.
To be members in good standing, all states are regularly required to do certain list maintenance activities, as well as use ERIC's data to send a postcard with registration information to eligible but unregistered voters.
That outreach was critical to the partisan balance that ERIC achieved, but now it had become a central part of the conspiracy claim that the organization was a left-wing plot to register Democratic voters and steal elections.
When Honey spoke to the group in Pennsylvania, she said ERIC was "bloating the rolls" by sending registration information to eligible people.
"The impact of ERIC is that instead of cleaning up our voter rolls ... they add more people to it," Honey said. "People who aren't even interested or disengaged don't really want to register. But they just, you know, you ask them enough times, they're going to say yes."
Florida's elections staff claimed the state was exempt from the organization's outreach requirement, but ERIC's staff and other states did not see it that way. The election official who spoke to NPR on background characterized Florida's action as "saying, 'Screw you, we're not going to do it.' "
"It's really hard not to call [their excuse] a bald-faced lie," the official said.
A failed effort to halt an exodus
ERIC was left scrambling to respond. Technically, Florida could have been kicked out of ERIC immediately for breaching the membership agreement, but data from the giant state was valuable, and it seemed certain that a red-state exodus would follow if Florida departed.
The working group began pushing a plan that would eliminate requirements for members, to allow each member state to use ERIC's data however it pleased, if they would just stay. It was referred to as an a la carte proposal.
And the plan initially had buy-in. On a call earlier this year, election directors from all of ERIC's member states voiced support for the structural changes.
Then politics interfered.
Democrats like Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon pushed back against the notion of changing the organization to satisfy the far right.
"I don't think any state appreciates it when ERIC has a gun to his head and that feels an awful lot like what happened," Simon told NPR.
Another concession on the table was a Republican demand to cut out ERIC founder Becker, whose involvement as a non-voting adviser had become another conspiracy theory plot point.
In 2020, Becker's current nonprofit helped administer hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to help election officials respond to the pandemic.
For the far right, that was evidence Becker was a liberal operative, even though that money went to both Republican-led and Democratic-led districts. NPR also spoke with a number of Republican election officials who said Becker had been instrumental in helping them in their work and one even began crying when speaking about Becker's role in standing up for beleaguered voting workers after the 2020 election.
The stage was set for an ERIC board meeting in March with more on the table than ever.
At its core, in an effort to move forward, members were set to decide whether ERIC should concede to complaints motivated by conspiracy theorists targeting the organization.
But before they could even vote, the exodus began.
On March 6, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced that they were pulling out of ERIC.
The stated reason was that ERIC was being partisan and dismissive of their concerns, despite the fact that the states withdrew from the partnership before the vote on the changes they were pushing for.
"As Secretary of State, I have an obligation to protect the personal information of Florida's citizens, which the ERIC agreement requires us to share," Florida's Byrd said in a statement. "Florida has tried to back reforms to increase protections, but these protections were refused. Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC."
The Gateway Pundit claimed that Missouri Secretary of State Ashcroft notified the outlet before he notified the public. Votebeat later confirmed that with Ashcroft.
During an appearance on Mitchell's podcast, Ashcroft alluded to not wanting to pull out of ERIC when Mitchell first approached him about it.
"We cussed and discussed about it," Ashcroft said.
The emails NPR acquired in Missouri show Ashcroft's staff calling the initial Gateway Pundit article "horrible and misleading," and saying that they were "glad to be part of ERIC."
But ultimately, Mitchell got her way.
"You have a lot of credibility with people, because of that leadership," she said.
"I hope so," the secretary responded. "There are a lot of people that think I should have left a lot earlier — including you, I think."
"I'm just glad you left!" Mitchell laughed.
A common Republican thread
The March ERIC meeting went ahead, and with three fewer Republican-led states, the structural changes failed to pass.
Ohio, whose Secretary of State LaRose called ERIC "one of the best fraud fighting tools that we have" just three months prior, and Iowa, whose Secretary of State Pate called it a "godsend," pulled out shortly after. Virginia followed suit in May.
Pate released a statement saying ERIC would be less useful now with other states leaving.
"Unfortunately, the organization just seemed to dig in and fight," said LaRose, in an interview with NPR in May. "And so after a year of trying to preserve what I thought could have been a useful institution — had been a useful institution for a long time — we arrived at the point where my decision was that it's worth saving, but it's not worth saving at any cost."
Ohio was an ERIC member for six years and joined voluntarily under the same rules and requirements that Republicans were now saying were unacceptable.
Still, LaRose was adamant misinformation did not influence his decision.
"Wild ideas about conspiracies of data leaking out the back door and secret funding sources and all that kind of stuff ... I've rejected all of that," LaRose said. "What we've said all along is that this organization needs to be more accountable."
There is a common thread that connects many of the election officials who decided to pull out of ERIC: ambition.
LaRose is widely expected to run in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 2024.
In Florida, DeSantis, who appointed Byrd, has announced he is a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
And secretaries of state in West Virginia and Missouri, Mac Warner and Ashcroft, have both announced runs for governor.
But ERIC founder Becker, who stepped down from his advisory role under pressure before the March meeting, said those looking to court the far right for political points should tread carefully.
"A variety of elected officials have thought they could just give the mouse a cookie and it'll go away," Becker said. "The mouse never goes away."
Back in Louisiana, where this ERIC saga began in earnest, Secretary of State Ardoin recently announced that he has decided not to seek reelection.
"It is shameful, and outright dangerous," he said, in his retirement announcement. "That a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods."
At a voting event this spring, Ardoin said fighting election conspiracies often felt like a losing battle.
ERIC is fractured, but still standing
ERIC is still standing, though with less shared data and higher costs for remaining members.
Some red state legislatures, like Texas and Oklahoma, have passed anti-ERIC bills. Trump himself has urged states to get out of the compact. But the partnership still has more than two dozen member states, including Republican governments like South Carolina, Utah and Georgia. California has legislation winding its way through its state government that would allow that massive — and data rich — state to join too.
For the states that have left, election experts say the consequence is that over time, their rolls will almost certainly be less accurate.
Brianna Lennon, a Democrat who oversees voting in Boone County, Mo., says that will surely be the case in her county.
Before the state joined ERIC, the elections office relied on returned mail to find out if a voter moved to another state.
"That's what we'll have to go back to using," she said.
Lennon had gotten a sense recently that community election integrity groups were gaining more traction in her state, but she says this ERIC decision was the first major policy decision she's seen that lined up so directly with their goals.
"I'm sure there are going to be ripples that come from this particular move and I'm not exactly sure what the end will be," she said. "I don't think this is an isolated thing."
READ MORE 
Pigs en route to slaughter in California. (photo: Bobby Sud/We Animals Media)
The Supreme Court sided with pigs. Will California?
In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld Proposition 12, a California law that partially bans the sale of pork from farms that keep pregnant breeding pigs, known as sows, in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. They’re akin to forcing a human to live their entire life in a bathtub. (Other parts of the law, which require eggs and veal to come from cage-free animals, took effect last year and were not a part of the Supreme Court case.)
While it was a victory for those who argue against caging intelligent, social animals like pigs for months on end, animal welfare wasn’t the main point for the justices. Rather, the case hinged on the ability of US states to set their own standards for how goods imported from other states are produced. California imports nearly all of its pork from other states, and the National Pork Producers Council, an industry trade group that brought the lawsuit, argued that the state’s heightened standards were imposing an unfair burden on other states, particularly top pork producers like Iowa and Minnesota. The industry estimated it would have to spend $294 million to $348 million to convert enough barns to crate-free.
Given the conservative, business-friendly majority on the Court, and the fact that 26 mostly red states and the Biden administration sided with the pork producers, the mother pigs’ odds didn’t look good. Animal welfare advocates I spoke to before the ruling assumed it likely wouldn’t go their way, which could have posed an existential threat to animal welfare laws in other states. (Disclosure: The effort to pass Proposition 12 was led by the Humane Society of the United States, where I worked from 2012 to 2017. I worked briefly on Prop 12 in 2018 while at a different animal welfare organization.)
To the surprise of both sides, that didn’t happen. But now that Prop 12 has been upheld, there’s another question: How will America’s strongest farm animal welfare law actually be enforced?
A law is only good as its enforcement
The animal welfare movement has poured millions of dollars into banning cages and crates for farmed animals, a strategy that has proven surprisingly successful. Hundreds of food corporations have pledged to source exclusively cage-free eggs and/or pork, and over a dozen states have passed what are called “production” bans, which prohibit in-state meat or egg producers from using cages and crates for one or more farmed animal species. Most of these states aren’t themselves agricultural heavyweights — they import most of their animal products from other states. So as a way of affecting production elsewhere, eight states have passed “sales” bans, like California’s Prop 12, which go much further by banning the sale of eggs, pork, and/or veal from caged animals raised anywhere in the world.
All told, California’s Prop 12 should get around 40 million egg-laying hens, tens of thousands of veal calves, and half a million sows out of cages and crates each year. Pigs will go from having around 14 square feet of space to 24 square feet, while hens will go from around 75 square inches to double the space or more. Such laws don’t create humane conditions, as the animals are still in factory farms, but it’s progress nonetheless.
However, Prop 12 does have important carveouts for industry.
For example, mother pigs can still be confined in crates for five days prior to the expected date of birth, and for several weeks after while they nurse piglets. Importantly, pork that goes into processed or precooked foods, like hot dogs, soups, and frozen pizzas — which accounts for 42 percent of California’s pork consumption — is also exempt. (The law only covers whole, uncooked pork cuts like bacon or ribs.)
But for the law to cover the tens of millions of animals it’s supposed to protect each year, it’ll need to be strongly enforced, which is far from a given with animal protection regulations.
“These laws are only as good as the enforcement,” said Bryan Pease, a longtime animal lawyer in California. “Unfortunately, the animal rights movement has a bit of a track record of passing great laws, claiming victory, and then just moving on to the next thing without actually ensuring enforcement.” Pease pointed to California animal welfare laws that had been violated and/or weakly enforced, like laws to prohibit the sale of foie gras, fur, and dogs from puppy mills (as well as cats and rabbits). Pease has sued two San Diego restaurants for allegedly selling foie gras and a store in Orange County for allegedly selling fur, and accused a store in Escondido of selling dogs from puppy mills.
As of 2019, there was only evidence of enforcement for one of 16 state cage production bans, according to the Washington, DC-based nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI). That one instance happened to be in Southern California, where an egg farm was charged in 2017 for not providing hens adequate space.
But there’s more evidence that cage-free sales bans have been enforced. Between 2015 and 2019, according to records obtained by AWI, California audited 15 noncompliant egg farms, five of which were out of state. Oregon investigated complaints of a noncompliant egg producer and a noncompliant egg wholesaler, both from out of state. Earlier this year, when Arizona’s cage-free egg law took effect, the state issued hold orders on eggs from out-of-state producers 32 times from entering the food supply until they could verify production methods.
Scant evidence of enforcement doesn’t mean there’s mass fraud. It just means enforcing animal welfare laws doesn’t appear to be a priority for states — and the production ban laws don’t even contain provisions that give states authority to enforce them, said Dena Jones of AWI.
Absent strict enforcement, compliance shouldn’t be assumed: Meat producers have been repeatedly accused of price fixing, water pollution, labor violations, and cruelty to animals.
Jon Lovvorn, chief counsel for animal protection litigation at the Humane Society of the United States, said that “the interlocking nature of the contractual relationships in this industry” — contracts between meat and egg producers and restaurant food distributors and grocers — “make compliance [with Prop 12] more likely.”
Prop 12 stipulates that grocers and restaurants aren’t liable for selling noncompliant products so long as they had received written certification of compliance from producers. As a result, meat and egg producers are incentivized to follow the law lest they risk not just the chance of monetary penalties and jail time, but also getting sued by the retailers for selling them noncompliant goods.
Lovvorn said that while he expects enforcement to be straightforward, it “doesn’t mean there won’t be problems, and it doesn’t mean there won’t be people cheating the system. … I think that’s going to exist in any enforcement system, but I don’t think this is going to be a huge problem.”
The industries that have allegedly flouted some of California’s animal welfare laws, like those that prohibit the sale of foie gras, fur, and dogs, are fragmented and informal. The egg and pork industries, by contrast, are highly consolidated, which could lead to higher rates of compliance compared to other animal industries, Pease believes.
“As long as you gain compliance from [the major producers], then you’re pretty much looking at full compliance, and that’s good,” he said. Many of the nation’s largest pork producers had publicly stated that they’ll comply with Prop 12 before the Supreme Court’s decision, including Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, Seaboard Foods, Hormel, and Clemens Food Group.
There’s ample evidence the egg and pork industries are complying with cage-free laws and keeping more of their animals in cage-free barns. In 2015, when the nation’s first cage-free sales law went into effect, just 6 percent of US hens were cage-free; today it’s close to 40 percent. That number will shoot up in 2024 and 2025 as more state laws come into effect and food corporations fulfill their cage-free commitments. A few years ago, the pork industry said over a quarter of its sows were crate-free for around 70 percent of their four-month pregnancies, up from 10 percent in 2011.
How Prop 12 will be enforced
Despite the minimal evidence of California enforcing its cage-free laws, Jones of AWI said the state is gearing up to ensure compliance with Prop 12: “California appears to have done the most in terms of setting up enforcement programs, so we’ll have to watch down the road.”
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) will require pork, veal, and egg producers to work with one of its five accredited third-party certifiers, or with the state itself, to conduct annual audits on their farms. But the enforcement rollout has been, and will continue to be for the months ahead, a bit messy.
First, let’s look at the sale of eggs and veal. These components of the law went into effect at the start of 2022, but the CDFA didn’t finalize regulations until September 2022. Since the egg and veal components took effect, producers have been allowed to “self-certify” — essentially attesting to grocers and food distributors that they are in compliance, with the understanding that they are subject to inspection. Egg, veal, and pork producers will all be allowed to self-certify until January 1, 2024, when they’ll need to be certified by a third-party auditor or the CDFA.
The pork component of Prop 12, which was delayed due to the Supreme Court case, is now slated to fully take effect on July 1, 2023. The six-month gap that allows producers to self-certify could mean some of the pork sold in California is noncompliant.
“During the transition period, it may be difficult to determine if whole pork is from breeding sows raised in compliance with Prop 12,” said CDFA spokesperson Jay Van Rein.
Despite the uncertainty, pork producers are pushing to convert their facilities and begin the auditing process. “Since the Supreme Court made their ruling, it’s gotten very busy here,” said Matt Jones, vice president of operations at the accredited certifier Validus, speaking about the flurry of interest from producers looking to understand certification.
Grocery stores and other food distributors must also certify that eggs, veal, and pork they sell is compliant, which entails demonstrating through an audit trail that the product came from a certified producer.
The political and corporate fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision
While the political fight over cages has failed in the courts, members of Congress from states that lead in pork production are looking to overturn Prop 12 on Capitol Hill. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) is expected to soon reintroduce a bill that would prevent state and local governments from setting standards for how agricultural products imported from other states are produced, which she said would “circumvent what Prop 12 does.” The bill is a repeat of past efforts by former Iowa Rep. Steve King to do the same.
On the other end of the political spectrum, progressive Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) last year introduced the PIGS Act to ban gestation crates nationwide.
However, animal advocates are more likely to find success at the state level, where the vast majority of legal progress for farmed animals has been made. There are legislative efforts underway to ban gestation crates in Oklahoma, home to around 8 percent of US sows, and allocate funds to help pork producers transition to crate-free systems.
The Prop 12 decision could also spur food corporations to eliminate gestation crates from their supply chains, as it’ll expand the crate-free pork supply. In the early 2010s, nearly 60 fast food chains and grocers, including McDonald’s and Kroger, pledged to source crate-free pork, but most still haven’t fulfilled their commitments.
For decades, there’s been a race to the bottom on animal welfare on America’s farms, where nearly 200 million animals are still stuffed into cages and crates. It’s torture, but it’s perfectly legal torture in most states, and at least for now, it’s still the dominant method of production for pork and eggs.
It should be expected that even incremental laws like Prop 12 will be challenged in the courts by industry, as they’re fundamental to our system of cheap meat. When a law survives, as Proposition 12 has, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if some producers violate it, or if enforcement is spotty. These aren’t reasons to ditch politics as a means of social change for the billions of animals factory-farmed in the US annually, but they should put renewed focus on not just passing laws and improving corporate food policies, but also ensuring they work as intended.
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