The Pentagon Made A Unit To Investigate UFOs And It's Not Keeping It Secret Anymore

A program investigating UFOs already existed for years under the Navy, but the Department of Defense publicly acknowledged the program Friday in a press release

Posted on August 14, 2020, at 7:55 p.m. ET

Screenshot from video released by Department of Defense

The Department of Defense announced Friday they had officially — and publicly — created a unit tasked specifically with investigating "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," or as you, I, and everyone else would call them, UFOs.

Named the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or UAPTF, the unit will "improve [the Department of Defense's] understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs."

"The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security," the Department of Defense said in a statement Friday evening.

Now, it's true that the existence of UAPs, or UFOs, doesn't necessarily mean the aircraft are spaceships from another planet piloted by little green aliens quietly and secretly observing Earth.

This task force is geared more toward possible violations of air space from another country, rather than looking for intergalactic encounters.

"The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report," the announcement reads. "This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing."

But 2020 has been something of a year for the Pentagon and UFOs.

2004
UFO FIRST SIGHTED FAST AND FAR AWAY

WITH PILOTS VOICE OVER

UFO CLOSE UP AND TURNING PILOT VOICEOVER SHOCK

2015 1 MINUTE VIDEO NO SOUND

Friday's announcement comes just a few months after the Department of Defense released and declassified three videos of Navy pilots encountering UAPs in 2004 and 2015.

The New York Times interviewed the pilots who encountered the objects, describing them as oblong-shaped and accelerating, "like nothing I've ever seen."

Despite the Pentagon's announcement Friday, the military has for years monitored unidentified aircraft and collected video of its pilots encountering the aircraft.

The New York Times in Dec. 2017 reported on the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which had the same task.

The Times reported that funding for the program had stopped and it was ended in 2012, but in July it reported the program had continued under the Office of Naval Intelligence, where it was named the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.

President Trump has himself expressed interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Talking to his son, Donald Trump Jr. in a video produced by his campaign in June, the president was asked whether, "before you leave office, will you let us know if there's aliens?"

"I want to know what's going on," Trump Jr. asked. "Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's going on there?"

The president's son was likely referring to what is popularly known as Area 51, a classified military base in Nevada. The base has long been the center of UFO conspiracies, including the theory that a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and that the spacecraft, and its supposed occupants, were taken to Area 51 to be studied.


"I won't talk to you about what I know about it but it's very interesting," Trump told Trump Jr. "But Roswell is a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what's going on."


Roswell itself is a city in Chaves County, New Mexico, which is, of course, open to the public.

The Department of Defense's announcement about UAPTF makes no mention about any part of its mission having to do with extraterrestrial beings or spacecraft because of course it wouldn't.


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Ellie Hall · April 27, 2020

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Dan Vergano · Dec. 21, 2017

Salvador Hernandez is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles.

We Received Documents Showing How The Feds Monitored BLM Protests. There Was Only One Mention Of White Supremacists.
Records obtained by BuzzFeed News show agents monitored protesters’ social media and braced for battle.

Posted on August 13, 2020, at 8:03 p.m. ET

Anne-Marie Caruso / Reuters
A police officer watches a Black Lives Matter march in Dover, New Jersey, July 3.

The email from the Federal Protective Service commander in Philadelphia was stark and alarming: “Apparent anarchists are numerous and are attacking banks, public structure, and statues,” he wrote on May 30, under the subject line “Ongoing Violence toward Law Enforcement.” “They are discussing burning down the Federal Reserve.”

As the country erupted in protest after a Minneapolis police officer killed Geroge Floyd on May 25, the federal government scrambled to respond, dispatching a range of federal law enforcement agencies in a sweeping effort to police the demonstrations from coast to coast. In Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, those efforts drew widespread condemnation after videos showed authorities using tear gas against protesters and, in Portland, detaining them inside unmarked vans. Records obtained by BuzzFeed News through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that officers from at least one federal agency, the Federal Protective Service, a division within the Department of Homeland Security, arrived at protest scenes braced for combat.

The mission of the FPS is to “prevent, protect, respond to, and recover from terrorism, criminal acts and other hazards threatening” the US government and its infrastructure.

Officials at the FPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. BuzzFeed News requested all records pertaining to the protests; the agency’s response indicated that some documents were withheld because of ongoing law enforcement investigations.

An “Information Bulletin” issued May 29 by the FPS investigations branch warned that “many of these demonstrations will continue to include destruction and/or violence” and that “participants may be wielding rudimentary weaponry and improvised incendiary devices” and “may conduct their attack if an opportunity exists.”


Federal Protective Service / FOIA
Images included in the FPS records.

FPS records show that top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including DHS’s undersecretary of management, Randolph “Tex” Alles, the former head of the Secret Service, were provided daily updates on the protests and the impact the demonstrations had on federal property.

Agents monitored social media for “intelligence” on upcoming Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Minneapolis, DC, LA, and elsewhere, cataloging Facebook and Instagram posts announcing protests and logging the number of people who expressed interest in attending.

“I have not found any information regarding PLANNED violence/destruction for any of these events,” an FPS intelligence research specialist wrote in an email listing upcoming protests in Minneapolis.

In at least one case, authorities used social media posts to try to identify protesters who may have witnessed a Molotov cocktail being thrown at an ICE facility whose location is redacted in the documents. A May 28 email to the FPS about the incident points out: “[A] video on Twitter that does not show the Molotov cocktail being used but does show the faces of some protesters. A hashtag on the post indicated the protest was in support of George Floyd.”

The documents raise questions about the scope of the federal agency's surveillance of the demonstrations, said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"In some ways, maybe most ways, it's routine police work to search for publicly available sources of information about crime — so it's not unexpected when they are investigating crime (like the purported throwing of a molotov cocktail)," Greene told BuzzFeed News. "But we don't want to see it for what looks like monitoring of participants in a protest. And we'd be concerned if there were an indication that they were collecting images or social media information of peaceful protestors — really, even if non-peaceful, just not associated with criminal activity — and creating dossiers of protestors to use for future undefined investigations or potential crime."

Email threads tallied even minor incidents of vandalism on federal property, including isolated cases of graffiti. Spreadsheets detailed the damage to federal buildings the agency claims was caused by protesters, as well as the response to those acts by FPS, which essentially serves as DHS’s police force.

Yet the documents, marked “law enforcement sensitive,” are just as revealing for what is absent.


Federal Protective Service, Via FOIA
Redacted images of graffiti included in the FPS records.

In the hundreds of pages of emails and intelligence reports, there is only a single explicit mention of white supremacist groups or other far-right extremists, despite the fact that their presence at the protests was known by federal law enforcement officials.

A May 29 DHS report found that white supremacists on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, discussed using “cocktails, chainsaws, and firearms” against “riot police.” But the single mention in the FPS intelligence reports merely notes that protesters in Washington DC had informed authorities of a “small group of approximately 4-5 White Supremacists in the crowd.” It says nothing further.

In another instance, an “operational readiness bulletin” warning agents to be prepared for possible “vehicle ramming attacks against pedestrians” states that “offenders aligned with violent terrorist extremist ideologies, such as those espoused by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and al-Qa’ida, probably will increase their use of vehicle ramming attacks.”

The report references high-profile vehicle rammings in France, Spain, the UK, and New York City, as well as the 2017 attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a white supremacist killed a protester. But the report gets the state wrong, placing Charlottesville in North Carolina, and makes no reference to white supremacy.

In fact, there would be at least 18 incidents of vehicle rammings during the Black Lives Matter protests, but none tied to Islamic extremists. Rather, a Ku Klux Klan leader was convicted of one such incident in June in Virginia.

The reports also show that while agents repeatedly attempted to track protest networks through social media — sharing screenshots of Facebook pages and online fliers — there was far less effort to track members of the boogaloo boys, a right-wing extremist group linked to the fatal shooting of a federal security guard in Oakland.

The only mention of the group comes from a quoted social media post included in a roundup of “recent incidents.” The post stated, “If someone really wanted to kick off the boogaloo, now would be the time to fire some shots and frame the crowd around you as responsible,” though the report provides no additional context, listing the post as a line item alongside incidents of vandalism, looting, and “Civil rights activists visited Minneapolis and called for nationwide demonstrations to continue.”

Records show that top agency officials were aware of the sensitive situation that they were tasked with handling. A report on May 27, two days after Floyd’s death, indicated that FPS agents underwent a “First Amendment Pre-Event Briefing.”

In an email to agents two days later, an FPS official, whose name is redacted in the documents, wrote that he wanted “to remind” them of their constitutional duty to ensure people’s right to free speech, no matter the “reasons for the protests.” “Property can be replaced, lives cannot,” the email stated. “Remain calm and professional at all times.”

When the US Park Police requested that the FPS send officers to help them manage protests in Washington, DC, it wasn’t initially clear to FPS officials whether they were legally able to assist.

“Lawyers, do we have the authority/jurisdiction to assist the Park Police at the federal owned Lafayette Park?” Kris Cline, principal deputy director of the FPS, asked in a May 30 email.

The response, four minutes later from an attorney adviser for the FPS, is redacted from the document.








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Albert Samaha is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Los Angeles. He is a 2018 Pulitzer finalist for international reporting, recipient of the IRE 2016 FOI award and a 2016 Newseum Institute National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame inductee.


Rosalind Adams is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

UPDATES

Belarus Is Detaining Thousands Of Peaceful Protesters. Many Are Telling Gruesome Stories Of Physical And Psychological Abuse By Police.

“They said if they were given an order to kill us, they would kill us all without any hesitation,” 16-year-old Miron Vitushka, who was detained by police, told BuzzFeed News.
Christopher Miller BuzzFeed News Contributor
Reporting From
Kyiv, Ukraine
Last updated on August 15, 2020,

Courtesy Miron Vitushka
Miron Vitushka, 16, was detained by police in Belarus along with both of his parents.

KYIV — People detained across Belarus this week say they were tortured physically and psychologically by the police forces loyal to the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko while in custody.

More than 6,000 people have been detained during protests that have rocked Belarus since the presidential election widely rejected as fraudulent last Sunday. On Thursday, many of them came staggering out of detention centers, and they brought with them horrific accounts of their experiences.

In interviews with independent Belarusian media and BuzzFeed News, many of those detained recalled being refused water and food and forced to endure stress positions with their hands tied behind their backs for several hours. They said police had locked them up with as many as 60 people in jail cells meant for 10 people or less. Some said police put guns to their heads and threatened to blow them up with grenades, the independent Belarusian news site Tut.by reported. And they described walking over weeping detainees lying facedown on floors soaked with blood, and hearing the spine-tingling howls of others being kicked, punched, twisted, and clobbered by police with batons.

Audio recorded by Nasha Niva, an independent news outlet, and shared by Belarusian journalist Franak Viacorka captured those disturbing sounds from outside one detention center.



Franak Viačorka@franakviacorka

[SOUND ON] "It feels like we live in Middle Ages." Here is audio recorded last night near the Minsk detention center where hundreds/thousands are being kept, indoor and outdoor. You can hear screams and moans from beatings.08:31 PM - 13 Aug 2020
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Upon being freed, some of those who were detained lifted up their shirts or rolled their pant legs up to show media what were melon-sized bruises on their bodies. In a photograph seen by BuzzFeed News, one man had the imprints of a police truncheon on his back in the shape of a cross. It was unclear whether that was intentional, but some said there had been a perverse religious element involved in what many said was torture: Police had forced many to recite the “Our Father” prayer, beg God for forgiveness for participating in the protests, and vow never to do so again, Russian News outlet Znak reported.

Miron Vitushka, a 16-year-old Minsk student who studies history and plays in a psychedelic rock band, described being detained on Monday evening while he was crossing the street with his mother and some friends in the Belarusian capital. Speaking to BuzzFeed News by phone, he said he was not even protesting at the time.

Vitushka said police officers in unmarked vans jumped out, beat him, handcuffed him, and threw him into the van before speeding off. He said he was forced facedown onto the floor of the vehicle. As police rounded up others, they threw them on top of Vitushka.

Vitushka said he was moved to a police station and later a school gymnasium, where about 100 men were kept tied with their hands behind their backs and faces flat on the floor. Officers beat the men, who howled and pleaded for the abuse to stop, he said.

“The police said if they were given an order to kill us, they would kill us all without any hesitation,” Vitushka told BuzzFeed News. “They were shouting, ‘Oh yeah, do you need your democracy now?’”


Sergei Gapon / Getty Images
People detained during recent protests show their traces of beatings as they leave the Okrestina prison early morning in Minsk, Aug. 14.

“They were trying to scare people so they wouldn’t take part in any protests,” he added.

Vitushka said his parents eventually figured out where he was being held and came to the makeshift detention center to demand his release, along with dozens of others asking the same for their family members. But instead of freeing those detained, police beat and arrested the group, including his parents. And so the family of three endured what Vitushka described as “three days of hell.”

Vitushka was released on Tuesday, his mother was released on Wednesday, and his father was released on Thursday. The family is currently meeting with lawyers to discuss the possibility of bringing a suit against the state.

Several other Belarusians described similarly horrendous experiences in detention. One young woman who was detained while peacefully demonstrating on Wednesday and was released Thursday from the notorious Okrestina detention center on the outskirts of Minsk recounted her ordeal through tears to the Tut.by news site.

In a video, she said 10 riot police officers pummeled her with batons and their fists, forced her against a wall, pulled down her pants, and threatened to gang rape and kill her.

“They told me, ‘We’ll fuck you so hard, your own mother won’t recognize you,’” she recalled a police officer telling her.


TUT.BY@tutby
Девушка, которую выпустили из изолятора на Окрестина, рассказывает, как с ней обращались силовики. «Били, оскорбляли, угрожали смертью, снимали штаны».08:45 PM - 13 Aug 2020
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At least one man has died in custody, Belarusian authorities said on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the country’s interior minister, Yuri Karayev, said he took responsibility for “random people” getting caught up in the protests and injured. But he expressed no regret for the alleged police abuse.

Reached by phone, an Interior Ministry official declined to comment on the reported abuses by police.

Vitushka called it an empty apology and claimed Karayev was merely trying to quell the large-scale demonstrations that have engulfed the country and threatened the 26-year rule of Lukashenko.

The demonstrations erupted following Sunday’s election, which culminated in the 65-year-old incumbent president claiming a sixth election victory despite widespread reports of vote-rigging. His challenger, 37-year-old former English teacher Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, declared victory for herself, citing reports from dozens of precincts that showed she had won somewhere between 60% and 70% of votes at each.

Under pressure from Lukashenko’s government and fearful of arrest, she fled to Lithuania on Tuesday. Her husband, a popular political vlogger who was barred from running in the election, has been in state custody since May.

On Friday, Tikhanovskaya published a video in which she said Belarusians no longer want to live under the Lukashenko regime. “The majority do not believe in his victory,” she said.

She also called on authorities to stop the “bloody slaughter” of protesters and agree to a dialogue.

“I ask the mayors of all cities to organize peaceful mass assemblies in every city on Aug. 15 and 16,” she added.

Later in another statement, she called for the “creation of a coordinating council to ensure the transfer of power” in the country.

Meanwhile, workers at state and private enterprises across Belarus walked off the job for a second straight day to protest police violence and demand the release of all those detained. They also called for Lukashenko to leave office, with a sign at one factory saying “we didn’t elect him.”

Lukashenko has said little since the election and the outbreak of protests against him and his regime. But on Friday, in comments carried by state media during a meeting to discuss the economy, he appeared defiant. Suggesting he was not ready to step down, he said, “I am still alive and not abroad.”

Belarusians Are Walking Out Of Work And Accusing Police Of Torture As Protests Grip The Country

The first cracks began to show in the authoritarian regime of President Alexander Lukashenko as a senior official and police officers resigned in protest over violence against demonstrators.

Christopher MillerBuzzFeed News Contributor
Kyiv, Ukraine
Posted on August 13, 2020, at 1:45 p.m. ET

Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters
Women take part in a demonstration against police violence following the presidential election in Minsk, Belarus, Aug. 12.

KYIV — Thousands of workers at state enterprises across Belarus staged walkouts and women dressed in white and carrying flowers formed human chains in the capital, Minsk, on Thursday to protest the brutal crackdown on demonstrators that have gripped the country since Sunday’s disputed presidential election.

The public displays of defiance are unlike anything the country has seen since it broke from the Soviet Union in 1991, and they have significantly upped the pressure on 65-year-old Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.

The unrest erupted after Lukashenko claimed to have secured a landslide reelection victory this weekend despite widespread reports of vote-rigging. The Belarusian opposition camp has called the vote fraudulent, while the US and the EU have condemned the election as neither free nor fair.

Lukashenko said he defeated Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher who exploded onto the political scene to challenge him in the election after her husband, a popular vlogger, was barred from running and jailed. Tikhanovskaya ignited a movement in Belarus, where she drew massive crowds inspired by her candidacy. After the election, she fled to Lithuania under tense circumstances and following a mysterious meeting with election officials on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on a visit to Prague that Washington, DC, wants “good outcomes for the Belarusian people.” He also said the US has observed “the violence and the aftermath, peaceful protesters being treated in ways that are inconsistent with how they should be treated.”

Reuters cited EU diplomats and officials as saying they will likely impose new sanctions on Belarus before the end of August.

Videos and photos shared on social media on Thursday showed laborers at an auto parts plant, a truck factory, an aircraft accessories shop, and several other state-run enterprises walking off the job. They told their bosses they would not go back to work until heavily armed riot police stopped beating up demonstrators and authorities released the thousands of people being held in detention centers, according to accounts in local media.


In one video, a supervisor at a plant in the western city of Grodno is heard asking workers to raise their hands if they voted for Tikhanovskaya. Nearly everyone in the large crowd erupts in approval and raises their hand.



Christopher Miller@ChristopherJM

“Show us by hands those who voted for Lukashenko. Now show us who voted for Tikhanovskaya.” Another factory strike.02:13 PM - 13 Aug 2020
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It wasn’t only blue-collar workers who joined the nationwide strike. Artists from the Belarusian State Philharmonic Society also walked out in protest over police violence and the election results. Holding placards that spelled out “My voice was stolen,” the group performed a stirring rendition of “Mighty God,” a hymn that was once proposed to be the official anthem of Belarus.



Медиазона. Беларусь@mediazona_by
Сотрудники Белгосфилармонии вышли на забастовку: они выстроились у здания с плакатами «У меня украли голос» и поют https://t.co/fefxUgMphB Видео: Сергей Козлович09:24 AM - 13 Aug 2020
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The demonstrations of defiance came as the first cracks began to show in the regime of Lukashenko, famously dubbed by the West as “Europe’s last dictator.” In an unprecedented move, a deputy head of his administration reportedly resigned in protest over police violence against demonstrators, and several officers and military personnel shared photos and videos on social media showing them throwing out or destroying their uniforms and credentials.

One former officer wrote on Instagram beneath a photo of his police badge and awards, “17 years of service over. My conscience is clear. Police with the people.” At the time of publishing, it had more than 380,000 likes.

The defections have also spread to Belarus’s powerful state-run media machine, with several popular talk show hosts and news presenters announcing their departures over the government-ordered abuse of protesters.

“As a wife, mother, media employee, and citizen, I cannot calmly look at what is happening in the country now,” Marina Mishkina, a state-run radio station reporter, told Radio Free Europe’s Belarusian service. “I’m afraid of everything now. I walk down the street and I’m afraid. I open social networks and I’m afraid [of what I’ll see].”

Riot police officers numbering in the thousands have been deployed across the country, transforming public streets and squares where families once strolled into bloody battlegrounds. The largest concentration of them is in Minsk, where the protests are now in their fifth day, and the clashes on the streets the most violent.


Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters
A woman gestures during a rally following the presidential election in Minsk, Belarus, Aug. 10.


Police forces have used stun grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets, and as of Wednesday even live ammunition to suppress crowds of protesters. They have confiscated ambulances and used them to disguise their approach while hunting people down in the streets. And they have targeted journalists covering the events, beating them and destroying their equipment.


At least 68 journalists, including foreign journalists, have been detained, and 23 of those remain in detention facilities, the Russian MediaZona news site reported.

Minsk-based journalist Hanna Liubakova, citing her own sources, reported on Thursday that police had begun searching hotels for foreign correspondents. On Tuesday, the head of the immigration department in Belarus’s Foreign Ministry warned that reporters working without government accreditation would be arrested, deported, and banned from entering the country for 10 years.

The ministry refused to grant press accreditation to dozens of media outlets, including BuzzFeed News, that applied in the run-up to the election.

Meanwhile, authorities released dozens of the more than 6,000 demonstrators who have been arrested during the protests. They staggered out of detention facilities across Belarus and were met by anxious family and friends. Some of them recounted their horrific experiences while in detention.

Videos have surfaced in recent days of police abuse against demonstrators. In one widely shared video, dozens of them are seen being beaten by police with batons as they lay facedown in a compound surrounded by high walls and razor wire. In another, filmed from outside detention facilities, demonstrators can be heard screaming and pleading with police not to beat them. In a video aired on state television, a disguised voice off camera tells a group of young protesters, their faces badly bruised and hands tied behind their backs, to apologize and vow not to participate in more demonstrations.

Russian journalist Nikita Telizhenko, who was detained by police and held in a jail cell for 16 hours before being released, described enduring and witnessing vicious beatings as well as the horrific conditions in which people are kept.


At the police station, he said, “The guy in front of me, they purposely hit his head on the doorframe of the entrance to the police department. He screamed in pain. In response, they began to beat him on the head and shout: ‘Shut up, bitch!’”

He continued, “The first time they hit me, it was when they took me out of the police van. I didn’t bend down low enough and got hit with a hand to the head, and then with a knee in the face.”

Telizhenko described the room where protesters were being held as covered with “a living carpet” of people he had to walk on top of. Then he said police ordered him to lie facedown. “And there was nowhere to lie. People are lying around in pools of blood.”

August 13, 2020, at 12:01 p.m.


Correction: Alexander Lukashenko has served as president of Belarus since 1994. The year was misstated in an earlier version of this post.


MORE ON THIS
Belarusians Clashed With Riot Police After Their “Dictator” President Claimed VictoryChristopher Miller · Aug. 10, 2020
Massive Crowds Are Rallying Around This 37-Year-Old Woman Trying To Oust “Europe’s Last Dictator”Christopher Miller · Aug. 7, 2020
“God Forbid You Ever Have To Face The Choice That I Faced." Belarus's Opposition Candidate Has Fled The Country As The Government Cracks Down.Christopher Miller · Aug. 11, 2020
A Former Bernie Sanders Campaign Staffer Is Stuck In A Belarus Jail Cell, Charged With Disrupting The PeaceChristopher Miller · Aug. 7, 2020

Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Danger
Facebook’s employees and fact-checking partners say they are left in the dark about how the company decides what content stays up and what comes down.

Posted on August 13, 2020

Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

On May 8, Prager University, a nonprofit conservative media outlet, published a video on Facebook that incorrectly claimed “there is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor” in climate change. Within days, Climate Feedback, a nonpartisan network of scientists and a member of Facebook’s global fact-checking partnership, rated the content as false — a designation that was supposed to result in serious consequences.

It was PragerU’s second strike for false content that month, which under Facebook’s own policies should have triggered “repeat offender” penalties including the revocation of advertising privileges and the specter of possible deletion.

But it didn't. As first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, a Facebook employee intervened on PragerU’s behalf and asked for a reexamination of the judgment, citing “partner sensitivity” and the amount of money the organization had spent on ads. Eventually, while the false labels on PragerU’s posts remained, Facebook disappeared the strikes from its internal record and no one — not the public, the fact-checkers, or Facebook’s own employees — was informed of the decision.

Meanwhile, PragerU cashed in on the fact-checks of its climate misinformation. On May 19 — the day after it received its first strike for false content — it launched a fundraiser. “Facebook is using biased 3rd party fact-checkers to flag content and censor conservatives," the organization told its more than 4.2 million followers. "Is Facebook now the arbiter of truth?”

The campaign raised $21,637.

Since at least late 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended Facebook by insisting it should not be “an arbiter of truth,” while creating a third-party fact-checking program to fill that role of umpire. But journalists and researchers at the dozens of organizations that make up Facebook’s fact-checking operation say the company is often just that. Some told BuzzFeed News they were surprised to learn their verdicts had been ignored or overruled by Facebook in a closed-door process with little transparency, and warned that this risks undermining the program’s credibility.

“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information,” said one fact-checker who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from Facebook.

“If people want to evade consequences, it’s easy to do it,” they added.

“They are the arbiters of the consequences for publishing false or misleading information.”

Some employees at the social network agreed. Last week, after BuzzFeed News revealed Facebook executives and staff were intervening in fact-check disputes on behalf of right-wing publishers, workers wondered if the company was caving to loud critics and political pressure.

“Mark likes to say how Facebook should not be ‘the arbiter of truth,’” one person wrote in an internal Facebook employee group. “But escalations... that are focused on partners who are ‘sensitive’ sound exactly like us meddling in this area. How do we reconcile this contradiction?”

Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said that even though Facebook doesn’t want to be in the business of declaring what is true and false, it still makes a lot of choices in how it structures its policies and fact-checking program that leave it “in the driver seat.”

“There will be a pretty big reckoning around fact-checking,” she said. “People don’t really understand it either and they see it as a panacea for problems on social media platforms.”
Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out at craig.silverman@buzzfeed.com, ryan.mac@buzzfeed.com, or via one of our tip line channels.

Facebook did not answer a list of specific questions related to the preferential treatment of right-wing pages that had received misinformation strikes. Previously the company had said that while it “defer[s] to third-party fact-checkers on the rating that a piece of content receives” only it is “responsible for how we manage our internal system for repeat offenders.”

"Facebook is the only company to partner with more than 70 fact-checking organizations worldwide to fight the spread of viral misinformation,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement for this story. “There is no playbook for a program like ours and we’re constantly working to improve it based on feedback from our partners and what we see on our platform.”





Jack Gruber / USA TODAY NETWORK


“The Arbiter of Truth”

Four days after the 2016 US presidential election, Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa to Facebook addressing mounting evidence that misinformation spread and amplified on the platform might have influenced its result. In the post, the Facebook CEO — who had previously said misinformation on the social network influencing the election was a "pretty crazy idea" — acknowledged hoaxes and fake news did exist on the social network.

“This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated,” he wrote. “While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. … I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Facebook launched a third-party fact-checking program a month after Zuckerberg’s post, and its CEO’s sentiment has become a common refrain from the social network’s executives. Debates on whether Facebook is a media company that’s responsible for the content on its platform have shifted to whether or not the company should play a role in identifying — and subsequently removing — misinformation.

Now, as the US heads toward another contentious presidential election, Zuckerberg is again rolling out the “arbiter of truth” talking point. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," he told Fox News in May. “Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

"They’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not."

But internal discussions and documents recently obtained by BuzzFeed News and NBC News revealed that Facebook has been doing just that, deciding whether or not to penalize pages after they’ve received strikes for misinformation and, at times, casting aside judgments made by its fact-checking partners seemingly for fear of political blowback or lost revenue. Unlike fact-checkers, Facebook does not disclose the reasons and evidence it uses to make decisions to remove misinformation strikes or otherwise choose to overrule its fact-checking partners.

“The problem with what they’re doing is they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth,’ but they do want to be the arbiter of whether pages are taken down or not,” said Peter Cunliffe-Jones, the founder of Africa Check, who now serves as an adviser to the International Fact-Checking Network. “And there is no transparency about that decision making process.”

Cunliffe-Jones suggested Facebook take a page from its fact-checkers and publish its rationale for removing misinformation strikes and other reversals, lest it undermines trust in the entire process.

“I do understand that even Facebook can’t provide granular detail on every decision made across millions of decisions, but on the significant ones they can,” he said. “I think it would help to develop trust in the process. And if the process [at Facebook] is not trustworthy, that would expose it.”

The lack of transparency to which Cunliffe-Jones referred has roiled the social network’s own employees. Following BuzzFeed News’ story that revealed preferential treatment for conservative pages and personal interventions from executives including vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan, an internal message board called “Let’s Fix Facebook (the company),” which has about 10,000 members, exploded in conversation.

“The silence on this is unacceptable. Both the pipeline intervention and the firing,” wrote one employee, referring to the removals of misinformation strikes and the dismissal of an engineer who gathered and revealed evidence of it.

“Can we also use this as an opportunity to be more transparent about fact-checking in general?” asked another employee. “Not just internally but also to our users? How escalations and appeals work, who can do them, who is doing them, aggregated statistics about posts labeled...”

“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job.”

The lack of transparency has also upset those being penalized for misinformation rulings, including the executives at PragerU. Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, said his organization appealed the fact-check decisions with Climate Feedback in May but was not aware of any Facebook employees working on their behalf to get the strikes removed.

“If someone at Facebook is trying to help us, they’re not doing a very good job,” Strazzeri said, noting that PragerU’s organic reach was cut following the two false fact-checks. PragerU was still able to run ads during that time period, according to Strazzeri, who noted that the company’s page is once again under scrutiny after two more strikes for misinformation since May.

Emmanuel Vincent, the director of Science Feedback, the not-for-profit organization that runs Climate Feedback, said PragerU only disputed one of its two May verdicts, which it upheld as false. He's concerned that PragerU has found a way to use fact-checks to its advantage.

"Each time they get a strike, they can raise money,” he said.



Bloomberg / Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC, July 29.


Repeat Offenders

Facebook's level of attention to concerns from American conservatives on its platform is unlike any other constituency in the world, according to the fact-checkers who spoke to BuzzFeed News. Some worry that’s detrimental to international efforts to police the platform for misinformation. Cunliffe-Jones told BuzzFeed News Facebook has failed to act against repeat offender financial scam pages in countries like Kenya.

“It’s been clear from quite early on that there’s a problem with the way that some pages that are repeat offenders seem to keep on operating,” Cunliffe-Jones said. “I’ve noted this from pages that have been repeatedly fact-checked [in Kenya]. With these pages, I don’t think there’s a political game. I think it’s a lack of attention — and that’s also harmful.”

Other international fact-checkers said Facebook’s emphasis on the US election cause it to be less responsive to issues in other parts of the world. One journalist at a fact-checking outlet in a G7 country said Facebook’s lack of local staff causes the company to at times ask its checking partners to help with decisions about how to apply company policy.

“They're not as well-staffed in some of the other markets outside the US. So they actually do lean on the fact-checkers a little bit more about some of the policy things,” said the journalist.


Bourgeois said Facebook values the expertise of local checkers. “We frequently speak to fact-checkers in different regions to understand how misinformation is spreading in their countries and languages. This is not in lieu of relying on the expertise of our own teams, it’s in addition.”

"...there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook."

Agence France-Presse has fact-checkers in more than 30 countries, making it Facebook’s biggest partner in the program. Phil Chetwynd, the global news director of AFP, said his organization has not felt pressure from Facebook about its ratings, though anything having to do with the US is given a different level of scrutiny by the company.

“You can feel there’s not much bandwidth for anything outside the US at the moment at Facebook,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous concentration of resources on the US.”

Chetwynd said one of the values of participating in the fact-checking program for organizations like AFP is knowing that repeat offenders face consequences. If Facebook fails to enforce its policies, it reduces the value of fact-checkers. And the lack of transparency around the internal decision-making process for removing misinformation strikes only makes things worse.

“Most fact-checkers have developed a very constructive relationship with Facebook, but this issue around transparency has always been a point of frustration,” he said. “It is something we have voiced to them many times both privately and publicly — we do not get nearly enough precise data on the impact of our fact-checks on the platform. Our feeling is that making this data public would only add to the credibility of our work and the fact-checking program in general.”

The Opinion Exemption

Over the past two months, Facebook and its fact-checking partners have been discussing one of the more contentious issues in their partnership: the so-called opinion exemption. Facebook’s policy is that opinion articles, like statements from political leaders, are exempt from review.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Facebook employees have cited this policy as justification for removing misinformation strikes from PragerU and pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk after fact-checkers issued them. A Facebook partner manager for PragerU said the false claims the publication made about the climate crisis should fall under the “opinion loophole.”

On Tuesday, Facebook seemingly closed this loophole explaining in a policy update that if “content is presented as opinion but is based on underlying false information - even if it’s an op-ed or editorial - it's still eligible to be fact-checked.”

"It’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media.”


Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the policy update will help ensure that misinformation can’t be embedded in op-ed pieces. But he noted that Facebook can still decide whether a piece of fact-checked content is opinion or not. The company can remove misinformation strikes without informing a fact-checker of its decision. That lack of transparency is a problem.

“At the end of the day, it’s not the best thing for a fact-checker to learn their flag has been removed by Facebook from the media,” he said.

Other fact-checkers echoed Örsek’s concerns. One said they wished Facebook had to publicly disclose when it removes a misinformation strike. Such an obligation would make it difficult for the company to give preferential treatment to “the partners who pay a lot of money to Facebook, or the partners who could say something and be heard at the very high levels of the company.”

That appeared to be the case with PragerU, which has managed to avoid severe punishment — and monetize it.

PragerU has raised at least $400,000 from Facebook fundraisers protesting alleged censorship on Facebook and YouTube since late 2018, according to a review by BuzzFeed News. On Aug. 5, it launched a fundraiser on Facebook in response to the company’s removal of a PragerU post featuring a now-infamous video initially circulated by Breitbart News of a group of doctors making false and potentially harmful claims about COVID-19.

It raised $66,844. ●


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Ilhan Omar Won A Bitter Primary To Keep Her Seat In Congress

Omar beat a well-funded challenger in her Democrat-heavy Minnesota congressional district.

Molly Hensley-Clancy BuzzFeed News Reporter


Last updated on August 12, 2020

Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Ilhan Omar beat back a well-funded primary challenger on Tuesday in Minneapolis by a comfortable margin, virtually guaranteeing a second term in Congress.

Antone Melton-Meaux had raised millions of dollars for a campaign fueled in large part by dislike of Omar, one of the first Muslim women in Congress and a member of the so-called Squad of Democratic women of color. In her first two years in Congress, Omar was accused of anti-Semitic comments and campaign finance irregularities, and had also been the target of racist attacks from conservatives.

Two other members of the Squad, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, also won high-profile primaries — both by significant margins.

But in Minneapolis, Omar’s race had appeared to tighten significantly: She lost the endorsement of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, her district’s major newspaper, and spent money on ads attacking Melton-Meaux. In recent months, she was out-raised by Melton-Meaux, whose average donation in June was over $600.

Votes are still being counted in Minnesota, but Omar is on track to join Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez with a large win.

Omar’s campaign had emphasized her progressive credentials in Congress — an important factor in her district in Minneapolis, one of the deepest blue areas in the country.

“No one has ever been in Congress who represents as many of the marginalized identities that I represent in one body, and who has been a first in the ways that I’ve been a first,” she told BuzzFeed News in a recent interview.

“To be the only member in Congress that comes from a country that is currently on the president’s Muslim ban — I did not expect there to be a red carpet welcome situation.”

Her reelection slogan, “Send Her Back — to Congress,” evoked the racist remarks by President Donald Trump, who said he believed she and other members of the Squad should “go back” to where they came from.

What The Kamala Harris Pick Means To The Black Women Who Lead The Democratic Party

“You do not understand how much this means for us,” a longtime Democratic official said of Biden picking Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Ruby CramerBuzzFeed News Reporter 

Molly Hensley-ClancyBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 12, 2020

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Sen. Kamala Harris poses for a selfie during an event in Washington, DC, Feb. 7, 2019.


At 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Yolanda Caraway was sitting at her desk, smiling as the notifications lit up faster than she could read them. “‘This is the first thing that’s lifting my mood in four months.’ ‘So excited I can’t stand it!’ ‘Howard University all the way.’ ‘’Kamala! Kamala!! Kamala!!!’”

The emails came one after the other, many from Black political leaders who, just like Caraway, have seen the Democratic Party through decades of change and transformation, but were left breathless and elated by Tuesday’s news. “You do not understand how much this means for us,” she said that night. “The emails are still coming.”


Karen Carter Peterson’s phone was blowing up, too. The first thing she did was tap out a text to her family group chat. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings on the thread — but it was a message of gratitude, she said, sent especially for her mother. “Happy to celebrate this with my Mom who sacrificed so much for my education at @HowardU and my public service,” wrote Carter Peterson, a Democratic Party officer and the departing chair of the Louisiana state party. “Heartfelt gratitude to all who helped us get to this moment.”

Minyon Moore was at the dining room table she uses as a desk when the call came. “And I just sat with that for a minute. I just sat there. And then I found, out of nowhere, just tears coming down — like they are now,” she said in a phone call on Tuesday night, before ticking off the names that came next to mind. “I thought about Betty Shabazz. I thought about Coretta Scott King. I thought about Maya Angelou. I thought about Dorothy Height. And I thought about everything that they have poured into us.”

Moore, a 62-year-old veteran political operative who, alongside Caraway and others, helped pave the way for Black women to become the institutional backbone of the Democratic Party, laughed as she came to the end of her list. “And then it took Joe Biden to say, ‘It’s time to come out from the shadows.’ To say, ‘I see you.’ He saw her. He saw her qualifications despite all the negative stuff that was being thrown at her,” Moore said. “He made history, but I think he will never know how much history he has made.”


The countless texts and emails and video calls that flew back and forth on Tuesday night, connecting Black women across the Democratic Party in the middle of both a pandemic and a time of deep pain and anger over racism and police violence in America, reflect the emotional weight and release of Joe Biden’s selection of the first Black woman on the presidential ticket for any major party, Sen. Kamala Harris.

Harris, a 55-year-old former attorney general of California, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and a graduate of the leading historically Black college Howard University, will make history for both Black women and people of South Asian descent when her name appears as the Democratic vice presidential nominee on ballots this fall.

For the operatives, candidates, and activists who see something of themselves in a person like Harris, Tuesday hit as something more personal and communal — almost familial — than a piece of political news.



One of the first people that Moore called was Leah Daughtry, another longtime official who has worked for the party since the ’80s. “And then we were crying together,” said Daughtry. When she hung up the phone, she sat alone in her office — “and I wept,” Daughtry said, thinking of her grandmother, raised in the segregated South; thinking of her own role in the party — “opening doors, making room at the table, ‘bringing a folding chair,’ as Shirley Chisholm would say” — and of “all the threads of my life wound into one, to see this Black woman on the ticket, it's an amazing moment.”


Melina Mara / The Washington Post via Getty Images
A packed room full of women of color listen to Harris during the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada, March 1, 2019.


Harris’s presidential campaign last year leaned into that history: Her bright yellow, red, and blue logo evoked the political buttons worn by Chisholm in her 1972 presidential run, and on the campaign trail, she spoke regularly of her parents, who met in the civil rights movement in Oakland. But she also struggled to make inroads with Black voters, including Black women. After her campaign zeroed in initially on South Carolina, where Democratic primary voters are overwhelmingly Black, she pivoted to mostly white Iowa.


In March, Harris spoke about the challenges of running as a Black woman, especially with a mostly white press corps who, she said, treated her differently than white candidates and could miss things like the significance of a Black institution like Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically Black sorority Harris joined at Howard.

“If you don’t notice the shine in the little Black girl’s eyes because you don’t look in their eyes, you’re not going to write about that,” she said this spring.

By then, the historically diverse slate of presidential candidates in the Democratic primary had winnowed to two white men in their late seventies, Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders — a moment of reckoning for some Democrats.

Across the country, though, a historic number of Black women are now running for office in 2020: more than 120, according to an estimate by the Center for American Women and Politics.


In her 5-year-old daughter’s room, Jennifer McClellan, a state senator and gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, jumped to her feet when she heard the news about Harris, shouting, “Yes!” Immediately, McClellan picked up the phone and made calls: first to Carter Peterson, who also serves as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, then to Shavonda Sumter, a state legislator in New Jersey, followed by texts to Ramesh Akbari, a legislator in Tennessee.

When she first heard Biden’s decision, McClellan said, she tried not to cry. But she teared up as she spoke about it later: “It’s just — I’m just proud. I’m just very proud.”

Pam Keith, a Florida Democrat running for a House seat, was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha in the same generation as Harris. On Tuesday, Keith’s group text buzzed with her sisters in AKA, including some who had not been active in the sorority in years. Keith felt “massively giddy” with excitement.

But she also felt relief.

“No matter what you are, as a Black woman, in politics, in leadership, in authority, you’re not quite the right kind of Black woman,” Keith said — something, she noted, that never happens to white men.

“To see Kamala having gone through the presidential primary and taken so many slings and arrows and insults for being the wrong kind of Black woman — to see someone with the visibility and respect and power of Joe Biden say, ‘No, Kamala is exactly the right kind of Black woman. She’s herself, and that’s exactly right.’ That’s a kind of validation that we seldom get when we walk this path. And that’s really relieving. And giddy. Just, massively giddy.”



Larry French / Getty Images
Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Minyon Moore, Leah Daughtry, and host Zerlina Maxwell at SiriusXM Studio in Washington, DC, March 28, 2017.


Many of the Democratic operatives interviewed for this article were part of an early and coordinated push by Black women to influence Biden’s search and defend the top contenders through the vetting process. Harris was one of about six Black women under consideration for the job, alongside former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, California Rep. Karen Bass, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Florida Rep. Val Demings, and former national security adviser Susan Rice. The women faced a barrage of opposition research and, at points, blatant racism and sexism.

Last week, more than 100 Black women leaders organized an open letter pushing back against depictions of the possible vice presidential nominees as too “ambitious” or lacking “remorse.” One comment, a Facebook post from a small-town mayor in Virginia who referred to Biden’s prospective pick as “Aunt Jemima,” was the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Caraway, the longtime political operative who served as a DNC member for about two decades.


“No matter who you are supporting for vice president,” the open letter read, “you should be equally outraged by the blatant disrespect of Black women.”

“We came together as a group and made a stand,” said Moore. “When you have a mayor that is calling you ‘Aunt Jemima,’ you can't just let that go idly by. The thing that I regret the most is that we did not stand up for Hillary. We voted for her. But we did not stand up.”

Earlier this spring, a group of Black women met virtually with Biden and his staff to express the importance of representation on the ticket.

About a month ago, a smaller group including Daughtry and Moore met again with Biden’s vice presidential search committee — this time to express their preference specifically for Harris, according to three people familiar with the meeting. (Moore and Daughtry declined to comment on the details of their talks with the committee.)

In interviews on Tuesday night, Black women described Harris’s nomination as a marker affixed between past and future. They sent around old videos of Shirley Chisholm, and they quoted Maya Angelou: “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”


For many, these were messages intended for the next generation. About a week ago, Daughtry said, she told one of the only young women in her family, a 3-year-old niece named Lauren Joy, that she was spending her days and nights working to get a Black woman on the ticket, “so that next year she will grow up only ever knowing a vice president to be a Black woman.”

Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic party official who has twice served as interim chair of the DNC, got the news early, and placed a call in secret to a young mentee: Amos Jackson III, a special assistant in Harris’s Senate office who also served as the former student body president at her alma mater, Howard University, class of 2019. “When I told him she had been selected, and that he had to keep it quiet, he just cried,” Brazile said in an interview. “And for me, that summed up what this moment has been.”

Brazile, Daughtry, Caraway, and Moore entered Democratic politics in the 1980s, a time that ushered in Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns and Ron Brown’s tenure as the first Black chair of the DNC, and helped cement Black women both the party’s longest-serving stewards and most loyal voting bloc every four years. Caraway said she remembers meeting Harris as a young college student at Howard University, when her roommate was a volunteer on Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign. “I was like a big sister to her,” Caraway said on Tuesday.


They also know well the singular challenge that Harris will face in her new role, with the burden of so many firsts on her back while running against a president who has frequently demeaned his opponents with racist and sexist attacks.

In his first comments about Biden’s new vice presidential nominee on Tuesday night, President Trump repeatedly referred to Harris as “nasty,” a word he’s frequently used for years to describe women with whom he is in conflict.

“Historically, the attacks on women, and particularly Black women, are well-documented,” said Joyce Elliott, a legislator running for a House seat in Arkansas. “I’ve felt that pain myself. But I’ve tried to channel it, and hoped that that’s going to be helpful to move the needle for women that come after me.”

Keith, the House candidate in Florida, said she knows the likelihood that Harris will be subject to attacks rooted in sexism and misogyny. But she’s not worried.


“It’s nothing she hasn’t dealt with before,” said Keith. “But second of all, she has got an army of the most ferocious Black women backing her. The people who are going to come at her with their kitchen knives ain’t got nothing on us.” ●


Bob Andres / AP
A young girl sits on the floor during a Kamala Harris campaign event in Iowa.

CORRECTION
August 12, 2020, at 9:15 a.m.
Caraway met Kamala Harris when her roommate was working on the 1984 presidential campaign. A previous version of this story misstated how they met.


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Molly Hensley-Clancy is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

Dinesh D’Souza’s Attacks On Kamala Harris Are Part Of A Bigger Problem In The Indian Community

As an Indian man, D’Souza has the privilege of appealing to white conservatives by being the minority in the room willing to attack Black people.

BECAUSE LIKE FELLOW INDO-AMERICANS BOBBI JINDAL, NIKKI HALEY HE IS JUST ANOTHER WHITE MAN (ARYAN) WITH A TAN

HE IS A BRAHMIN

Scaachi KoulBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 12, 2020

Shannon Finney / Getty Images
Dinesh D'Souza attends the DC premiere of his film Death of a Nation on Aug. 1, 2018, in Washington, DC.

Whenever white people do something terrible — I could give you an example or you could just Google “Karen” and save me the trouble — I often joke to my white friends that they have to collect their people. But now, given conservative political commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s recent statements defending the president and attacking Kamala Harris, I must accept my burden, and collect this idiot.

If you’re not versed in D’Souza’s oeuvre, you’re very lucky. Originally from Mumbai, he’s a right-wing commentator perhaps best known for his yearslong hard-on for attacking Barack Obama, first in 2010 with his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and then in 2012 with a documentary based on the book. He’s also released a few other documentaries including Hillary’s America (which is an extended argument against the Democratic Party) and Death of a Nation, which features white nationalist Richard Spencer, and compares Trump to Abraham Lincoln and Democrats to fascists.

D’Souza’s latest round of comments may also be some of his dumbest. Last week he went on Twitter to, again, defend Donald Trump when the president pronounced Thailand as “Thighland.” “‘Thighland,’ not ‘Tai-land,’ is how English speakers around the world say it,” tweeted D’Souza, which is too stupid an argument to parse. Then yesterday, he hopped over to Fox News to argue that Kamala Harris shouldn’t be considered “African American” because she’s related to “one of the largest slave owners in Jamaica.”

There are many legitimate critiques to make of Kamala Harris, especially now that she’s the Democratic vice presidential pick. You can criticize her for being too much of a centrist while young Democratic voters are looking for more progressive representation. You can go after her for being a pro–law enforcement attorney general whose views don’t align with more progressive abolitionist views of the police. But going after her Blackness, and arguing that she isn’t actually Black because some of her ancestors might have been slave owners — as is true for many Black Americans, something beyond their control — is hardly relevant. It’s hard to deny that D’Souza has built his career off making ad hominem attacks against Black people. As a brown man in the media, D’Souza gets more cover than his white, conservative counterparts: It’s as if he’s saying, Me, a racist? That’s unpossible! I’m an ethnic!

I have known so many Indians like D’Souza in my life. They’re in my family, despite my best efforts to have them excommunicated. They pronounce their first names as anglicized as possible — Din-esh instead of Dhin-eish, trust me, I notice the difference, and I make fun of you — to, I can only assume, make white people comfortable. Maybe they voted for the very right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP, if they’re living in India, and say things like, “Well, I’m polite to Muslims, I just wouldn’t want to befriend one.”

D’Souza is an immigrant from Mumbai but raised Catholic, who has seemingly spent his entire life trying to outrun his own heritage and his outsider-status anxiety, desperate to fit in even at the expense of his own community, or of communities with even less privilege than upwardly mobile, middle-class, America-bound Indians. His entire career has been built on boot-licking white conservatives, as if that’ll give him some protection as a brown immigrant living in America. I guess, to some degree, this has worked — in 2018, Trump gave him a pardon after he pleaded guilty to using straw donors, illegally, to contribute to a Republican Senate candidate in 2014.

This is not the first time D'Souza has said racist things against Black people. He called Obama a “boy” from “the ghetto,” and called his father a “philandering, inebriated African socialist.” He joined in on the birther movement against Obama when he was president. He declared Michelle Obama’s college thesis “a document so illiterate and incoherent that it was written … in ‘no known language’” and called Rosa Parks “overrated.” He’s tweeted about how “a disproportionate amount of violent crime is done by blacks,” and once called the late John Lewis “a nasty, bitter old man.” In one of his books, he wrote that slaves in America were treated “pretty well” because they were treated like property.


Robyn Beck / Getty Images
California Sen. Kamala Harris

Fox News has D’Souza on its shows regularly, perhaps because he offers the network some leeway. Ben Shapiro, with his do-you-have-a-hall-pass-to-go-to-the-bathroom voice, likely can’t cast aspersions on Harris’s ethnic background without getting some well-earned criticism for it. (It’s the same reason why Shapiro won’t just say that he resents Black female sexuality with his chest and instead reads the lyrics to “WAP” like he’s allergic to them, which I assume he is, since he is the alleged president and treasurer of the DAP Society.)

But D’Souza can appear on The Ingraham Angle like a Trojan horse, his Indian name, his namaskar, Dinesh Uncle-Ji hair, and his dark — oop, but not too dark — skin, and spout off racist arguments against a Black politician. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

The Black Lives Matter protests in the last few months have been a good time for all non-Black people to reflect on how we participate in the oppression of Black people. Indians, in particular, have a unique responsibility here — we have privilege not in spite of how Black people are treated around the world, but because of that treatment. My father, the other day, called me and mentioned I should keep a Gandhi portrait in my home. I gently (or as gently as the Kouls get, which is about as gentle as an ice scraper being dragged across concrete) reminded him that Gandhi, too, was a racist. Gandhi said Black people are “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” He believed in the “purity of races” and thought white people should be the “predominating race” in South Africa in the early 1900s.

Just like white people, Indians have also been steeped in anti-Blackness from early on in our history, even in moments when we, too, were being oppressed. D’Souza continues this long-held tradition with no subtlety and no guile. His language around Black people is something just about every Indian has heard from their own family. The difference, of course, is my racist cousin isn’t on television and doesn’t write books. I’m not even friends with him on Facebook anymore. That’s growth, kids.

There’s a long tradition of Indians being racist against Black people, and the logic is clear: If Black people remain one of — if not the — most oppressed groups in North America, then Indians are given a slightly elevated pedestal. If we act like the model minority white people want us to be, then we can thrive. D’Souza, I’m guessing, is just fine getting privilege at the cost of Black people’s dignity.

White people get away with anti-Black racism enough as it is, but anti-Blackness takes an even more pernicious tone with D’Souza because he’s using his Indianness to get away with even more. It’s important for white people to point out anti-Blackness wherever they see it, but as Harris becomes more and more prominent in this election cycle, it’s essential for Indian people to point it out in our own community, loudly and often, too. Harris is a Black woman, but she’s also an Indian woman, and her right to live in both of those identities should be protected.

It’s our duty to point out those within Indian communities — even if we don’t really want them in our community, hare raaaaaaam — who use anti-Blackness as a way to prop themselves up. It’s our responsibility to stay vigilant in how we criticize D’Souza, his toxic rhetoric that’s nothing more than misdirection during an already fraught election cycle. He isn’t better than a white man saying the same thing — in fact, he might be worse. I suspect that on some level, he knows what it’s like to have your life made smaller because of racism, discrimination, and bias.

No passes for anti-Black white people in 2020, and no passes for anti-Black Indian people either. D’Souza, I’m sure, can continue going on Fox News to keep upping the ante on what’s acceptable speech, but at the very least, I can do what so many of my fellow Indians have done for me when I did something wrong: Yell far and wide about my failures, so that every aunty in the world knew my shame.



Scaachi Koul is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/08/tamil-nadu-village-grabs-spotlight.html

The Trump Administration Is Preparing To Treat Asylum-Seekers As Security Threats

If implemented, the rule would take effect for 90 days and block immigrants who've been in Mexico or Canada within the last two weeks from legal protections.

Hamed Aleaziz BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on August 14, 2020

Paul Ratje / Getty Images
A group of immigrants sit on the ground near US Border Patrol agents in Sunland Park, New Mexico, March 20, 2019.

The Trump administration has drafted a new rule that would take effect immediately and treat those seeking protection from persecution at a US land border as security threats if they had been in Mexico or Canada within the last two weeks of their arrival, according to a draft obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The draft rule, if implemented, would block affected asylum-seekers from legal protections and be in effect for 90 days immediately after it’s issued.

The draft rule cites the effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus within the US, but would represent the latest attempt by the Trump administration to restrict asylum protections at the border.

In the time since the coronavirus caused a global pandemic, President Donald Trump has blocked green cards for certain individuals abroad and cut work visas. Separately, an order issued by the CDC has allowed border officials to quickly send back those coming to the border, including children who arrive on their own.

“The pandemic has allowed the Trump administration to accomplish what they had been working towards for years — a complete shutdown of asylum at the southern border. This regulation shows that they have no intention of walking it back willingly,” said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “By layering their policy change with multiple bureaucratic tools, they are doing everything they can to insulate the asylum shutdown against legal challenges.”

Administration officials posted a notice for a rule in July that would allow Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials to block asylum for those coming from countries determined to be suffering from a spread of health emergencies, but it did not take effect immediately and was undergoing a formal process to become policy.

The draft of the rule obtained by BuzzFeed News states that the US cannot wait to implement an immediate block of asylum at land borders. DHS officials declined to comment.

This new rule would immediately make those who attempt to enter the US at a port of entry or who cross without authorization on or after the day the policy is issued ineligible for asylum and a separate protection known as “withholding of removal” if the individual has been in Mexico or Canada for any length of time in the 14 days prior to their arrival. 

The new rule, which does not apply to green card holders, would appear to work in unison with a separate order that also limits protections.

Since March, DHS officials have turned back thousands of immigrants at the southern border by using an order issued by the CDC that bars the entry of those who cross into the US without authorization. Administration officials argue that the policy is necessary to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the US and has been a key tool for border agents.

The new draft rule could also provide a backstop should a federal court step in and block the current policy of quickly turning around immigrants at the southern border.

The drafting of the rule comes as the coronavirus continues to spread in the US. As of Thursday, more than 5 million people in the US have contracted COVID-19, while more than 160,000 have died of the disease. But immigrant advocates believe the draft rule would be unnecessary as a form of protection against the coronavirus.

“The Trump administration is once again using COVID-19 as a pretext to accomplish their long-sought goal of destroying the United States’ asylum system,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the American Immigration Council. “Public health experts agree that mass-deportation of refugees is not a valid response to COVID-19, and that it would be wrong to deport people to their deaths in the name of “public health.”


Hamed Aleaziz is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.