You ain’t seen nothin’ yet in Donald Trump’s disinformation campaign

SEPTEMBER 3, 2020 BY RICK SNEDEKER
PATHEOS 

Blatant deception and disinformation, by now, has become baked into the Trump administration.

But something along that inflamed vein that occurred yesterday somehow seemed different as we race headlong into the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

It seemed insidiously different. It crossed a bright line.

Caricature of U.S. President Donald Trump. (Christoph Scholz, Flikr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

What happened was that Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff, circulated a tweet of a video ostensibly showing Joe Biden sleeping during a recent television interview.


“Sleepy Joe,” ya know, a dismissive slur President Trump repeats ad nauseum, trying, without evidence, to slime his presidential rival as “low energy,” mentally vacuous and unfit to lead.

As far as anyone can tell in the real world, Biden is none of those things.

But when a friend of New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni first saw the slickly produced video, he was taken aback.

“Can this possibly be real?” the friend emailed Bruni.

No, in fact, it couldn’t.

Bruni reports that the whole film was a fraud — taking video from a long-ago interview with singer Harry Belafonte and stitching it together with a clip of Biden nodding off.

There was no Biden interview. Never happened. The clip of him was shot at totally different time and place, perhaps during a campaign rest break. In 2020, the Trump campaign is just willing to violate every standard of honesty and decency to try and gain a political edge on their rival, despite the president’s sweaty embrace of fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity, which has new moral issues of its own (i.e., Jerry Falwell Jr.).

Scum is a fair descriptor for anyone who does this sort of thing to get elected (or for any reason) — dirty tricks that the GOP is deservedly famous for. Remember Richard Nixon’s soulless campaign of lies before he was ousted for Watergate crimes?


The enormous implausibility of the new video was immediately apparent to Bruni when he watched it:

“I was pretty sure at first sight that I was looking at a fake, because Biden’s near motionlessness suggested that someone had captured a few seconds in which his eyelids were lowered and his head tilted forward just so. The sound effect of his snoring was suspiciously loud, as if grafted on after the fact. One top of which, Biden wouldn’t be alone during a television interview. There’d be at least one aide nearby, offscreen. That aide wouldn’t stand by idly as Biden slipped into public slumber. He or she would rouse him right away, even throw something at him if necessary.”

Unfortunately, More than two million people watched the fake video before Twitter ultimately shut it down for subterfuge. Scavino alone has more than 900,000 Twitter followers on his personal account. These are facts well know to Trump himself and the other people without scruples who run his political apparatus; you can get away with a lot of dirty dealing because of the time lag before the attacks on public integrity are noticed and, if the rest of the country is lucky, are ultimately removed from the web.


So, even if they’re made to disappear, their effect lingers.

What really disturbs me about this kind of bald-faced dishonesty that seeks to damage people’s ability to make fact-based, reasoned decisions about candidates, is that there doesn’t seem to be a damned thing any honorable person can do about it.

America’s vaunted free-speech ethos, which is on steroids in political campaigns, was originally created with the understanding (now increasingly shown to be nonsense) that the best disinfectant of dastardly speech is more speech. No. The best disinfectant would be laws making the willful dissemination of gratuitous and damaging disinformation illegal under any circumstance, with consequences strong enough to be deterrent.

I get nauseous when people say, “The American people are smart enough to know what’s what and to make reasoned decisions.”

Yeah. Like tens of millions of those “smart” Americans electing inarguably the most awful president and worse human being ever to sit in the Oval Office. A president who is now fomenting political violence across the country just because he thinks it will help his re-election chances.


Sure. Why try to mitigate dishonest speech that propagates dangerous unrest in the nation for reasons that don’t actually exist? Certainly more speech will solve that.

Right.

Because of this new fraudulent Trump video sliming Biden we can trust even less of what we see and hear in the country, and that was already at the vanishing point. Don’t forget that video technology exists now that can very convincingly seem to show someone saying things that they never said. I’ve seen some examples (it’s called “deep fake” technology), and it’s insidious and destructive portent is chilling. If you’re skeptical, watch this embedded video below and you no longer will be.

Don’t forget that the Trump administration’s purposeful assault on truth and veracity is exactly the same propaganda playbook Hitler used in grabbing absolute power and hijacking Nazi Germany for total war in the 1930s.

The tactic was that if you say a damn lie often enough for long enough, it begins to seem more and more like truth.

But the strategy was to create a chaotic environment of such uncertainty that people begin to doubt what they actually, irrefutably know — and then turn to their “Dear Leader” for truth.

That’s where we’re at in America at the moment.

That’s why a presumably very smart and well-informed friend of Frank Bruni momentarily wasn’t altogether sure whether the doctored video of Biden was real or not.

This stuff is very dangerous for a democratic republic, and for reason.

I mention it here in a nonreligious blog because this misrepresentation of reality in service to fantasy is what religious indoctrination is all about.

BELARUS UPDATES 

 Russia Is Using the Media to Wage War in Belarus. Sound Familiar?

Eli Lake, Bloomberg News

Not a prominent image on Belarusian state media. , Photographer: Misha Friedman/Getty Images Europe

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If you believe the message from the Kremlin, Russia currently has no plans to send police or military forces into neighboring Belarus. But it has sent in some reinforcements — to the news media, as part of a strategy that should stand as a warning to democracies around the world.

Of course, President Vladimir Putin mused last week, Russia may eventually need to intervene in Belarus militarily. But as his spokesman put it this week: “At present we see that the situation is under control.”

Putin is trying to convey the impression that he is just a concerned neighbor in a crisis that has exploded in national unrest since Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared victory in a stolen election last month. Russia, Putin wants the world to believe, is holding back.

This perception is deceiving. In reality, Russia is waging a kind of stealth intervention in Belarus, the first part of which is taking place in the media. Belarusian state television has replaced Belarusian journalists with those from the Kremlin-financed RT network, which Lukashenko confirmed this week in an interview. “You understand how important you were to us during this difficult period,” he told an RT correspondent. “And what you demonstrated technically, your IT specialists, and journalists, and correspondents, and so on ... and your manager. This is worth a lot.”

An early warning about the Russian takeover of Belarusian state television came from George Barros, who works for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Barros wrote on Aug. 20 about new montage videos that depicted the U.S. and NATO as fomenting unrest in Belarus, as well as slick propaganda videos being released through Belarus’ interior ministry. State TV was engaged in an effort to “humanize Belarusian officials,” he told me in an interview, while portraying protesters “as threatening the families and lives of security personnel.”

This is the opposite of what was happening in Belarus. The state began arresting thousands of protesters indiscriminately after the disputed election last month. The BBC has reported that some of those detained said they were tortured in jail.

Russia’s assistance to Lukashenko did not end there, either. Barros and his colleague Mason Clark have also tracked three flights in mid-August of government-owned passenger jets from Moscow to Minsk. The first such plane, they say, belonged to the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service.

There is no direct evidence that FSB officers were on those flights. But Barros says there is circumstantial evidence that the FSB is advising Lukashenko on how to disperse the protests. After that first flight on Aug. 18, for example, the Belarusian security services ended a policy of mass arrests, which fueled unrest, and began a strategy of targeted detentions of organizers and opposition leaders.

In an interview with reporters this week, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun said there was little doubt that Russia was “exercising some level of influence” in Belarus, and said that publicly available flight tracking data showed that “elite aircraft from the FSB intelligence service has flown into Minsk on more than a couple of occasions.”

What all this means for the future of Belarus is not good. If Lukashenko is able to retain power, he will have to reverse any policies or stances that sought or promoted greater independence from Moscow. What will happen to his opposition to an economic and political union between Belarus and Russia? Will he still tout his anti-Russian bonafides, as he did during the presidential campaign, when Belarusian law enforcement agencies arrested 33 Russian mercenaries?

More broadly, Putin’s offensive in Belarus is yet more evidence that Russia considers the media landscape a battlefield for its own brand of hybrid warfare. Sometimes, the war requires actual troops, as in 2014 in Ukraine. Other times, the goal is to sow chaos and mistrust in democracy. This time, in Belarus, it appears that Russia is trying to quell a democratic uprising without firing a single shot.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

A distorted Muscovite picture
The information war over Belarus hots up
Russia rules the airwaves but not social media

Europe Sep 5th 2020 edition

Sep 5th 2020

MINSK

It was the cables that gave them away. As foreign and local journalists in Belarus scrambled to report on the latest crackdown on peaceful protesters, one film crew was always in prime position. Its members were untouched whenever police hounded other journalists, stripping them of their accreditation and deporting them. The camera cables that stretched past several unmarked police minibuses led to the source of their protection: a white and green van belonging to Russia Today.

Russia’s “green men”, unbadged soldiers sent to Ukraine after its revolution in 2014, are yet to make an appearance in Belarus. But the Kremlin’s propaganda warriors have already occupied its airwaves. Their invasion was solicited by Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s embattled dictator, who has lost any claims to legitimacy first by rigging the recent presidential election, then by unleashing terror against the large numbers of his people who protested.


Shocked by the violence of the security services, workers in state-owned factories, who were once Mr Lukashenko’s most solid backers, went on strike. Journalists for state television, normally obedient servants of the regime, walked out of their studios in protest. Desperate to look more in control, Mr Lukashenko appealed to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for help.

Mr Putin cannot afford to let Mr Lukashenko be overthrown by popular protests. He does not want to set a dangerous precedent. The attempt to kill Russia’s main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, shows just how nervous the Kremlin is feeling. But Mr Putin has little desire to incur new Western sanctions by sending soldiers to save Mr Lukashenko. (Sanctions may be forthcoming anyway, following Germany’s confirmation on September 2nd that Mr Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent similar to ones used in other Russian-sponsored assassinations, to which only state operatives could have access.) Helping Belarus improve its propaganda is more deniable and less provocative than sending troops.

The change in programming wrought by Russia is glaring. Before the information takeover, Belarusian state tv offered a largely ineffective diet of Soviet and second world war mythology—more Belarus Yesterday than Russia Today. The newly arrived propagandists from Moscow have wheeled out an arsenal of aggression and divisiveness. Breathless news reports have started to warn of the havoc caused by protests in France and Syria. Coverage also seeks to discredit and sneer at the local protests as creations of the West. Selective editing depicts them as feebly supported yet violent—and doomed to failure. A new legion of experts warns of the dangers of a split in Belarusian society.

Mr Lukashenko, who has spent the past two years rallying Belarusians around the flag and feeding his army and security services a yarn about Russia’s threat to the country’s sovereignty, has abruptly changed his tune. He talks these days about one fatherland stretching from Brest, a city in Belarus’s west, to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. “We now have no other choice but to fasten our boat to the eastern shore,” one senior and somewhat disoriented government official says, landlocked Belarus being conspicuously lacking in shores.


But sprucing up state television’s news reports in this way may not have the intended effect. The change is so sudden and so obvious that it risks further alienating citizens who have experienced a national awakening in the past few weeks. The rush of Russian-made propaganda might persuade some wavering Belarusians against taking to the streets, but it seems unlikely to change the minds of the hundreds of thousands who are already there.

The Belarusians who brave police violence do not watch state television, but rely instead on social media and messenger groups, such as Nekhta (Someone), a Telegram channel run by young Belarusians from neighbouring Poland. It has quickly clocked up over a billion page views. Being told by Russia that they are mere extras in a Western plot will make the protesters all the more determined to prove themselves leading actors in an historic drama. ■

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "A distorted picture"

Belarusian leader reshuffles security chiefs in face of mass protests

Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko promoted hardline loyalists to top posts in his security apparatus on Thursday in an effort to strengthen his grip on the former Soviet republic after weeks of mass protests and strikes.


Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko meets with newly appointed head of the KGB security service Ivan Tertel, newly appointed secretary of the security council Valery Vakulchik and acting head of the state control committee Vasily Gerasimov in Minsk, Belarus September 3, 2020. Nikolai Petrov/BelTA/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. MANDATORY CREDIT.

Lukashenko, facing the biggest challenge to his 26-year rule, accompanied the reshuffle with instructions to act tough in the face of what he has repeatedly alleged is foreign aggression. “Belarus finds itself confronting an external aggressor one-to-one,” he told the new security chiefs.

“Therefore I ask you to take this to the people. They shouldn’t condemn me for any sort of softness. There’s no softness here. The country is working, although many, especially our neighbours, would like us to collapse.”

Retaining the loyalty of the security forces, who have helped him crack down hard on dissent, is vital to Lukashenko as he tries to crush protests that show no sign of abating after nearly four weeks.

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Lukashenko removed Andrei Ravkov, head of the security council which coordinates the work of all the agencies, and replaced him with Valery Vakulchik, previously head of the KGB security police.

Vakulchik was replaced by Ivan Tertel, formerly head of the state control committee which investigates economic crime. In that role, Tertel had led a criminal investigation against banker Viktor Babariko which led to the latter being banned from running against Lukashenko in last month’s election.

Another loyalist, Vasily Gerasimov, was named acting head of the control committee, and Anatoly Sivak, the mayor of Minsk, was promoted to deputy prime minister.

TORTURE REPORTS

Lukashenko has provided no evidence that foreign powers are behind the protests. The opposition has denied this, and NATO has also denied his allegations that it is massing forces near the Belarusian border.

Belarus is a close ally of Moscow, which sees it as a vital strategic buffer between Russia and NATO. President Vladimir Putin said last week the Kremlin had set up a reserve police force at Lukashenko’s request but it would be deployed only if necessary.

Human rights experts from the United Nations said this week they had received reports of hundreds of cases of torture, beatings and mistreatment of Belarusian protesters by police.

The government has denied abusing detainees and has said its security forces have acted appropriately against demonstrators.

Separately, two former TV presenters were arrested in the capital Minsk on Wednesday night, relatives and local media said.

Broadcaster Euroradio said Denis Dudinsky was detained by uniformed officers who dragged him into a black minibus near his house.

A second former TV anchor, Dmitry Kokhno, was also arrested and driven away, according to his wife Nadezhda. She wrote on Instagram that he was held in jail overnight and would appear in court on Thursday.

“I thank God our son didn’t see it (the arrest),” she said, alongside a black and white photo of her husband with the small boy.

Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Tom Balmforth; Writing by Mark Trevelyan; editing by Mark Heinrich



SHADOW GOVERNMENT
The Trump Administration Has Gone AWOL on Belarus
The Belarusian people may yet achieve the end of the Lukashenko era, but it will be in spite of the United States’ silence.
BY DANIEL B. BAER | SEPTEMBER 3, 2020, 6:30 AM
A woman holds a forbidden Belarusian flag during a protest rally in Minsk on Aug. 14. SERGEI GAPON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


During the Republican National Convention last week, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got a lot of attention for using public resources to travel to Israel to give a convention speech he could have delivered from his living room. The abuse of his position for party politics was an untoward, unprofessional, and unethical contravention of longstanding norms, if not the law. Yet in the long run, less important than what Pompeo did last week is what he didn’t do: stand with the courageous people of Belarus.

The last month has been a seismic political moment in Belarus, replete with dramatic scenes recalling other historic European flashpoints—Prague in 1968, Gdansk in 1980. Stunning mass protests erupted in the wake of the flagrantly rigged Aug. 9 elections in which incumbent Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko—in power for a quarter century and known as “Europe’s last dictator”—claimed victory despite widespread fraud and a likely loss to opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Having stepped up in July after her husband was denied registration as a candidate and arrested by the regime, she proved a capable if unlikely politician, and she managed to consolidate the opposition and draw huge crowds at rallies in the weeks before the election. After Lukashenko declared himself the winner, Tsikhanouskaya fled to Lithuania, fearing for her safety.


The official U.S. reaction to the rigged election and resulting protests has been weak, but the U.S. diplomatic response is even more disappointing. On the day after the election, Pompeo issued the obligatory statement professing to be “deeply concerned” about the vote that was “neither free nor fair”—an understated reaction. Two days later, on Aug. 12, he addressed the Czech parliament in Prague in a 14.5-minute speech called: “Securing Freedom in the Heart of Europe.” In his speech, Pompeo mentioned China, the Chinese government, and the Chinese Communist Party 20 times; he never once said the word “Belarus.” There has been no formal statement from the White House. Once more, we have to wonder whether President Donald Trump is more worried about ruffling feathers in Moscow than he is about advancing democratic values and U.S. national security interests.
Putin sensed the United States and Europe were not coordinated, and decided to move forward with his own agenda.

It’s a missed opportunity. A different president, whether Republican or Democratic, would have had long calls with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. There would have been a clear, timely, and public rejection of the election as a farce and a call for Lukashenko to negotiate with protesters and the opposition. The secretary of state would be working the phones and conducting shuttle diplomacy, working with the Europeans to present a united position that Lukashenko must be given an off-ramp, while communicating with the Russians that the U.S. and European position is not a matter of geopolitics but of commitment to the rights and freedoms of the Belarusian people, and all the while reaffirming publicly that the future of Belarus is for Belarusians to decide.

Instead, Pompeo and Trump have been missing in action. And while the Europeans have moved forward with a number of laudable steps—including allocating financial resources to support victims of the regime’s crackdown and independent media—when Washington is absent, there is no opportunity for U.S. leadership and no opportunity for a coordinated and cooperative U.S.-European approach.

Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun deserves credit for his effort at picking up the ball fumbled by Trump and Pompeo and doing his best to run with it. He traveled to Vilnius and Vienna in the last 10 days to meet European colleagues and opposition candidate Tsikhanouskaya, and to support the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in its efforts to mediate a negotiated solution to the political crisis. Biegun is a skilled diplomat, and has said the right things, including at an emergency meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council last weekend, when he called for an end to the crackdown on protestors, the release of political prisoners, and new elections in which the people of Belarus are “provided the self-determination to choose their own leaders through a truly free and fair election under independent observation.” Unfortunately, Biegun cannot do this on his own—this level of statecraft requires the “oomph” that can only come from the White House and the secretary of state. Pompeo’s belated statement this week that the United States might sanction those responsible for human rights abuses in the election’s wake is welcome, but falls short of a real strategy.
We should not accept the Trump administration’s failure as the Belarusian people’s fate.

And that’s heartbreaking, because Biegun’s efforts are a reminder of what could be—and of the opportunity that the United States, and with it the West, may be missing. Much has been made of Putin’s role in all this; since the early days after the election, some have been predicting that Putin would rush in with troops to reinforce Lukashenko. But Putin’s initial statement—like Pompeo’s—was tepid. The Russians are certainly active covertly on the ground in Minsk, but, at least until this week, Putin appeared to be holding back. Lukashenko has skillfully played the West and Moscow against each other in recent decades, cozying up to one in order to entice concessions from the other; this has not endeared him to Putin. Putin sees Lukashenko as a loser who makes other autocrats, like himself, look bad by association. And no one in the region has a more acute paranoia about popular discontent than Putin. He has seen the crowds of hundreds of thousands in the streets of Minsk in the wake of the election. He knows that Lukashenko lost the election, and that if he remains in office, he remains as a corpse. In the short term, that might be ok for Putin—he has experience turning corpses into puppets—but he knows that a political corpse must sooner or later be replaced. It’s clear that Putin wasn’t immediately ready to take action to secure Lukashenko’s grip on power. It’s unclear what alternatives Putin might have seen as acceptable.

It’s possible that in the weeks after the election, Putin would have been open to some sort of negotiated solution that provided a face-saving exit for Lukashenko and a new chapter for the Belarusian people. Perhaps he would still be open to such an outcome now. But his latest move—using a birthday call last Sunday to invite Lukashenko to Moscow—seems to suggest that he is moving out of his “wait and see” phase. If so, the explanation is not that protests have ended—on Sept. 1, high school and university students were beset by Lukashenko’s thuggish security forces with dramatic violence—but may be that Putin sensed the United States and Europe were not coordinated, and decided to move forward with his own agenda.


READ MORE


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Putin is signaling he wants a clear resolution—but he may not mind which side wins.
ARGUMENT | VLADISLAV DAVIDZON


Lukashenko Unleashed Changes in Belarus That Are Out of His Control


Whatever happens in the ongoing protests, the country’s society is increasingly less governable for a dictator.
ARGUMENT | TOMASZ GRZYWACZEWSKI


Is Belarus Putin’s Next Target?


As protests rock another post-Soviet state, the Kremlin could be in an annexationist mood.
IT'S DEBATABLE | EMMA ASHFORD, MATTHEW KROENIG

There may still be time, but given Trump and Pompeo’s manifest failures on so many issues, there may not be hope. Diplomatic wins on behalf of freedom are hard enough to come by when political leaders and skilled diplomats work in concert—but they are nigh impossible when those at the top are incompetent and unprincipled. As with so much else in the Trump administration, it is not just that they do so much that is bad—the abuse of public office, the attacks on institutions, the rampant corruption—it is also that they miss so many chances to do good. We may never know how big of an opportunity was lost. But we will know that the United States failed to do what it could for 10 million people who deserve—in Pompeo’s own words—“freedom in the heart of Europe.”

This is not to say that we should accept the Trump administration’s failure as the Belarusian people’s fate. For Americans wondering what political courage they might be called upon to muster in the face of an authoritarian sabotaging elections, the people defiantly protesting in Belarus because they are unwilling to play the fools for Lukashenko’s farce have been an inspiring example. As for Americans, they cannot say that they believe in universal values like freedom and human dignity and not hear the call of the Belarusian people, and cannot be champions of those values without making an effort to answer it. The Belarusian people may yet achieve the end of the Lukashenko era, but it will be in spite of the United States’ silence, rather than in harmony with its commitment to freedom.


\Daniel Baer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from 2013 to 2017. Twitter: @danbbaer

AVA DUVERNAY INTERVIEWS ANGELA DAVIS ON THIS MOMENT—AND WHAT CAME BEFORE

The scholar and activist has spent more than 50 years working for social justice. This summer, society started to catch up.


BY AVA DUVERNAYAugust 26, 2020

IN THE MOMENT
Angela Davis, at her residence in Oakland, July 2020. Poncho by Pyer Moss.Photograph by Deana Lawson.

AVA DuVERNAY: I was reading an interview in which you talked about something that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. It’s about this time we are in that I’ll just call a racial reckoning. Do you feel that we could have encountered this moment in as robust a manner as we’ve felt it this summer without the COVID crisis having been the foundation? Could one have occurred with this much force without the other?

ANGELA DAVIS: This moment is a conjuncture between the COVID-19 crisis and the increasing awareness of the structural nature of racism. Moments like this do arise. They’re totally unpredictable, and we cannot base our organizing on the idea that we can usher in such a moment. What we can do is take advantage of the moment. When George Floyd was lynched, and we were all witnesses to that—we all watched as this white policeman held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds—I think that many people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, who had not necessarily understood the way in which history is present in our lives today, who had said, “Well, I never owned slaves, so what does slavery have to do with me?” suddenly began to get it. That there was work that should have happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery that could have prevented us from arriving at this moment. But it did not happen. And here we are. And now we have to begin.

The protests offered people an opportunity to join in this collective demand to bring about deep change, radical change. Defund the police, abolish policing as we know it now. These are the same arguments that we’ve been making for such a long time about the prison system and the whole criminal justice system. It was as if all of these decades of work by so many people, who received no credit at all, came to fruition.


You understood the dangers of American policing, the criminalization of Black, native, and brown people, 50 years ago. Your activism and your scholarship has always been inclusive of class and race and gender and sexuality. It seems we’re at a critical mass where a majority of people are finally able to hear and to understand the concepts that you’ve been talking about for decades. Is that satisfying or exhausting after all this time?


I don’t think about it as an experience that I’m having as an individual. I think about it as a collective experience, because I would not have made those arguments or engaged in those kinds of activisms if there were not other people doing it. One of the things that some of us said over and over again is that we’re doing this work. Don’t expect to receive public credit for it. It’s not to be acknowledged that we do this work. We do this work because we want to change the world. If we don’t do the work continuously and passionately, even as it appears as if no one is listening, if we don’t help to create the conditions of possibility for change, then a moment like this will arrive and we can do nothing about it. As Bobby Seale said, we will not be able to “seize the time.” This is a perfect example of our being able to seize this moment and turn it into something that’s radical and transformative.


I love that. I know that there’s a lot of energy around how to keep the attention. But what you’re saying is it needs to be happening in isolation of any outside forces. So that when the right time comes, there’s a preparation that had already been in process. Don’t think so much about sustaining the moment. Just always be prepared for the moment when it comes, because it will.

Exactly. I’m also thinking about your contributions. So many people have seen your work, your films: 13th and the film on the Central Park Five.

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD CHANGES...AS A RESULT OF THE PRESSURE ORDINARY PEOPLE EXERT ON THE EXISTING STATE OF AFFAIRS.

When They See Us! I can’t believe you know about it. I’m excited.


Oh, my God. I’ve not only seen it, but I’ve encouraged other people to look at it. I saw that really moving conversation between the actors and the actual figures. All of that helps to create fertile ground. I don’t think that we would be where we are today without your work and the work of other artists. In my mind, it’s art that can begin to make us feel what we don’t necessarily yet understand.

You’ve just made my life saying that. Thank you is not enough. There is a lot of talk about the symbols of slavery, of colonialism. Statues being taken down, bridges being renamed, buildings being renamed. Does it feel like performance, or do you think that there’s substance to these actions?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer. It is important to point to the material manifestations of the history that we are grappling with now. And those statues are our reminders that the history of the United States of America is a history of racism. So it’s natural that people would try to bring down those symbols.

If it’s true that names are being changed, statues are being removed, it should also be true that the institutions are looking inward and figuring out how to radically transform themselves. That’s the real work. Sometimes we assume the most important work is the dramatic work—the street demonstrations. I like the term that John Berger used: Demonstrations are “rehearsals for revolution.” When we come together with so many people, we become aware of our capacity to bring about change. But it’s rare that the actual demonstration itself brings about the change. We have to work in other ways.

I always love talking to you because you drop nine references in the conversation. You give me a reading list after from your citations. John Berger. Writing that down. One of the things that you’ve talked about that I hold on to is about diversity and inclusion. In many industries, especially the entertainment industry where I work, those are buzzwords. But I see them in the way that you taught me during our conversation for 13th. These are reform tactics, not change tactics. The diversity and inclusion office of the studio, of the university, of whatever organization, is not the quick fix.

Absolutely. Virtually every institution seized upon that term, “diversity.” And I always ask, “Well, where is justice here?” Are you simply going to ask those who have been marginalized or subjugated to come inside of the institution and participate in the same process that led precisely to their marginalization? Diversity and inclusion without substantive change, without radical change, accomplishes nothing.

“Justice” is the key word. How do we begin to transform the institutions themselves? How do we change this society? We don’t want to be participants in the exploitation of capitalism. We don’t want to be participants in the marginalization of immigrants. And so there has to be a way to think about the connection among all of these issues and how we can begin to imagine a very different kind of society. That is what “defund the police” means. That is what “abolish the police” means.

How can we apply that to the educational system?


Capitalism has to be a part of the conversation: global capitalism. And it’s part of the conversation about education, because what we’ve witnessed is increasing privatization, and the emergence of a kind of hybrid: the charter schools. Privatization is why the hospitals were so unprepared [for COVID-19], because they function in accordance with the dictates of capital. They don’t want to have extra beds because then that means that they aren’t generating the profit. And why is it that they’re asking children to go back to school? It’s because of the economy. We’re in a depression now, so they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of so many people in order to keep global capitalism functioning.

I know that’s a macro issue, but I think we cannot truly understand what is happening in the family where the parents are essential workers and are compelled to go to work and have no childcare. Not only should there be free education, but there should be free childcare and there should be free health care as well. All of these issues are coming to a head. This is, as you said, a racial reckoning. A reexamination of the role that racism has played in the creation of the United States of America. But I think we have to talk about capitalism. Capitalism has always been racial capitalism. Wherever we see capitalism, we see the influence and the exploitation of racism.

We haven’t been talking a lot about that period of Occupy. I think that when we look at how social movements develop, Occupy gave us new vocabularies. We began to talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And I think that has something to do with the protests today. We should be very explicit about the fact that global capitalism is in large part responsible for mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, as it is responsible for the migrations that are happening around the world. Immigrants are forced to leave their homelands because the system of global capitalism has made it impossible to live human lives. That is why they come to the U.S., that is why they come to Europe, seeking better lives.

How does it feel for a woman born into segregation to see this moment? What lessons have you gleaned about struggle?

That’s a really big question. Perhaps I can answer it by saying that we have to have a kind of optimism. One way or another I’ve been involved in movements from the time I was very, very young, and I can remember that my mother never failed to emphasize that as bad as things were in our segregated world, change was possible. That the world would change. I learned how to live under those circumstances while also inhabiting an imagined world, recognizing that one day things would be different. I’m really fortunate that my mother was an activist who had experience in movements against racism, the movement to defend, for example, the Scottsboro Nine.

I’ve always recognized my own role as an activist as helping to create conditions of possibility for change. And that means to expand and deepen public consciousness of the nature of racism, of heteropatriarchy, pollution of the planet, and their relationship to global capitalism. This is the work that I’ve always done, and I’ve always known that it would make a difference. Not my work as an individual, but my work with communities who have struggled. I believe that this is how the world changes. It always changes as a result of the pressure that masses of people, ordinary people, exert on the existing state of affairs. I feel very fortunate that I am still alive today to witness this.

And I’m so glad that someone like John Lewis was able to experience this and see this before he passed away, because oftentimes we don’t get to actually witness the fruits of our labor. They may materialize, but it may be 50 years later, it may be 100 years later. But I’ve always emphasized that we have to do the work as if change were possible and as if this change were to happen sooner rather than later. It may not; we may not get to witness it. But if we don’t do the work, no one will ever witness it.




Ava DuVernay is a filmmaker whose work includes the Oscar-nominated Selma and acclaimed Netflix limited series When They See Us.

BLUE BLOODS: AMERICA’S BROTHERHOOD OF POLICE OFFICERS

To understand the citadel of law enforcement, we must reckon with its unions—which resemble fraternities more than labor unions.


BY EVE L. EWING

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAWN MARTINBROUGHAugust 25, 2020

Illustration by Shawn Martinbrough. Colorist Christopher Sotomayor.

The man stands before them, head slightly bowed. He is gangly, awkward, against the backdrop of the officers’ firm march. They are hurried and he is not. Everything about them is fast, crisp, matte.

We watch the push. We watch him fall.

We watch them pass his body. Swirling around him, an eddy of thick black fabric. When the blood comes, it drifts languidly across the concrete.

When night falls, this is the story they tell: “During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.” But when the video appears, the world will see the police shove Martin Gugino to the ground, fracturing his skull.

The email from John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, came the next day. Evans forcefully defended the police officers implicated in the assault. “After witnessing first hand how these 2 officers were treated,” Evans wrote, “I can tell you, they tried to fuck over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years.” He signed off the email by writing, “Fraternally, John Evans – PBA.”

There are people who will tell you that people like John Evans lead a union. But this is not a union. This is something else.

This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

IT ABIDES NO LAW BUT ITS OWN. IT SCORNS THE PERSONHOOD OF ALL BUT ITS OWN BRETHREN. IT DERIDES ALL CREATURES OUTSIDE ITS OWN CLAN.

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”


These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ” These officers sought a way to bargain collectively over issues like wages and hours, without affiliating themselves with labor organizations.

And as labor historian Rosemary Feurer told me in an interview, until the 1970s “there was a feeling that police didn’t belong in the union movement. And now I think we have to realize that that is part of our history, from the stark reality that people were confronted with police brutality whenever they tried to assert their rights as union members.” Indeed, the most formative days of the labor movement were marked by police violence against workers. During the 1886 Haymarket Affair, police fired on the crowd during a dispute with striking workers. During the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest labor uprising in American history—thousands of West Virginians led by the United Mine Workers were in armed struggle against thousands of police and National Guardsmen. The local sheriff, Don Chafin, was paid by mine operators to beat, arrest, or intimidate suspected union organizers, a job which each year earned him more than 10 times his annual salary in bribes and helped him maintain a well-funded department. By 1921, his net worth was about $350,000. In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, police fired on a demonstration of steelworkers, killing 10 and seriously wounding many others, including a baby and an 11-year-old boy. A worker on the scene said that as the injured fell under the hail of bullets, it looked “as though they were being mowed down with a scythe.”

And the institution of policing as a means of violently controlling working persons’ right to economic freedom has deeper roots than even the labor movement itself. The need to attack workers in the name of private interests is historically intertwined, like a double helix, with the need to control, limit, and sanction Black autonomy.

“You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest,” South Carolinian William H. Trescott told the governor of South Carolina in 1865. The end of the Civil War meant that millions of Black people were transformed from items of property, from which labor could be forcibly and freely extracted, to independent humans with, at least nominally, the agency to do with their labor what they pleased, for their own benefit. “Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended,” writes historian Eric Foner, “the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.” In the absence of slavery as the means by which Black people could be made to stay in one place and work when and how White people needed them to work, the plantation class looked to the law to ensure that they would. Hence, the Reconstruction-era legislation known as the Black Codes was born. In Mississippi, being Black and not having written proof that you were employed was now illegal. In South Carolina, being Black and having a job other than servant or farmer was illegal unless you paid an annual tax of up to $100. Being in a traveling circus or an acting troupe? Illegal. In Virginia, asking for pay beyond the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” was illegal. In Florida, disrespecting or disobeying your employer was illegal. In some areas, fishing and hunting, or even owning guns, were now banned, as these activities could lessen Black dependence on White people for employment.

And who would enforce these new laws? The police. In some cases, Foner writes, these newly deputized men wore their old Confederate uniforms as they patrolled Black homesteads, seizing weapons and arresting people for labor violations.

Despite this history, those who lead America’s police unions raise a cautionary alarm—that teachers and other public sector workers should be wary of any attempts to curtail police power, lest they find themselves at the center of the next effort to limit union rights. In June, Patrick J. Lynch, who heads the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News drawing a direct connection between efforts to defund the police and a broader labor struggle. “Our brothers and sisters in the labor movement should be very careful. If they support a successful campaign to strip police officers of our union rights, they will see those same tactics repeated against teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other public sector workers across this country.”

But there’s a crucial difference. “How many unions are there where you’re assigned a gun and told you can shoot people?” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner asked me during a phone interview. “I mean, they have superpowers. They are given superpowers over the lives and freedom of other people. Over the integrity of their bodies.” Krasner told me of two instances in his legal career when he defended women who, after finding their police officer husbands cheating and trying to divorce them, had been arrested by those same husbands. One was arrested twice. The other was arrested alongside her brother, who had tried to defend her. Both women were found not guilty despite police officers testifying against them on the stand. Krasner attempted to sue on their behalf, for monetary damages but also injunctive relief—for the police department to change its policies to require an arrest of a relative or spouse to be overseen by a supervisor.

“The answer that I got from the city is nope. We’re not going to do any of that. Dealing with the police department, contract negotiations…we’re not even going to get into it. So we’ll just pay you more money,” Krasner recalls. “So you know, that kind of told me everything I needed to know. It was an overwhelming imbalance of power. It’s a city I think that in many ways is so politically compromised by its relationship with police unions that they have for a very long time pretty much given them anything they wanted.” Krasner believes that the situation is exacerbated by the fact that in Philadelphia, the FOP allows retired officers to be voting members. “The police union is the voice of the past,” says Krasner, “and in Philly the past is Frank Rizzo,” the 1970s-era Philadelphia mayor who openly told his supporters to “Vote White.” Before becoming mayor, Rizzo was police commissioner. During his campaign, Rizzo promised his supporters that after he was elected, he would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Rachael Rollins, district attorney of Suffolk County (which includes Boston as well as nearby Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop) agrees with Krasner, telling me that police are “the only section of our municipal local, state, or federal government that has the lethal and legal authority to kill you with no oversight.” For this reason, she dismisses Lynch’s comparison between police unions and teachers unions. “If a teacher strangled George Floyd as an 11-year-old,” Rollins said, “no D.A. would even wait a nanosecond to charge that teacher with a homicide. We would be shocked and appalled. But when police do it, we have been so triggered to believe law enforcement, right? To not question them…. When you have the authority to do something as final as death without oversight, you are different than any other union we are talking about.”

Beyond this point—police carry guns and are permitted by the state to kill people—is a deeper distinction: the task of policing itself as intrinsically counter to the ideology of a union. “A union is supposed to protect the rights, and the labor movement is supposed to protect the rights, of all working people,” said Sheri Davis-Faulkner, a program director at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. “The point is to be lifting up all working people. That is the work. Collective bargaining and having bargaining units, that is a part of it. But it’s also pushing an ideology that people should not be exploited.” Police unions do not and cannot promote this ideology, because doing so would require them to confront “the infrastructure that has been built for them to be policing Black bodies and protecting White communities,” Davis-Faulkner told me.

“In its best formulation, the labor movement has been about the concept of solidarity,” says Feurer, who studies political conflict and the labor history of the late 19th and 20th centuries at Northern Illinois University. “And so that is the key conundrum here. Is that if you’re an entity that’s sworn against solidarity, you can put your foot on the neck of a working-class person. It is the cardinal issue that we’re facing right now…what do you do with a group of workers that are in your movement whose purpose is a state purpose? Whose purpose is to deny protest rights, and to deny solidarity?”


In Minneapolis, after the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, wrote a letter to membership in which he said: “I commend you for the excellent police work you are doing in keeping your coworkers and others safe during what everyone except us refuses to call a riot…. What has been very evident throughout this process is you have lacked support from the top. This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years.”

In August 2019, when Daniel Pantaleo—the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner—lost his job, Lynch, the PBA president, condemned the decision. “The police commissioner needs to know he’s lost his police department,” he said at a press conference. Lynch declared that if Pantaleo could be labeled “reckless,” the condemnation could be applied to any police officer and warned that the commissioner would “wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late.”

After Tamir Rice was killed, Jeffrey Follmer, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told MSNBC that “this shooting was justified. It was tragic that it was a 12-year-old. But it was justified.”

Indeed, for American policing to function, physical assault is an important tool, but as important is intimidation—the threat of physical assault and the psychological terror it engenders. And for those tools to work, they require the premise of impunity, elevating the police officer as a different kind of being, one unencumbered by the laws of civic comportment or even the basic laws of reality. It requires not only that Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis after he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, fracturing his skull—it requires a system that defines Lewis as the criminal in that scenario, and the trooper as the guardian of safety and order. It requires not only that a Chicago police officer, guarding a statue of Christopher Columbus this past July, be able to punch 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the mouth, knocking out her front teeth—it requires us to see the video and know that the officer will go unnamed and unpunished. It requires not only that a New York City police officer crack 20-year-old Dounya Zayer’s head against the pavement, causing her to have a seizure—it requires a commanding officer to watch and do nothing. It requires Lynch to refer to the officer who shoved Zayer as someone “whose boss sent him out there to do a job, who was put in a bad situation during a chaotic time,” and to refer to the decision to charge him with assault as “dereliction of duty.” For the police to act as they do, and for the body politic to accept it, requires not only fear or force but a reconfiguration of the very fabric of reality as we know it.

“Part of what fascist politics does,” explains philosopher Jason Stanley, “is get people to disassociate from reality.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that such politics craft an alternate universe—an unreality. “It is not so much the barbed wire,” says Arendt, “as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure.”

When I was in college, I was a resident assistant, which meant that in some instances I was the first responder when someone had been sexually assaulted. I once confronted a young man who was the president of one of the fraternities where a resident of mine had recently…she thought, she wasn’t sure…she had woken up, in the attic, she told me. Alone. She didn’t know where he had gone, or….

I asked: How could you choose to call someone your brother when you know they are capable of something like that? He looked away.

This was the wrong question. The whole point of the brotherhood is that it enables a willful not knowing. The brotherhood swallows all other planes of reality that could pose an existential challenge. I had asked the wrong question, because the answer to how can you call someone your brother when he does something like that is: Because he is my brother. The brotherhood is a self-contained universe, with its own physics, its own gravity. Within a band of brothers, there is no law that supersedes the law of the brotherhood itself. To be part of a brotherhood is not to be a “member” of something—for membership is fleeting, and outside oneself. To be part of a brotherhood is not simply to be a workaday person who belongs to a collective corps, but to be reborn as a new type of thing, nestled in a selfhood intimately woven among other selfhoods, moving as one through a world in which you trust nothing but one another, because your self has become inextricable from all those other selves you call brother.

In the brotherhood, there is no such thing as wrongful police action. A member of the brotherhood cannot err any more than a dropped apple can fall toward the sky. The man who choked Eric Garner to death can never be “reckless.” All police work is “excellent police work.” The death of a 12-year-old boy is “justified.” You watch the video again. He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

In the days after my city rose against the clouds, I woke to a news item that made me laugh out loud. When desperate and angry and tired people were breaking windows across the South Side, a group of police officers had broken into the campaign offices of Representative Bobby Rush. The surveillance footage is almost cartoonish. The officers ate popcorn. They made coffee. As Chicago burned, they napped on the couch.

When the incident became public, Catanzara told the press that Rush or his staff had asked the officers to come. He told local news that Rush was “an absolute liar, a piece of garbage” and that anyway, the coffee and popcorn were bought with taxpayer money, and the officers were taxpayers, were they not?

Of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criticism of the officers, Catanzara said: “Shame on her for ever questioning their valor and the heroism and the officers of CPD to make it sound like they were letting other officers get the crap beat out of them while they sat there and slept. That is a disgusting accusation. She owes the men and women an apology for even implying that was.”

I read the statement. I looked again at the picture of the sleeping officer.

He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

A union is a pact, wrought among the human. Among the fallible. And there can be no error in the brotherhood. And the brotherhood can never be reformed, because reform requires fidelity to something external, and the brotherhood has fidelity only for itself. This is the unreality of the brotherhood. And as long as police are endowed with near-absolute state-sanctioned power, it is our unreality. We live behind its gates.

Eve L. Ewing is a poet and sociologist whose 2019 collection, 1919, inspired this issue’s title. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here.

Annals of a Warming Planet

How Fast Is the Climate Changing?: It’s a New World, Each and Every Day


By Bill McKibben September 3, 2020

The extra energy trapped by the atmosphere is expressing itself every second of every hour, usually quietly; you may not notice it, but eventually a downpour turns into a flood.Photograph by Eric Thayer / Getty

The struggle over climate change is necessarily political and economic and noisy—if we’re going to get anything done, we’ll have to do it in parliaments and stock exchanges, and quickly.

But, every once in a while, it’s worth stepping back and reminding ourselves what’s actually going on, silently, every hour of every day. And what’s going on is that we’re radically remaking our planet, in the course of a human lifetime. Hell, in the course of a human adolescence.

The sun, our star, pours out energy, which falls on this planet, where the atmosphere traps some of it. Because we’ve thickened that atmosphere by burning coal and gas and oil—in particular, because we’ve increased the amount of carbon dioxide and methane it contains—more of that sun’s energy is trapped around the Earth: about three-fourths of a watt of extra energy per square meter, or slightly less than, say, one of those tiny white Christmas-tree lights. But there are a lot of square meters on our planet—roughly five hundred and ten trillion of them, which is a lot of Christmas-tree lights. It’s the heat equivalent, to switch units rather dramatically, of exploding four Hiroshima-sized bombs each second.


We get a sense of what that feels like when we have a week like the one we just came through. Hurricane Laura detonated in intensity in a few hours before it made landfall—that escalation was one of the most rapid that has ever been observed in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s because of the extra heat that’s available. That sudden burst of fury is becoming more likely, the experts explain, precisely because there’s more energy stored in the ever-warmer ocean, ready to be converted into howling wind and surging tide. As the Washington Post reported, some experts say that “it is almost as if as the maximum ‘speed limit’ for storms increases, the storms themselves, like drivers, are adjusting by speeding up.” Sometimes we get comparatively lucky, as we did with Laura—it poured most of its power into the wildlife refuges and the marshes along the Louisiana-Texas border. Only about three per cent of the planet’s land surface, after all, is urbanized, so the odds are with you most of the time. And physics, of course, is agnostic—a storm goes where it goes.

But physics is also implacable. It just keeps going, hour after hour, day after day. The wildfires in California came earlier this season than usual and were the second largest the state has ever recorded. But they were inevitable in the same way. “With temperatures warming, unless there are increases in precipitation or atmospheric moisture to compensate, our fuels are going to get drier,” the University of Alberta fire scientist Mike Flannigan told E&E News. Fuels, in this case, means grass, brush, and trees, and they dry out at a predictable pace, which becomes much faster in a heat wave. Get the temperature high enough (and in August California saw, if verified, the hottest ever reliably recorded on our planet) and “grasslands can be bone-dry in seven days.” Once they’re dry, all it takes is a spark. “Fuel moisture is critical in that the drier the fuel, the easier it is for the fire to start and spread, and there’s more fuel available to burn.”

Floods and fires are obvious and dramatic. But this extra energy is expressing itself every second of every hour, usually quietly; you may not notice it, but eventually an ice shelf collapses or a heavy downpour turns into a monster flood. It’s relentless, and it means that we live in a new world, newer all the time. For almost all of human history, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide stuck at about two hundred and seventy-five parts per million, meaning that the planet’s energy balance was essentially unchanged. The physical world worked in predictable ways. But there’s around twenty-five parts per million more CO2 in the air now than there was a decade ago: That’s more change in ten years than over all the millennia from the invention of agriculture to the start of the Industrial Revolution. To think about it this way is to understand why this is a bigger predicament than any we’ve ever faced. Our other dramas—wars, revolutions—have played out against the backdrop of an essentially stable planet. But now that planet has become the main actor in our affairs, and more so every second.

Passing the Mic

The environmental journalist Amy Westervelt—she won an Edward R. Murrow Award, in 2016, for a series that aired on Reno Public Radio about the environmental and economic effects of a Tesla plant in Nevada—is now the host of the podcast “Drilled,” which has been exploring the climate-denial history of the fossil-fuel industry. Season 5 launches soon, and it will tell the story of Chevron’s misadventures in Ecuador, where a series of oil spills in the jungle have led to decades of litigation. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Chevron and Ecuador is a huge, sprawling story—can you explain the saga enough to make clear why it’s so interesting?

The first complaint was filed to Texaco back in 1993, there have been so many twists and turns and legal proceedings since then, and it’s still going on. [Chevron bought Texaco in 2001 and therefore assumed responsibility.] But it all sort of boils down to accountability; oil companies dumped wastewater and crude in the Amazon, it contaminated the water and the land, and it ought to be cleaned up. There’s been a lot of legal maneuvering in this case, and Chevron has tried to make it about the lawyers—and about one particular lawyer—but they were found liable for this contamination in 2011, and since then they have sued the lawyers, blamed the Ecuadorian oil company, sued the Ecuadorian government in international arbitration, and . . . the pollution is still there.

Why does it matter so much?

First, Chevron’s strategy seems engineered to intimidate any activists that might try to hold them accountable. Then, it’s a very good example of how oil companies have continued colonialism long past the point when countries stopped (or at least said they would). Related, it’s a good example of how the international arbitration system has become a tool that enables multinational companies to circumvent the sovereign constitutions of (usually developing) countries. And, finally, I think it illustrates that these are companies that do not and will not operate in good faith; the idea that eventually they’re going to come to the table and make good decisions about energy transition or emissions is just implausible, and it’s probably time to stop expecting them to.

You’ve done a lot of work on the public-relations industry and the oil industry—what story are the fossil-fuel companies trying to tell about themselves at this point

There are these two levers they pull, depending on what’s happening at any given time. For a long while it was the science-denial lever, but lately they’ve gone back to their first and favorite story: the idea of oil as central to the American identity and the American economy. They’re on it, they will solve this problem, and if you’re a red-blooded, God-fearing American you are on their side. They are also cynically co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement to push the message that energy transition will be racist (yet another good reason for the environmental movement to sort itself out on that front). There’s an interesting difference between the American companies and the European companies like BP and Shell, which seem to feel more required to commit to climate goals, because they’re operating in countries that have signed on to the Paris Climate Accord. But their commitments should be questioned at every turn.
Climate School

“Carbon capture and storage”—taking CO2 from the exhaust stream of, say, a coal-fired power plant and storing it underground—may get more play from a Biden Administration trying to score climate points but wary of forcing utilities to stop emitting carbon in the first place. Judith Lewis Mernit, at Capital & Main, reminds us why this is almost certainly a poor idea—and an expensive one at that.


The lift Solar Everywhere project, a collaborative effort of four clean-energy organizations, has released a comprehensive report explaining how to quickly increase access to solar power for low- and moderate-income households: no upfront costs and letting people pay for their efficiency improvements on their electric bill turn out to make a huge difference.


A Times investigation shows how Big Oil is pivoting to plastics as part of a plan for survival in an age of climate change and is trying to flood Africa with them. The Times reviewed e-mails from industry representatives last year revealing efforts to stall tough laws designed to curtail plastic waste in Kenya. To understand the desperation that would lead people to embrace that as a business plan, consider this piece by Chris Tomlinson, a business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, who writes, “While the broad S&P 500 index of top corporations is up 6.6 percent for the year, the energy sector is down 40 percent. Energy was the worst performing sector in 2018 and 2019, too.” Companies like Exxon continue to pay dividends because otherwise their stocks would dive, but “the five supermajors paid out $16.9 billion more in dividends than they generated from their core business operations, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonpartisan think tank.”
Scoreboard

The endless battle to block a giant new coal mine in Queensland, Australia, heated up last week, as the traditional owners of the Wangan and Jagalingou lands blocked access to the construction site. Meanwhile, court records revealed that the company building the mine, an Indian firm called Adani, had asked Australian courts to grant it an order to search the home of an activist. (The court said no.)

What if a tree burns in the forest and everyone sees it on TV, but no one says why it caught on fire? Noting that “it’s been 15 years since Hurricane Katrina left its mark on New Orleans, and news outlets are still failing to discuss the links between fossil fuel pollution, climate change, and extreme weather,” the N.G.O. Progress America has a petition asking the networks to take note.

Good news from a small study: painting one of three blades of a wind turbine black was enough to minimize “motion smear,” enabling birds to better see the blades, and so reducing the avian mortality rate at the turbines by seventy per cent.

Polling makes it clear that, even amid the pandemic and resulting recession, public interest in the climate is unabated. Sixty-eight per cent of Americans want the government to do more to deal with climate change; a quarter of the country feels that the issue is very important to them personally.

After tireless campaigning by New York climate-justice groups—and the defeat of a pipeline proposed by Williams, an Oklahoma energy company, which would have cut through New York Harbor—ConEd announced last week that it would stop investing in natural-gas pipelines and that expanding the use of fracked fuel was “no longer . . . part of the longer term view” for the utility.

It begs the question of whether buying lots of stuff makes environmental sense, but the odds of it arriving at your home in an electric truck seem to be growing quickly.

Warming Up

Judy Garland had a slightly different, and considerably more lyrical, take on this idea of a new world every day.



Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment.

Facebook bans Indian politician over hate speech

Hasan Chowdhury,
The Telegraph•September 3, 2020
  

Raja Singh, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi, was blocked from Facebook - SAJJAD HUSSAIN /AFP

Facebook has banned a politician from India’s ruling party over alleged hate speech on the social media service after facing strong condemnation over its inaction and handling of similar posts.

Raja Singh, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi, was blocked from Facebook over posts in which he suggested Rohingya refugees in the country should be shot and incited hate towards Muslims.

The ban marks a significant move by Facebook in India, its largest market with over 300m users and a country where it has faced a growing political storm from critics who have accused it in the past of failing to take down extremist posts to protect its business.

On Wednesday, Ajit Mohan, the head of the Silicon Valley giant’s India division, faced a series of questions from a parliamentary committee over reports in the Wall Street Journal that Facebook refused to apply its policy on hate speech to posts from BJP politicians.


The paper claimed that Facebook deemed posts from the politician violated its rules on hate speech back in March, but left the posts up after a top executive of the firm in India was alleged to have waived the call for them to be taken down.
Profile | Narendra Modi

The Hindu nationalist party has faced growing criticism in recent months both at home and internationally over the spread of propaganda on Facebook and its sister apps such as WhatsApp that promote violence against Muslims and other minorities in the country.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform.”

The company claimed its process for evaluating potential violators is “extensive”. Mr Singh has claimed he was not responsible for the posts that went on his page.

It comes as Facebook has upped its efforts in recent months to make further inroads into the India market, after it announced a $5.7bn (£4.6bn) investment in April into Reliance Jio, the telecoms empire owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst promoted a far-right conspiracy theory that falsely claims coronavirus cases are inflated by healthcare providers

Oma Seddiq,Eliza Relman Business Insider•September 2, 2020

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaks with reporters.

Associated Press


Republican Sen. Joni Ernst pushed a conspiracy theory that coronavirus deaths in the US are being drastically overcounted because healthcare providers want to be paid more.

During a campaign stop in Iowa, her home state, Ernst said she was "so skeptical" of the reported national figures and noted that medical professionals are compensated at higher rates for COVID cases.

The unsubstantiated claim has been promoted by the far-right conspiracy group QAnon and President Donald Trump.

Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, pushed a baseless conspiracy theory on Monday claiming that US deaths from the coronavirus have been vastly over-reported by medical professionals.

During a Monday campaign stop in Black Hawk County, an attendee told Ernst he believed coronavirus cases and deaths are being overcounted in the US, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported.

Ernst replied that she's similarly "so skeptical" of the official figures, which are currently at 6 million infections and 185,000 deaths in the US, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And the senator baselessly suggested the numbers have been vastly inflated by medical professionals, who receive more money from the federal government for handling COVID-19 patients.

"These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they're doing?" Ernst told the crowd.


"They do get reimbursed higher amounts if it's a COVID-related illness or death," she told the Falls Courier after the event. "I heard the same thing on the news. ... They're thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19. ... I'm just really curious. It would be interesting to know that."

The claim that case counts and deaths are fraudulently tallied has been widely debunked by medical professionals and public health experts.

The official coronavirus numbers are most likely significantly undercounted, according to experts. Researchers at Yale University reported in July that nearly 30,000 likely coronavirus deaths in the US had not been reported.

Ernst, who's facing a competitive race for reelection this year, made these comments a day after the White House announced Iowa is currently suffering from the largest COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

"Rural and urban counties in Iowa continue to have increases in case and test positivity. Common sense preventive measures must be implemented to stop further spread," White House coronavirus task force officials wrote.

President Donald Trump promoted the same conspiracy over the weekend in a tweet that was later removed by Twitter for violating the platform's rules about spreading misinformation.

On Sunday, the president retweeted QAnon follower "Mel Q," who shared a message falsely claiming that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported only 9,000 people — or just 6% of the more than 180,000 reported deaths — were actually killed by the virus.

In reality, the CDC reported that 94% of those who've died of COVID-19 in the US also suffered from another disease that contributed to their death. These so-called "co-morbidities" include obesity, diabetes, and asthma.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci fact-checked the conspiracy this week, explaining that while the vast majority of people who've died from the coronavirus in the US had underlying conditions, it was COVID-19 that killed them.

"That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn't die of COVID-19. They did," Fauci said. "It's not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19, it's 180-plus thousand deaths."