WitchTok: the rise of the occult on social media has eerie parallels with the 16th century

October 28, 2021 

It’s 1.30am in the morning, and I’m about to watch a duel between magicians. One is a “demonolater”, a word I have never heard before, someone who claims they worship demons and can petition them in return for knowledge or power. The other describes themselves as a “Solomonic magician”, and claims to be able to command demons to do his bidding, as some Jewish and Islamic traditions have believed of King Solomon, who ruled Israel in the 10th century BC.

I first discovered this debate because, in the course of studying 16th century books of magic attributed to Solomon, I had found, to my astonishment, that “Solomonic magic” is still alive and well today, and growing in popularity. Twitter had suggested to me that I might be interested in an account called “Solomonic magic”, and a few clicks later I had found myself immersed in a vast online community of young occultists, tweeting and retweeting the latest theories and controversies, and using TikTok to share their craft.

To my further bemusement, it seemed that the tradition of Solomonic magic had recently faced accusations that its strict and authoritative approach to the command of demons amounted to a form of abuse, akin to domestic violence. As I had made a note in my diary of a public debate that I wanted to attend out of sheer curiosity, it seemed astonishing to be asking myself whether Solomonic magic, the same found in books of necromancy dating back hundreds of years, was on the brink of cancellation in 2021.

At 28, I’m slightly too old to be familiar with the platform Twitch, mostly used for live video streaming, but tonight I’ve managed to get it working for this particular debate. As an atheist, I’m very likely in the minority, though I’m not the only Brit to have turned up in spite of it being such an ungodly hour this side of the pond. The chat box is buzzing as occultists of various stripes arrive to hear the arguments.

My mum would hate this, I can’t help thinking to myself. She didn’t even let me read Harry Potter.

When people ask me what I do, it’s always fun to tell them, “I study magic at Cambridge University.” It’s technically true. I’m researching the representation of magic on the early modern stage, and am interested in the ways in which dangerous, forbidden or “occult” knowledge was theorised by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. My research combines my fascination with the mechanisms of belief with my love of storytelling and the stage. When I’m not researching plays, I’m writing them: I’m an award-winning playwright, whose work has been performed across the UK and abroad.

British painter George Romney was only one of many artists whose imagination was inspired by the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Suspending disbelief is my forte, but actually believing is something I’ve never been very good at. The history of magic fascinates me because it is a history of people – of human faults and foibles, vanities, hopes and needs – rather than because of any genuine investment in the esoteric. This is why I’m here to listen to articulate and likeable young people across the globe discussing theories of knowledge and the supernatural – beliefs to which I myself cannot subscribe.

Even more astonishingly, these Generation Z occultists, with their substantial followings on Twitter and TikTok, are about to debate a form of magic that lies at the heart of my research into Shakespeare’s England.

This story is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.

The rise of WitchTok

While the most watched TikTok videos may appear asinine to anyone who doesn’t enjoy teenagers lip syncing to popular songs, some surprising subcultures have arisen since the platform’s inception in 2017. One of these is the “WitchTok” community. Videos labelled #WitchTok have so far clocked up an impressive 18.7 billion views.

I accidentally found WitchTok because I had – to my shame, I’ll admit – found it calming to watch compilations of Cottagecore TikTok videos in my breaks during PhD research. Cottagecore is a popular fashion and lifestyle aesthetic that evokes the bucolic idyll of country living. Cottagecore videos are saccharine and safe: jam is preserved, mushrooms are picked, and flowing dresses stream across ripe fields while a girlfriend holds the camera and gentle music plays.

Cottagecore TikToks are perfect means of escapism, featuring castles, fields, elf ears, and magic flutes, among other elements of wonder.

In short, it is pure escapism, and so is WitchTok; creators of WitchToks often also make Cottagecore videos. Yet, where Cottagecore offers hope for a good, green world that just might be baked and planted into existence, WitchTok audaciously skips past the bounds of possibility, and promises supernatural means of making life more bearable.

The abundance of magic on TikTok piqued my interest, representing as it does a new frontier in popular belief. It has also caught the attention of mainstream media. In April 2021, for example, the Financial Times consulted anthropologists and theologians who scrambled to interpret this strange turnout of events. Its author noted with astonishment that #WitchTok had surpassed #Biden by over 2 billion views and is now leading by around 6 billion and counting.

Practical magic

TikTok allows its users to make 15-second video clips, or a string of 15-second clips of no more than 60 seconds in total. This format lends itself to fast-paced, visually appealing content, and this has shaped the kind of magic found on WitchTok. Spells using candles, bottles, crystals and herbs make for snappy and succinct tutorials which can be readily imitated by the viewer.

Tarot reading has become a viral trend on WitchTok.

Interactive WitchToks are particularly popular, usually using tarot cards or pendulum boards, where a crystal is dangled over a set of words, supposedly swinging over the truth when asked a simple question. By urging the viewer to participate, to “think of a question you want an answer for”, creators are conspicuously gaming TikTok’s algorithm, keeping people watching and encouraging engagement, while claiming that it was supernatural power that drew them to a video.

Brevity is the soul of WitchTok, where complex tarot spreads are abandoned for a one or three card message told to an audience of millions in 30 seconds. Carving a magical symbol into a candle upstages convoluted and expensive ritual magic from more formal, structured esoteric systems, where a single spell can take a day or more.

What, then, are TikTok users looking for in their magical clips of 60 seconds or less? The most common functions of a spell seem to be love, money, healing or revenge, particularly vengeance on behalf of a loved one, whether wronged by a school bully or abusive husband. Magic appeals because life is unfair, and power is a pleasant fantasy. In this regard, WitchTok is no different from any other magical tradition.

Witchtok hunters

The occult subculture is a controversial one, and the witches of TikTok are a particularly powerful magnet for outrage and mockery. They have come under fire from three main types of enemies who appear in turn as caricatures in WitchTok videos.

The first one of these is an interloper who I’ll call “the angry Christian”. When pantomimed in a WitchTok, the angry Christian blazes with furious indignation, railing against the evils of magic, till they are silenced with a sassy retort or threat of a hex. The angry Christian believes in magic, in Satan and in the occult. They simply think you’ll risk your soul if you engage with it. The Christians I grew up with are cut from precisely this cloth.

Less common than the angry Christian but occupying a similarly villainous role is “the smarmy sceptic”, the unbeliever who has no interest in any kind of faith. WitchTok videos often dramatise fantasy conversations with them, imagining ominous retorts: “Don’t believe in curses? Sure! Just give me a lock of your hair then … no?” In some ways the smarmy sceptic is worse than the angry Christian, refusing point blank to be “spiritual” at all. I’m afraid this is probably the category into which I would be placed.

Intriguingly, however, a third opponent has arisen from within the occult community itself. This is what I am calling “the learned magician”, a practitioner who takes the occult seriously as a complex and scholarly pursuit, delighting in the theory, the complexity of rituals, and the broader philosophical implications of their beliefs.

Not quite so TikTok-friendly, they tend to make an occasional appearance when the trends of WitchTok deviate from the logic of a particular magical system, stepping in to correct the new “baby witches” and expressing exasperation with controversies that will sound familiar even to those with no interest in the occult. (Is it cultural appropriation to wear an evil eye pendant? Does calling for discipline in magical ritual equate to a form of fascism?)

Learned magicians sometimes take to TikTok to set the record straight for ‘baby witches’.

Some learned magicians are attempting to bridge the gap. Gen-Z occultist Georgina Rose or “Da’at Darling” – who has convened the debate between the demonolater and Solomonic mage to which I am about to listen – puts out a prolific array of content ranging from introductory YouTube lectures to witty tweets and TikToks.

Upset by the “rise of anti-intellectualism in Generation-Z heavy online occult spaces”, she responded, appropriately, with a successful TikTok hashtag: #DefendOccultBooks. Perhaps not an outright “enemy” of Witchtok, after all – as “Da’at Darling” puts it, “it is important to reach this platform, so new practitioners can have good information on the occult” – the learned magician is still, at best, tolerant of the trends of TikTok spirituality.

Here, then, is a new theatre of ideas where innovative technology has not quelled ancient magical practices but has advanced them, giving rise to new forms of faith and schism. If the unbelieving reader is asking themselves how a new age of occultism has arisen in a supposedly enlightened modern age, when surely the tech-literate young know better than to return to ancient superstition, they need look no further than a parallel series of events in Shakespeare’s England. This was a time when innovations in technology and culture served to reinvent and energise ancient magical beliefs.

The occult renaissance

In medieval England, getting your hands on a book of magic was a tricky business. Prior to the invention of the printing press, handwritten texts were passed around in manuscript form between those lucky enough to have been taught how to read. Costly and time-consuming, the production of a book was simply not worth the effort unless the contents truly mattered.

In spite of this, from the mid-13th century onwards, a series of treatises that dealt with occult knowledge were translated into Latin and various European languages, slipping covertly between the personal libraries of wealthy men. If the Renaissance can be characterised more widely as a period of translation of classical wisdom, so too was it an era when occult “wisdom” began to circulate more widely than before.

Grimoires, or ‘spellbooks’, had a great influence on science and religion. 

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Books of magic, or “grimoires”, a word which derives from the French grammaire, promised, like ordinary school grammars, to teach the reader the rudiments of a new language, though this was the language of spell-making and devil-raising. Grimoires were frequently attributed to famous men of esoteric learning, and the wise king Solomon in particular appealed to Christian readers. If Solomon had authored such a text, could not the wise Christian reader likewise practice the occult without endangering his soul?

Rumour of the grimoires and their grim rituals would circulate widely throughout the medieval era while the actual, often comparatively bland contents, remained obscure.

The occult reformation

The introduction of printing press technology to Europe in the 15th century revolutionised the speed and scale by which all texts could be produced. It was the printing press which facilitated the Protestant Reformation, and it was also the printing press which was responsible for the introduction of the occult grimoires to a larger audience than ever before.

Surprisingly, this occult reformation was enacted not by magicians themselves, but by a series of sceptics who believed that, by revealing in print the content of infamous esoteric manuscripts, they could expose them to the ridicule that they deserved.

Dutch scholar Johann Weyer’s Latin treatise De Praestigiis Daemonum or “On the Tricks of Demons” was published in 1563. It was one of the first great sceptical works debunking magic, criticising notorious witch hunting manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum and, indeed, successfully curbing some of the continental witch trials. Weyer’s work had a huge influence on one Englishman in particular, Reginald Scot, who borrowed from it in his own book, The Discovery of Witchcraft, first published in 1584.

The Malleus Maleficarum is a manual for hunting witches that would serve as guidance for 15th century witch trials. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Scot’s The Discovery is a thrilling exposé of both the folk magic practised by witches and the “learned” magic found in grimoires, particularly those attributed to Solomon. Weyer had included, as an appendix to De Praestigiis Daemonum, a direct translation of a Solomonic grimoire which listed the names and ranks of various demons, and how a magician might go about conjuring and commanding them as, supposedly, could Solomon.

Scot “Englished” much of this appendix for his book, concluding scathingly: “He that can be perswaded that these things are true … may soone be brought to beleeve that the moone is made of green cheese.”

Though by no means an atheist – nobody was, at least not openly, in the 1500s - Scot was certainly a smarmy sceptic, and The Discovery shares the exasperated horror of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion (2006) at the excesses of superstition and belief. Joined by George Gifford’s A discourse of the Subtill Practices of Deuilles by Vvitches and Sorcerers by which Men are and Haue Bin Greatly Deluded (1587) and Henry Howard’s A Defensatiue Against the Poyson of Supposed Prophesies (1583), Scot’s treatise seemed to ride the crest of a new wave of scepticism concerning the whole project of magic in general.

Surely the genie was out of the bottle (or demon out of the brazen bowl, as the Solomonic grimoires would describe it). Now that occult beliefs had been so thoroughly exposed and ridiculed, how could they possibly survive?

King James and the witches

In 1597, King James VI of Scotland, who would inherit the English throne in 1603, published an extraordinary treatise: Daemonologie. The book was not, as the name might suggest, a grimoire-like guide to the conjuration of demons, but rather a serious study of demonic power and the harm it could inflict. King James did not accept the suggestion that any man, even if he was as wise as Solomon, could seriously practise magic without risk to his soul. Nor did he believe, as the smarmy sceptics did, that there was no real threat whatsoever.

James was an angry Christian, a man who believed, sincerely, in the power of the occult and felt duty-bound to protect his people from it in all its forms. He had nothing but contempt for the likes of Scot, whom he regarded, in much the same way as a modern Christian fundamentalist might regard an unbeliever, as a dangerous mocker who did the Devil’s work for him by dismissing the real threat that magic posed.

Even worse, Scot and his fellows had inadvertently introduced into printed English, for the first time, the detail of dangerous grimoire magic which had formerly reached only limited circulation. While it is a myth that James ordered copies of The Discovery to be burned, extracts from the text were indeed consigned to the fire during the witch trials of the 17th century, when sections were found, freed from their original sceptical context, in the documents of those accused of witchcraft.
One devil too many

My PhD looks specifically at the fallout of this fascinating cultural clash in the work of the early modern dramatists, and I am particularly interested in the overlooked presence of Solomon in these debates. Most famously, it was Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which sparked a vogue for plays that dealt with the question of the learned magician.

Doctor Faustus raised many objections due to its interplay with the demonic realm. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Written in around 1588, Doctor Faustus drew on Scot’s The Discovery in its representation of magic, yet discarded its dismissive tone. Faustus succeeds in summoning the demon Mephistopheles, and signs away his soul in a contract written with his own blood in return for 24 years of power. After wasting his time on petty vengeances, greed and lust, Faustus is finally sent to hell.

Rumour circulated that an extra devil had been seen on stage during the play, a fact which the Puritan William Prynne would gleefully repeat as proof of the evils of theatre in his Histriomastix, 1632. Magicians who both did and did not achieve their hoped-for Solomonic command of occult forces would populate the English stage for decades.

Scot and the sceptics had indeed laid bare the detail of occult belief, and their work was highly influential, but it had precisely the opposite of their desired effect. Advances in technology, accessible English translations and an entertainment industry hungry for a good story had conspired to democratise magic. The process they unwittingly began continues today on TikTok and elsewhere.

Solomon on trial

It’s a strange truth that grimoire magic is more widely available in 2021 than ever before, and that it is the internet which has popularised exactly the same material that was hidden in a handful of libraries for the first few hundred years of its presence in Europe.

With the debate about the ethics of Solomonic magic underway on Twitch, I hardly dare imagine Scot’s horror, much less King James’s, to hear phrases like “pro-demon rights” from a young person describing themselves as a “demonolater” and “magic is the scientific study of conversations with spiritual beings” from a self-professed “Solomonic mage”.

The latter has done a good job of persuading the Twitch stream that commanding demons is not inherently disrespectful, though a poorly-judged comparison between the authority of the magician and that of the policeman sparks momentary indignation in the chat.

Nevertheless, the debate is civil and ends with discussions of new online editions of the rare grimoires. It seems the magical incarnation of King Solomon will live to exorcise another day, and I can’t say I’m surprised. The historical inability of sceptical dismissals and technological advances to do anything other than encourage belief in magic has persuaded me that the fundamentalists are right in one respect: speak of the devil and he shall appear – and that goes for TikTok too.

Author

Rebekah King
PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

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COMMENT

Ian Tully

masuk via Google

Superstition (folk religion) has always been there, and perhaps one of the reasons why there is such an outbreak of witch-hunting in the early modern period is that the superstition tolerated and incorporated in the Roman Catholic Church was challenged by the Protestant Reformation. There is something quite similar 500 years earlier when the Church, led by the reforming monk Bernard of Clairvaux, attacks pagan folk religion as Satanic.

One can also point to other periods of stress as in the late-18th century when alongside Enlightenment Rationalism there is a flourishing of Rosicrucian belief and the semi-serious Satanism of the Hellfire Club among others. Folklore and ‘Gothic tales are popular just as rational science is making its greatest strides. Again the same trends can be found at the Fin de Sciecle when there is a flourishing of Rosicurianism and other exotics, Satanism in France and Germany, and Spiritualism especially after the slaughter of the Great War, which marked the end of much male Church attendence and a radical decline in the safe magic of British Masonry. The attraction of magic to some Nazis is well-known and they were the products of this period.

There is really no difference between this and the Witchdoctor led beliefs of the non-Western world. They all draw on the same ideas and they can all point to some “proofs” because if people believe, and fear is a good basis for belief, they can experience psycho-physical effects. I knew of a Dyak soldier who was quite literally dying from a curse because he believed in it. The growth of fringe Christian sects, notably in the Third World which appeal emontionally and sometimes as with the Properity Churches economically too, meet a gap that reformed Religion (even the contemporary Roman Catholic one) does not address. Teenagers are particularly susceptible because they both feel powerless and have a desire for power which is often associated for them with sexual power, hence boys especially have been drawn to the Occult. This is rather different from the silly cartoon stuff although that can be an entry point, just as we have recently been reminded that the anti-rationalism of “New Age” thinking can lead to extremist Right-Wing political positions.

Africa to press climate finance demands at COP26: negotiator
Agence France-Presse
October 28, 2021

Vulnerable: Zimbabwean farmer Josephine Ganye struggling to grow corn in the drought that gripped the country last year 

Jekesai NJIKIZANA AFP

African countries will use next week's COP summit to demand rich nations honour and then deepen their pledges to fund the fight against climate change, a top negotiator said Thursday.

The UN meeting in Scotland hosts a two-day summit of world leaders from Monday, with organisers warning that the chances of averting runaway climate change are dwindling.

For wealthy economies, the big focus will be on cuts in carbon emissions to try to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

This is the safer of two goals set down by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for preventing worse drought, floods, storms and rising seas.

But for African countries, the biggest issue is money -- funds to help struggling economies curb their emissions and also adapt to the wrenching impact of climate change.

"We have been waiting for more than 10 years for the promise of $100 billion per year," Tanguy Gahouma-Bekale, chair of the African Group of countries at the climate talks, told AFP.

It was in 2009 that rich countries first pledged to muster $100 billion annually, from all sources, to help poorer nations, a target that would be achieved by 2020.

The promise was made to help stave off a fiasco at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit and was enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement -- the negotiating basis for the coming talks in Glasgow.

But the 2020 goal was missed and Britain's COP president, Alok Sharma, has admitted it is unlikely to be achieved before 2023.

"The position of the African group is that we can come back on track and find a solution to close this gap," said Gahouma-Bekale, an adviser to the Gabon government.

"We need now to go to the target that we committed in the Paris agreement this year, not in two years."
Vulnerable Africa

Wealthier countries are grappling with how to revamp their energy systems to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, but African nations face different challenges, said Gahouma-Bekale.

"Africa is not going to accept to limit its economic development to accompany the fight against climate change -- that is why we are asking for support," he said.

"Africa is not at all responsible for the situation, but is one of the most vulnerable continents.

"We must also ensure the fight against poverty, we must ensure jobs for young people and we must ensure energy for all.

"The African continent has a population that is almost half disconnected from the electricity grid.

"So rather than looking for an energy transition, we need to look at how we are going to match our energy supply with demand," he added.

That would require much more funding than the $100 billion a year currently pledged, he warned.

"Now that promise has become obsolete, it's no longer relevant. We think that maybe we need 10 times more."

He also demanded better accounting of how the money was being delivered.

"Today we have no methodology, no table on how to track this money," he said.


Official figures show that between 70 and 80 percent of the $100 billion target had been delivered, "but a lot of countries didn't see the money on the ground", he claimed.

"So where goes this money?"

Many developing countries are also angry at the logistics of the conference in Glasgow, despite British government promises to offer free coronavirus vaccines to any delegates in need.

"The cost to find accommodation is very high, so African delegates may be one hour" from Glasgow, Gahouma-Bekale said.

"We have also a lot of challenges due to quarantine, to vaccines."

Given the scarcity of vaccines in Africa, many delegates will instead have to isolate on arrival and undergo costly tests.


"But we try to come here, we try to do all the visa, all the accommodation to travel to here because it's a fight for the future, for our children," he vowed.

"And we will be here until the end of this COP."

© 2021 AFP

 ABOLISH CBP

Border Patrol has a 'shadow police unit' that protects agents when they kill, groups say

2021/10/28 
© The San Diego Union-Tribune

A U.S. Border Patrol agent looks off toward the Otay Mountain Wilderness Area at the U.S.- Mexico Border east of San Diego's Otay Mesa neighborhood on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019. - John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS

Border Patrol has special, secretive units that work to cover up any wrongdoing when agents kill someone or otherwise use force in potentially problematic ways, according to a letter sent to Congress on Thursday calling for an investigation.

These "shadow police units," the letter says, have been operating since at least 1987 and without any actual authority under federal law. They do not appear in Department of Homeland Security documents as official entities.

The letter, written by the Southern Border Communities Coalition and Alliance San Diego, condemns the use of these units, which documentation shows have different names depending on their location, and suggests that the agents who worked for them could even be charged criminally with obstruction of justice.

The units "have allowed border agents to get away with nearly everything, including murder," the letter says. It was sent to leaders of Senate and House judiciary, homeland security and oversight committees.

There are three entities with authority from Congress to perform criminal investigations. They are the FBI, the DHS Office of the Inspector General and the Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility. These Border Patrol units are not among them.

"Their stated mission is to mitigate liability for agents," said Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, quoting from a presentation created by San Diego's Border Patrol unit and obtained by a journalist, John Carlos Frey. "In other words, their mission is protect agents, not the public."

When asked about the units, a spokesperson with Customs and Border Protection who declined to be named on the record said that the agency has a "multi-tiered oversight framework in place to address allegations of misconduct involving agency personnel."

"The U.S. Border Patrol maintains teams with specialized evidence collection capabilities across the southwest border," the unnamed spokesperson said. "These teams consist of highly trained personnel available to respond around the clock to collect and process evidence related to CBP enforcement activities as well as critical incidents. In the case of serious incidents involving CBP personnel, members of these teams are sometimes called upon to assist investigators from CBP OPR and other local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. This is a vitally important capability as many critical incidents involving CBP operations occur in remote locations where other agencies may be unwilling or unable to respond."

The letter to Congress is the product of months of research and analysis, Guerrero said, and wouldn't have happened without information that surfaced in a San Diego case.

She and other human rights attorneys investigating the 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the San Ysidro Port of Entry found indications that the unit based in San Diego had tampered with and even destroyed evidence in the case to protect the agents involved. Then they began finding documentation of other cases in which similar units had interfered in other regions.

"This is not an isolated incident of bad actors in the case of Anastasio," Guerrero said. "This is a systemic impunity problem that shows us that the impunity is not accidental. It is by design."

Guerrero and her team found that the San Diego unit, called the sector's Critical Incident Investigative Team, was the first to be notified after Hernández Rojas was beaten and tasered on the ground at the port of entry. The unit never notified San Diego police, who would have had jurisdiction over the criminal investigation. The local department found out about the incident after a media inquiry and arrived on scene a day later.

The Critical Incident Investigative Team controlled witness lists and were present at every interview during the San Diego police investigation, the letter says, and the team removed phrasing in the apprehension report for Hernández Rojas that said he was compliant before handing the report to San Diego police.

The Critical Incident Investigative Team was also present at the hospital soon after Hernández Rojas arrived and asked medical staff to draw his blood to test for drugs. Hospital records obtained by Guerrero's team show that the blood was drawn but there were no results. The one blood test with results in his medical record indicates that there were no drugs detected. However, the letter says, the medical examiner in the case used a different blood sample — that had no chain of custody information — to determine that Hernández Rojas had meth in his body.

"It was this determination that led the Justice Department to decline to prosecute for murder," the letter says. "This raises serious questions about [the unit's] interference."

These revelations are in addition to what Guerrero and team already published as part of their case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — including that the Critical Incident Investigative Team illegally gave the hospital a subpoena for Hernández Rojas' medical records and then refused to provide them to investigating police, and that the team sent the wrong video footage to investigators, allowing time for the actual recordings of the incident to be erased.

Former high-level CBP officials who worked in internal affairs, one of the entities authorized to investigate agents, have acknowledged and condemned the existence of these units.

"The purpose of an investigation is to collect the facts, regardless of whether they are exculpatory or not," the letter says in quoting James Wong, former CBP deputy assistant commissioner for internal affairs. "Investigators should never set out to mitigate liability. That is inappropriate. Given that [the units] have worked to mitigate instead of collect facts leading to the truth shows that they are a questionable management tool, not a legitimate investigative tool. As such they should be abolished."

The letter identifies several other cases in which such units have had access to and possibly tampered with evidence.

In the trial over the death of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, a teenager who was standing in Mexico when he was shot by an agent — one of the only instances in which a Border Patrol agent was charged in a killing — the courtroom learned that the local Critical Incident Team had collected all of the evidence for the FBI.

"The Critical Incident Team, basically we went out and did a third-party investigation for the Border Patrol," an investigator with the local Critical Incident Team explained to the court. "We investigated and collected forensic data in regards to shootings, uses of force incidents, collisions, things like that. Anything that the Border Patrol deemed to be critical and there might be some media attention or somebody was hurt, injured, or killed."

The special unit, according to the letter, also shaped the investigation into the shooting of Marisol Garcia Alcantara, whom a Border Patrol agent shot in the head while she was sitting in the backseat of a car. She survived but still has bullet fragments in her skull.

According to a Nogales police incident report, the responding local police mostly directed traffic while the special Border Patrol unit and the FBI investigated. It is not clear which of the two entities gathered the evidence in that case.

Guerrero and her team also found that the Border Patrol considers participation in these kinds of units when promoting agents to supervisor positions. That means, Guerrero said, that many of the people higher up in the Border Patrol ranks likely worked on the units.

New recording creates new troubles for Liberty University

Jerry Falwell Jr. (left) and Donald Trump (right). (Image via Falwell's Twitter)

If Liberty University exists to influence election outcomes, then it's not entitled to a tax exemption.


Oct. 28, 2021, 
By Steve Benen

Liberty University, a Virginia school founded by the late Jerry Falwell, a controversial televangelist, is no stranger to controversy. Just this week, ProPublica published a brutal report on the evangelical school and how it's allegedly "discouraged and dismissed" students' reports of sexual assaults.

A year earlier, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as Liberty's president following a highly tumultuous tenure, which included awkward questions about his personal life.

But his successor appears to be at the center of a new controversy that's likely to create fresh difficulties for the school. Politico reported:

Liberty University's new president, Jerry Prevo, told a top university official this year that he wanted the large Christian school to become a more effective political player with the goal of helping to influence elections, according to a call recording shared with POLITICO.

According to the reporting, Prevo told Scott Lamb, then the university's senior vice president for communications and public engagement, that he wanted Liberty's "think tank" to become more effective at political activity.

"Are they getting people elected? Which is one of our main goals," Prevo told Lamb, apparently unaware that he was being recorded. "Are they really motivating our conservative people to really get out to vote? If they are, we ought to be seeing some changes in elected officials — and we are to some extent. All I want to do is to make us more effective."

Under federal tax law, Liberty is a 501c3 institution — which is the same tax-exempt designation given to houses of worship and non-political charitable organizations. As far as the IRS is concerned, the evangelical university is entitled to its tax-exempt status because it's a school, focused primarily on education and spiritual matters.

The revelations in the Politico report are important because they call Liberty's purpose into question. If the school exists to influence election outcomes, then it's not entitled to a tax exemption.

The article noted that Lamb, mindful of the school's non-profit tax status, pushed back against the idea of engaging in partisan electioneering. According to the reporting, Liberty's new president responded that he knows "how to work" federal tax law.

It's the sort of boast that the IRS might be interested in.

For context, it's important to emphasize that Lamb was recently ousted from Liberty, and as Politico added, he claims to have been fired for raising concerns about the school blurring the line between education and politics, as well as his concerns about how the university responds to allegations of sexual assault and harassment. From the article:

Lamb said in an interview that he believed that Prevo, during the recorded call and on other occasions, was directing him to do things that could have jeopardized the university's status as a 501(c)(3) charity. He said he interpreted Prevo's comments to mean that "the president of the university was directing his senior vice president to get 'our people' elected this fall." ... "He's telling me to do things that we can't do," Lamb said.

A university spokesperson denied any wrongdoing.

Exclusive: Apple, Amazon and Marvel: How TikTok monetizes teens cutting themselves
John Byrne
October 28, 2021


Warning: This article contains descriptions of individuals discussing self-harm and eating disorders and may be triggering for some readers. Raw Story has included only mild photos, as images of actual teens in crisis on TikTok cannot be published. Have tips about TikTok or internal documents about tech companies? Email techtips@rawstory.com.

ATLANTA — In August, Apple, the world's largest company by market capitalization, announced it would begin scanning uploaded photos for child pornography. The company also said it would warn teens who send nude photographs about the dangers of sharing sexually explicit images.

"At Apple, our goal is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives — while helping them stay safe," Apple said in a release. "We want to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them."

And yet, weeks after a major report revealed that social media app TikTok recommends bondage videos to minors, including clips about role-playing where people pretended to be in relationships with caregivers, Apple continues to buy ads targeting young teens. The ads appeared just prior to Raw Story's Wednesday report that found TikTok serves teens videos about suicide and self-harm.

In a clear example of Apple's peril, Raw Story found an Apple Music ad adjacent to two videos about users cutting themselves. One displayed a razor, antibiotic ointment, gauze, and sweatshirts used to hide scars. In the second video, a girl in dark eye makeup appeared beneath the caption, "My mom when she found me bl33ding."

"If I was as pathetic as you are, I would have killed myself ages ago," a voice says, mimicking a parent.




TikTok provides a stream of user-uploaded videos and recommends additional clips based on which videos users watch. The app is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, and is popular among young teens. In its app store, Apple calls TikTok a "must-have" and "essential."

Apple's ad was among dozens showing that TikTok monetizes videos users post about self-harm, eating disorders and suicide. Other major brands included Amazon, Hollister and Target. An ad for Disney's Marvel action figure toys followed a young woman hospitalized after a suicide attempt. A Target ad ran next to a video of a girl discussing the shame of cutting herself. An Amazon ad accompanied a girl joking about razors. "Jeans are back baby," quipped Hollister, following a young woman mentioning crying herself to sleep in a mental hospital.

The juxtaposition of major American brands alongside teens discussing self-harm was stunning.

The videos demonstrate the challenges of policing user-uploaded content, and the lengths advertisers will go to reach children, whose brand habits can follow them for life.

Apple, Disney, Marvel and Amazon did not reply to multiple requests for comment. Each was sent videos of their ads running alongside videos about self-harm or suicide. Target didn't comment for the record. TikTok, which received a dozen clips, declined to comment.

Abercrombie & Fitch, which owns the Hollister brand, said it reached out to TikTok about the videos and that it doesn't place ads beside "harmful and dangerous content." Raw Story confirmed the image below alongside Hollister's ad has been taken down.


"We are committed to working with all of our social media partners to ensure content is safe and appropriate for our audiences," spokeswoman Kara Page said. "We followed up with TikTok and can confirm most of these videos were removed for violating the platform's community guidelines."

Advertisers often find their appeals placed beside problematic content online. And the issue of how to keep teens safe online is complex — Apple delayed its child protection measures after blowback from privacy advocates. But the brands soliciting young teens on TikTok continue to do so despite a September Wall Street Journal report documenting drug and sex videos TikTok serves to minors.



Just before an ad for Target promoting Arianna Grande's Cloud perfume, a young girl lipsyncs to Billie Eilish's "Everything I wanted." "Nobody cried, nobody even noticed," she mouths, in front of a caption, "When I wore long sleeves all through high school and would constantly hold my arms."

An Amazon Prime ad featuring actress Elizabeth Bowen was followed by a girl joking about cutting herself. The girl posted about razors and getting a blood test, suggesting the razor was jealous. The girl's account is filled with videos about surviving an eating disorder. One video shows her with a feeding tube up her nose.

Hollister's ad appeared in the same sequence of videos with the words, "Me at 10 on the kitchen floor with a bl@de in my hand covered in c*ts crying." Another displayed a young woman in a hospital recovering from an eating disorder with the caption, "About to get my [feeding] tube placed 😭."


Hollister, which said it had asked that the videos be taken down, said they were dedicated to teens' health and well-being.

"TikTok and Hollister have a shared dedication to the safety, health and well-being of our customers and communities," spokeswoman Kara Page said. "In 2020, we launched World Teen Mental Wellness Day, which occurs annually on March 2 and aims to disrupt the stigma against teen mental wellness. Hollister's mental wellness support also continues year-round through the Hollister Confidence Project, an initiative and grant program dedicated to helping teens feel their most comfortable, confident and capable."

TikTok recommended videos of young adults discussing cutting themselves to an account Raw Story set up for a user it said had just turned thirteen. Raw Story initially paused on military videos; TikTok then recommended depression memes, followed by suicide and self-harm clips. As Raw Story noted Wednesday, some videos TikTok recommends show young girls in hospitals after suicide attempts, with cuts on faces, arms or legs. Others show anorexic girls with feeding tubes in their noses. Captioned posts include phrases like "me at 10 years old bl££ding down my thighs and wrists," or "me at 10 on the kitchen floor with a bl@de in my hand covered in c*ts." In one video, a user posts about a father who touches her, and asks other users if the touching is acceptable.


TikTok placed one ad for Marvel's Black Panther and Captain America toys near a video the app recommended about cutting and suicide. The latter was captioned, "Tonight's the night. I've wrote my notes. I've planned how many I'm gonna take and I'm gonna be done with all this. I'm sorry I couldn't stick around longer." The video flashed the word "ZUICÏD€."




News that TikTok is running Apple, Amazon and Target's ads beside young users' videos about suicide comes just weeks after TikTok's first virtual product event, where it discussed new brand safety tools for advertisers.

According to Ad Age, the company promised "machine-learning technology that classifies video, text, audio and more based on the level of risk," allowing "advertisers to make decisions about which kind of inventory they'd like to run adjacent to and avoid."

"This is especially important as TikTok wants to maintain a healthy atmosphere that promotes shopping," the site said, noting that the company hoped to "fuel in-app shopping ahead of the holidays."

Tech companies struggle to police the user-generated content they profit from. Last year, advertisers cut spending on Facebook over hate speech, forcing the company to invest in tightening controls on extremism. In 2019, Google's YouTube suffered an exodus of advertisers over pedophilia comments, just two years after Google found itself embroiled in a similar scandal around white nationalists and Nazism. According to Google, most of the advertisers returned.


Much of the focus on teen safety has centered on the platforms themselves. But major U.S. companies continue to fund platforms that feed troubling content to teens, despite odious content surfacing time and time again.

Alan Blotcky, a clinical psychologist from Birmingham, Alabama who works with teens and families, called the companies' advertising "shameful."

"Advertisers should be ashamed of themselves running ads adjacent to content that is likely to be harmful and even toxic to some vulnerable children and teens," Blotcky said. "Making money pales in comparison to the social responsibility of protecting our youth."

Josh Golin, Executive Director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that fights marketing to children, said advertisers should take responsibility for where their ads run.

"I think they absolutely have a responsibility not to advertise in any way adjacent to self-harm and other concerning content," Golin said. "And if TikTok is incapable or unwilling to stop putting their ads next to that content, they should pull their ads."

Fairplay recently filed an FTC complaint against TikTok, alleging that it continues to collect children's personal data. TikTok's owner, ByteDance, settled a FTC complaint in 2019 alleging it illegally collected data from children for $5.7 million.

"Advertisers, like the platforms, are putting what's good for their profits ahead of what's good for children," Golin said. "They see a huge teen audience and they are looking to monetize them regardless of whether their ads are appearing with toxic content."

Testifying Tuesday to a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, TikTok's head of public policy for the Americas, Michael Beckerman, defended the company's efforts to protect its young users.

"I'm proud of the hard work that our safety teams do every single day and that our leadership makes safety and wellness a priority, particularly to protect teens on the platform," he said. "When it comes to protecting minors, we work to create age-appropriate experiences for teens throughout their development."

TikTok's rules about self-harm depend on how they are interpreted. Many of the videos shown to Raw Story's teen account appear to comply with the platform's rules.

"We do not allow content depicting, promoting, normalizing, or glorifying activities that could lead to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders," the guidelines say. But, they add, "We do support members of our community sharing their personal experiences with these issues in a safe way to raise awareness and find community support."

Stanford's Internet Observatory rated TikTok's self-harm guidelines ahead of YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. The study did not examine the platforms' effectiveness in removing content.

TikTok recently announced it would let its algorithms try to automatically remove harmful content. Previously, the company required user-flagged videos to undergo human review. TikTok has said no algorithm will be completely accurate in policing a video because of the context required.

While TikTok represents China's most successful social media foray on American soil, its parent company, Bytedance, has struggled with what content to allow. After relaxing an early rule that restricted skin exposure and bikinis, the platform was inundated with sexualized content.

Few videos alongside the ads conveyed positive sentiment, but at least one seemed to suggest TikTok might offer some productive mental health content for teens. Titled "What Teen Mental Hospitals Are Really Like," a young contributor discusses the challenges of her first night in the hospital. The video is tagged with the hashtags "mental health community" and "wellness hub."

The video was followed by a girl talking about why she feels she's the family disappointment, and another captioned, "My entire life, that's been nothing but me trying to run away from my loneliness and tears."

Shortly afterward, Hollister ran an ad for jeans.

John Byrne holds direct investments in Amazon; Alibaba; Softbank, one of TikTok's early investors; Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Facebook; Microsoft; and Tencent. He is the founder of Raw Story.

Prior articles in this series:
#Paintok: The bleak universe of suicide and self-harm videos TikTok serves young teens
TikTok recommends gun accessories and serial killers to 13-year-olds
Updated 10/28/21 @ 2:45pm and 2:52pm ET to include comment from Abercrombie & Fitch.

Ex-NYT columnist Kristof announces run for Oregon governor


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Former New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof talks about his candidacy for governor of Oregon, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021, in Portland, Ore. Kristof joins a crowded field of Democrats seeking their party's nomination to be the candidate in the 2022 election, including Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. Democrats have held the governor's office since 1987. 

(AP Photo/Sara Cline)


SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Former New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof announced his candidacy Wednesday for Oregon governor, saying the state needs a political newbie to solve problems like homelessness and rural despair.

“I’ve never run for political office in my life,” Kristof said in a campaign video, expressing it as an asset. He said he felt compelled to run for governor because, after covering crises around the world, he was heartbroken to see ones afflicting his home state.

Kristof pointed out that many of the kids he grew up with in Yamhill, 25 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of Portland, are dead, their deaths drug- or alcohol-related. Kristof calls them victims of inequality.

Kristof joins a crowded field of Democrats seeking their party’s nomination to be the candidate in the 2022 election, including Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. Democrats have held the governor’s office since 1987.

In his video, Kristof said political leaders have been unable to resolve issues such as drug addiction, homelessness, unaffordable housing, a spiraling homicide rate in Portland and weak mental health support.

“Nothing will change until we stop moving politicians up the career ladder year after year, even though they refuse to step up to the problems Oregon faces,” said Kristof, wearing a jacket with the logo of Portland-based Columbia Sportswear.

Kristof has faced questions of whether he’s even eligible to run for governor. According to the law, a candidate must have been a resident of the state for at least three years before an election. Kristof voted in New York state in November 2020.

“I probably should have changed my registration. I wasn’t focused on paperwork. I was focused on voting to remove President Trump and vote for Joe Biden,” Kristof told reporters in Portland on Wednesday.

A legal opinion by lawyers working for Kristof, first reported by Willamette Week newspaper, said Kristof has always considered Oregon his home, even though his job required him to live around the world.

“Nothing in the Oregon Constitution or the historical sources used to interpret its meaning suggest that registration to vote in another jurisdiction alone disqualifies a person from residential eligibility for governor,” said the opinion, co-written by Misha Isaak, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s former general counsel.

Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn — who also was a New York Times reporter — bought a 150-acre property in Yamhill in 1993 and have worked the land and paid Oregon property taxes on it.

Also trying to illustrate Kristof’s ties to this Pacific Northwest state, the lawyers added that Kristof has hiked its entire length on the Pacific Crest Trail, backpacked around Mount Hood (the state’s tallest peak) and eaten at Mo’s Seafood and Chowder in Lincoln City, a restaurant chain that’s an institution on the Oregon Coast.

Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University — where Kristof’s parents used to teach — said Kristof won’t be able to coast to election victory on name recognition. Many Oregonians don’t know who Kristof, who won two Pulitzer Prizes as a foreign correspondent and columnist, is.

“He is not a prominent actor, or a professional wrestler, or a reality TV star. He’s a columnist for a publication that has a specific kind of a readership,” Clucas said.

On Monday, he asked his class of around 30 students on state politics who had heard of Kristof. Only two did.

Media coverage of Kristof’s announcement will help him gain name recognition, but he faces an uphill battle ahead of the May 17 primary elections in which the Democratic and GOP gubernatorial candidates will be elected.

Kristof’s background in rural Oregon could resonate with voters, Clucas said.

“Clearly the issues he has raised are ones that people are concerned about in the state. Some parts of rural Oregon have remained in economic recession since the 1980s,” Clucas said.

Kristof, who left The New York Times earlier this month, has written frequently about the economic and social problems of the people he grew up with in Oregon as the region’s manufacturing and timber economy collapsed.

“I think we do need to try to build some bridges and try to knit this state together,” Kristof said. “I would hope that, perhaps as a liberal from a rural area, I may have some advantage in trying to do that.”

Democratic Gov. Kate Brown is term-limited and can’t run for the state’s top office again. About a dozen Republican candidates have also said they will run for their party’s nomination.

___

Associated Press/Report for America journalist Sara Cline contributed to this report from Portland.

___

Follow Andrew Selsky on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andrewselsky

FORA! BOLSONARO!

Brazil probe of Bolsonaro offers COVID-19 families solace

By DAVID BILLER and DÉBORA ÁLVARES

Bruna Chaves, a 25-year-old chemistry student, who lost her mother to COVID-19, poses for a photo at the Penitence Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021. In recent weeks, Chaves started tuning in to the Brazilian Senate committee's nationally televised investigation of the government's pandemic response. 

(AP Photo/Bruna Prado)


RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The morning after a Brazilian Senate committee recommended criminal indictments for President Jair Bolsonaro over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bruna Chaves, who lost her mother to the disease, was venting her pain in an emotional grief support group session.

“It wasn’t my mom’s time to go,” she told the others Wednesday inside an ecumenical chapel in Rio de Janeiro. “Somebody needs to be blamed.”

A government body laying blame at the president’s feet in the form of a nearly 1,300-page report is already helping bring solace and validation to the mournful nation with the world’s second highest death toll from the virus and eighth highest per capita.

Chaves, a 25-year-old chemistry student, has been watching in recent weeks the nationally televised sessions on the committee’s six-month probe, which culminated Tuesday with the recommendation that President Jair Bolsonaro face charges along with dozens of other officials and allies.

Bruna Chaves, second left, a 25-year-old chemistry student who lost her mother to COVID-19, attends a weekly support group for bereaved families. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

The social worker coordinating Chaves’ session, Márcia Torres, said that publicly laying out the facts during the Senate inquiry can help people move forward in their grieving process. Seeing officials face the consequences of their actions would bring further comfort.

“Condemnation would be justice,” Torres said. “For people, it would be of great value to see that, see the government arrested — literally arrested. For them, it would be a relief.”

Many including Chaves fear, however, that prospects are slim for concrete punishment of officials accused of responsibility for many of Brazil’s 607,000 COVID-19 deaths. It’s far from certain that the prosecutor-general, a Bolsonaro appointee, will pursue charges or that impeachment proceedings will advance in Congress.

The president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and called the Senate committee’s probe a politically motivated sham seeking to undermine his administration.

But Dr. Helian Nunes, a psychiatrist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais who coordinates a program providing mental health support to front-line workers, said the probe has mattered to his patients. Of the nearly 100 people he personally counseled, almost all of whom lost loved ones or acquaintances, most have followed news from the Senate inquiry closely and brought it up in sessions, he told the AP.

“It isn’t possible to replace the losses, but when you give voice to these people, and hold the people involved responsible, it’s possible to lessen the damage,” Nunes said.

“Society needs to give importance to what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” he added.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsoanro, center left, takes a motorcycle tour with supporters in May. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Bolsonaro has often deflected blame for the pandemic’s toll, excoriating governors and mayors for imposing restrictions on activity to contain the virus’ spread, attacking the Supreme Court for upholding local leaders’ jurisdictions and casting himself as righteously refusing politically correct recommendations by keeping the economy running, ostensibly to shield the poor.

A constant in his pandemic approach has been dismissive, belittling rhetoric — COVID-19 was just “a little flu,” Bolsonaro has said, and he also joked that Brazilians should be studied because they can swim in sewage without falling ill.

That has long rankled people like Márcio Antônio Silva, who lost his 25-year-old son to the coronavirus and recently told the Senate committee it pained him to have his grief downplayed as mere bellyaching by a president offering sarcasm rather than succor.

“That’s why this investigation was so important to me, because someone appeared who didn’t say, ‘So what?’” Silva said in testimony, his voice quavering. “Someone came and said, ‘I’m going to do something for you.’”

Marcio Antonio Silva, who lost his son to COVID-19, holds a box of white scarves representing people who have died as he gives testimony to a Senate committee investigating the handling of the pandemic. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Throughout the pandemic, Bolsonaro gathered crowds of maskless people to demonstrate that individuals have a right to come and go as they please, but not once did he pay respects at a COVID-19 memorial or burial. He has followed tepid statements of regret over COVID-19 deaths with pivots to fatalism by saying death is part of life.

An outspoken vaccine skeptic, he insistently touted the anti-malaria pill hydroxychloroquine long after broad testing showed it wasn’t effective against COVID-19. The Senate committee’s report says hydroxychloroquine was “practically the only government policy to fight the pandemic,” and as a result Bolsonaro is “the main person responsible for the errors committed by the federal government.”

Amid the drumbeat of allegations arising from the investigation, the president’s approval ratings have steadily declined to reach their lowest level since he took office in 2019. Early polls for next year’s election, meanwhile, show him trailing his main rival.

A protest against President Jair Bolsonaro in capital Brasilia earlier this month, with demonstrators calling for his impeachment and holding a banner highlighting 600,000 COVID-19 deaths. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz who lost her father to COVID-19, cries into the arms of her mother outside Congress where white flags were planted in memory of coronavirus victims. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

The Senate committee has proposed creating a monument for COVID-19 victims, but for now, relatives of the dead must take solace in temporary memorials like the white flags planted earlier this month outside Congress in Brasilia, the capital.

Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz was there that day mourning her father, whom she recalled as a lawyer who often provided pro bono legal services to those in need. After initially heeding stay-at-home recommendations, he started letting his guard down, got infected and died before getting the chance to hold his newborn granddaughter. Ahead of that much-anticipated encounter, he sent her a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupérys “The Little Prince.”

Now, whenever Cruz’s daughter glimpses the book, she points excitedly as if she knows someone wanted her to grow up reading it.

Luna Tarsila points to her grandfather Juracy Cruz Junior, who died of COVID-19, as she sits on the lap her mother, Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

On Wednesday, Cruz said the Senate committee’s decision brought some measure of justice.

“It’s important that there be institutions on the side of the people who are suffering and were made very fragile by this process,” Cruz said. “It’s not just personal grief. It’s collective grief.”

___

Biller reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Álvares reported from Brasilia.

A miniature Christ the Redeemer statue adorns a tombstone at the Penitence Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, where some people who have died from COVID-19 are buried.

 (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST

India Walton beat Buffalo’s mayor once. 

Can she do it again?

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

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Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton is seen during a walking tour of local businesses in Buffalo, N.Y., on Monday, Oct. 18, 2021. The race for mayor of Buffalo has four-term incumbent Byron Brown relying on a write-in campaign to fend off a challenge from newcomer Walton, who identifies herself as a democratic socialist. 

(AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — When India Walton beat Buffalo’s four-term mayor in a Democratic primary last June, New York’s second largest city looked like it was about to get a leader like no other in its history.

She’d be its first female mayor and the first to identify as a democratic socialist. After becoming a mother at age 14, she grew up to be a nurse and strived through a lifetime of financial hardship that continued through the campaign, when her car was impounded for unpaid parking tickets.

But rather than pack up his City Hall office of 16 years, Mayor Byron Brown has stayed in the race in pursuit of his own superlatives: He’s trying to become the first person to win a major race as a write-in candidate in New York state, and — if he gets a fifth term — Buffalo’s longest-serving mayor.

“Either way it’s going to be historic,” Nazareth College political analyst Timothy Kneeland said of the race, which is yet another marquee battle between the center and left of the Democratic Party.

Brown has gained traction by reversing his strategy from largely ignoring Walton to labeling her “an unqualified radical socialist” who will defund the police and raise taxes.

Imploring voters to “write down Byron Brown,” the mayor says he has earned another term after turning around a Rust Belt city of 280,000 that was in financial distress to one where the population and property values are rising.

Recent polls show potential voters favoring Brown, but his name isn’t on the ballot and it is unclear whether that support will translate into write-in votes.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, has steered clear of choosing sides while the state’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, are backing Walton.

“Any Democrat right now that is trying to establish a precedent of not uniting behind the party’s nominee is playing a dangerous game,” U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said during a recent trip to Buffalo to rally for Walton.

Walton, who led a small housing trust before launching her campaign, promises a new, more progressive way of doing business, saying Buffalo’s comeback has left many people behind.

“This is our city. We are the workers. We do the work. We are are sick and tired of those that have the most always getting everything,” she said at the rally with Ocasio-Cortez. The packed event also featured actress Cynthia Nixon, who unsuccessfully challenged former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a 2018 primary with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America, who also have endorsed Walton.

Walton, Kneeland said, is following an increasingly familiar strategy: “A progressive in a time period of great upheaval, understanding that people want change and then drawing on that energy to knock off a more moderate Democratic candidate.”

Brown has had to carefully navigate support from Republicans eager to thwart the democratic socialist candidate. He publicly declined backing from Buffalo developer and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino after he pushed the mayor to stay in the race.

The Republican State Committee has promoted Brown in mailings that praise his “effective, commonsense leadership” and warn that “India Walton’s radical agenda will destroy Buffalo.”

With about 68% of registered voters who are Democrats, and 9% Republicans, general elections in the city typically hold little suspense. Brown says this one has energized him and united voters across party lines.

“This election is a choice, a clear choice between proven experience and proven results and ideas for the future versus an unqualified, radical socialist whose story has been proven to be fictitious,” Brown said in an interview. He says Walton has exaggerated her accomplishments as founder of the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust.

Folding cheese into a pan of macaroni at Freddy J’s barbecue restaurant, owner Frederic Daniel wrestled with what “change” should look like going forward in Buffalo, whether under Brown or Walton.

“You don’t want anybody to divide a country or the state or the city,” he said, declining to reveal his choice. “Everybody has to feel like they are not left behind. When people feel like they’re left behind they become very bitter.”

Walton, 39, says that is just what has happened as Buffalo’s economic successes have failed to reach many poor families and neighborhoods. She has endeared herself to supporters on the strength of her personal experiences as a poor, Black single mother and nurse who started the land trust to increase affordable housing.

“My life has not been much different than a typical person who grew up on the east side of Buffalo. I’ve survived poverty, abuse and trauma. And that’s why I’m running for mayor,” she said during a debate.

Walton has framed legal problems in her past as evidence of the plight of the poor and working class. In 2003, she was made to repay a $295 food stamp overpayment after failing to report income on time. The following year, she and her ex-husband were cited in a $749 tax lien for unpaid income taxes, WKBW reported.

In 2014, she was arrested after a colleague at a hospital accused her of harassment — a charge later dismissed. Walton said it was a verbal disagreement and she’s since matured.

When her car was impounded, Walton on Twitter pointed to the challenge of being a “low-income single mother enrolled in Medicaid” and criticized such fines and fees as predatory in a city where 30% of residents live in poverty.

That message has resonated with many.

“It’s really heartbreaking that the Black homeownership rate in Buffalo is so low,” said former state Sen. Antoine Thompson, a real estate agent who has worked on Brown’s campaigns but is supporting Walton because of her focus on affordable housing.

Her lack of experience, though, has been an issue for some voters. She’s never held public office. That was the deciding factor for Darnell Cummings, a 34-year-old career counselor who voted for Brown.

“Let’s say you’re in the hospital,” he said. “Do you want someone that’s had 15, 16 years of experience performing surgery on you or do you want someone who ... hasn’t been to medical school?”

In a political career that has stretched 25 years, Brown already has logged notable firsts. He is Buffalo’s first Black mayor. He was the first Black candidate to win a New York state senate seat outside of New York City and the first to win in a white majority district.

Brown has found his support from construction unions and law enforcement after hitting hard at Walton’s plans to cut $7.5 million from the police budget as part of what she says is a more holistic approach to address the root causes of crime. Brown at a debate called that “clearly defunding police.”

His television spots featured people identifying themselves as some of the 100 police officers that he said were bound to lose their jobs with a Walton win.

Walton denies she would lay off any police officers, saying she would reduce the police budget through retirements, attrition and reductions in overtime.

“We stop police from being dog catchers, homelessness outreach, mental health counselors and we put professionals into those roles,” she said.

Unions Take Center Stage In Buffalo Mayor’s Race

Daniel Marans
Tue, October 26, 2021

The race between Buffalo, New York, Democratic mayoral nominee India Walton, left, and incumbent Mayor Byron Brown speaks to ideological disagreements between unions. (Photo: Associated Press)

BUFFALO, N.Y. ― Aside from elected officials, a spoken-word poet, and a former candidate for governor, the only speakers at Democratic mayoral nominee India Walton’s mayoral campaign rally in downtown Buffalo, New York, on Saturday were labor union officials and activists.

Walton’s message was clear: As the only unabashed critic of corporate power at City Hall in the running for the top job, she was the true ally of organized labor in the Nov. 2 election.

“This is our city. We are the workers. We do the work,” declared Walton, a registered nurse and former union member. “We are sick and tired of those that have the most always getting everything.”


A few hours later, Mayor Byron Brown, a moderate who lost to Walton in the Democratic primary in June and is running a well-funded write-in campaign against her, laid his claim to the union mantle.

Flanked by union members atop the bed of a truck parked in a vacant lot on Buffalo’s East Side, Brown singled out organized labor for gratitude that he accorded to none of his other allies.

“I want to thank organized labor that has stood so strong with me,” he said, ticking off a list of union members’ contributions that included door knocking, phone calls and literature distribution on his behalf.


The actual functional structure of unions in the United States is that they represent the interests of their members as they see it.Erik Loomis, labor historian, University of Rhode Island

The competition between Brown and Walton over who is a greater friend to organized labor is lopsided: The Western New York Area Labor Federation and the lion’s share of individual unions that have gotten in the race ― from unions representing city and state employees to manufacturing workers and building tradespeople ― are backing Brown.

Still, a handful of more progressive unions’ decisions to get behind Walton, and her own forceful case that she would be a more pro-labor chief executive, speak to a divide within the labor movement that has echoes in elections across the country.

As unions strategize ways to maintain their numbers at a time of historically low union membership in the United States, they have conflicting impulses about whether to play it safe or engage in what many union officials see as a high-risk, high-reward strategy.

“Fundamentally, despite what we want to think about unions as the vanguard of the working class and leaning toward radical change, the actual functional structure of unions in the United States is that they represent the interests of their members as they see it,” said Erik Loomis, a University of Rhode Island historian of the U.S. labor movement and author of the book “A History of America in Ten Strikes.”

“For a lot of unions, their interests, at least as perceived by the workers themselves and by their leaders, are not necessarily that radical,” Loomis said.

Supporters of Byron Brown, including some union members, interact with supporters of India Walton on Saturday. (Photo: Joshua Bessex/Associated Press)

At the same time, a contingent of more progressive labor unions has adopted at least some of the anti-establishment politics of the activist left.

Since winning the primary, Walton has picked up the support of the New York State Nurses Association and Upstate Workers United, as well as local chapters of the United Food and Commercial Workers and the stagehands union IATSE.

Progressive strategist Eddie Vale, who has worked closely with unions, characterized the breakdown of union support between the two candidates as “your pretty typical split of where you would expect folks to be on the more traditional incumbent side versus more progressive challenger side.”

“The strategic divide is ... between those who think it’s best to be focused more on ‘now’ ― who will get most jobs, best benefits ― and those who think we also need to have more focus on a longer term strategy of building power, changing the game,” Vale said.

Especially in states like New York where unions enjoy bipartisan support and retain levels of membership and influence that are the envy of their counterparts in other states, unions are often loath to take any steps that they believe could jeopardize existing power. Even in the Buffalo metropolitan area, where the decline of manufacturing has devastated organized labor, over 20% of the working population belongs to a union ― nearly twice the rate of the country as a whole.

In such an environment, a union breaking with an incumbent Democrat in a general election ― to say nothing of a Democratic primary ― is highly unusual.

“You have these power centers in the union movement that have been built up over decades now,” Loomis said. “There’s not that many of them left in the United States, so if anything, union leaders in these places are going to be even less willing to take risks than they were in the past.”

That kind of political cautiousness is especially apparent in the Buffalo Teachers Federation’s change of heart about Walton. The city’s teachers union found Walton’s opposition to charter schools appealing enough to endorse her in the primary. But BTF President Phil Rumore told the Buffalo News on Friday that endorsing Walton in the general election “would be too divisive” among its members. (Rumore did not respond to HuffPost’s request for clarification of his remarks or additional details about the decision.)

While the mayor does not have direct control over Buffalo’s public school district, the teachers union may still be hedging its bets in the event of a Brown victory, Loomis ventured.

“I suspect a lot of it is fear,” Loomis said.

You can drive through the city of Buffalo and see the improvement in the city, the investment in the city.Peter DeJesus, president, Western New York Area Labor Federation

At the municipal level, unions sometimes don’t even see eye to eye with progressives who are critical of corporate tax breaks and other giveaways designed to spur investment.

Under the leadership of business-friendly Democrats, struggling post-industrial cities like Buffalo have relied on attracting private real-estate development to grow their property tax base, which in turn enables them to negotiate more generous contracts with unionized public employees.

Peter DeJesus, a former factory worker and president of the Western New York Area Labor Federation, credits Brown for negotiating strong collective bargaining agreements with public-sector workers, avoiding public-sector layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic, and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour for city employees and employees of companies that do business with the city.

“You can drive through the city of Buffalo and see the improvement in the city, the investment in the city,” DeJesus said of Brown’s tenure.

Under DeJesus’s guidance, the regional labor federation is employing a large member-to-member education program in support of Brown’s candidacy. DeJesus, who spoke at Brown’s march-to-the-polls event on Saturday, has also been a ubiquitous surrogate for Brown in the media.

For example, DeJesus has been spreading the word about the lack of a union “bug,” or marker, indicating the use of union labor, on Walton’s campaign literature.

The Walton campaign said that its printing vendor, Keller Brothers and Miller, is a union shop ― the company website says as much ― but that union workers there lack a current collective bargaining agreement and are still working under its old contract. The union representing the printing workers normally doesn’t permit the “bug” to be used in cases where an updated CBA is not in place, according to the Walton campaign.

But Steve Nobles, the secretary-treasurer of the Graphic Communications Conference, the Teamsters union’s printing arm, told HuffPost that Keller Brothers and Miller has not been a union shop in years. He plans to have the union issue a cease-and-desist letter to the company for claiming it is still unionized.

Members of the Starbucks Workers United union marched with India Walton and her supporters at Buffalo's Labor Day parade. The union has endorsed Walton. (Photo: Starbucks Workers United/Facebook)

But DeJesus’ concerns about Walton go beyond what might be narrowly defined as union issues. He worries about Walton’s lack of experience in government and positions on some hot-button issues.

Union members in Buffalo, much like the population of Buffalo as a whole, skew moderate and are wary of changes like Walton’s plan to reallocate some police funding to poverty prevention programs, according to the labor federation president.

“This is a blue-collar town,” he said. “They’re not there yet when it comes to some of her ideas.”

The members of the unions backing Walton don’t see it that way. Mark Manna, Western area director for UFCW Local One and a speaker at the Walton rally on Saturday, told HuffPost that the Local endorsed Walton based on conversations with its 1,200 members in the city of Buffalo who preferred her to Brown.

“They wanted a mayor that reflected their working-class values,” Manna said, citing Walton’s background as a former union nurse and her more outspoken style of labor and community activism. “She walks the walk.”

The support that Brown has picked up from many of Buffalo’s business leaders, Republican donors, and even the state Republican Party, only strengthens the case for Walton, according to Manna.

“Those are anti-worker, anti-union dollars,” he said.

The most illustrative union endorsement that Walton has received, however, is from Upstate Workers United, the SEIU affiliate behind Starbucks Workers United ― a union formed by workers at a handful of Starbucks locations in and around Buffalo.

Walton and her team see the divergence between her and Brown’s response to the potentially groundbreaking union drive as a case study of their different brands of pro-union governance.

In an effort to thwart the unionization effort, Starbucks has, among other things, inundated its Buffalo-area stores with executives from headquarters, conducted closed-door anti-union meetings and sought to expand the pool of workers who would participate in a federally supervised union vote to include employees at Buffalo locations that have not filed for recognition.

My message to Starbucks would be: ‘Union busting is disgusting.'India Walton, Democratic nominee for mayor of Buffalo, New York

From the start ― weeks before the Starbucks workers decided to endorse her ― Walton has addressed herself to Starbucks directly, calling on the Seattle-based company to “follow the lead” of the unionized regional chain Spot Coffee.

Asked in an interview last Thursday how she would use her bully pulpit as mayor to try to get Starbucks not to intervene in the workers’ unionization efforts, Walton told HuffPost, “My message to Starbucks would be: ‘Union busting is disgusting.’”

“I will be encouraging Starbucks leadership to allow the vote to take place and not interfere,” she added.

Brown, by contrast, has refrained from appealing to the company’s leadership to recognize the union.

“Unions play an important role in ensuring fair pay and favorable conditions for workers,” he tweeted in August. “Congratulations Starbucks Workers United on your partnership.”

HuffPost asked the Brown campaign whether he had a direct response to reports of Starbucks’ union busting tactics. The campaign provided a general statement about Brown’s support for unions, noting Brown’s role as chair of New York’s fast-food wage board that recommended raising the industry’s minimum wage to $15 in 2015.

“Mayor Byron W. Brown has always supported organized labor and the right to unionize,” the Brown campaign said in a statement. “That is why he has the overwhelming support and endorsement of the majority of labor unions across the City of Buffalo.”

Mayor Byron Brown, left, and Buffalo Common Councilman Chris Scanlon, right, join CWA Local 1133 official Terri Legierski at the Mercy Hospital picket line on Saturday. (Photo: CWA Local 1133/Facebook)

To union officials and activists backing Walton though, Brown’s unconfrontational rhetoric about the Starbucks fight is typical of his approach to organized labor throughout his nearly 16-year tenure. Brown is only willing to stand up for unions when it doesn’t conflict with his desire to mollify big business, these critics charge.

In 2011, when BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York locked out its unionized clerical workers during a contract dispute, Brown did virtually nothing to express support for the workers, wrote Deana Fox, a former Buffalo union official, in a Facebook post on Monday. Acting independent of Brown, the Buffalo Common Council helped end the impasse by temporarily delaying the renewal of a city contract with the insurance company, according to Fox.

“Buffalo is a union town, despite Byron Brown,” she wrote.

Asked about Fox’s comments, the Brown campaign issued a statement from Brown touting his union support.

“I’m very proud to have received the overwhelming support of labor in WNY including the recent endorsement of the AFL-CIO and their 150,000 members,” he said. “I’m honored to have received their endorsement after they thoroughly reviewed the qualifications of both candidates.”

Walton and her allies’ efforts to paint Brown as an unreliable ally to organized labor have occasionally come up against the reality of his deep union ties.

For example, Walton criticized Brown for not using stronger language in support of Mercy Hospital employees who went on strike at the beginning of the month.

Unfortunately for Walton, however, the union representing the striking workers ― Communication Workers of America Local 1133 ― is backing Brown.

At the union’s picket line outside the hospital in South Buffalo on Friday, Giovanna DiGesare, a spokesperson for the striking workers who lives in the suburbs, had nothing critical to say about Brown’s response to the strike.

“He’s been here. He’s definitely shown some support,” DiGesare said.

Asked about Walton, DiGesare said, “She’s been here quite a bit as well.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Turkey’s Lake Tuz dries up due to climate change, farming

By SUZAN FRASER and MEHMET GUZEL

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A man walks along Lake Tuz in Aksaray province, Turkey, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. Lake Tuz, Turkey’s second largest lake, and home to several bird species has seen its waters entirely recede this year, a victim of climate change-induced drought that has hit the region as well as decades-long wrongful agricultural policies that have exhausted the lake’s underground waters. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

KONYA, Turkey (AP) — For centuries, Lake Tuz in central Turkey has hosted huge colonies of flamingos that migrate and breed there when the weather is warm, feeding on algae in the lake’s shallow waters.

This summer, however, a heart-wrenching scene replaced the usual splendid sunset images of the birds captured by wildlife photographer Fahri Tunc. Carcasses of flamingo hatchlings and adults scattered across the cracked, dried-up lake bed.

The 1,665 square kilometer (643 square mile) lake — Turkey’s second-largest lake and home to several bird species — has entirely receded this year. Experts say Lake Tuz (Salt Lake in Turkish) is a victim of climate change-induced drought, which has hit the region hard, and decades of harmful agricultural policies that exhausted the underground water supply.

“There were about 5,000 young flamingos. They all perished because there was no water,” said Tunc, who also heads the regional branch of the Turkish environmental group Doga Dernegi. “It was an incredibly bad scene. It’s not something I can erase from my life. I hope I do not come across such a scene again.”


An aerial view of Lake Tuz in Aksaray province, Turkey, Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2021. Lake Tuz, Turkey’s second largest lake, and home to several bird species has seen its waters entirely recede this year, a victim of climate change-induced drought that has hit the region as well as decades-long wrongful agricultural policies that have exhausted the lake’s underground waters. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Several other lakes across Turkey have similarly dried up or have receded to alarming levels, affected by low precipitation and unsustainable irrigation practices. Climate experts warn that the entire Mediterranean basin, which includes Turkey, is particularly at risk of severe drought and desertification.

In Lake Van, Turkey’s largest lake, located in the country’s east, fishing boats no longer could approach a dock last week after the water fell to unusual levels, HaberTurk television reported.

”(We have) rising temperatures and decreasing rain, and on the other side, the water needs for irrigation in agriculture,” said Levent Kurnaz, a scientist at Bogazici University’s Center for Climate Change and Policy Studies. “It’s a bad situation all over Turkey at the moment.”

A study based on satellite imagery conducted by Turkey’s Ege University shows that water levels at Lake Tuz started to drop beginning in 2000, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. The lake completely receded this year due to rising temperatures, intensified evaporation and insufficient rain, according to the study.

The study also noted a sharp decline in underground water levels around Lake Tuz, a hypersaline lake that straddles the Turkish provinces of Ankara, Konya and Aksaray.

The Konya basin in central Anatolia, which includes Lake Tuz, was once known as Turkey’s breadbasket. Farms in the region have turned to growing profitable but water-intensive crops such as corn, sugar-beet and alfalfa, which have drained groundwater supplies, photographer Tunc said. Farmers have dug thousands of unlicensed wells while streams feeding the lake have dried up or been diverted, he said.

Environmental groups say poor government agricultural policies play a significant role in the deterioration of Turkey’s lakes.

“If you don’t pay them enough money, the farmers, they will plant whatever is water intensive and will make money for them. And if you just tell them it’s not allowed, then they won’t vote for you in the next election,” Kurnaz said.

The overuse of groundwater is also making the region more susceptible to the formation of sinkholes. Dozens of such depressions have been discovered around Konya’s Karapinar district, including one that Associated Press journalists saw next to a newly harvested alfalfa field.

Tunc, 46, a native of Aksaray, is saddened by the thought that he won’t be able to enjoy the flamingos with his 7-month-old son like he did with his 21-year-old son. He remains hopeful, however, that Lake Tuz may replenish itself, if the government stops the water-intensive agriculture.

Kurnaz, the climate scientist, is less optimistic.

“They keep telling people that they shouldn’t use groundwater for this agriculture and people are not listening. There are about 120,000 unlicensed wells in the region, and everybody is pumping out water as if that water will last forever,” Kurnaz said.

“But if you are on a flat place, it can rain as much as you want and it won’t replenish the groundwater in a short time. It takes maybe thousands of years in central Anatolia to replenish the underground water table,” he added.

The drought and flamingo deaths at Lake Tuz were just one of a series of ecological disasters to strike Turkey this summer, believed to be partly due to climate change.

In July, wildfires devastated swaths of forests along Turkey’s southern coast, killing eight people and forcing thousands to flee. Parts of the country’s northern Black Sea coast were struck by floods that killed 82 people. Earlier, a layer of sea mucilage, blamed on soaring temperatures and poor waste management, covered the Sea of Marmara, threatening marine life.

Although Turkey was among the first countries to sign the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the country held off ratifying it until this month as it sought to be reclassified as a developing country instead of a developed one to avoid harsher emission reduction targets. Turkish lawmakers issued a declaration rejecting the status of developed country at the same time they ratified the climate agreement.

In the town of Eskil, near the shores of Lake Tuz, farmer Cengiz Erkol, 54, checked the irrigation system on his field growing animal feed.

“The waters aren’t running as strong and abundant as they used to,” he said. “I have four children. The future doesn’t look good. Each year is worse than the previous year.”

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Ayse Wieting and Robert Badendieck in Istanbul contributed.

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Follow all AP stories on climate change at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-change.

HE LIES

Exxon CEO denies spreading disinformation on climate change


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Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil testifies via video conference during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on the role of fossil fuel companies in climate change, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON (AP) — ExxonMobil’s chief executive said Thursday that his company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change″ as he and other oil company chiefs countered congressional allegations the industry concealed evidence about the dangers of global warming.

Testifying at a landmark House hearing, CEO Darren Woods said ExxonMobil “has long acknowledged the reality and risks of climate change, and it has devoted significant resources to addressing those risks.″

The oil giant’s public statements on climate “are and have always been truthful, fact-based ... and consistent” with mainstream climate science, Woods said.

Democrats immediately challenged the statements by Woods and other oil executives, accusing them of engaging in a decades-long, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming.

“They are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were,″ said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.

She was referring to a 1994 hearing with tobacco executives who famously testified that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive. The reference was one of several to the tobacco hearing as Democrats sought to pin down oil executives on whether they believe in climate change and that burning fossil fuels such as oil contributes to global warming.

The hearing comes after months of public efforts by Democrats to obtain documents and other information on the oil industry’s role in stopping climate action over multiple decades. The fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change since at least 1977, yet spread denial and doubt about the harm of its products — undermining science and preventing meaningful action on climate change, Maloney and other Democrats said.

“Do you agree that (climate change) is an existential threat? Yes or no?” Maloney asked Shell Oil President Gretchen Watkins.

“I agree that this is a defining challenge for our generation, absolutely,″ Watkins replied.

Watkins, Woods and other oil executives said they agreed with Maloney on the existence and threat posed by climate change, but they refused her request to pledge that their companies would not spend money — either directly or indirectly — to oppose efforts to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’re pledging to advocate for low-carbon policies that do in fact take the company and the world to net-zero” carbon emissions, said BP America CEO David Lawler

Maloney said she hoped the hearing will help persuade oil executives to change their approach to climate change.

“I hope that after 40 years of misleading the public to block climate action, our nation’s oil and gas industry will finally change its behavior and join the many good corporate citizens, community leaders and scientists who are working together to save our planet and our children,″ she said.

“This hearing is just the start of our investigation,” added Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who leads a subcommittee on the environment. “These companies must be held accountable.”

The committee released a memo Thursday charging that the oil industry’s public support for climate reforms has not been matched by meaningful actions, and that the industry has spent billions of dollars to block reforms. Oil companies frequently boast about their efforts to produce clean energy in advertisements and social media posts accompanied by sleek videos or pictures of wind turbines.

Maloney and other Democrats have focused particular ire on Exxon, after a senior lobbyist for the company was caught in a secret video bragging that Exxon had fought climate science through “shadow groups” and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. That agenda includes a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping climate and social policy bill currently moving through Congress.

In that video, Keith McCoy, a former Washington-based lobbyist for Exxon, dismissed the company’s public expressions of support for a proposed carbon tax on fossil fuel emissions as a “talking point.”

McCoy’s comments were made public in June by the environmental group Greenpeace UK, which secretly recorded him and another lobbyist in Zoom interviews. McCoy no longer works for the company, Exxon said last month.

Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, has condemned McCoy’s statements and said the company stands by its commitment to work on finding solutions to climate change.

Chevron CEO Michael Wirth also denied misleading the public on climate change. “Any suggestion that Chevron has engaged in an effort to spread disinformation and mislead the public on these complex issues is simply wrong,″ he said.

Maloney and Khanna sharply disputed that. They compared tactics used by the oil industry to those long deployed by the tobacco industry to resist regulation “while selling products that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.″

“Spare us the spin,″ Khanna told the oil executives. “Spin doesn’t work under oath.″

Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the top Republican on the oversight panel, called the hearing a “distraction from the crises that the Biden administration’s policies have caused for the American people,″ including higher gasoline prices.

“The purpose of this hearing is clear: to deliver partisan theater for primetime news,″ Comer said.