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The movie is everywhere—including in our subconscious mind.
Those inexorable, ominous seconds were the basis of a nightmare I had recently. It’s an old adage that nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, but perhaps we can make an exception for nuclear night terrors this summer. Poke around social media right now, and you’ll notice that scores of people are experiencing acute nuclear anxiety. (“Too many Oppenheimer dreams last night đ”đ«,” reads one representative tweet.) My bomb dream happened last Sunday night. I was dead asleep, watching a missile carve an arc across the sky. I awoke just before impact, sweating, heart thumping, fists clenched. I did not get back to sleep.
End-of-the-world anxiety is omnipresent in contemporary American culture. Oppenheimer is poised to be among the biggest films of the year and will likely nab several Academy Award nominations. American Prometheus, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film, is currently No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list. In the latest Mission: Impossible installment, Tom Cruise’s on-screen team races to thwart a possible nuclear attack at Abu Dhabi International Airport. Desert bomb tests pop up in the background of Wes Anderson’s pastel dramedy Asteroid City. A ridiculously large bomb that resembles Oppenheimer’s Gadget even rolls through the streets of Rome during a dizzying chase scene in Fast X.
Fear of the bomb is also in the news in a way that it hasn’t been since the end of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly taunts enemies and boasts about the strength of his nuclear arsenal. Last month, President Joe Biden told reporters that the threat of Putin using a tactical nuclear weapon is “real.” Just this week, North Korea’s defense minister responded to an American nuclear submarine’s docking in South Korea by saying that the move “may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons” according to North Korean law.
In a sense, it’s no wonder nukes are in people’s dreams. After my bomb nightmare left me unsettled for a few days, I reached out to Veronica Tonay, a licensed psychologist and a retired professor at UC Santa Cruz who has studied dreams as part of her work. She told me that although most people don’t dream about politics specifically, “they do tend to dream about things that are very emotionally valent for everyone, like an earthquake, or like nuclear annihilation.” She invoked a former colleague, the late Frank X. Barron, who told her he collected accounts of nuclear-annihilation dreams from patients during the Cold War. As one would expect, Barron’s data found that such dreams were more common when the topic was more prevalent in news coverage. This phenomenon relates to the “continuity hypothesis,” in which our dreams are an extension of what we see and experience in our waking life.
Though Tonay has yet to see Oppenheimer, she predicted that the film is “going to put right back into the collective unconscious and consciousness of all of us that in fact we could have been destroyed by nuclear warheads for decades now. At any moment. And we have no control over it.” Nolan recently told an interviewer that he doesn’t disagree with a fellow filmmaker’s characterization of his film as a horror movie.
Our country’s obsession with nuclear destruction has ebbed and flowed over the past half century, but it’s never really abated. The overwhelming majority of Americans were not alive when their government chose to drop nuclear bombs on humans. But the fact that such destruction could happen again, and that if it did it, it might involve a hydrogen bomb, which would be exponentially worse, yields the feeling that this historical episode does not exist safely in our past. Trinity Site—where Oppenheimer’s team conducted that first test just three weeks before America leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is today part of White Sands National Park, in New Mexico. The surrounding area remains an active military testing ground. Twice a year, the Department of Defense opens Trinity to tourists. Right now, a page on the U.S. Army’s website warns prospective visitors in blaring red that “due to the release of the movie, Oppenheimer in July, we are expecting a larger than normal crowd at the 21 October open house.” (Referring to this as an “open house” is indeed quite weird.) The notice sounds a bit like the fine print on a theme-park ticket: “You may experience wait times of up to two hours getting onto the site. If you are not one of the first 5,000 visitors, you might not get through the gate prior to its closure at 2 p.m.”
Oppenheimer is by no means the first time a film about the nuclear bomb became Americans’ preoccupation. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb tackled the subject head-on, albeit from a satirical perspective. Understandably, the serious stuff hits harder. On November 20, 1983, an estimated 100 million people tuned in to ABC to watch The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that depicted Soviet nukes destroying Kansas City, among other places. Audiences were instantly traumatized. President Ronald Reagan watched the film a month before its release while at Camp David. That morning, he wrote in his diary:
I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Back to W.H.
In November, when the public broadcast concluded, the ABC News anchor Ted Koppel hosted a roundtable discussion with Henry Kissenger, Elie Wiesel, William F. Buckley Jr., Carl Sagan, and others about the film. Before the talk began, Koppel sensed the need to reassure the shaken masses: “If you can, take a quick look out the window. It’s all still there.”
I asked my colleague Tom Nichols, who grew up near a Strategic Air Command bomber base, about his own nuclear-annihilation dreams through the years. “In college and graduate school, I was studying Soviet affairs and strategic issues, and gaining all the detail that added a terrible sense of reality to those dreams,” he said. “I would be deeply skeptical about anyone in my field who says they’ve never had such nightmares.” (Though disturbed by The Day After, he told me that the British equivalent, Threads, was “the one that kept me up all night.”)
What are you supposed to do if all this stuff is keeping you awake, or if you find yourself having nightmares after seeing Oppenheimer? Tonay, the dream expert, told me that the moment you wake up, it’s important to put yourself in a quiet, safe place. Imagine you’re walking down a stairway, she said. When you reach the bottom, mentally put yourself back into the scariest part of the dream, and then consciously give it a different ending.
“I really think that one of the most difficult things that’s happening right now culturally is this relentless marketization of doom,” Tonay said with a sigh. “The movies, the apocalyptic films—they’re expressing a great concern that we all have, consciously or unconsciously, that what we’re doing isn’t sustainable, and we’re really in trouble on this planet right now. And those are real concerns. It’s just that they don’t leave a lot of room for a different ending.”
“I have seen a lot of young people, especially in the last five or six years in particular, who feel absolutely no hope,” she added, “because every image that they have, that they’ve taken into their unconscious, is that the world ends. And it may. But, you know, throughout history, every story that’s been told, we get to the point where we think everything’s going to end—and then something unexpected happens.”
Nukes may be invading people’s dreams because they are legitimate threats to our survival. Though nuclear anxiety may have seemed to recede in the decades between The Day After and Oppenheimer, the truth is, it’s been there the whole time. After we spoke, Tonay wrote me a follow-up email. “We do live in a world we mostly don’t control; overt and existential threats to our well-being are real; and our apprehension about that is always present to some degree, above or under the surface of our awareness, expressed in our dreams,” she said. “Rather than discounting our dreams, it helps to recognize them as our own, unique, nightly reminder of how we view the world, what feelings we need to acknowledge and express, and actions we might want to take in our waking lives.”
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In January 2023, crowds protesting the Roe v. Wade reversal as well as those supporting it met at the U.S. Supreme Court. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/AFP)
Amid a widening crackdown on abortion access, 19 Republican attorneys general in states where abortion is illegal are demanding the right for local governments to access the private medical records of patients in order to see if they obtained abortions out of state. We speak to Tamarra Wieder, state director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates in Louisville, Kentucky, where residents are crossing state lines to access abortion care due to the state’s near-total abortion ban. Wieder says the act of seeking healthcare “should not be turned against us,” adding that this latest attack on reproductive rights, if it is carried out, would set “a precedent of fear” that would “chill care.” She also discusses the Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, and the Texas women who are suing to overturn the state’s abortion ban, which put their lives in danger when they were unable to end their pregnancies, even when they were nonviable.
Meanwhile, more than a year after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion providers report many Kentucky residents are crossing state lines to access abortion care due to the state’s near-total abortion ban. To be clear, it’s legal for anyone in the United States to access abortion care in a state where that care is legal.
That comes after related news out of Tennessee, where the state attorney general has demanded Vanderbilt University Medical Center hand over medical records of patients at its clinic for gender-affirming care. A ban on surgical and nonsurgical care that helps people transition toward their self-identified gender took effect in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, in Nebraska, the teenager who used abortion pills to terminate her pregnancy was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Police charged 19-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother, Jessica, who assisted her in getting the pills and disposing of the fetus, after Facebook handed over their private messages to each other. Celeste was just 17 when her mother got the pills online. The events took place before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. At the time, abortion in Nebraska was banned after 20 weeks. Earlier this year, Governor Jim Pillen signed a 12-week ban into law.
For more on all of this, we go to Louisville, Kentucky, and we’re joined by Tamarra Wieder, Kentucky state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you begin with this first story of attorneys generals, Republicans attorneys general, demanding medical care records of people who have gone to other states for abortion? And what exactly is happening in your state of Kentucky, Tamarra?
TAMARRA WIEDER: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
No, it’s really troubling. Daniel Cameron, our attorney general in Kentucky, along with 18 other attorneys general, have demanded that states turn over medical records, entire medical records, in states where abortion is legal, to hostile states. And this is deeply troubling. This goes against HIPAA laws. You know, this is your private medical records being turned over to hostile attorneys general. What else are they going to do with this? It’s likely that they are going to look for a case to prosecute either providers, patients or those helping people cross state lines to where abortion is legal, seeking care.
JUAN GONZĂLEZ: And, Tamarra Wieder, are they looking for blanket records, or are they wanting the right to look at individual records that they somehow suspect somebody may have violated the abortion bans?
TAMARRA WIEDER: You know, that’s a good question. They are asking for medical records from people, we believe, that are from their state, but they’re asking for the entire record. And that is what’s deeply troubling. Right now, when somebody does have an abortion, there is a terminated pregnancy report, which gives just vital statistics that protects a person’s private medical history and identity. That should be enough statistical information for the state to know how many people from, say, Kentucky are getting an abortion. We know from Indiana’s recent reporting on abortion that over 90% of their out-of-state care for abortion in Indiana went to Kentuckians this last year. That should be enough information for Daniel Cameron. And that’s, you know, across the country with the terminated pregnancy reports. But they’re asking for your entire medical record. And that is going to be scrutinized. Every decision your doctor has made for you over your entire medical history is going to be scrutinized, and that is deeply troubling. And everybody across the country should be concerned and alarmed that your medical history, your choices, your provider’s choices are up for grabs.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the Attorney General Daniel Cameron of Kentucky demanded this information from a Planned Parenthood clinic?
TAMARRA WIEDER: Not yet, to my knowledge. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. And he is running for governor, so we hope that he does not seek that information. You know, right now no Planned Parenthood in Kentucky, of course, is providing abortion, because we are under the ban.
AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to ask you about what’s happened in Nebraska, this astounding story of Facebook handing over the private communication between a mother and a 17-year-old daughter who was seeking an abortion. The mom got abortion pills for her daughter, and the daughter took these pills. Now both the mother and daughter — the daughter, what, faces — she’s 19 now — 90 days in prison.
TAMARRA WIEDER: Yeah. No, it’s deeply troubling that, you know, communication that we’re having, in times where we don’t know what is legal in our communities around healthcare, if we’re just asking questions, if we are seeking out healthcare advice, can be used against us. This information, be it text messages, Facebook messages, search histories, should not be turned against us as we are seeking healthcare.
And people are scared. They are desperate. They need healthcare. And if you are asking questions, if you are searching for support, this should not be turned against anybody. But this is what happens when healthcare is politicized and it is criminalized. People become scared and desperate. Healthcare should be safe for people to search and demand respect from. They should be able to get healthcare from their providers and, you know, talk to their parents about. They should not be criminalized for seeking support.
JUAN GONZĂLEZ: And to go back for a second to this request by these Republican attorney generals, you mentioned the HIPAA law. That’s a federal law. Shouldn’t any judge just throw this out of court, saying that federal law trumps any efforts by local states to access these records?
TAMARRA WIEDER: You know, I hope we’ll find relief from the courts, but the courts have become more politicized in the last decade, you know? And so, there is fear that as we go forward in, you know, relief, if they seek judicial — if they seek the courts to uphold what they are seeking on these records, you know, we don’t know what circuit they’ll go for. Will they go to the judge in Texas, Kacsmaryk? We don’t know how this will play out.
But one thing that I think is really important to focus on is this sets a really chilling precedent. This scares patients. This scares providers. I think that that is a big component of this coordinated attack. It is to set a precedent of fear. If I leave my community, will I be arrested? Will my medical records be released? If I am a provider, will I be subpoenaed and arrested in Kentucky? Should I provide care to out-of-state patients from banned states? I think, you know, what this sets is a precedent of fear that’s going to chill care.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a court in Austin, Texas, last week, which heard testimony from women who are suing to overturn Texas’ abortion ban, which put their lives in danger when they were unable to end their pregnancies, even when they were nonviable. In a dramatic moment, plaintiff Samantha Casiano vomited on the stand as she recounted how she was forced to carry out her pregnancy even after receiving a diagnosis of anencephaly, a severe congenital disorder that results in a baby being born without portions of its brain and skull. And this is another plaintiff, Elizabeth Weller.
ELIZABETH WELLER: I was sent home to wait for my baby to die or for my infection to start showing physical symptoms, even though they were already there. But I wasn’t sick enough to get the care that I needed. There is no statement of pro-life in this state when you send me home to wait for my baby to die inside of me and for me to wait for myself to get to a point where I have to gamble my uterus and gamble my life and gamble any future possibility of becoming pregnant. That’s not pro-life. In a sense, it’s almost pro-torture.
AMY GOODMAN: That news conference was held by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of 13 patients and two doctors. If you can tell us, Tamarra, what you think the Biden administration should be doing as state after state, run by Republicans, are cracking down or imposing almost complete abortion bans? What can the federal government do?
TAMARRA WIEDER: Yeah, I know that story all too well here in Kentucky. We have so many that are nearly identical, as we face the same barriers here. And the federal government, you know, needs to do better by us. They need to protect, protect us, protect Kentuckians, protect Americans seeking abortion care. We shouldn’t be fleeing from our homes to access care that we should be able to get at home. You know, now in Kentucky, we’re going to lose our second-closest state for abortion care next Tuesday. Indiana is going to go dark for abortion care on August 1st, and 90% of Kentuckians were going to Indiana this last year. And so, we will have to go further away for care, and it puts more people in jeopardy, especially in emergent needs, where even in medical crisis, we have to leave our state. And so, more needs to be done, because this is all too familiar a story for so many of us across the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Tamarra Wieder, we want to thank you for being with us, Kentucky state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates.
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Activists protesting Cop City. (photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis)
The Atlanta City Council—and the state more broadly—cannot define “loss” or “victory” for everyday people
Despite Atlanta residents testifying for almost 15 hours during public comment the same day (and another seven hours weeks before) with overwhelming opposition to funding the facility, the City Council members voted 11 to 4 to pass the budget, with roughly another $40 million dedicated to it over the next three decades. This was more than double what officials initially said it would cost.
“We know that safe communities are not heavily policed, they are heavily resourced,” Rehana Lerandeau, an Atlanta resident and member of the group Critical Resistance, told the City Council. “We also know that you cannot train the violence out of policing. Policing at its core is a violent institution.”
The affirmative vote — which also flies in the face of an Emory University survey conducted in the spring showing a plurality of Black Atlanta residents oppose the project — represented significant forward movement towards Cop City’s completion. It was undoubtedly a massive blow to #StopCopCity organizers in Atlanta and beyond who have been fighting for months to stop the project from sucking up sorely needed public funds and further aiding in the militarization of police departments both locally and around the country.
However, the decidedly tough loss was also a masterclass in what it means to lose strategically — to accept defeat at one stage of a campaign while celebrating, and foreshadowing, its significance to a much larger and longer struggle.
In Chicago, where I live, organizers will recall the parallel #NoCopAcademy campaign from 2017 – 19, which fought the construction of a $95 million police training facility in the majority Black west side neighborhood of Garfield Park. After an 18-month struggle – during which I was one of the core organizers – attempting to block multiple votes approving the project’s budget and zoning, we ultimately lost the final vote on March 13, 2019, when the Chicago City Council approved the contract with multinational conglomerate AECOM to build the academy by a 38 to 8 margin.
This marked the end of the campaign and it was a devastating loss, but it also represented a massive shift for our city and our social movements in our efforts to defund and abolish police. During the final vote, hundreds of local residents, many of them young people, took over City Hall for hours. They participated in public comment but they also chanted, sang and danced in the halls. The 8 “no” votes were a huge achievement for our campaign, especially given that it was the largest block of council members we’d ever gotten to oppose the project, and because that configuration of the City Council under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel voted in step with the mayor’s office more than 90% of the time.
But there were even more significant victories coming down the pike that we had no way of predicting. In the aldermanic elections that closely followed the final vote for the cop academy, many of candidates who supported our campaign either kept or won their seats, creating a crucial leftward shift in the City Council from which poor and working Chicagoans continue to benefit. And no one could have imagined that a global pandemic and the subsequent murder of George Floyd would lead to one of the largest protests in U.S. history, with millions of people calling for the defunding of police only a year after campaigns like ours had helped foreground the issue and make the demand plausible.
Chicago organizers walked into that #NoCopAcademy final vote knowing we would lose. But accepting defeat, and accepting defeat on the state’s terms, are two very different things. We understood that it didn’t just matter that we lost, it mattered how we lost. Going out with massive, noisy, and joyous resistance wasn’t just about setting the tone for the day, it was about laying the foundation for future battles — ones that ended up having a much wider impact than any of us could have known on that afternoon in 2019.
In a similar fashion, on the day of the vote last month, #StopCopCity organizers didn’t merely show up to Atlanta City Hall en masse, they transformed it into their own vision for their city. Participants offered free childcare, passed out masks to ensure COVID safety, and communed over hot food that was brought in by continuous waves by volunteers who made sure as many local residents as possible had the opportunity to make their voices safely heard. Knowing full well that City Council members would vote with Atlanta’s 1% and not the constituents who elected them, many of those giving public comment chose not to address the corporate shills, but instead to speak directly to their fellow residents:
“Not a single member of this body is worthy of being addressed today, but you, the people of Atlanta, are worthy of being addressed today,” said Eva Dickerson, turning away from the City Council and to the audience. “I am a teacher, a farmer, and a neighbor, and Atlanta I love you. I believe in you so deeply. Do you remember 2020? When we took this city? When we took these streets? … This is our city. We do not answer to any of these cowards. They answer to us.”
Though not every speaker identified themselves as a police or prison abolitionist, many articulated abolitionist dreams for their neighborhoods, clearly stating again and again that resources were what were needed to keep their communities safe, not more racist policing. Moreover, when the Atlanta City Council did approve the budget for Cop City – including a defensive Michael Julian Bond, who rode his father’s civil rights legacy into public office – organizers were prepared. They immediately announced a new Week of Action against the compound and introduced a referendum that would halt construction, which voters could petition to get onto the ballot this fall. The maneuver was characteristic of a campaign whose genius has always been about creating multiple points of entry for people from across the political spectrum, and supporting a wide range of tactics to achieve its abolitionist ends.
June 5, 2023, like March 13, 2019, was also a lesson in taking losses in stride, not only because we should expect them when directly challenging wealthy and entrenched institutions of violence, but because one “no” vote delivered by an undemocratic sham of a body should propel us into new action, not demoralize us into apathy.
While many Atlanta residents were appalled to see their leaders vote in favor of a project with such resounding disapproval from the public, the resulting disillusionment was itself a form of victory. Locals there, especially those who may not have been previously politically engaged, are collectively learning the same thing we learned in Chicago during the #NoCopAcademy campaign: If we accept that the state does not actually represent the interests of everyday, ordinary people, that it is not actually the democratic apparatus it has fought to convince us it is, then the state is equally incapable of delivering true justice – true victory, true liberation – to everyday people.
The state cannot define “loss” or “victory” for everyday people. A city council cannot give it or take it away. We define these things for ourselves through struggle, through relationship building, through the envisioning and enacting of our own liberation on our own terms.
Victory in Chicago has looked like the recent election of progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson. This is not because individual elected officials are the key to winning abolition, but because Chicago choosing the candidate with a clear platform of funding social programs instead of the same old law-and-order fear mongering of rival Paul Vallas proves that abolition as a narrative is winning – a direct result of campaigns like #NoCopAcademy. It is becoming common sense in our city that the constant ratcheting up of policing and incarceration is not addressing the root causes of violence, and that social programs and the meeting of basic needs are what create real public safety.
We do not yet know if the #StopCopCity campaign will be successful in shutting down its destructive target in Atlanta. But we do know it has revealed the craven nature of local leaders to a much wider audience. We do know they have radicalized a new generation of organizers in Georgia, and built real bonds of solidarity with other abolitionists around the country and world. We know they have given thousands of people accessible entry points into anti-police and anti-militarist organizing. And while we may not know what battles lie ahead, we know that all of these achievements provide the necessary foundations for future victories – victories which only we can imagine and define. We know that, no matter what happens on the local scale, abolitionist organizers have already won a shifting tide of public opinion in the direction of a demilitarized future.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) speaks at the Moms for Liberty Summit in Philadelphia. (photo: Hannah Beier/The Washington Post)
From laws to standards, Florida’s governor is shaping and limiting what students can learn
A host of laws and policies enacted during the controversial administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hem in teachers on all sides, requiring them to give — or stay away from — certain lessons, on penalty of possibly losing their jobs. A 2022 law mandates students may not be made to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” because they were forced to reflect on bad acts committed in the past by members of their race. And now, according to curriculum standards released last week, Florida students must learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit” — an assertion that immediately drew fire from historians.
Over the past three years, DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has led his state through a rapid-fire reevaluation of Black history education. In that time, Florida has adopted laws restricting the teaching of race; repudiated an Advanced Placement course that DeSantis blasted as “woke”; rejected a host of math and social studies textbooks partly for alleged references to critical race theory; and, in late July, approved a set of history standards emphasizing the benefits of slavery for the enslaved.
DeSantis’s initiatives have divided and riveted not only his state, but also the nation. Some warn of an erasure of the reality of Black lives. “They are whitewashing history and the African American experience in the United States,” said Andrew Spar, head of the Florida Education Association.
Yet others laud these measures as a needed corrective to liberal bias in education. “The governor and the Department of Education is teaching history in a balanced way, not from a one-sided point of view that the United States is an oppressive nation,” said Keith Flaugh, co-founder and CEO of the Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative education advocacy group.
Each of the DeSantis administration’s actions on Black history has drawn harsh blowback from not only the political left, but also many educators and historians. Last week’s release of the standards was no exception. It earned bipartisan political condemnation, too, from figures such as Vice President Harris (D) and GOP presidential candidates Will Hurd, a former congressman from Texas, and Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey.
“Enslavement wasn’t a training ground for job placement. It was an institution that was horrific,” said LaGarrett King, a professor at the University at Buffalo and founding director of the school’s Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education.
Asked about the cascade of criticism and the administration’s track record on Black history more generally, DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern sent a link to tweets he posted quoting William B. Allen, a member of Florida’s African American History Standards working group, in support of the curriculum he helped develop. Contacted for comment, Allen, a Black professor emeritus at Michigan State University, wrote in an email that the goal of the standards is to tell the truth.
“It is correct that people held in slavery both arrived with and developed skills that inured to their personal benefit and accomplishment,” Allen wrote. “I stand behind the work of the group in its literal rendering.”
DeSantis has spoken out in recent days to back up the standards. He told a group of reporters and supporters Friday that enslavement sometimes led to job opportunities. “They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said, addressing an almost all-White crowd. He said the standards are “rooted in whatever is factual.”
The governor’s intervention into the teaching of Black history dates at least to summer 2021. That June, the state Board of Education banned “critical race theory,” a catchall term used on the right to denote various teachings about race, and the New York Times’s 1619 Project from classrooms. DeSantis spoke to the board before its meeting, telling the members that “some of this stuff is, I think, really toxic” and that “we will not let them bring nonsense ideology into Florida’s schools.”
The campaign has since shifted to state lawmakers. Between 2021 and 2023, the Republican-dominated legislature — with DeSantis’s guidance and encouragement — adopted a raft of laws restricting teaching about sex, gender, race and racism.
One such measure that took effect in July 2022, known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” prohibits teaching that an individual, by virtue of his or her race or color, “bears responsibility for ... actions committed in the past by other members of the same race.” Signing this law in April 2022, DeSantis promised: “We are not gonna use your tax dollars to teach our kids to hate this country or to hate each other.”
That same month, the Florida Department of Education also rejected 54 math textbooks, some for alleged references to critical race theory. The department conducted a similar review of social studies textbooks this spring, deeming more than 30 unacceptable, some because they conflict with state laws on race education.
In early 2023, the Education Department rejected a pilot version of the College Board’s long-planned AP African American studies course, contending it lacked “educational value.” DeSantis declared the class a form of “indoctrination.” DeSantis’s bashing of the AP course led at least four other states to launch reviews of the program, The Washington Post reported.
Most recently came the 216-page state academic standards, which encompass Black history. In addition to mandating that teachers detail the benefits of slavery for the enslaved, these standards — approved unanimously by the Florida Board of Education last week — specify that, when talking about mob violence against Black citizens, teachers must mention “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
The standards also say teachers must highlight positive contributions made by Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and tell fifth-graders about the “resiliency” of Black Americans, such as their efforts to help enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad. Florida is one of 12 states with a law requiring the teaching of Black history, per a tally by Education Week. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act” reiterated that teachers must discuss “the history of African Americans” — an element of the legislation touted by the governor’s supporters as proof he wants to accurately teach history.
DeSantis has based his White House bid on modeling a federal agenda that mimics how he has governed in Florida. He has emphasized using government power to shape corporate and academic positions on controversial social issues, especially diversity and sexuality.
The initial strength off DeSantis’s landslide reelection as governor has faded in early polls as Republicans have rallied around former president Donald Trump after his multiple indictments. The DeSantis campaign is now working to recalibrate its spending, events and media strategy, with a special focus on pulling off an upset in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest.
Teachers are already contacting Spar of the Florida Education Association about the standards, he said, sharing worry and frustration. If educators fail to teach to the standards, they could lose their teaching certificate, Spar said. He added that by attacking teachers’ certificates, Florida’s government could also make it very hard for erring teachers to get school jobs in other states.
For mother Stephana Ferrell, meanwhile, the standards added weight to fears that children in the state, including her elementary-schoolers, are not learning true, full history, with serious consequences for their and the nation’s future. Ferrell, who directs the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which advocates against book bans in schools, said people have advised her to supplement her children’s education with outside reading.
“But if my children decide they want to go to college out of Florida,” she asked, “will their application be viewed the same way as another student in another area of the country who did have a more robust education and an understanding of our shared history?”
To others, though, DeSantis is a hero.
Flaugh of the Florida Citizens Alliance said schoolteachers have become overly focused on the negative aspects of U.S. history in recent years, especially the wrongs and violence done to Black people. He said DeSantis is fighting against what he called a depressing, harmful and inaccurate trend.
“The balance was just not there,” he said, “in terms of teaching our kids what actually happened.”
Some historians take issue with this characterization.
Donald Ritchie, former historian of the U.S. Senate who has written history textbooks since the 1970s, said America has a long tradition of justifying slavery. He said the “moonlight and magnolia” school of thought held sway from the 1860s to the 1960s, asserting that plantations were lovely places in which enslavers treated the enslaved like family.
Only in the 1960s through the 1990s did historians begin to reassess that rosy picture, relying on 1930s-era interviews with former enslaved people as well as runaway slave advertisements in newspapers and records documenting enslaved people’s rebellions. The consensus, Ritchie said, was overwhelming.
“They began to get a slave’s perspective, and it’s much darker,” Ritchie said. “The benefits of slavery were entirely to the slaveowners. Enslaved people did not benefit from slavery; that is a point of view that has been pretty much refuted.”
Still, over the weekend, Redfern, the DeSantis spokesperson, sent The Washington Post a message justifying the new state standards.
The message linked to an Encyclopedia.com entry titled “Crafts and Slave Handicrafts: An Overview.” The first sentence of the entry states, “There is ample evidence regarding the production of crafts by slaves in the American colonies and during the antebellum period in the Untied [sic] States.”
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, holds a vial of insulin medicine during a hearing in Washington, D.C., May 10, 2023. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg)
Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need more cheaply.
The measure was part of an amendment to a bill reauthorizing the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, and was reported out of the committee 17-3. It allocates $3 million for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study different models to pay for the development of new drugs. NASEM, which was created by Congress to provide high-quality advice on technical issues, would have to produce the report within two years.
The bill’s language specifically instructs NASEM to examine two ways of funding new drugs: the government paying for it directly, and innovation prizes for inventors. Drugs created in this manner would presumably then be placed in the public domain and sold as generics.
This issue is almost never discussed in U.S. politics and would likely sound arcane and meaningless to most people if they ever heard about it. But in reality, it’s both easy to understand and powerfully relevant to all of our lives. Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need, while at the same time saving regular people huge amounts of money.
The most important thing to understand about drugs is that they are expensive to discover and test for safety and efficacy — but once that’s done, they’re generally cheap to manufacture. According to the Food and Drug Administration, when a patent on a drug has expired and there are five generic companies producing it, the price will fall nearly 85 percent. In the 10 years from 2009 to 2019, the lower costs of generics saved the U.S. health care system $2.2 trillion.
The current way of dealing with this dynamic is so entrenched that it may seem like a law of nature. First, pharmaceutical companies pay the high costs of developing new drugs. (At least theoretically — the federal government often pays for a significant chunk of the upfront outlays.) Then, so the drug companies can recoup their investment and make a profit, they are granted a patent on their discoveries that lasts 20 years. This gives them alone the right to make and sell the drug. In other words, for two decades the government steps in to prevent a free market from functioning.
The most striking recent example of this is vaccines for Covid-19. Moderna raked in $36 billion for its vaccine in 2021 and 2022 — and if you try to make and sell a version of it yourself, you will go to jail. This case is especially galling, given that the government paid even more than usual for the drug’s development costs.
The proposed study could lay the ground for a new world, in which the government would use different mechanisms in another pandemic to create incentives for the creation of treatments. Pharmaceutical companies would still make money, just not gargantuan amounts of it thanks to a public health emergency.
You can measure the age of this current patent system by the fact that it’s mentioned in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
It’s important to read this carefully, however. Congress has the power to grant patents, but the Constitution does not require it to do so.
Thomas Jefferson expounded on his perspective on this at great length in a letter he wrote in 1813. “Ideas,” he said, “should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition. … Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society.”
The time seems ripe now to consider whether our current system serves the the will and convenience of society. The U.S pharmaceutical industry is incredibly costly, with 2021 revenues of $550 billion and profits far higher than those of other industries.
But the price may not be the worst part of it. Patents perversely disincentivize companies from developing actual cures — because when a patient is cured, they no longer will need the drug. As Chris Rock once said, “There ain’t no money in the cure. The money’s in the medicine. That’s how a drug dealer makes his money — on the comeback.”
This has led to systematic underdevelopment of new antibiotics, with disastrous results: Over 1 million people worldwide are now killed every year by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, with the number potentially rising to 10 million by 2050.
This is also a problem for new classes of drugs. Goldman Sachs analysts explained it straightforwardly in 2018, writing in a report: “The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy [but] while this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
Drug companies are also left unmotivated to research drugs to treat rare diseases, given the low number of potential buyers. This has long been recognized as a flaw in the patent system; the passage of the Orphan Drug Act in 1983 was an attempt to nudge pharmaceutical companies to make some effort in these areas. Notably, the Orphan Drug Act followed a 1979 FDA report examining the problem of drugs for unusual afflictions.
Meanwhile, patents incentivize the development and promotion of truly dangerous drugs. The Sackler family made billions from helping to generate an opioid epidemic, inventing drugs that were extremely profitable because they were addictive and patients were desperate to keep using them, up until the point they expired.
Thus, we might be much better off with the government simply absorbing all the cost of developing new drugs and then allowing any drug company to manufacture them. This makes particular sense because the government already pays for a large chunk of the expenses. Money from the National Institutes of Health contributed to the development of every single one of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA from 2010-16, providing a cumulative subsidy to the drug industry of $100 billion.
Dean Baker, a progressive economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, looks closely at this issue in his book “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.” He estimates that if patent protection for drugs and medical devices ended, with the government covering the tab for research, the net saving for regular Americans would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
The proposed NASEM study would examine this issue and much more. But whether it will actually happen is still very much up in the air. The reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act will have to pass the entire Senate, and the study would then have to survive reconciliation with the House version. (A House committee has approved its own PAHPA reauthorization, but without the study.)
Most importantly, the pharmaceutical industry will be doing everything possible to knife this positive development in its crib. PhRMA, the industry’s trade group, has released a statement that it is “deeply concerned” because a new system of drug development could let “the government pick winners and losers.” That’s a power they intend to keep for themselves, along with all the profits that flow from it.
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An image of Marielle Franco is projected onto a building in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 14, 2023, during a tribute to mark the fifth anniversary of her killing. (photo: Amanda Perobelli/Reuters)
Justice minister says Brazil is close to solving ‘horrendous’ 2018 slaying of Rio de Janeiro councilwoman.
A preventive arrest warrant and seven search and seizure warrants were served, Justice Minister Flavio Dino said during a press conference in the capital, Brasilia, on Monday.
The man arrested was named as former firefighter Maxwell Simoes Correia, and he is suspected of hiding the weapons used by the ex-police suspects who are on trial over the shooting, Dino said.
“We are close to solving this horrendous crime,” he said.
The killing of Franco, a Black, openly gay and progressive councilwoman born in a poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood, sent shock waves across Brazil and spurred mass protests calling for accountability and justice.
On the five-year anniversary of the killing in March, Amnesty International urged Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to establish an “international mechanism of independent experts” to support the local authorities investigating the case.
“Over the past five years, six different police chiefs, eleven prosecutors, four police secretaries, three governors, one federal ombudsman, two attorneys general and three presidents of the republic have been in charge of the investigations, and we still have no answers,” Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, said in a statement at the time.
“Who ordered the killing of Marielle Franco and [her driver] Anderson Gomes, and why? It is unacceptable that, after half a decade, none of the authorities that have gone through this case have been able to solve it,” Werneck said.
In March 2019, two former police officers, Ronnie Lessa and Elcio de Queiroz, were indicted on charges of shooting Franco and Gomes. They remain in federal prison custody.
Dino said on Monday that Queiroz, who is accused of driving the car used in the crime, made a plea bargain with police and prosecutors and said he was an accessory to the crime and confirmed that Lessa was involved in the murder.
The minister added that information provided by Queiroz will help identify others involved in the crime and more police operations can be expected in the coming weeks.
A rising star in the Socialism and Liberty Party, Franco was an outspoken critic of police killings of poor Rio residents. Investigators believe her killing to be a political assassination carried out by paid hit men.
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Climate activist Greta Thunberg being carried away by the police. (photo: AFP)
Climate activist carried away by police for blocking traffic at protest near the harbour in Malmo, Sweden.
Thunberg, 20, who became the face of young climate activists worldwide after staging weekly protests in front of the Swedish parliament, admitted during the court proceedings on Monday that she had disobeyed the police order but pleaded not guilty and said she was acting out of necessity.
Asked by reporters if she would exercise more caution in the future following her fine, Thunberg said climate protesters were “definitely not going to back down”.
“We know that we cannot save the world by playing by the rules because the laws have to be changed,” the activist said.
“It is absurd that those who act in line with science should pay the price for it,” she told reporters in the Malmo District Court.
Thunberg and other activists from the group Reclaim the Future blocked the road for oil trucks in Malmo harbour on June 19. She was charged for failing to leave when ordered to do so by police.
After Monday’s sentencing, Thunberg and other activists headed back to Malmo harbour only to be carried away by police again for blocking traffic.
Thunberg had earlier told the court that her actions were justifiable. “I believe that we are in an emergency that threatens life, health and property,” she said. “Countless people and communities are at risk both in the short term and in the long term.”
The court ordered Thunberg to pay a fine of 1,500 crowns ($144) and an additional 1,000 crowns to Sweden’s fund for crime victims.
The fine was applied in proportion to her reported income. Failure to obey a police order carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison.
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