RIP 

Nightmare On Elm Street Actor John Saxon Dies At 83 

Enter the Dragon star leaves behind vast body of work.

New Line

John Saxon, the rugged and intense-eyed actor who rose to iconic status for his roles in Enter the Dragon and A Nightmare on Elm Street, has died of pneumonia in his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, according to his wife Gloria. He was 83 years old.

Born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn, New York, he was discovered at age 17 by famed talent agent Henry Willson and rechristened John Saxon. His breakthrough came in 1956, when his starring roles in the film noir The Unguarded Moment and the musical Rock, Pretty Baby made him a teen idol and brought in some 3000 fan letters a week. At the 1958 Golden Globes, he won Most Promising Newcomer - Male.

For the next three decades Saxon would appear in dozens of films and television series as both a charismatic leading man and reliable supporting player. His turn as an unstable Mexican bandito opposite Marlon Brando in the 1966 Western The Appaloosa brought him a second Golden Globe nomination, and he played Dr. Theodore Stuart on the NBC drama The Bold Ones: The New Doctors for three seasons. During this time he also began appearing in European films, starring in Mario Bava's seminal giallo horror The Girl Who Knew Too Much (released stateside as Evil Eye), and several poliziotteschi (crime) films.

Warner Bros.

One of his most well-remembered parts would come in 1973, when he starred opposite martial arts icon Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Saxon, who was practiced in judo and Shotokan karate, played sleazy American gambler Roper, on the run from loan sharks and participating in a martial arts tournament with Lee and fellow martial artist Jim Kelly. Saxon was meant to die in the film's second act, but his agent insisted that he live through the end and had the script rewritten to accommodate the change.

Though no stranger to horror films, Saxon would become forever etched in the minds of horror fans when he starred as Lt. Donald Thompson, father of Heather Langenkamp's Nancy Thompson, in Wes Craven's iconic 1984 supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street. As a well-meaning but overbearing and ultimately-useless police officer, Saxon came to define the impotent authority figure that would be a central part of the series and the horror genre as a whole. He would later reprise his role in the 1987 sequel Dream Warriors, and play himself in the 1994 metasequel New Nightmare.

New Line

Saxon continued acting well into his seventies. His last credited role was in the 2017 indie film The Extra, and he's still listed as part of Bring Me the Head of Lance Henriksen, which is in post-production. At the time of his death, he had appeared in 200 film and television projects over 60 years. He was married three times, to screenwriter Mary Ann Murphy, airline attendant turned actress Elizabeth Saxon and, since 2008, cosmetician Gloria Martel. He is survived by his sons, Antonio and Lance; grandson Mitchell; great-grandson John; and sister Dolores.

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LAST WEEK
Thousands of US workers walk out in 'Strike for Black Lives'
21 July 2020 - BY AFP

The Strike For Black Lives rally, which brought together labour unions, fast food restaurant workers and racial and social justice groups and a car caravan in support of Black Lives Matter, is taking place in numerous cities across America.
Image: Frederic J. BROWN / AFP

Thousands of US workers walked out of their jobs across the country Monday for a strike in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and other minority groups which suffer racism.

The "Strike for Black Lives" saw employees from a broad range of industries briefly walk off their jobs in a call to end "systemic racism."

US media reported that tens of thousands of people in more than 200 cities across the country participated in the strike.
Although organizers did not have exact figures on how many people took part, they said around 1,500 janitors demonstrated in San Francisco, and nearly 6,000 nurses from 85 different nursing homes in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut also went on strike, according to The Washington Post.

In New York, some 100 people marched outside the Trump International Hotel to demand the adoption of the HEROES Act, legislation that would provide financial aid to households struggling during the coronavirus pandemic.

The bill was passed in May by the Democrat-majority House of Representatives but has since been blocked by the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.

Among the New Yorkers who demonstrated in sweltering heat were nurses, doormen and cleaners -- workers who were considered essential during the pandemic and turned up for their jobs even when it put them at risk of infection.

African Americans and Hispanics died in disproportionately high numbers in New York City's coronavirus epidemic, which killed more than 22,000 residents.

"We are the ones who have kept the economy going and have kept everybody safe and in NY specially have kept the numbers down. We should be respected and compensated for that," said 42-year-old doorman Jordan Weiss.

The Service Employees International Union said protests would take place in more than two dozen cities including Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Interview
Glenda Jackson: ‘I’m an antisocial socialist’

Rich Pelley

Glenda Jackson: ‘I am not very good at dressing up. I don’t really like parties.’ 

Photograph: Anton Corbijn/Trunk Archive

Glenda Jackson doesn’t much like going out, but to save the UK’s arts industry, the actor, former MP and slightly terrifying national treasure will consider it…

Published on Sun 26 Jul 2020

“Don’t be ridiculous,” barks Glenda Jackson down the phone. “Are you kidding me?”

Oh dear. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Glenda Jackson. The 84-year-old double Oscar-winning actor and ex-MP is the national treasure of national treasures; as renowned for speaking her mind as she is for airing her politics. Indeed, as a Labour MP she famously threatened to challenge Tony Blair if he didn’t resign over the Hutton inquiry into Iraq. So she’s hardly likely to take any nonsense from some scruffy journalist who has just asked her if she would consider a return to politics.

“I’m 84 years old. You think I’ve got the energy to go pounding around the pavements again?” she says. How about if they just instantly promoted her to prime minister, I wonder, out loud, by accident, with immediate regret.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I took being an MP very seriously. Questions like that don’t sit well with me.”

Insubordinate questions aside, Glenda Jackson is lovely; like any octogenarian who has spent their career in the public eye, she dishes out as good as she gets. She doesn’t do Zoom, and sensibly isn’t taking in visitors at the moment, but otherwise she’s more than happy to accommodate. (“This is your interview, my dear,” she reassures. “You choose what we talk about.”) She’s Glenda all over, but the only Glenda I get to appreciate today is that voice: velvet, austere and with the throaty rasp of smoking a lifetime’s stash of fags.

We’re speaking today because Jackson is back on our screens for the first time since 1992, and back in the running for awards in spite of the fact that she’s already won them all, from Emmys, Golden Globes and Oscars to Tony Awards. (“I’m not ungrateful,” she says nonchalantly, “but that isn’t what you work for. I was just grateful for getting the job. The idea of something on top was way down the list.”)

Vote winner: at a Labour Party meeting with Gordon Brown in 2010. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock


This time she’s up for a TV Bafta for the BBC drama Elizabeth is Missing, screened last Christmas and based on the 2014 novel by Emma Healey. The Guardian awarded it five stars, praising Jackson’s “magnificent form in a poignant murder mystery that doubles as a study of the sorrows of dementia.” Jackson herself has been nominated for best actress at the ceremony, which takes place on 31 July. (“I’ll be watching in my living room, on Zoom, or whatever it’s called…”)

Is she enjoying the limelight again?

“I mean, there’s very little limelight in my small flat. I assure you of that.”

Jackson lives in a basement granny flat in Blackheath. Her 51-year-old son – Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges – lives upstairs with his wife and 11-year-old son, Jackson’s only grandchild.

“I haven’t been out of my front door for three months,” she says. “Fortunately, my flat is garden level. The sun is shining. The rest of my family live upstairs, so I do have people looking after me, which is nice. I have lost all track of time. Time is an endless river, but I never know which day it is. It was my birthday in May. My grandson came downstairs and said, ‘Happy birthday’. I didn’t know it was my birthday. I’d completely forgotten. But then I’ve never been a birthday person.”

And how does she think the government has been coping with this terrible pandemic?

“I mean, they’re not, but you wouldn’t expect me to have any other reaction to a Conservative government. But in fairness, this is such an extraordinary interruption to life that I think we can be critical when we should be, but supportive when we have to be. I think Keir [Starmer] is doing very well. But at the moment, party politics are way down the level of national concern.”

The view from here: with her husband Roy Hodges 1971. She had just been awarded an Academy Award for her role as Gudrun in Women in Love. Photograph: Joe Bangay/Getty Images


The major political event since Jackson’s political retirement has of course been Brexit, to which the conversation naturally flows. Where did she stand?

“Well, I’m a Remainer,” she says. “I went to bed the night of the referendum hearing that the verdict was going to be remain. I woke up in the morning to discover we were coming out. I said to my daughter-in-law, ‘We’re going to have to emigrate to Scotland!’”

Only 27% of 18 to 24-year-olds who voted, voted to leave. But 60% of over-65s who voted, voted to leave. Does Jackson have any theories on why Brexit was so successful at securing the so-called grey vote?

“Was it really 60%?” she queries. “I can certainly see how it was a generational thing, looking through rose-tinted spectacles, saying, ‘We can be an empire again’. But do you seriously think Canada, New Zealand and Australia are going to say, ‘Please govern us again’? I think most young people are still shocked at the idea of coming out of Europe. Negotiations are still ongoing. We still don’t know what kind of deal we’re going to get and we won’t until the pandemic stops pushing it off the front pages.”

As part of its pandemic measures, the government earlier this month announced its £1.57bn investment to protect Britain’s cultural, arts and heritage institutions, having left much of the industry up the proverbial creak since March. What does Jackson say to this scheme?

Long to reign over us: as Queen Elizabeth I in Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

“I say, ‘Thank you very much indeed.’ But the problem, certainly for the performing arts, is that generating money is vital. The problem remains: will audiences be confident enough to come back? The idea that performances now can take place outdoors is very positive. We’ve always had outdoor summer performances, even when it pours with rain. It’s good, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

Considering that the arts is Britain’s second biggest economy after finance, is £1.57bn enough? By comparison, the government’s furlough scheme is thought to have cost £14bn a month since March.

“The word ‘enough’ is meaningless, really,” Jackson continues. “Some productions require a great deal of money. Others can be very small. But it’s good to know that at least the validity of the arts, of our culture has been acknowledged and there is money to keep at least several arms and legs afloat. But I go back to my previous point. When will we, as people, feel confident enough to sit in theatres and concert halls? We’re still in this uncertain area. Have we actually crushed this pandemic? Or is a second spike going to come next week?”


So how would she feel about venturing out of the house for the first time in three months to put her Most Excellent Order of the British Empire bum on seat?

“As a member of the audience? I would seriously think about it. I was thinking about this earlier and wondered if it would be possible to stage something where you could see the stage, but any potential germs might be prevented by… a very fine net or something. I know it sounds ridiculous… Fortunately, we’re talking about the acknowledged creative aspect of a society. So people will come up with ideas.”

Anyway, she doesn’t particularly like going out. “I’m not good at dressing up. I don’t particularly like going out to parties. I think I’m an antisocial socialist, actually.”

So, not a big schmoozer? “No. I’m no good at it. I can’t do it. It’s just not my style. There’s always the element that you have to sell the product. But for me, it’s only the work that’s interesting.”

To play the king: as Lear at the Old Vic with Rhys Ifans as Fool and directed by Deborah Warner. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Isn’t schmoozing just acting? Can’t she just act schmoozey? “Oh, come on. That isn’t what it’s about. The demands are very different.”

Jackson found fame in 1970s Academy Award-winning romantic dramas Women in Love and A Touch of Class, then quit a stellar acting career for politics when she was elected Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate in 1992. She was junior transport minister from 1997 to 1999 and stood down in the 2015 general election, two days before her 79th birthday.

The next year, she returned to the stage for the first time in 25 years, as King Lear at the Old Vic and later Broadway. Her performance was touted as “magnificent” and Jackson was nominated for an Olivier. Was she confident in returning to acting? What if she’d forgotten how to act?

“That’s what someone said to me when I was doing Lear at the Old Vic,” she says. “I was talking to a friend and I said, ‘My God, I might have forgotten.’ And she said, ‘It’s like riding a bike. You never forget.’”

Jackson was cast sex-blind as King Lear because King Lear is, more traditionally – and definitely according to Shakespeare – a bloke. Sir Ian McKellen (age 81) has just been cast as Hamlet (age 30) in a similar age-blind role.

“Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? If we’re all living longer, that includes actors as well, I hope,” says Jackson. “It will be interesting to see what he does with it.”

You’ve done sex-blind. Could you do age-blind, I ask? Could you be a Juliet?

“Are you kidding me?” laughs Jackson. “Come on! One of the things I’ve found most curious – given we’re not equal by any means as far as women in the world are concerned – is that contemporary dramatists still don’t find us interesting. Very few contemporary dramatists place a woman as the central dramatic. And I find that bizarre. I’ve been banging on about it for a very long time, but nobody takes any notice.”

But you’re Glenda Jackson! They should listen to your every word!

“Oh, come off it!”

How about Margaret Thatcher? Could you play her, um, politics-blind?

“I would find it very hard. I’ve always tried to abide by an unbreakable rule that you have to look at the world through the eyes of whoever you are playing. And I would find it very, very hard to see the world that Thatcher wanted us to inhabit.”

She’s played Elizabeth I, a role for which she famously shaved her head. Could she play Queen Elizabeth Version 2.0?

“Oh, well anybody can play the Queen. I mean, God, if ever a woman’s kept herself to herself, it’s the Queen. Who knows what she’s like? You know what she’s like as the Queen. What’s she like as a person? That is one of the best kept secrets in the world.”

Does Jackson watch her own TV shows and films?

“No.”

What happens if one comes on telly, would she change the channel?

“Well, it would be on very late at night, wouldn’t it? I’d be in bed and fast asleep.”


Is she critical of her own performances?

“I certainly don’t enjoy them. My reaction is completely subjective. I think, ‘Why did you choose to do that? Why didn’t you do something different there?’ But it’s all too late. It’s pretty much part of the sadomasochistic streak, which I think is in all actors.”

‘People have said that the care sector should be equated with the NHS’: starring in Elizabeth is Missing which deals with the challenges of living with Alzheimer’s. Photograph: Marsaili Mainz/Acorn TV

In Elizabeth is Missing, Jackson plays a widowed grandmother living with Alzheimer’s – something she thinks we ignore at our peril. “Despite the pandemic, we are – along with all other western democracies – living longer. And the big black hole that no one really has examined – is, how do we actually pay for those extra years when people may not have a family to support their inability to look after themselves, because of Alzheimer’s and dementia?

“We need to have that discussion: how do we pay for it? We’re beginning to see the first ripples in what will be a fairly big stream of how to provide the requisite care as a society. But this is not something that can be solved by individual practices. It is something that we, as a society, have to put on the table and think about seriously. For example, people have said that the care sector should be equated with the NHS. This is something that has to be looked at.”

I wonder if Jackson feels vulnerable herself? Does she feel her own immortality?

“Well, by virtue of my age and of the time we’re living in, I mean, of course one does. I’m not overtly religious, but when things get bad, I’m constantly calling on God. I’m grateful for the other dimensions that are there for all of us. I do believe that we’re more than flesh, blood and stone. I was partially raised as a Welsh Presbyterian and that runs quite deep. I do have a spiritual side.”

Has she ever met anyone else called Glenda?

“I did, actually. A woman came up to me. It was years ago. My mother was torn between two Hollywood stars – Glenda Farrell and Shirley Temple. I think I’m quite grateful she opted for Ms Farrell.

And has she taken up any bonkers hobbies during lockdown, to help pass the time?”

“No,” she chuckles. “But I do have the tidiest knicker drawer in the world.”

Elizabeth is Missing is available to stream on Acorn TV from 31 July


An interview with Glenda Jackson – archive, 1969

28 November 1969 While starring as Gudrun in Ken Russell’s Women in Love should have made here instantly recognisable, Jackson maintains her anonymity is safe

Glenda Jackson in Women in Love, 1969. Photograph: Everett/REX Shutterstock

Catherine Stott
Published onTue 28 Nov 2017 05.00 GMT

Glenda Jackson has a face which, while not actually anonymous, can change so much from one day to the next, from one emotion to another, as to be barely recognisable. Indeed no one ever has recognised her, for which fact she is enormously grateful. It would seem likely to anyone else that Miss Jackson cannot fail to be instantly recognisable henceforth, after the marvellous reviews she has collected for her performance as Gudrun in Women in Love, but she thankfully maintains that her precious anonymity is safe.

For several years she has been an actor’s, critic’s, and director’s actress; extremely diligent and professional on the job, but having a real horror of the glossy accompaniments to the success in her field. The only time she thinks about acting is when she is doing it and she divides her life rigidly into “work” and “home” – “an ordinary person leading a non public life” she calls herself. Asked to give a rundown of her acting career, she disposes of 13 years’ work in about 20 seconds, where far less talented actresses would take a good two hours.


Glenda Jackson on her scary reputation: ‘I’ve never understood the fear thing’
ead more

She says that she had six lean years and seven where things were getting better and she was always in work. She first came to notice after playing Charlotte Corday in the Peter Brook production of The Marat/Sade.

She explains her workmanlike attitude: “The thing about acting is that you start out looking for work and that takes you three quarters of your time and the quality and size of it are immaterial – all you want to do is work. Then you work more regularly and perhaps do one thing which attracts notice and brings more work. The only people I ever meet are people involved with the work, never anybody outside who says, ‘Gosh, aren’t you Glenda Jackson?’ So the so-called acclaim is merely some thing you read about. It doesn’t touch me personally.

I’m quite sure I’ll never be recognised anyway because I never look outside like I look in anything I act in. I go out looking absolutely dreadful.” (She pulls an ugly face to demonstrate and for a moment it is hard to see how “Harper’s” once wanted to include her in their list of Most Beautiful Women.)

Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jennie Linden and Eleanor Bron in a scene of Ken Russell’s film Women in Love. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UNITED ARTISTS


Women in Love is Glenda Jackson’s first film to have an automatic release. By the time she finished it she was six months pregnant. Now she is playing the mad wife of Tchaikovsky, again in a Ken Russell film, and next year expects to play the Dorothy Tutin part in The Devils – again for Ken Russell. Being a rather severe artist herself, she says characteristically that “this will be a very good thing for Ken Russell to do because it will mean that he can’t be lyrical and have people running through trees and fields of corn.”

She has become completely jaundiced by the live theatre, positively iconoclastic. “It is a dead loss, she says damningly. “Boring and tedious to work in. Everything about it is wrong these days – the theatres themselves, the plays they put on, the large companies. It would have to be a marvellous play to tempt me back.


From the archive, 8 April 1970: Women In Love and sex on the big screen
Read more

In the theatre what happens is that you find something in a rehearsal and spend another five weeks trying to re-create it each night which is really a remembrance of things past. It gets dreary after a bit and I’m certainly out of key with that way of acting. I love the immediacy of films – you find it then and there and once you’ve found it, it’s done and then you are on to the next.”

Her next, after Tchaikovsky, will be John Schlesinger’s Bloody Sunday – with an original screenplay by Penelope Gilliat. She will again be playing a fraught, neurotic woman. She feels that playing “an out-and-out lunatic” in The Marat/Sade has rather set the trend for these downbeat roles.

Certainly she never gets offered a comedy which is a great pity since site has a very sharp sense of humour. An example of this was where she went to an after-theatre party in New York given by Jackie Kennedy, one of her rare outings, wearing a £2 cotton frock from M and S, hair in rats’ tails, and a pair of sunglasses to keep her fringe out of her eyes. “I thought that was great fun,” she says, “with the rest of them dripping diamonds down to their navels.”

Reluctantly, she agrees that the parts in films she is now getting offered are “star” roles. Certainly she will be one of the first women film stars to break all of the rules.

How to access past articles from the Guardian and Observer archive

King Lear review – Glenda Jackson is magnificent

Old Vic, London

Less is more as Glenda Jackson exudes command in Deborah Warner’s fitfully brilliant production

‘One of the most powerful Lears I have seen’: Glenda Jackson as King Lear, with Rhys Ifans, ‘genuinely funny’ as the Fool. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer



Susannah Clapp
@susannahclapp

Published on Sun 13 Nov 2016

Sandpaper voice; gliding movement; complete, ferocious concentration. Glenda Jackson cleavers her way through the part of King Lear. I was expecting her to be good. I was not prepared for her being one of the most powerful Lears I have seen.

It is not simply what Jackson does that makes her so authentic. It is what she does not do. No wavering voice, no rheumy eyes. Command shines out of her. In many productions when the disguised Kent says he sees authority in the old king’s face, it is hard to see what he means through the regal shambles. Not here. This monarch treats even her own emotions as if they were unruly lackeys. Scorn is a strong note. The curses are relished, delivered in a voice that sounds like a football rattle. The steps to madness are precisely marked. Nothing is wasted; nothing is superfluous. Which is one kind of great acting: it’s the economy, stupid.

Rhys Ifans (Fool) and Glenda Jackson (King Lear) at the Old Vic. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

Jackson makes the hoo-hah about Lear being played by a woman look like an old-fashioned load of fussing. That fuss has rather obscured the importance of another woman’s work. Deborah Warner has been a trailblazing director: it is 21 years since she brilliantly directed Fiona Shaw as Richard II. It used to be said that more men got more first-class degrees than women because they were less cautious. Less afraid of making mistakes, they apparently have more flashes of brilliance. Warner turns that idea on its head. More than any other director she produces wonderfully good and really duff moments. Sometimes within one production.


Glenda Jackson returns to the stage as King Lear – in pictures
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As here. Throughout she uses the stage in an extraordinary way, continually bringing the action from its depths: it is as if the audience sees tragedy coming towards it through the mists of time. Yet she sets the play in what looks like a rehearsal room, with everyone in modern dress: all the women wear trousers. The design – on which Warner has collaborated with the French designer and artist Jean Kalman – is of featureless dun-coloured screens that you might find in a conference centre. The idea that we might be watching a run-through may appeal to Brechtians; not to me, for whom the power of Lear lies in its dreadful uncompromising finality. And in its untrammelled bellowing. Which Warner does capture in a tremendous storm scene: the stage is engulfed in billowing black plastic, shot through with zigzags of silvery light.

This is an uneven cast. Celia Imrie and Jane Horrocks, both actors I would travel to see, are strangely underpowered as Goneril and Regan. Karl Johnson’s Gloucester splutters monotonously, and his sons are disappointing. As Edmund, Simon Manyonda overexerts himself: through crucial speeches he moons, wanks, skips with a rope. Harry Melling’s Edgar throws away the beautiful clifftop speech: he clucks over the samphire gatherer’s “dreadful trade” as if he were offering careers advice. Yet as the Fool, Rhys Ifans brings a gentle warmth to the stage. He is also genuinely funny, particularly when embellishing with a saucy aside – “Hello Mike” – or a snatch of Dylan on his mouth organ. Lear can withstand this unevenness: its drama is so fragmented and ragged. And it is worth travelling through hurricano and cataract to see Jackson.

• At the Old Vic, London until 3 December

Tsunami of fake news hurts Latin America's effort to fight coronavirus

More than 160,000 people have died but from Mexico to Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and conspiracies

Children wearing masks sit on a hill in Puente Piedra shantytown on the outskirts of Lima. Ginger consumption in Peru has rocketed because of the belief it can treat or cure Covid-19. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP

Tom Phillips in São Paulo, David Agren in Mexico City, Dan Collyns in Lima and Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires Published on Sun 26 Jul 2020

For months Gustavo Andrade has been battling to convince his parishioners to take Covid-19 seriously.


Desperate Bolivians seek out toxic bleach falsely touted as Covid-19 cure
Read more

“This town is full of infected people. Two or three die every day,” said the priest, from the town of Venustiano Carranza in southern Mexico.

Yet for all Andrade’s efforts, many locals remain unconvinced. “Their understanding is that these deaths are from the poison the mayor is spraying as part of the anti-dengue fumigation,” he said.

The culprit for the confusion is fake news.

As Latin America battles the advance of Covid-19, which has now claimed more than 160,000 lives in the region, it is also fending off a tsunami of online disinformation designed to bamboozle and deceive.

From the Mexican state of Chiapas to Ceará in Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and fantastical conspiracies that can carry an all-too-real human cost.

The misinformation streaming through millions of Latin American mobile phones and computers ranges from the bizarre to the ridiculous.

A man checks his phone outside a branch of Caixa Econômica Federal in Belo Horizonte. Photograph: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images

In recent weeks, there have been claims that Brazilian coffins were being filled with rocks to inflate the country’s Covid-19 death toll; that drones were being used to deliberately contaminate indigenous communities in Mexico; that the CIA was helping spread the coronavirus in Argentina; that seafood in northern Peru was not safe to eat because the corpses of Covid-19 victims were being dumped in the Pacific Ocean; and even that the World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had been spotted boogying and boozing at a bar on the São Paulo coast.


Many of the false claims include miracle Covid-19 cures including Peruvian sea water, Venezuelan lemongrass and elderberry tea and supernatural seeds being hawked by one Brazilian televangelist.

In Bolivia, politicians have been promoting the use of a toxic bleaching agent as a potential cure – with panicked residents in the hard-hit city of Cochabamba reportedly lining up to buy the poisonous product.

“Some clearly represent political or commercial agendas, others are just absurd,” said Jorge Bruce, a Peruvian newspaper columnist and psychoanalyst who studies the phenomenon.

“The problem is these are spread around by well-intentioned people in family WhatsApp chats probably because they can create a sense of control over a situation which is out of control.”

Yasodora Córdova, a Brazilian expert in online misinformation, said the tight-knit social groups that define Latin American society were one reason the region was such a “fertile ground” for fake news.

Disseminators of online disinformation had taken advantage of such pre-existing communities – such as church groups – and used them as a powerful mechanism through which to spread their lies.

Some sought financial gain from their fabrications.

Córdova, who has spent a decade studying online conspiracy theories, recalled how during the Zika epidemic viral YouTube videos falsely claimed the illness could be cured with honey or garlic, as has happened again this year with the coronavirus.

A Bolivian pharmacist with chlorine dioxide. At least 10 cases of chlorine dioxide poisoning have been reported in Bolivia in recent days. Photograph: Danilo Balderrama/Reuters

“Videos that promote this kind of ‘cure’ get thousands of views and the people who make them earn a lot of money,” said Córdova who said such producers could easily earn up to 7,000 reais (£1,050) per month. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not – what matters is the number of views.”

Others used falsehoods for political purposes. Córdova said that some far-right politicians in Brazil were engaged in a permanent “race to remain relevant” using bombastic and bizarre “news” to stay in the public consciousness.

“You need these fantastical-bordering-ridiculous [videos] for people to keep tuning in – either out of curiosity or because they genuinely believe in them.”

Whatever the motivation, the spread of fake news in a time of coronavirus has real-life consequences.

The misguided belief that 5G telecom towers spread the coronavirus via radio waves prompted villagers in Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes to detain eight telecoms engineers for more than a day. Ginger consumption in Peru has rocketed and exports nearly tripled because of the belief it can treat or cure Covid-19. At least 10 cases of chlorine dioxide poisoning have been reported in Bolivia in recent days.


'Planes spray the city at night': Covid-19 conspiracy theories in Mexico's motor town
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In Chiapas – where WhatsApp rumours have spread claiming government health workers were deliberately spraying indigenous communities with the coronavirus – there has been violence. An angry mob reportedly ransacked the community hospital in the municipality of Los Rosas in early June before torching an ambulance, the town hall and the mayor’s home.

In May, another group rampaged through Venustiano Carranza, looting an electronics store and torching the town hall along with the homes of the mayor and state governor’s mother. “The call came through social networks, trying to confuse people with the false argument that Covid-19 doesn’t exist and was created to affect poor people,” the Chiapas state government said at the time.

In Brazil, the president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been caught peddling disinformation – and been punished for doing so, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all deleting a video in which the far-right leader falsely claimed the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine had been “working everywhere” to treat Covid-19.

The Parque Taruma cemetery in Manaus. There have been unfounded claims that coffins were being filled with rocks to inflate Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters

But Córdova said authorities and internet giants were not doing enough to deter the deceivers.

“The justice system needs to find a way to hold people responsible for the content they share – so they feel less comfortable distributing and sharing this kind of news,” she said.

“This will only stop when there is a counter-attack, when the justice system understands they must hold these people to account” by forcing those who alleged, for example, that Covid-19 was a Chinese experiment to prove such claims in court.

“As long as this doesn’t happen, people will keep believing the internet is a no-man’s land.”

Car drives through Black Lives Matter protest in Aurora, Colorado

A man was also shot during the Aurora march, as rival militias demonstrated in Kentucky

A car drives through a crowd of Black Lives Matter marchers on a Denver interstate on Saturday. Photograph: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images


Associated Press
Published on Sun 26 Jul 2020
93

A car drove through a crowd and a protester was shot in the Denver suburb of Aurora during demonstrations against racial injustice.

The Aurora Police Department said on Twitter that protesters were walking on Interstate 225 Saturday when a vehicle drove through. Police said a protester fired a weapon, striking at least one person who was taken to a hospital in stable condition.

Authorities said the vehicle was towed and they are investigating. Protesters also broke windows at the courthouse and a fire was started in an office, police said. An unlawful assembly was declared and police ordered protesters to leave the area, authorities said.


America 'staring down the barrel of martial law', Oregon senator warns
Read more

Tensions have been heightened at recent protests against racial injustice since federal officials were sent to quell demonstrations in Portland, Oregon. Police declared a riot in Seattle on Saturday.

Protests sparked by the 25 May death of George Floyd, a black man in Minnesota who died after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes, have also highlighted other cases of fatal police violence.

In Colorado, protesters have been drawing attention to the death of Elijah McClain, who was stopped by police while walking down an Aurora street in August 2019 after a 911 caller reported him as suspicious. Police placed him in a chokehold, and paramedics administered 500 milligrams of ketamine, a sedative, to calm him down. He went into cardiac arrest, was later declared brain dead and taken off life support.

ARMED FOR SELF DEFENSE IN THE TRADITION OF THE BLACK PANTHERS

Black Lives Matter protesters gather in a park in Louisville, Kentucky, where they were demonstrating over the death of Breonna Taylor. Photograph: Leslie Spurlock/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

In Kentucky meanwhile, hundreds of armed, predominantly black, activists demanded justice for Breonna Taylor during peaceful demonstrations in Louisville that drew counter-protesters from a white militia group.


Police closed streets and set up barricades to keep the two groups apart as tensions remained high in a town where protests have flared for months over the death of Taylor, a black woman killed when police burst into her apartment in March.

By the time black activists dressed in black fatigues arrived in the heart of downtown Saturday afternoon, most of the white militia members had already left. Police in full riot geared looked on.

Earlier in the day, three people were accidentally shot at a park where black activists had gathered, police said. The victims, all of whom were members of the militia group, were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.

“This is a tragic situation that could have been much worse,” Louisville metro police chief Robert Schroeder said in a news release. “I encourage anyone choosing to exercise their second amendment rights to do so responsibly.”

The only confrontation among the competing groups appeared to occur earlier Saturday when white militia members and Black Lives Matter activists yelled at each other over the police barricades.

Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron’s office is heading an investigation into Taylor’s death.

Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was fatally shot when police officers burst into her Louisville apartment using a no-knock warrant during a narcotics investigation. The warrant to search her home was in connection with a suspect who did not live there and no drugs were found.

BACKGROUNDER

'White as hell': Portland protesters face off with Trump but are they eclipsing Black Lives Matter?

On another night of confrontation with federal agents, activists said their message was in danger of being forgotten

America ‘staring down barrel of martial law’ – Oregon senator

‘Made-for-TV fascism’: how Trump’s ploy could backfire

Chris McGreal in Portland, Oregon

The Observer

Portland Sun 26 Jul 2020

 

Federal law enforcement officers detain a demonstrator during a protest against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon. Photograph: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters


Teal Lindseth surveyed the sea of mothers she was about to lead into the firing line.

“I look at this crowd and I don’t see many black people,” lamented the 21-year-old African American activist. “Oregon is white as hell. Whitewashed.”

'That’s an illegal order': veterans challenge Trump's officers in Portlan

Lindseth has been a stalwart of the Black Lives Matter protests that have continued for nearly 60 days without interruption in a city that was derided as “Little Beirut” over the intensity of its demonstrations against a visit by George HW Bush four decades ago.

Portland has cemented that reputation in the Trump era, as the protests evolved into nightly showdowns with federal paramilitaries sent by the president to end what he described as anarchy.

But Portland has another reputation alongside its radical image. That of the whitest large city in America in a state with a constitution that once barred African Americans from living there. An 1850s law required black people to be “lashed” once a year to encourage them to leave Oregon, and members of the Ku Klux Klan largely controlled Portland city council between the world wars. Housing was effectively segregated in large parts of the city.

Many of today’s protesters say their support for racial justice in a city where the police department has a history of disproportionately killing African Americans is driven at least in part by an attempt to atone for Oregon’s racist past. But as Portland’s battles play out on the national stage, and Donald Trump stokes unrest for political advantage, some black leaders are asking whose interests the televised nightly confrontations really serve – and whether they are a continuation of white domination at the expense of black interests.


The children of the privileged are dancing on the stages of those that gave their lives for this movementED Mondainé, NAACP

The president of the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), ED Mondainé, warned that the Black Lives Matter movement in the city is being coopted by “privileged white people” with other agendas. He said the confrontations with the federal officers sent by the president are little more than a “spectacle and a distraction that do nothing for the cause of black equality”.

Mondainé accused groups of young white people at the forefront of confronting federal officers of rising to Trump’s bait and using the campaign against racial injustice to provoke a fight in pursuit of other causes, such as anti-capitalism.


“The children of the privileged are dancing on the stages of those that gave their lives for this movement,” he told the Guardian.

Trump’s dispatch of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) taskforce reinvigorated the protests in Portland as federal agents in camouflage snatched protesters off the streets in unmarked vans and severely beat others.


Outrage in the city, and nationally, at what smacked of police state tactics only fuelled the demonstrations, which did not displease the president. Trump presented the pictures of protesters in helmets and gas masks confronting federal agents as evidence of a city overrun by anarchists and antifa, and the Democrats as either helpless or complicit in the chaos.

Trump raised the ante by vowing to send a “surge” of federal forces to other Democratic-run cities such as Chicago, ostensibly to quell gun killings. He said Operation Legend, named after a four year-old boy shot dead in Kansas City, would see thousands of agents from the FBI, US Marshals Service and other agencies deployed to end a “rampage of violence”.

The mayors of Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and 11 other cities wrote to the administration on Tuesday, accusing the president of an abuse of power and alleging that “federal law enforcement is being deployed for political purposes” amid suspicions that Trump is more interested in creating conflict than ending it in the run-up to the election.

“Unilaterally deploying these paramilitary-type forces into our cities is wholly inconsistent with our system of democracy and our most basic values,” they wrote.

The mayors also said they were disturbed at the actions of federal agents in Portland, calling their failure to wear proper identification and the snatching of protesters off the streets “chilling”.

“These are tactics we expect from an authoritarian regime – not our democracy,” the letter said.

Mondainé, who led a rally on Thursday evening to “bring back the focus” on to Black Lives Matter, said “empty battles” were serving Trump’s agenda because the president creates political theatre for electoral advantage. He said Trump is baiting protesters in Portland to light the fuse on a racist backlash across the country before the presidential election.

“We have to change that narrative. We cannot let teargas and rubber bullets define the moment that we’re in now. We must seize the moment and assure the world that this time racism will no longer live,” he said.
A dark stain

Mondainé and other black leaders want to shift the focus of protests in Portland back to one of the enduring legacies of Oregon’s racist past – reform of a police department with a long history of violence against the supposedly liberal city’s relatively small black population, and which has seen a sharp rise in the killing of African American men since Trump came to power.

African Americans make up just 6% of Portland’s 650,000 residents but accounted for 30% of shootings by police over the past three years. Black people were also several times more times likely to be arrested or stopped. The police department has proved so trigger happy that the Obama administration placed it under federal court oversight, although it sidestepped the issue of race in doing so.

But African Americans in Portland remain sceptical that the city or the police department are committed to change, particularly when officers are accused of siding with far-right groups such as the Proud Boys who regularly use the city as a platform for protests knowing it will create a backlash. 

Members of the Proud Boys and other rightwing demonstrators march in Portland in 2019. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Accusations that the force tolerates neo-fascist sympathies are not new. Critics regard the case of Mark Kruger as a particularly dark stain on the police department and city government.

In about 2000, the then Portland police sergeant built a shrine in a public park to five Nazi soldiers including a member of Hitler’s SS and a war criminal. Kruger nailed plaques with their names to what he called an “Ehrenbaum” or honour tree. They were positioned so he could see them from the road when driving to work as a police officer, and he kept them polished.

The shrine remained in the park for several years until Kruger removed it when he was the target of federal lawsuits for use of excessive force against anti-Iraq war protestors. Portland attorney’s office stored the plaques until they were discovered years later by an internal affairs investigator.

That led to an investigation which concluded Kruger brought “discredit and disgrace” upon Portland police and the city. But he kept his job after a brief unpaid suspension for illegally posting the plaques on public property, and was later promoted to captain and head of the vice squad.


Trump ripped the band aid off of the racism that was bubbling under the surface of the country for a very long timeDan Handelman, Portland Copwatch

Kruger admitted wearing Nazi uniforms but said it was because of his interest in history. He said the plaques were to honour the Germans’ military prowess not their crimes against humanity.

“Many military historians have erected similar remembrances all over the world,” he claimed at the time.

He remained a captain in the police department until his recent retirement.

People pressing for police reform saw Kruger’s continued employment and promotion as a reflection of the values of a police department with a reputation for brutality. The Obama justice department finally intervened over the level of police shootings in Portland, prompted by the case of Aaron Campbell in 2010.

The young black man’s brother had died earlier in the day. Campbell’s family feared he might be suicidal and called the police. The officers who went to check on him quickly established that he was not a threat to himself or anyone else, and even exchanged a lighthearted text message that put everyone at ease. But a second police unit arrived as Campbell emerged from a building. They shot him with a bean bag.

When he instinctively reached for where he had been hit, officers said he was going for a gun and shot him dead. Campbell was unarmed.

The civil rights leader Jesse Jackson called Campbell’s killing “an execution”. A Portland grand jury said the officer who shot him acted within the law but that did not mean he was innocent.

“This was very difficult for us as a grand jury, as our sympathies lie with the Campbell family and the mood of the community. As a group, we are outraged at what happened,” the grand jury said in a letter to the district attorney. The city paid Campbell’s family $1.2m.


The Obama administration demanded reforms and placed the police department under federal court oversight in 2014. But in a move some critics suspected was to save Portland’s Democratic leadership from embarrassment, the justice department said Campbell had been shot because the police had a pattern of using excessive force against people with mental health problems, not because he was black. Campbell’s family disagreed.
‘An often tense relationship’

A justice department report found “a pattern of dangerous uses of force against persons who posed little or no threat” but who had mental illness. These include the case of a 42-year-old local musician with schizophrenia, James Chasse, who was shot multiple times with a taser and beaten so badly by the police he had a punctured lung, 16 fractured ribs and 26 broken bones in all. He died in custody.

In another case, Portland police repeatedly tasered a naked and unarmed man who was acting oddly because he was suffering a diabetic emergency.

Although the justice department sidestepped a full investigation of racism by the Portland police, it did note “the often tense relationship” between the force and the African American community. It said there was a widespread perception among black people of racial profiling and that the police “protect the white folk and police the black folk”.

Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, which monitors police killings, said eight years of justice department oversight has not fundamentally changed how the Portland police act because, while the agreement between the city and the federal government requires new policies and training, it does not measure whether they are successful.

“If the Portland police continue to use violence against the general public, they’re still in compliance with that agreement. Have some changes have been made? Yes. But does it did it get at the root problems and the issues that people were worried about the first place? Not at all,” he said. 

Federal police officers in Portland on 23 July. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Getty Images


Handelman said that if anything, the situation has worsened.

“We had not actually had a shooting death of an African American Portlander by the police between early 2010 and February of 2017, which is rather remarkable. A seven-year stretch with no black man being killed. Since then, there have been at least five shootings of African Americans, and four of them died,” he said.

“For me, part of that is the national situation that we’re in. That the election of President Trump kind of ripped the Band-Aid off of the racism that was bubbling under the surface of the country for a very long time.”

The police response to protests in Portland after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May reinforced the perception that the force was resistant to change and raised questions about accountability.

In recent days, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has made a show on national television of denouncing Trump’s deployment of federal forces, accusing the president of conducting “urban warfare” in his city. But when Wheeler turned out to speak at a protest on Wednesday, he faced hostility from demonstrators who accused him of hypocrisy.

The mayor is also the city’s police commissioner. In May, Wheeler declared a state of emergency amid escalating protests over Floyd’s death which saw storefronts smashed and some looted. Critics accused the police of overreacting by being too quick to fire teargas to break up demonstrations until a federal judge barred its use except where the police declare a riot.

When Wheeler arrived at Wednesday’s demonstration, a protester emptied a bag of spent teargas canisters at his feet as others peppered him with questions and accusations about his oversight of the police. Later, the mayor faced a barrage of derision after he denounced federal agents for an unprovoked firing of teargas that left him gasping for breath.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Demonstrators in Portland have accused the mayor, Ted Wheeler, of hypocrisy. Photograph: Gillian Flaccus/AP


Teressa Raiford, the African American founder of Don’t Shoot Portland, accused the mayor of using the presence of the federal agents as cover for his own failure to address police reform.

“Our leaders now say: ‘Donald Trump’s attacking you and we care about you’. But the people on the front line realise we were being attacked by them before Donald Trump started attacking us,” he said. “They’re trying to claim that they stand as allies with the protesters. It is political. What you’re seeing with the mayor being sprayed with teargas, that is political propaganda.”

Raiford said Portland’s political leadership did not care to substantially change the system of policing because much of the city was comfortable with policies that, as the justice department noted, protect whites and police blacks.
‘All these liberal cities have extreme inequality’

The failure of so many American cities run by Democrats to address reform of racially biased policing hangs over Democratic political leaderships that claim to support the Black Lives Matters campaign.

Hyung Nam, who has been closely observing police reform as a member of a city committee that advises on how the police budget is spent, said the lack of political will reflects economic realities.

“All these liberal cities have extreme inequality, economic inequality, and there’s a major racial dimension to that. As long as we have that kind of economic inequality we’re going to see some form of policing like this,” he said.


Inequality has grown enormously and the way we’re dealing with that is through tougher policingHyung Nam

Nam said there is a pattern of more prosperous whites gentrifying black Portland neighbourhoods and then demanding increased policing which often makes the remaining African American residents feel insecure.

“Just the other day when I was testifying at the city council, there were people from the Irvington neighbourhood complaining to the council about homeless people that were engaged in illicit activities and basically calling for the cops to do something, which means criminalise them and sweep them somewhere.

“This is what’s happening in all these Democratic liberal cities. Inequality has grown enormously and the way we’re dealing with that is through tougher policing.”

However, Nam thinks that the scale of popular protest over Floyd’s death may finally have pushed the administration to get serious about reform including “significant” cuts to the police budget for its paramilitary teams and enforcing proper civilian oversight.

For now though, attention in and on Portland remains focused on the nightly theatre outside the federal courthouse – and where Trump will target next.

‘We’re living in fear’: LGBT people in Italy pin hopes on new law

Debate on long-awaited bill that would punish discrimination and hate crimes towards LGBT people opens on Monday

A Pride demonstration in Bari, southern Italy, earlier this month. Far-right politicians have spoken out against the proposed changes in legislation Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

Angela Giuffrida in Rome Sun 26 Jul 2020

For 15 years, Marco and his boyfriend had lived together fairly peacefully in a town outside Rome. Then, in early June, a neighbour started harassing them.

“It began quite lightly, with him being provocative whenever we met in the street,” the 38-year-old said. “Then he came to our home and forced his way in, calling us ‘dirty faggots’. My boyfriend managed to get rid of him but he returned with a baton and threw himself against the door, repeating the same insults and threatening to set us alight when we were asleep.”

The man, who had recently moved into the same building, has incessantly taunted the couple over the past month, threatening to also torch their car. Marco has been recording evidence on his mobile phone, but his pleas to the police for help have so far been ignored.


“We’re living in fear,” Marco said, citing the example of a gay friend who was almost killed by his antagonist following repeated harassment. “Twice the police came, and twice they did nothing.”

The couple are hoping they will soon be protected by a long-awaited law that would punish discrimination and hate crimes towards LGBT people. Politicians will begin debating the draft legislation, already being virulently contested by far-right parties and religious groups, in parliament on Monday.

“We need this law,” Marco said. “This guy came to us simply because he hates gays. This isn’t anything new, it happens to gay people all the time, but many do not report it through fear.”

Although Italy approved same-sex civil unions in 2016, the country lags behind its EU partners in creating anti-homophobia measures. An EU-wide survey published last autumn showed that 55% of Italians accepted LGBT people – far below the EU average. Attempts at progress or even just meaningful debate have been stymied by a macho culture, Catholicism and support for far-right parties. LGBT rights associations have linked a rise in hate crimes in 2019 to the prominence of Matteo Salvini’s far-right League, which continues to poll as Italy’s most popular party.

People mark the global Pride celebrations in Rome’s San Lorenzo neighbourhood in June. Photograph: Riccardo Antimiani/EPA

Attempts by various governments over the past three decades to enshrine gay rights in law have either been stifled or sabotaged. If approved, the new law would be an extension of an existing law that punishes racist violence, hatred and discrimination. In addition, it would criminalise misogyny.

After a spate of recent attacks against gay people, proponents argue that the legislation is urgently needed. In late June, a 25-year-old man was brutally attacked by a gang of seven people as he walked hand-in-hand with his boyfriend in the city of Pescara. Less than two weeks later, a gay couple were assaulted by a group of six after they kissed each other at a train station in Cinque Terre, Liguria. At a recent demonstration in Rome in support of the law, two teenage girls, who were holding hands, were spat at and insulted by a man attending a nearby counter-protest organised by the League and its political partner, Brothers of Italy.

Fabrizio Marrazzo, a spokesperson for Gay Centre, a Rome-based association, said it received about 20,000 reports of discrimination against LGBT people a year, of which about 9% are severe.

“But many do not report the discrimination as their families do not know about their sexuality,” he added.

Alessandro Zan, a gay politician with the Democratic party, part of the ruling coalition, and architect of the draft legislation, was threatened with death by an online opponent unless he withdrew the bill.

Detractors, including Salvini and his Brothers of Italy counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, claim the law would suppress freedom of expression. At the protest in Rome, Salvini said: “I’m here to defend the right of a child to have a mother and a father … tomorrow I don’t want to be tried for defending family rights.” Meloni described Zan’s law as “a crime against opinion”.

Rightwing politician Giorgia Meloni at a protest against the proposed law in Rome on 16 July, calling it an attack on freedom of speech. Photograph: Piero Tenagli/IPA

“The idea that the law would restrict free speech is such fake news,” said Zan. “The law works to fight discrimination, not limit the freedom of thought. They are using LGBT people as an enemy to fly an ideological flag and ignite hatred, rather than discuss the merits of the law.”

The far-right parties are in sync with the Italian bishops’ conference, which said the bill would mark “the death of liberty”. A priest in Puglia recently held a vigil among parishioners to pray for the law’s failure. Another in Sicily who opposed the law said during a sermon: “If you express an opinion against homosexuals, or don’t agree with two men adopting a child, you could end up in jail.”

The Eurobarometer survey, published last autumn, showing 55% of Italians accepted LGBT people was far below the EU average of 72%. However, campaigners believe a significant part of the population would accept the new law.

“Those who attack it with such aggression are in the minority,” said Luisa Rizzitelli, an LGBT activist. “Italy is behind in respect of accepting diversity … but if we ask people if they want to make hatred against LGBT people a crime, I truly believe they would say yes.”

Zan said: “While it is true that there is still strong homophobia, stemming from a patriarchal culture, the country has also made progress. If you look at the pride events across the country, they are full of young people and this gives hope that, in the future, citizens will be much more open.”

If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention
Carole Cadwalladr

Facebook and America are now indivisible, says the Observer journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal – and the world is a sicker place for it

John Naughton on how Facebook could stop Biden’s progress to the White House

Q&A with Facebook whistleblower Yaël Eisenstat

Q&A with early Facebook investor Roger McNamee

Cutouts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg placed outside the Capitol in protest ahead of his testimony before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees in 2018. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Published onSun 26 Jul 2020 10.00 BST

In 2016, we didn’t know. We were innocent. We still believed social media connected us and that connections were good. That technology equalled progress. And progress equalled better.

Four years on, we know too much. And yet, it turns out, we understand nothing. We know social media is a bin fire and that the world is burning. But it’s like the pandemic. We understand in outline how bad things could get. But we remain hopelessly human. Relentlessly optimistic. Of course, we believe there’ll be a vaccine. Because there has to be, doesn’t there?

In Facebook’s case, the worst has already happened. We’ve just failed to acknowledge it. Failed to reckon with it. And there’s no vaccine coming to the rescue. In 2016 everything changed. As for 2020… well, we will see.
In 2016, a hostile foreign government used Facebook to systematically undermine and subvert an American election. With no consequences

We have already been through the equivalent of a social media pandemic – an unstoppable contagion that has sickened our information space, infected our public discourse, silently and invisibly subverted our electoral systems. It’s no longer about if this will happen all over again. Of course, it will. It hasn’t stopped. The question is whether our political systems, society, democracy, will survive – can survive – the age of Facebook.

We are already through the looking glass. In 2016, a hostile foreign government used Facebook to systematically undermine and subvert an American election. With no consequences. Nobody, no company, no individual or nation state has ever been held to account.

Zuckerberg says Black Lives Matter and yet we know Donald Trump used Facebook’s tools to deliberately suppress and deny black and Latino people the vote. With no consequences.

People queue to vote in the Wisconsin presidential primary in April. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

And though we know the name “Cambridge Analytica” and were momentarily outraged by Facebook’s complicity in allowing 87 million people’s personal data to be stolen and repurposed including by the Trump campaign. A $5bn fine was paid but no individuals were held to account.

And that’s just in America. For us here in Britain, there’s an even bigger reckoning that has not come. If it wasn’t for Facebook, there would be no Brexit. The future of our country – our island nation with its 1,000 years of continuous history of which we’re so proud – has been set on its course by a foreign company that has proved itself to be beyond the rule of parliament.

Who in Britain understands that? Almost no one. The intelligence and security committee, perhaps, who reported their astonishment this week that no attempt had been made to investigate foreign interference in the EU referendum. And maybe Dominic Cummings, the man who sits in 10 Downing Street by Boris Johnson’s side.

Dominic Cummings understands the role that Facebook played in Brexit. He wrote about it. In excruciating Cummings detail. He described the deliberate use of misinformation targeted at unknown individuals in an election operation the scale of which had never been seen before. He deployed more than a billion Facebook ads, he says. At a cost of pennies per view.

Was there Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum? The Tories just didn't care
Jonathan Lis

Read more

He doesn’t talk about this now, of course. And though the intelligence committee noted media companies “hold the key and yet are failing to play their part”, it also says “DCMS informed us that [REDACTED]”.

The fact is that we now know how the platform was systematically abused by the Leave campaigns. We know that loopholes in our laws were deliberately exploited. And we know that these actions were proved to be illegal and “punished” by “regulators” whose “regulations” have been exposed to be not worth the paper they are written on.

Donald Trump and senior White House staff meeting with Mark Zuckerberg in the Oval Office in September last year. Photograph: Alamy

Will Facebook be used to subvert the 2020 US presidential election? Yes. Will Facebook be held to account? No. Are we looking at a system shock that will change America for ever? Yes. Because Trump will either win this election using Facebook or he will lose it using Facebook. Both ways spell disaster. On Sunday, interviewed by a Fox reporter, he refused to say if he would leave the White House if he lost the election.

America, the idea of America, is on the brink. And at the cold, dead heart of the suicide mission it has set itself on, is Facebook. Facebook and America are now indivisible. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, these are now the bloodstream of American life and politics. A bloodstream that is sick.


And so the world is sick, because American capitalism has been the vector that has brought this infection across the globe. Algorithmically amplified “free speech” with no consequences. Lies spread at speed. Hate freely expressed, freely shared. Ethnic hatred, white supremacy, resurgent Nazism all spreading invisibly, by stealth beyond the naked eye.

For Trump 2020, the band is back together. The chief data scientist of Cambridge Analytica, Matt Oczkowski has launched a new firm, Data Propria, which is working with the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign Brad Parscale. And Trump is testing his limits. Can he place ads that feature Nazi symbols? Yes. (Taken down but only after accruing millions of views.) Can he spread lies about mail-in fraud? Yes. Can he threaten Black Lives Matter protesters with violence? Yes. Will be he be able to use Facebook to dispute the election? Watch this space.

In a world without consequences, the bad man will be king. And an aggressive multinational company whose business model is threatened by the bad man’s opponent is, at best, conflicted; at worst, complicit.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg was forced to deny he had a “secret deal” with Trump. “A ridiculous idea,” he said. It was an uncanny echo of the “pretty crazy idea” he cited in November 2016 when it was first suggested fake news on Facebook might have played a role in electing Trump.

It wasn’t crazy. It was true. We know this because of the painstaking work the FBI and congressional committees did in investigating foreign interference in the US election. Work that hasn’t even been begun in the UK. That was not an accident we discovered this week. It was because of another populist who didn’t want the truth to come out: Boris Johnson.

Facebook is at the centre of this too. It’s Facebook that enables hostile nation states like Russia to attack us in our homes. A geopolitical war being fought in front of our noses, in our pockets, on our phones.

This is Facebook’s world now. And we live in it. And if you’re not terrified about what this means it’s because you haven’t been paying attention.