It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, January 24, 2021
ANOTHER Q
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/
Conservatives are freaking out over Biden’s new LGBTQ protections
He hadn't even been in office for a day before he was accused of attacking religion and erasing women.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Photo: VP Brothers / Shutterstock
Yesterday, on his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order to fight discrimination against LGBTQ people, and naturally anti-LGBTQ activists – both conservative Christians and anti-transgender “feminist” activists (TERFs) – are hopping mad.
“Ultimately, if this executive order is able to be fully carried out, it will affect everyday Americans who hold biblical and conservative values,” said Tony Perkins of the SPLC-designated hate group Family Research Council.
Biden’s executive order instructs executive agencies that the Biden administration considers discrimination against LGBTQ people to already be banned under federal laws that ban discrimination “because of sex” and to look for ways to implement federal law in light of that. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of this interpretation of the law in Bostock v. Clayton Co. decision last year.
While the Trump administration fought against implementing it, the Biden administration is already getting hate from anti-LGBTQ activists about it.
“The Biden administration is planning to go much further in its assault on biological reality and is expected to order schools to abolish girls’ sports and force boys and girls to use the same showers and locker rooms, and maybe even bunk together on school trips,” Perkins warned, adding that “the world’s major religions will be forced to violate their consciences” as a result of Biden’s order.
None of it is true.
Over on Twitter, the hashtag #BidenErasedWomen is trending. TERFs (transgender exclusionary radical feminists) are saying that the executive order to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity somehow means that women don’t exist anymore.
One British Twitter user declared that Biden had “erased female people and their sex based rights from US law” but she doesn’t appear to actually understand the law.
The President of the United States just erased female people and their sex based rights from US law.
Possibly without even fully grasping the magnitude of what he has done.
Biden’s executive order expands the number of cases where federal anti-discrimination laws like Title VII can be used and did not ban anti-discrimination laws from being used in cases about discrimination against women.
But that didn’t stop the angry tweets about how women don’t have rights anymore.
Biden has erased the sex-based rights of half the population, hard won rights that he signed away in one day. #BidenErasedWomen
Other anti-transgender activists on Twitter focused entirely on sports.
On day 1, Biden unilaterally eviscerates women's sports. Any educational institution that receives federal funding must admit biologically-male athletes to women's teams, women's scholarships, etc.
But many people using the hashtag were also arguing against transphobia, pointing out that the first president to take office with a woman vice president maybe has a better record on women’s rights than his predecessor.
American evangelicals are really disgusted by a British Cadbury Eggs commercial they can’t see
The ad that will never air in America is "graphic and offensive" to their delicate sensibilities, so they're sharing a video of it with their followers so they'll be sure to see it. Because that makes sense.
By Bil Browning Thursday, January 21, 2021 Photo: Shutterstock
One Million Moms, the astroturf offshoot of the anti-LGBTQ hate group American Family Association, is incredibly upset by a commercial that will never appear on their televisions. The British spot is for Cadbury Eggs.
The ad shows people eating the chocolate Easter candy in various ways. But the gay couple who appear in the commercial for six seconds, they say, are “graphic and disturbing.”
Real-life couple Callum Sterling and Dale Moran went viral this month after they were featured in a Cadbury Cream Egg commercial. The two men share one of the chocolate treats as other people demonstrate other ways to eat the confection.
Monica Cole, the perpetually perturbed head of the group, sent a breathless email alert to her decidedly-less-than a million followers alerting them of the chocolate commercial that describes the men as “disgusting” and “gross.” The group uses the words by attributing them to random “Christians and non-Christians” who have commented on the internet.
The alert also quotes a far-right columnist who compares the men to dogs.
“This video is graphic and offensive,” Cole warns right after including a link to the video.
Christians who enjoy the yearly sugary confection should be upset “how the company celebrates the risen Savior,” Cole advises. Easter eggs are a leftover symbol of spring from the original pagan holidays that Easter replaced on the calendar. They have nothing to do with the crucifixion.
“A portion of each sale goes to help finance Cadbury’s social agenda that has nothing to do with chocolates and candies,” Cole warns before linking to a “petition” that harvests email addresses for their mailing list. Supporters are urged to donate money to support the group’s agenda.
“I’m super happy this has all happened. The love we have received totally outways the fear based negative comments. Makes me proud to live in the UK and to have so much love in my life,” he wrote.
“And let’s be honest, I’m sure there would be half as many complaints if it was two ‘beautiful’ cis gendered hetero looking caucasian women. ‘I’m not homophobic but …’ nah mate, you’re dumb, and homophobic. At Least admit it."
Trump blocked Dr. Fauci from going on Rachel Maddow’s show “for months.” Biden has already let him. Dr. Fauci made his most open rebuke of the Trump administration to date during his MSNBC appearance. "I had pressure put on me, but I resisted it." By Juwan J. Holmes Sunday, January 24, 2021 Rachel Maddow (left) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (right) on the Rachel Maddow Show Photo: MSNBC/Screenshot
In an appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show on January 22, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that he had wanted to appear on the MSNBC show for months, but the requests were “just blocked” by the Trump administration.
“I’ve been wanting to come on your show for months and months,” he told Rachel Maddow, the show’s out host. “You’ve been asking me to come on your show for months and months, and it’s just gotten blocked.”
In one of his most revealing interviews yet, Dr. Fauci exposes what it was like working under the Trump administration, which ended just four days ago. Part of that was his limited participation in publicly addressing the coronavirus pandemic.
While 400,000 American lives were lost in the last year, it seems that President Donald Trump (R) and Alex Azar, then-secretary of the Department of Human & Health Services (HHS) — which oversees NIAID — were focused on preventing Dr. Fauci from going on-air with one of the president’s biggest critics.
“Let’s call it what it is: It just got blocked because they didn’t like the way you handle things, and they didn’t want me on. It was so clear,” he told Maddow.
Dr. Fauci, who is now the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, explained that officials in the previous administration asked why he wanted to appear on her show, and the 80 year-old said that he “just likes the way [she] handles things,” and he told them that “I like her, she’s really good.”
“It doesn’t make any difference. Don’t do it,” was the purported response Dr. Fauci received. Under the new Biden administration, “I don’t think you’re going to see that now,” Dr. Fauci opined. “I think you’re going to see a lot of transparency…. you’re not going to see deliberate holding back of good people when the press asks for them.”
“The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence and science is, and know that’s it — let the science speak — it is somewhat of a liberating feeling,” he said.
Dr. Fauci also made his most open rebuke of the Trump administration to date during the appearance, although he didn’t disparage any specific individuals and tried to show respect for his former boss due to his “respect for the office.”\
“I don’t take any pleasure in criticizing Presidential leadership, or the people around the President, but we had a situation where science was distorted and/or rejected, and a lot of pressure was put on individuals and organizations that were not directly related to what their best opinion would be, vis-à-vis the science.
“I had pressure put on me, but I resisted it, and I had to do something that was not comfortable, but I did it. I had to be directly contradicted not only the president, but some of the people around the president who were saying things that were not consistent with the science,” Dr. Fauci recalled.
He also went on to address the open secret that the administration had considered firing him.
“I am not a political appointee, so you know, this whole idea of “we’re gonna fire him” and that kind of stuff – I mean, I didn’t want to be at odds with the president, because I have a lot of respect for the office of the presidency, but there was conflict at different levels with different people at different organizations, and a lot of pressure being put on [me] to do things that are just not compatible with the science.
“I think the only way that happens is when you have leadership from the very top, and people surrounding the leadership, that essentially let that happened.”
“People were influenced, unfortunately. But I’ve got to tell you, at the same time that some might have been, a lot of people weren’t,” he said. “There were a lot of people in the CDC and the FDA who were really suffering under that.”
“I’ve served, now, this is my seventh administration, Rachel – and I’ve been advising administrations and presidents on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, people with different ideologies – and even with differences in ideology, there never was this real affront on science.
“So it was a real [embarrassment] that I haven’t seen in the 40 years that I’ve been doing this. So it’s one of those things that are chilling when you see it happen.”
“It was a tough situation, it really was,” Dr. Fauci concluded.
Deborah Birx Says Some Donald Trump White House Staff Believed COVID Was a Hoax BY KHALEDA RAHMAN ON 1/24/21 NEWSWEEK
White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on November 19, 2020 in Washington, D.C.TASOS KATOPODIS/GETTY IMAGES
Dr. Deborah Birx has said there were some staff in former president Donald Trump's White House who believed COVID-19 was a hoax.
In an interview with on CBS News' Face The Nation, Birx spoke about the challenges she faced while working with the Trump White House on combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There were people who definitely believed that this was a hoax," Birx, the former coordinator of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, told Margaret Brennan when asked if there were coronavirus deniers in the Trump White House.
Pressed on why, Birx said: "I think because the information was confusing at the beginning, I think because we didn't talk about the spectrum of disease... they saw people get COVID and be fine, and then they had us talking about how severe the disease is and how it could cause these unbelievable fatalities of our American public."
Birx claimed Trump "appreciated the gravity" of the pandemic in March last year, but said the president was being fed information that wasn't coming from her.
"It took a while after I arrived in the White House to remove all the ancillary data that was coming in," she told Brennan.
"There was parallel data streams coming into the White House that were not transparently utilized and I needed to stop that."
She added: "I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made...Someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president."
Birx also insisted that her role on the Trump task force was not political. "I thought that I could be helpful, which is the only reason I go and do anything," she said.
She also said she believes the former president's language had played a significant role in "derailing" the response to the pandemic, which has so far claimed more than 400,000 lives in the U.S.
"When you have a pandemic where you're relying on every American to change their behavior, communication is absolutely key," she said.
"And so every time a statement was made by a political leader that wasn't consistent with public health needs, that derailed our response. It is also why I went out on the road because I wasn't censored on the road."
Birx announced last month that she would retire, after it was reported that she had traveled out of state over Thanksgiving weekend, even though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was urging Americans to avoid family gatherings and travel over the holiday.
In a statement last month, Birx said she was accompanied by family members to her property in Delaware, but insisted the purpose of the visit was to winterize with property and not to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Birx told Brennan she plans to retire from her current role at the CDC in the next four tsix weeks.
"It hurt my family... all of this," Birx added. "This tested my resilience because it tested my family."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, has also spoken about how he was kept from speaking about the pandemic on national media by the Trump administration.
He told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Friday that he was "blocked" from going on her show. On Thursday, he told reporters that Trump often put him in an "uncomfortable" position, and that the new administration felt "liberating."
MEET THE NEW BOSS SAME AS THE OLD BOSS
Biden will continue Trump's Abraham Accords framework, says NSA
Presenting the Abraham Accords Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
Biden will continue Trump's Abraham Accords framework, says NSA New National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan tells top Israeli official Biden administration will 'build on' Trump's Mideast peace process. Tags: Meir Ben ShabatJoe BidenAbraham Accords
David Rosenberg , Jan 24 ,2021
The Biden administration will continue its predecessor’s Middle East peace efforts, the new National Security Advisor said, vowing the White House will ‘build on’ the Abraham Accords deals brokered by the Trump administration.
Just days into its term, the new Biden administration is already working to reverse a plethora of Trump administration policies ranging from border security and illegal immigration to energy, the coronavirus pandemic, and travel.
But White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reassured his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat, that the new administration will not deviate from the Trump White House’s bid to broker normalization deals between Israel and moderate Arab states.
While some Democrats had criticized the Trump administration for brokering the deals in the absence of a breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Sullivan told Ben-Shabbat in a Saturday night telephone call that the Us would work to ‘build on’ the last administration’s “success”, Reuters reported.
“They discussed opportunities to enhance the partnership over the coming months, including by building on the success of Israel’s normalization arrangements with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco,” according to a statement on Sullivan’s conversation with Ben-Shabbat.
Workers rescued from China gold mine 2 weeks after being trapped Some brought their hands together in gratitude and many appeared almost too weak to stand.
Rescue workers help a miner as he is brought to the surface at the Hushan gold mine on Sunday.
STRINGER / Reuters
Jan. 24, 2021 By The Associated Press
BEIJING — Eleven workers trapped for two weeks inside a Chinese gold mine were brought safely to the surface on Sunday, a landmark achievement for an industry long-blighted by disasters and high death tolls.
State broadcaster CCTV showed workers being hauled up one-by-one in baskets on Sunday afternoon, their eyes shielded to protect them after so many days in darkness.
Some brought their hands together in gratitude and many appeared almost too weak to stand. They were swiftly covered in coats amid freezing temperatures and loaded into ambulances.
Hundreds of rescue workers and officials stood at attention and applauded as the workers were brought up from the mine in Qixia, a jurisdiction under Yantai in the eastern coastal province of Shandong.
One worker was reported to have died from a head wound following the explosion that deposited massive amounts of rubble in the shaft on Jan. 10 while the mine was still under construction.
The fate of 10 others who were underground at the time is unknown. Authorities have detained mine managers for delaying reporting the accident.
The cause of the accident is under investigation but the explosion was large enough to release 70 tons of debris that blocked the shaft, disabling elevators and trapping workers underground.
Some of the miners were too weak to walk to waiting ambulances after Sunday's rescue in eastern China's Shandong province. (Chen Hao/Xinhua via The Associated Press)
Rescuers drilled parallel shafts to send down food and nutrients and eventually bring up the survivors, 10 of whom had been in a lower chamber and one in a separate area slightly closer to the surface.
The official China Daily newspaper said on its website that seven of the workers were able to walk to ambulances on their own.
Such protracted and expensive rescue efforts are relatively new in China's mining industry, which used to average 5,000 deaths per year. Increased supervision has improved safety, although demand for coal and precious metals continues to prompt corner-cutting.
A new crackdown was ordered after two accidents in mountainous southwestern Chongqing last year killed 39 miners.
The Associated Press
10 years after Tahrir Square protests, Egyptians grapple with lessons of failed revolution
Anti-government demonstrators hoist the Egyptian flag during the
Arab Spring protests in 2011.
It's been one cruel decade since Egyptians dared to disrupt the status quo of living in a suffocating police state.
The first month of 2011 was marked by the early days of Egypt's uprising, part of a wave of Arab Spring protests that many saw as brave, hopeful and inevitable.
Now, with a pandemic capping off a decade of violence, horror and mass displacement in the Middle East, the protests in Tahrir Square are, at best, consciously forgotten by skeptical Egyptians as a naïve footnote or, at worst, cursed as original sin.
Many of the ills that made Egypt ripe for an uprising in 2011 have only been exacerbated in 2021: the lack of jobs, the lack of political participation and the utter lack of freedom.
Under President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt has outdone itself as a prolific jailer and executioner — Human Rights Watch recently estimated the number of political prisoners at 60,000 and rising.
According to activists, the government has also deployed a persistent campaign aimed at framing the revolution as the harbinger of Egypt's myriad woes and the reason it has been "brought to its knees."
Egypt is now a country where the "Tahrir people" — as they're pejoratively referred to by supporters of the regime — are either out of the country, if they haven't been arrested, or keeping a silent vigil.
Many of them find it "very, very painful" to revisit those two and a half weeks in 2011, says celebrated Egyptian novelist and commentator Ahdaf Soueif, who participated in the protests.
Jubilation among Egyptian protesters on the night in February 2011 that longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak stepped down.
According to Soueif, they "keep the 18 days in a place where they can be safe, where we protect them against accusations of having been a collective hallucination," she said in an interview with CBC Radio's Ideas.
"I hope the day will come when we draw inspiration again from those 18 days."
Weeks of demonstrations
It took 18 days of protests in Tahrir Square for the uprising to bring down Egypt's longstanding strongman president, Hosni Mubarak. Defying predictions of certain failure, the protesters took over the square, bringing Christian, secular and Islamist Egyptians — as well as affluent and poor citizens — together in idealistic common cause.
After Mubarak's fall, the country saw a military council take charge, followed by the election of a president from the Muslim Brotherhood, vast counter-revolutionary protests, a military coup and the subsequent massacre of hundreds or more at a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in in August 2013.
The 2011 protests spread beyond Egypt to neighbouring Libya — currently all but a failed state — as well as Syria, which was plunged into a horrific civil war that has seen intervention from the region and abroad and has killed tens of thousands and displaced many more.
Other countries swept up in the Arab Spring are either in the grip of violence (like Yemen) or in a repressive political vice-grip (Bahrain or the UAE). Only Tunisia, where the wave of protests began, appears to be on a relatively peaceful path of post-revolution political reform.
Hard as it may be to talk about Tahrir, given the loss of life and the crackdowns, some veterans of the revolution insist there is something to be salvaged from its ashes.
"Yes, society has changed," said Soueif, who wrote a book about the protests called Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. "Everybody believes that something different is absolutely necessary, but [they] don't quite know how to go about getting it."
But while there may have been subtle positive consequences from the uprising — like a greater awareness of the rights that have been denied to many people — she cautioned, "I really hesitate to say it because the price has been so high and continues to be so high."
Anti-government protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square react after a speech by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 saying he would not step down.
On top of what happened to so many Tahrir activists, Soueif's blogger nephew and activist niece are currently in prison. Last year, Soueif was briefly arrested herself for protesting the conditions in their prison during COVID-19. Greater politicization
The Tahrir revolution may have laid the groundwork for future action, whenever conditions permit it.
For example, it has led to mass politicization among Egyptians, says journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, a longtime blogger and activist who was also involved in the 2011 protests and helped document them.
One major lesson from that time is that "public squares do not bring down dictators and do not change regimes," he said from Berlin, where he now lives.
"The real power is in the factories, it's in the workplaces and it's in the civil service offices."
Countless strikes were going on during the revolution and workers were "chanting the same chants that we were chanting in Tahrir… and they declared their solidarity with the revolution," said el-Hamalawy.
"That's when I knew that … we're going to win. Victory was on our doorstep."
But ultimately, there was no victory.
Destined to fail?
Activists say they found themselves wedged between forces much larger and more organized than they could hope to be — namely, an Islamist vision of the country espoused by the well-established Muslim Brotherhood; the military's iron grip; and the geopolitics of the region, which has long favoured dictators who insisted real democracy was not compatible with stability.
There was also the very practical problem of organizing a leaderless movement and marshalling it beyond the streets. The cracks showed immediately after those 18 days.
"This was a missed opportunity," said Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian and professor of modern Arabic studies at the University of Cambridge. He happened to be in Egypt when the protests started. Unusually for a historian, he was both an observer and a participant during a revolutionary moment.
"There was no attempt to think, OK, now Tahrir — then what? How do you transform this into a movement?"
Decades of military and one-party rule in Egypt have made it difficult for national opposition parties to flourish.
A former army general, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power after a military coup in 2013, and has overseen an unprecedented political crackdown, silencing critics and jailing thousands.
Another lasting injury from longtime repression, said Fahmy, "is [our] inability … to imagine another world" in which the state as it is today did not exist. That meant the absence of a model of a more open society to point to in Egypt's history.
Does all that mean the revolution was destined to fail?
"If the revolution had been adopted and protected by the people who had the guns and given the space to work through these decisions and these visions that were coming from the ground up, then it would have worked and we would have had something amazing," said Ahdaf.
Tahrir Square's role
Beyond serving as the site of protest, Tahrir Square itself provided space and inspiration for discussion of ground-level proposals for an "ideal" Egypt that might have seen the light of day had there been a way to channel them into practice.
One example, said Fahmy, was the idea of a demilitarized police force that would be designed to serve the people rather than the state — a novel idea for modern-day Egypt.
A far more basic achievement for the square was that it brought people together to talk.
"This sounds banal," said Fahmy, but not in a place like Egypt. "Our cities, our country, our political system is designed in a way to deprive us of not only free speech but the ability to listen to others."
That kind of conversation is the starting point of compromise, he added.
Fahmy believes the revolution continues, at least on some level. The 2011 protests, he said, "is one phase."
Protesters gathered again in central Cairo in 2019 for anti-government protests, this time against President el-Sisi.
Soueif agrees. But not el-Hamalawy.
"No, it's not ongoing. The revolution got defeated," el-Hamalawy said. "There will be another revolution, but not anytime soon, I'm afraid." Contested legacy
Indeed, even among those who participated in the Tahrir revolution, the lessons and the legacy are contested.
After years of instability and the return of fear, the old argument that stability trumps freedom resonates among many Egyptians and others throughout the region.
That resonance is unsurprising given the state of the Middle East after the protests spread and crackdowns of varying levels of brutality ensued.
The message from Egypt's rulers now — as it was during Mubarak's time — is "give up your freedoms and we will give you security," said Fahmy.
"It's a Faustian deal and many people accepted that. And the result is that people have not only given up freedoms, they've given up their dreams. That's the most dangerous thing."
But el-Hamalawy said Tahrir's legacy cannot be forgotten wholesale.
Because of the internet, "the whole visual memory of the revolution, it is saved," he said.
"Now there is a younger generation that's growing up and on YouTube, they know quite well that their older brothers were protesting in Tahrir.
"The memory is there. Tahrir is there. And it will remain there."
This episode of CBC Ideas was produced by Nahlah Ayed and Menaka Raman-Wilms.
AOC Accuses GOP Senator Josh Hawley of 'Trying to Wiggle Out of Inciting a Riot'
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Republican Senator Josh Hawley on Saturday for saying he was merely "representing my constituents" when he voted against the election certification for Joe Biden after deadly riots broke out at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Five people died in the violence
"Sen. Hawley is trying to wiggle out of inciting a riot that killed 5 by saying 'I was just representing my constituents' - but only those who wish to overturn the election and resurrect the Confederacy," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Saturday.
"Hawley is Senator of Missouri. His constituents are ALL the people of Missouri - which is the same state that JUST elected sister @CoriBush, the first Black woman to ever represent MO in Congress," she added.
"So Hawley really needs to clarify who he considers a constituent & who he doesn't," she wrote.
Sen. Hawley is trying to wiggle out of inciting a riot that killed 5 by saying “I was just representing my constituents” - but only those who wish to overturn the election and resurrect the Confederacy. https://t.co/39MdcfRwwc— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 23, 2021
Ocasio-Cortez has accused both Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, for inciting a mob of pro-Trump rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Hawley was the first senator to publicly announce that he would object to the election certification of President Joe Biden.
Following the riot, politicians accused Hawley and other GOP lawmakers of misleading rioters into falsely believing the election outcome could change.
Democrat Ocasio-Cortez has since called for her GOP colleagues to be removed from office and accused them of "supporting the insurrection."
"If we've got time on our hands, then we should actually be bringing justice to the members of Congress... who also helped support this insurrection," Ocasio-Cortez said on Friday.
"If they don't resign, they should be expelled from the Senate."
But Hawley has vehemently defended his position. In an op-ed published in the Southeast Missourian on January 14, Hawley said he objected to the vote to reflect the views of "many, many citizens in Missouri [who] have deep concerns about election integrity. For months, I heard from these Missourians—writing, calling my office, stopping me to talk."
Who Is Josh Hawley, Republican Senator Facing Growing Calls To Be Censured?
"They want Congress to take action to see that our elections at every level are free, fair, and secure. They have a right to be heard in Congress. And as their representative, it is my duty to speak on their behalf. That is just what I did last week," he added.
The GOP senator has also faced calls to resign from protesters who have gathered in downtown St. Louis, chanting slogans like "No Hawley. No KKK. No fascist USA."
On Thursday, seven Senate Democrats requested an ethics review of Hawley and Cruz, and said that they "amplified claims of election fraud that had resulted in threats of violence against state and local officials around the country."
"The Senate Ethics Committee should investigate their conduct to fully understand their role," the letter to the Senate Committee on Ethics said. "The actions of which we know demand an investigation and a determination whether disciplinary action is warranted. Until then, a cloud of uncertainty will hang over them and over this body."
Newsweek has reached out to Hawley. A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment.
Navigating a toxic workplace is a risky and lengthy process, experts say
TORONTO — In the wake of Julie Payette's resignation from the role of governor general on Thursday after an investigation into harassment allegations, some Canadian workers may find themselves relating to the rank and file at Rideau Hall
In many cases however, workers who have the courage to complain about mistreatment from their managers find all too often that their boss doesn't face any consequences, notes human resources consultant Janet Candido.
"If it's somebody that nobody likes, or if it's a fairly low-level person, companies are usually much more apt to take action," says Candido, founder of Candido Consulting Group.
"The problem really comes in when the person is very senior, or popular, or a good producer. And then people turn a blind eye."
Candido says that any employee experiencing bullying should take detailed notes about each clash, including the day, time and whether there were any witnesses. Workplaces should focus on anti-harassment training that empowers managers from other departments to step in when they see a fellow manager bully a subordinate, she says.
"Don't expect a subordinate to be able to stand up to their boss and say, 'You are harassing me and haven't stopped,' she says. "They're afraid of being ostracized. They're afraid of their career being finished."
Many workplace policies, however, do exactly that, says Fredericton employment lawyer Dan Leger. Most workplaces are required to have policies to deal with harassment, but many vary in how they define harassment or require employees to start with informal discussions.
"It all starts with confirming to the individual that behaviour is not welcomed," says Leger. "We all know what it looks like, at the far end: If somebody's making a sexual advance to a subordinate employee, that's easy to classify. But what about the employer or the boss or the manager who decides to shun an individual in the copy room?"
Leger says workplace policies are often designed to mediate and diffuse disputes without ever reaching the point where investigators are called in. A good policy, Leger says, includes at least one backup mediator if an employee cannot safely complain to the manager.
"That's not uncommon in workplaces: A boss might have an employee in the management team that they've worked with, that they go camping with, and employees know that," says Leger. "If you can't go to your immediate supervisor, then who is the default after that, and who was the default after that?"
Leger says any workplace policy should also have a clause that protects good-faith complainants from retaliation. If violated, that could be a violation of a work contract — and entitle the employee to monetary damages, Leger says.
Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed says more workers have reported feeling isolated and vulnerable to difficult employers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hameed says that there are several different routes of recourse for workers who are being bullied. For example, a unionized workplace may allow an employee to file a grievance.
If an employer request is unlawful, discriminatory or a threat to health and safety, Hameed says that merits workers raising an instant alarm, and can open the door to the province's human rights tribunal or Ministry of Labour. A traumatic workplace incident that ends in a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder means that an employee now has a medical condition that must be accommodated by the employer, Hameed says.
On the other hand, if a workplace is proven to be so toxic that a worker is impeded in carrying out their duties, Hameed says an employee could try to build a legal case for constructive dismissal, sometimes called "quitting with cause."
But each legal option has its risks, Hameed says, as does the option of "going public" with complaints without having a lawyer or union to advocate for you.
"The caveat for all of these kind of interventions is that legal processes are long and drawn out," says Hameed.
"The danger of going public with something is ... you have to have the confidence that then you will be able to weather a vigorous response by the employer."
When harassment is between two co-workers, the worker on the receiving end should make a complaint to management requesting protection, says Hameed.
"The liability of management is triggered when you let management know that this co-worker is harassing you, and they just condone that behaviour," he says.
What's tougher, he said, is when management is accused of abuses. Hameed says workplace complaints are more likely to be investigated if there are multiple employees willing to come forward with similar experiences — which, he admits, is easier said than done.
"Even if there's a group of them, they may still not feel that they have that safety," says Hameed. But, he adds, when it comes to a group complaint, "in most circumstances, it would be highly imprudent of management to just sort of whitewash that or dismiss that."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2021.
