Sunday, November 21, 2021
First look at St. Paul's $15 minimum wage: Some restaurants were shedding jobs before it took effect
Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Sun, November 21, 2021
Nov. 21—Even before the city of St. Paul increased the citywide minimum wage last year, some restaurants and retailers began dropping jobs and shedding hours.
Full-service restaurants — those with wait-staff and sit-down service — saw jobs decline by 16 percent. Limited-service restaurants, such as fast-food eateries, saw a 27 percent decline.
Minneapolis, which began hiking its minimum wage two years earlier, lost nearly 3,000 restaurant jobs during the same time, according to two new analyses from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota.
But some St. Paul retailers and food service employers actually raised wages in 2018 and 2019, apparently in anticipation of the mandate, or in competition for workers with higher-paying jobs across the river. And a tight labor market in the months since has raised wages further.
IMPACT OF $15 MINIMUM WAGE
With the goal of gradually moving toward a $15-an-hour citywide minimum wage over the next few years, St. Paul rolled out a wage schedule that requires most low-wage employers to institute annual increases, which began at $9.25 to $11.50 an hour as of July 1, 2020, depending upon business size.
Officials in both St. Paul and Minneapolis promised they would contract economists to analyze the impact on jobs, earnings and employment hours. It's a task complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the recession, rioting and arson following the death of George Floyd, federal relief checks, a labor shortage, inflation and other curveballs of the past several years.
"This needs to be interpreted with caution," said Anusha Nath, a research economist who worked on the analyses for the Minneapolis Fed.
Nevertheless, the researchers were able to glean some "baseline" data from pre-COVID employment numbers, and they spotted some sizable "anticipation effects" in St. Paul. In short, restaurants, retail and food services apparently braced for the minimum wage hike by cutting jobs or reducing hours in 2018 and 2019, even before the new law rolled out, though the overall low-wage sector showed little net effect.
DROPS IN JOBS, HOURS, EARNINGS
St. Paul restaurants in particular saw large drops in jobs, hours and total earnings.
"The estimates of job loss in the restaurant industries of both St. Paul and Minneapolis are particularly large compared with other studies of minimum wages, implying that at least some businesses in the Twin Cities were quite sensitive to the actual or imminent increases in labor costs," reads a study summary by Lisa Camner McKay, a writer-analyst with the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Minneapolis Fed.
Most other low-wage sectors studied in St. Paul, such as social assistance and administrative support, showed no deep changes in the studies. A hodge-podge of jobs falling into the "other" category — such as repair shops, barber shops and personal care services — actually increased in number, for reasons that aren't entirely clear.
"In that sector, we saw an increase in total jobs," Nath said. "This could partly be driven by if there's a loss in restaurant jobs, these workers could be getting jobs elsewhere. ... These are the types of channels we want to study in future reports."
How much did St. Paul's initial minimum wage increase impact St. Paul businesses after July 1, 2020?
Given that the increase took effect in the early months of the pandemic, shortly after riots rocked St. Paul's Midway, it's probably too soon to tell.
"Isolating the impact of the minimum wage during ... unprecedented times poses a significant challenge and raises questions about how to interpret data from 2020," reads the study summary from the Minneapolis Fed.
Given the scramble to attract workers during a labor shortage, some call it unlikely that boosting the minimum wage has had deep impact.
Andy Remke, co-owner of the Black Dog Cafe in St. Paul's Lowertown, said the restaurant industry used to attract many casual workers who wanted to pick up a shift here or there for extra spending cash.
"The pandemic pushed a lot of those people out of the industry," said Remke. "We're paying probably easily 20 percent more than we were for cooks, and probably more."
He added: "Minimum wage is certainly not a factor. The only people we have working here making the minimum wage are servers, and that's before tips, after which they make substantially more. Everybody else — food runners, kitchen staff — they're all making more, because that's the labor environment we're in."
MINNEAPOLIS IMPACTS
The Minneapolis wage law began in 2018, offering more pre-pandemic data to work with.
The researchers found that through early 2020, the total number of jobs declined by 12 percent more than they otherwise might have at full-service Minneapolis restaurants, and 18 percent more at limited-service restaurants. That's roughly 2,900 Minneapolis restaurant jobs lost over the 27 months analyzed.
At the same time, wages increased about 4 percent more for Minneapolis full-service restaurant workers, and 9 percent more for limited-service restaurant workers, than they otherwise might have.
The analyses are the first in a series of annual reports planned from the Minneapolis Fed through 2028, and they've already garnered pushback from advocates for the $15 minimum wage. A written critique published by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C., calls the Minneapolis changes in employment "implausibly large" and likely attributable to other factors, given that the Minneapolis minimum wage last year increased by only 75 cents at small employers and $1 at large employers.
"The data and methodology used in the study are simply not sufficient to distinguish between the effects of the minimum wage increases and other changes in employment happening around the same time," it states.
FULL EFFECT MIGHT NOT BE KNOWN FOR YEARS
It will be a few more years before the full effect of a $15 minimum wage in the Twin Cities can be studied in retrospect.
That's because the mandated increases roll out on different schedules for large or small employers in Minneapolis, and micro, small, large, and macro businesses of more than 10,000 employees in St. Paul. It won't go into effect for all city businesses until 2024 in Minneapolis and 2028 in St. Paul.
For their findings, researchers with the Minneapolis Fed and the University of Minnesota used administrative data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, which provides quarterly earnings and hours worked for each employee of businesses that file unemployment insurance reports with the state.
The DEED data was combined with information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, allowing researchers to identify the specific establishment, industry, ZIP code and city where each individual works.
Afghanistan: Taliban unveil new rules banning women in TV dramas
Sun, November 21, 2021
New guidelines set out by the Taliban prohibit female presenters from appearing on TV without headscarves
Women have been banned from appearing in television dramas in Afghanistan under new rules imposed by the Taliban government.
Female journalists and presenters have also been ordered to wear headscarves on screen, although the guidelines do not say which type of covering to use.
Reporters say some of the rules are vague and subject to interpretation.
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in mid-August and many fear they are gradually imposing harsh restrictions.
The militant Islamist group, which took control following the departure of US and allied forces, almost immediately instructed girls and young women to stay home from school.
During their previous rule in the 1990s, women were barred from education and the workplace.
The latest set of Taliban guidelines, which have been issued to Afghan television channels, features eight new rules.
They include the banning of films considered against the principles of Sharia - or Islamic - law and Afghan values, while footage of men exposing intimate parts of the body is prohibited.
Comedy and entertainment shows that insult religion or may be considered offensive to Afghans are also forbidden.
The Taliban have insisted that foreign films promoting foreign cultural values should not be broadcast.
Afghan television channels show mostly foreign dramas with lead female characters.
A member of an organisation that represents journalists in Afghanistan, Hujjatullah Mujaddedi, said the announcement of new restrictions was unexpected.
He told the BBC that some of the rules were not practical and that if implemented, broadcasters may be forced to close.
The Taliban's earlier decision to order girls and young women to stay home from school made Afghanistan the only country in the world to bar half its population from getting an education.
The mayor of the capital, Kabul, also told female municipal employees to stay home unless their jobs could not be filled by a man.
The Taliban claim that their restrictions on women working and girls studying are "temporary" and only in place to ensure all workplaces and learning environments are "safe" for them.
Sun, November 21, 2021
New guidelines set out by the Taliban prohibit female presenters from appearing on TV without headscarves
Women have been banned from appearing in television dramas in Afghanistan under new rules imposed by the Taliban government.
Female journalists and presenters have also been ordered to wear headscarves on screen, although the guidelines do not say which type of covering to use.
Reporters say some of the rules are vague and subject to interpretation.
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in mid-August and many fear they are gradually imposing harsh restrictions.
The militant Islamist group, which took control following the departure of US and allied forces, almost immediately instructed girls and young women to stay home from school.
During their previous rule in the 1990s, women were barred from education and the workplace.
The latest set of Taliban guidelines, which have been issued to Afghan television channels, features eight new rules.
They include the banning of films considered against the principles of Sharia - or Islamic - law and Afghan values, while footage of men exposing intimate parts of the body is prohibited.
Comedy and entertainment shows that insult religion or may be considered offensive to Afghans are also forbidden.
The Taliban have insisted that foreign films promoting foreign cultural values should not be broadcast.
Afghan television channels show mostly foreign dramas with lead female characters.
A member of an organisation that represents journalists in Afghanistan, Hujjatullah Mujaddedi, said the announcement of new restrictions was unexpected.
He told the BBC that some of the rules were not practical and that if implemented, broadcasters may be forced to close.
The Taliban's earlier decision to order girls and young women to stay home from school made Afghanistan the only country in the world to bar half its population from getting an education.
The mayor of the capital, Kabul, also told female municipal employees to stay home unless their jobs could not be filled by a man.
The Taliban claim that their restrictions on women working and girls studying are "temporary" and only in place to ensure all workplaces and learning environments are "safe" for them.
Coast Guard targets second vessel tied to Orange County oil spill
Richard Winton
Fri, November 19, 2021
Dozens of fish swim under oil slicks at the Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach on Oct. 3. (Raul Roa / Times Community News)
Federal authorities Thursday boarded the container vessel Beijing in Long Beach, identifying it as a second ship under investigation in the Orange County oil spill.
Authorities from the U.S. Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board believe a ship's anchor hit an oil pipeline off Huntington Beach and eventually led to the Oct. 2 spill.
Braden Rostad, chief of investigations for Los Angeles-Long Beach, determined that the Beijing was involved in a Jan. 25 anchor-dragging incident during heavy weather at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Coast Guard said in a statement. As a result of the Coast Guard findings, it has designated the ship's owners, Capetanissa of Liberia and the operator V-Ships Greece Ltd. as parties of interest in the investigation.
Rostad had previously identified the MSC Danit, another large cargo vessel that was being investigated for anchor dragging.
Coast Guard Capt. Jason Neubauer, who is leading the investigation, told The Times, "both vessels could be involved" in dragging the pipeline off Huntington Beach with their anchors earlier this year.
The anchor-dragging occurred near a pipeline that runs from an oil platform to the Port of Long Beach. That pipeline was discovered to be the source of the Orange County oil spill Oct. 2 An oil sheen was first spotted that evening by a vessel 4½ miles off Huntington Beach, then detected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The pipeline was intact in October 2020 when the company that operates it last did an inspection, and the marine growth visible around the displaced section of the pipeline indicates the anchor drag probably was not recent, said Neubauer.
Investigators suspect an initial anchor strike displaced part of the pipeline many months before the spill, stripping away its concrete casing and causing it to be more vulnerable to other potential anchor strikes or environmental stressors.
As they attempt to determine when that first strike occurred, the investigating team is focusing on a storm that brought strong winds to the area over two days in late January.
Data of vessel movements reviewed by The Times show MSC Danit moving over the pipeline while in high winds Jan. 25, before eventually moving out to the channel near Santa Catalina Island.
The Coast Guard has designated Mediterranean Shipping Co., the operator of the vessel, and Dordellas Finance Corp., its owner, as parties of interest in the ongoing investigation.
Those designations provide the owner and operator of the MSC Danit the opportunity to be represented by counsel, to examine and cross-examine witnesses, and to call witnesses who are relevant to the investigation.
Coast Guard officials have said several ships are under investigation.
Coast Guard investigators plan to bring in experts to determine how long ago the pipe was damaged and when it began leaking.
The service also sent its own team of divers to gather evidence.
Multiple state and federal investigative agencies are already examining whether any criminal violations occurred with the pipeline leak.
The FBI is now assisting with the criminal investigation, which among other things is examining whether there was a negligent discharge of oil into navigable waters.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Richard Winton
Fri, November 19, 2021
Dozens of fish swim under oil slicks at the Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach on Oct. 3. (Raul Roa / Times Community News)
Federal authorities Thursday boarded the container vessel Beijing in Long Beach, identifying it as a second ship under investigation in the Orange County oil spill.
Authorities from the U.S. Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board believe a ship's anchor hit an oil pipeline off Huntington Beach and eventually led to the Oct. 2 spill.
Braden Rostad, chief of investigations for Los Angeles-Long Beach, determined that the Beijing was involved in a Jan. 25 anchor-dragging incident during heavy weather at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Coast Guard said in a statement. As a result of the Coast Guard findings, it has designated the ship's owners, Capetanissa of Liberia and the operator V-Ships Greece Ltd. as parties of interest in the investigation.
Rostad had previously identified the MSC Danit, another large cargo vessel that was being investigated for anchor dragging.
Coast Guard Capt. Jason Neubauer, who is leading the investigation, told The Times, "both vessels could be involved" in dragging the pipeline off Huntington Beach with their anchors earlier this year.
The anchor-dragging occurred near a pipeline that runs from an oil platform to the Port of Long Beach. That pipeline was discovered to be the source of the Orange County oil spill Oct. 2 An oil sheen was first spotted that evening by a vessel 4½ miles off Huntington Beach, then detected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The pipeline was intact in October 2020 when the company that operates it last did an inspection, and the marine growth visible around the displaced section of the pipeline indicates the anchor drag probably was not recent, said Neubauer.
Investigators suspect an initial anchor strike displaced part of the pipeline many months before the spill, stripping away its concrete casing and causing it to be more vulnerable to other potential anchor strikes or environmental stressors.
As they attempt to determine when that first strike occurred, the investigating team is focusing on a storm that brought strong winds to the area over two days in late January.
Data of vessel movements reviewed by The Times show MSC Danit moving over the pipeline while in high winds Jan. 25, before eventually moving out to the channel near Santa Catalina Island.
The Coast Guard has designated Mediterranean Shipping Co., the operator of the vessel, and Dordellas Finance Corp., its owner, as parties of interest in the ongoing investigation.
Those designations provide the owner and operator of the MSC Danit the opportunity to be represented by counsel, to examine and cross-examine witnesses, and to call witnesses who are relevant to the investigation.
Coast Guard officials have said several ships are under investigation.
Coast Guard investigators plan to bring in experts to determine how long ago the pipe was damaged and when it began leaking.
The service also sent its own team of divers to gather evidence.
Multiple state and federal investigative agencies are already examining whether any criminal violations occurred with the pipeline leak.
The FBI is now assisting with the criminal investigation, which among other things is examining whether there was a negligent discharge of oil into navigable waters.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
‘No ground for cockiness’: Tough love for U.S. at pro-democracy conference
Andrew Desiderio, Alexander Ward and Paul McLeary
Sun, November 21, 2021,
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — If "America is back,” someone forgot to tell America’s allies.
At a major national security conference this weekend designed to rally the world’s democracies against autocratic forces, critics fired away at China, Russia and other backsliding nations. Yet some of the harshest words were reserved for the U.S., in what turned into a therapy session of sorts for high-ranking diplomats and officials, both current and former.
From Afghanistan to the Jan. 6 insurrection to congressional paralysis, attendees expressed their fears and doubts about the health of American democracy and questioned Washington’s commitments to countering Beijing or Moscow. It turned the 2021 Halifax International Security Forum into less of a celebration of President Joe Biden’s agenda and more of a global intervention for a nation in crisis.
Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister from 2015 to 2018, replied, "We are," when asked in an interview if allies are worried about the United States.
“The U.S. is by far the most important of the Western democracies. … We all have a vested interest in the health of American democracy. So, yeah, I think it is a real concern,” he said.
A bipartisan group of six senators in attendance — three Republicans and three Democrats — will now carry the message they heard loud and clear back to Washington, where hyperpartisanship is already putting key national security priorities at risk as the threats emanating from great powers have crystallized.
“I do feel like there’s no ground for cockiness. Sometimes a little bit of humility actually enables you to make better connections with other nations because we’re not really in a position to lecture,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, said in an interview. “We are in a position to dialogue, share experiences, share best practices, acknowledge areas where we have to work together.”
“We can’t really go and lecture” other countries about political unrest and corruption, Kaine added. “But that actually sometimes means the conversations are more candid and a little more authentic and a little more productive.”
This year was the conference’s first gathering since Donald Trump left office and Biden took over with a renewed pledge to build the strategic alliances that his predecessor often shunned. It was supposed to be a coming-out party for the U.S. after four years of anti-democratic moves by Trump that shook allies. But in the 10 months since Biden took office, the U.S. has confronted cascading crises at home and abroad that have caused Western allies to question America’s promises.
A major focus of the three-day conference was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which many foreign officials here saw as a betrayal of Washington’s commitment to the country’s struggling democracy. Sabrina Saqeb, a former member of the Afghan parliament, told an audience, “We have been sold out to terrorists.”
“There is an acknowledgment by the members of our delegation that the United States has let partners down in a number of aspects,” including in Afghanistan, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), an Armed Services Committee member and a combat veteran, said in an interview. She added that the U.S. has to work on “upholding our commitments.”
Some of those crises were brought up organically by the lawmakers themselves. During panel events, Kaine and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) talked about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and its impact on American democracy. Specifically, Kaine said the U.S. has a problem with its “immune system,” which he characterized as America’s ability — or lack thereof — to respond to strains on its democracy.
Coons, meanwhile, said the best way for the U.S. to counter China’s worsening predatory behavior — a major focus of the conference — is to “take decisive actions to heal our own democracy.” He said the Jan. 6 attack “emboldened Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, autocrats around the world, those who wish us ill.”
“Other nations’ heads of states or ministers of foreign relations often bring up their concerns about the state of our democracy and the impact for them of Jan. 6,” Coons said in an interview. “So I think it’s completely appropriate to bring it up, and I frankly think there’s a lot more specific work that we need to be doing to strengthen our civic culture.”
Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister, is in full agreement. Misinformation and extremism on the American right “led to the attack on the Capitol. That led to an attempted coup,” he said. “The rest of the world looked at January the sixth and was shattered.”
“When you see the absolute essential foundations of the democracy being challenged from within, and where you see a political party, the Republican Party — not all of them, but many of them — actually challenging the constitutional institutions on which this great democracy of well over two centuries depends, that’s what really undermines public international faith in American democracy,” Turnbull continued.
Some also expressed doubt that the U.S. would act to stop aggressive actions by autocrats, namely the massing of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border.
Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president from 2014 to 2019, said in an interview that the West — led by the U.S. — needs to send more “lethal defensive weapons” to his country, push for Ukraine to become a member of NATO, reverse its stance on the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany pipeline, and target Moscow with tougher sanctions. If the U.S. and its allies fail to make these moves, it would “increase the probability” of Putin launching a second major incursion of Russia's neighbor.
Europeans are also increasingly concerned that the American turn toward the Indo-Pacific, and competing with China in the region, will pull Washington’s gaze away from Europe.
The idea of an emerging “strategic autonomy,” even if still ill-defined, has taken hold in NATO deliberations about how to deter and contain Russia.
“I think strategic autonomy is about the fact that in Europe, there needs to be more military capabilities available that are now only available in the U.S.,” Adm. Rob Bauer of the Netherlands, head of NATO’s Military Committee and the alliance’s highest-ranking military officer, told a small group of reporters on the sidelines of the event.
“If the European nations and Canada are able to take on some of the roles that now only the U.S. can take on because of its capabilities, then the U.S. would be able to prioritize and do more in the Indo-Pacific,” Bauer said.
The senators will now return to Washington after the Thanksgiving recess staring down several time-sensitive agenda items.
Congress is already at risk of failing to pass a defense authorization bill for the first time in six decades — a concern that foreign counterparts expressed directly to the lawmakers here. And Senate leaders are hoping to confirm Biden’s diplomatic nominees who have been the subject of a GOP-led blockade that is preventing swift confirmation of more than 50 nominations.
Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, was asked about the blockade here and said he was working to break it, adding: “I was a governor. I understand you have to have a team in place in order to govern.”
Lawmakers were especially concerned about the impression that they are unable to work together to help solve pressing challenges. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who co-led the Senate delegation alongside Risch, said there are “legitimate questions based on what people are reading” about tensions between Republicans and Democrats back in Washington.
“We haven’t seen folks in almost two years,” Shaheen said in a brief interview. “And so I think it’s not unexpected.”
SUNDAY SERMON
OPINION: Tennessee's Bible-thumping Republican Party needs to read the book they're thumpingPam Sohn, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tenn.
Sat, November 20, 2021
Nov. 20—Hate trafficking is alive and well in Tennessee — and particularly in the Tennessee General Assembly.
Last Monday, Tennessee state Rep. Chris Todd, R-Jackson, accused a Christian foster care organization — the well-known Bethany Christian Services which has an office in Chattanooga — of facilitating human trafficking by working with the federal government to place unaccompanied migrant children with vetted sponsors in this country.
"This whole thing reeks of impropriety, and I'm very concerned about these children that are being pushed into this trafficking situation," Todd said. "Our own federal government is trafficking. They're hauling them all over the country and dropping them in neighborhoods, flying them in in the middle of the night."
Sound familiar? Of course it does. It sounds just like the wild and false hate-trafficking rhetoric thrown around in Chattanooga last spring and summer after a television news report aired about unaccompanied children being flown into Chattanooga — sometimes at night — and housed in a shelter in Highland Park operated by the Baptiste Group.
In fact, Todd's comments came during the final meeting of the state's special committee to investigate issues surrounding refugees and immigrants — an effort that began with concerns about the now-closed Chattanooga shelter.
It began here, with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann and U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty all flogging the Biden administration, making similar, false "human trafficking" accusations.
The trouble with their message was that Lee and his Department of Children's Services had approved the Baptiste Group's shelter for the very purpose of temporarily housing unaccompanied minors until they could be placed with vetted sponsors. And they had approved it a year before — when Donald Trump was still president. Yet suddenly all these Trumpian Republicans were aghast and wondering why these children were being snuck in here.
Raise your hand if you think they would have grabbed for their pearls and accused a Trump administration of human trafficking to a shelter they themselves approved.
But the resulting kerfuffle in Chattanooga was just as ugly as the initial slurs. Not long after the Republican politicians put up a racket, an allegation of abuse was filed with the state.
The Tennessee Department of Children's Services punted on the first allegation of an adult kissing a child, then punted again on a second allegation, saying "kissing" is not listed as an act of sexual abuse. On June 3, the state made an unannounced visit to the Baptiste Group shelter and interviewed six children, one of whom told a DCS worker he saw a shelter employee kissing a child there. State inspectors wrote in their summary on June 3 that the "physical inspection had yielded no findings or need for corrective action."
But the news coverage sparked both an internal investigation and a probe by local and federal law enforcement, eventually leading to three arrests. The state also suspended the residential child care license of the Baptiste Group.
Baptiste has sued the state, charging discrimination and claiming that despite similar allegations against other shelters, the Tennessee Department of Children's Services suspended only one residential child care license in the past five years — that of the Baptiste Group.
But judging from Chris Todd's screed last week, that's not enough to appease the rabid, anti-immigration, anti-Biden members of the GOP in Nashville.
Bethany, a national organization following longstanding federal immigration policy, has supported unaccompanied children since the 1960s and helped settle 40 unaccompanied children in Tennessee last year through a transitional foster care program, said Amy Scott, state director for the group.
The organization has received around 100 children since March 2019 (yes, even when Trump was president), with about 15-20 staying in Tennessee after locating a sponsor, she said. The program is federally funded and does not receive any money from the state.
"Children are children. An unaccompanied child wants what every child wants — to be with their family and to be safe," Scott told the panel in her opening testimony. "We help unaccompanied children as a faith-based organization because Jesus calls Christians to welcome the stranger, love their neighbor and serve the overlooked and ignored. We believe that all children, no matter where they are from or what they have been through, deserve to be treated with dignity and care."
Someone needs to preach that sermon to our GOP leaders and lawmakers. They missed it.
Todd said he wouldn't trust the documentation of the children's immigrant relatives in the U.S., and he asked why organizations like Bethany were not placing unaccompanied children with a family member in their home country.
Another lawmaker, Rep. Ryan Williams, R-Cookeville, said it is a commandment in the Christian tradition to provide for those in need. But he added: "We [the U.S.] can't go and solve all the world's problems unless we had all the world's resources and we still might not be able to do it."
Clearly those two missed many Bible lessons. They should brush up on the "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" sermon, along with the "miracle of five loaves and two fish" — the makings Christ used to feed a multitude of thousands.
Michael Flynn is wrong. Christians shouldn't mandate one religion for everyone in America.
Ed Stetzer
Sun, November 21, 2021, 2:39 PM·6 min read
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn caused a firestorm with his recent comments on Nov. 13 at the "ReAwaken America Tour" in San Antonio.
"If we are going to have one nation under God – which we must – we have to have one religion," said Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump last November.
The tour, organized by Clay Clark, whom The Guardian calls a "media figure and Christian entrepreneur" from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has included stops in Florida, Michigan, California and Texas. Flynn followed the pattern of Christian nationalism by taking a biblical passage aimed at Christ's disciples and applying it to the United States.
"You have to believe this, that God Almighty is, like, involved in this country, because this is it. ...This is the shining city on the hill," Flynn said.
Hint: It’s not.
President Donald Trump and Michael Flynn, on Dec. 21, 2016, in Palm Beach, Florida.
The genius of religious liberty
As we look for ways to respond to the Great Sort, Christians and non-Christians alike should reflect on the genius of our political tradition of religious liberty. Beginning with the Founders and proven consistently throughout our history, providing people with freedom to believe and practice their faith strengthens our democracy, our communities and our institutions.
This is, in part, why the Baptist John Leland is a personal hero. Standing for religious liberty in America’s early years when few others would, Leland argued, “All should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”
Attorney Lin Wood speaks during a rally on Dec. 2, 2020 in Alpharetta, Ga.
What Leland understood – and what many Christians today must relearn – is that when one faith is enforced or even preferred by the government, society loses. When those of us who identify as Christians allow the government to pick whose freedoms are recognized, we undermine our own religious liberties. It is a misnomer to think that protecting the rights of people to believe whatever they choose is a tacit endorsement of other faiths. On the contrary, for Christians to stand for religious liberty is a statement of our confidence in the Gospel.
Beyond the importance of religious liberty to our democracy, any ideology that attempts to establish Christian political domination – in other words, a theocracy – reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ and the Christian faith. At its core, the power of the Christian faith is in its ability to transform the heart, not coerce behavior. Jesus modeled this in his own ministry, refusing to set up a political theocracy on earth even as many in his day expected the Messiah would do just that.
At every turn, Christ confounded these expectations and modeled an understanding of a kingdom "not of this world." (John 18:36). Instead of power and domination, we find Christ modeling sacrifice and forgiveness.
When professing Christians are far more enthusiastic about the glory of America than proclaiming an ancient faith that transcends our nation, they reveal themselves to be at odds with this model.
The message of Jesus seems to be far less a priority for many who name the name of Jesus than "standing for truth" and conflating Christianity with a nationalistic bent. When speakers at events held in the name of Christ are also speakers who wonder aloud whether America needs a coup like we saw in Myanmar, the Great Commandment and the Great Commission have been replaced by exceptionalism and nationalism.
If we believe that the Christian faith transforms lives, we must resist the pull to coerce people into words and behaviors that we know are worthless before God. Instead, we must trust in the power of the Gospel – and only the Gospel – to save.
Christians should embrace freedom of religion because we believe that the Gospel is light in the darkness, hope for the lost, liberation for the captive and revival for the dead. We believe that it is, most fundamentally, good news for a burdened and beleaguered world that is crying out for it.
Seeking God in America
Flynn is right about one thing: God is at work in this country.
Yet his vision of a reestablished church so sadly misses the point. God’s involvement in this country, indeed his involvement in the whole world, will not come through coercion. Rather, He is already working to revive and renew through thousands of churches who chose sacrifice and forgiveness over power and domination.
Former Defense Secretary Michael Flynn served under President Donald Trump. He was charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 2017. Flynn was pardoned by Trump in November 2020.
After one group chanted “Let’s go, Brandon” (a stand-in for insulting President Joe Biden) in San Antonio, I finished up a message at the Galveston Convention Center to 1,500 Texas Christians, also ready to say, “Let’s go.” But in this case, I called them to go in the way of Jesus.
One mission is the way of anger, conspiracies and more. The other involves showing and sharing the love of Jesus to a broken and hurting world.
Christians are going to have to choose which way is the way of Jesus.
Ed Stetzer is a dean and professor at Wheaton College, where he leads the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Michael Flynn, we don't need 'one religion'; we need Jesus
Ed Stetzer
Sun, November 21, 2021, 2:39 PM·6 min read
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn caused a firestorm with his recent comments on Nov. 13 at the "ReAwaken America Tour" in San Antonio.
"If we are going to have one nation under God – which we must – we have to have one religion," said Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump last November.
The tour, organized by Clay Clark, whom The Guardian calls a "media figure and Christian entrepreneur" from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has included stops in Florida, Michigan, California and Texas. Flynn followed the pattern of Christian nationalism by taking a biblical passage aimed at Christ's disciples and applying it to the United States.
"You have to believe this, that God Almighty is, like, involved in this country, because this is it. ...This is the shining city on the hill," Flynn said.
Hint: It’s not.
President Donald Trump and Michael Flynn, on Dec. 21, 2016, in Palm Beach, Florida.
'The Great Sort' demonstrated
That the response to Flynn has been both swift and polarized is indicative of what I see as the "Great Sort" in American Christianity. For the past decade, we have begun to see a transition in the rationale for how many self-identifying Christians make decisions about their local church membership, relationships and serving.
Ed Stetzer: When will Christians learn from the unending engagement cycle of evangelicalism and race?
While politics and culture have always played a significant role, in recent years we are beginning to see religious identity being primarily driven by broader political debates. Now, instead of Scripture, doctrine or worship providing a central role in church association and participation, political identity is squarely in the driver’s seat.
Michael Flynn on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
As I explained in Outreach Magazine, Christians are increasingly sorting themselves into churches that reflect their ideology.
Politics has always played a major role in religious identification, but now Christians are more actively disassociating and associating with churches based upon their political affiliations. This is primarily why once-fringe voices like Flynn, Stella Immanuel, Mike Lindell, Charlie Kirk and Lin Wood have been able to find significant followings in churches around the country.
As opposing or moderate voices leave and new members are attracted by a political alignment, churches are becoming less politically diverse and more vocally partisan.
Cornell William Brooks: Democracy demands: Make a filibuster exception to stop police violence and voter suppression
Critically, this is not a sort between patriotism versus Christianity. Often maligned, patriotism can be good and noble. Rather, this sort pits Christianity against Christian nationalism, a perversion of the faith that subverts its mission.
The rhetoric of the ReAwaken tour reeks of such Christian nationalism. It utilizes Christian ideas, language and spaces but submits these to nationalistic ends. By identifying America as God's chosen nation and calling for a religious establishment, Flynn and others offer a gospel mission that is a distorted caricature of the one to which Christians are called.
That the response to Flynn has been both swift and polarized is indicative of what I see as the "Great Sort" in American Christianity. For the past decade, we have begun to see a transition in the rationale for how many self-identifying Christians make decisions about their local church membership, relationships and serving.
Ed Stetzer: When will Christians learn from the unending engagement cycle of evangelicalism and race?
While politics and culture have always played a significant role, in recent years we are beginning to see religious identity being primarily driven by broader political debates. Now, instead of Scripture, doctrine or worship providing a central role in church association and participation, political identity is squarely in the driver’s seat.
Michael Flynn on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
As I explained in Outreach Magazine, Christians are increasingly sorting themselves into churches that reflect their ideology.
Politics has always played a major role in religious identification, but now Christians are more actively disassociating and associating with churches based upon their political affiliations. This is primarily why once-fringe voices like Flynn, Stella Immanuel, Mike Lindell, Charlie Kirk and Lin Wood have been able to find significant followings in churches around the country.
As opposing or moderate voices leave and new members are attracted by a political alignment, churches are becoming less politically diverse and more vocally partisan.
Cornell William Brooks: Democracy demands: Make a filibuster exception to stop police violence and voter suppression
Critically, this is not a sort between patriotism versus Christianity. Often maligned, patriotism can be good and noble. Rather, this sort pits Christianity against Christian nationalism, a perversion of the faith that subverts its mission.
The rhetoric of the ReAwaken tour reeks of such Christian nationalism. It utilizes Christian ideas, language and spaces but submits these to nationalistic ends. By identifying America as God's chosen nation and calling for a religious establishment, Flynn and others offer a gospel mission that is a distorted caricature of the one to which Christians are called.
The genius of religious liberty
As we look for ways to respond to the Great Sort, Christians and non-Christians alike should reflect on the genius of our political tradition of religious liberty. Beginning with the Founders and proven consistently throughout our history, providing people with freedom to believe and practice their faith strengthens our democracy, our communities and our institutions.
This is, in part, why the Baptist John Leland is a personal hero. Standing for religious liberty in America’s early years when few others would, Leland argued, “All should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”
Attorney Lin Wood speaks during a rally on Dec. 2, 2020 in Alpharetta, Ga.
What Leland understood – and what many Christians today must relearn – is that when one faith is enforced or even preferred by the government, society loses. When those of us who identify as Christians allow the government to pick whose freedoms are recognized, we undermine our own religious liberties. It is a misnomer to think that protecting the rights of people to believe whatever they choose is a tacit endorsement of other faiths. On the contrary, for Christians to stand for religious liberty is a statement of our confidence in the Gospel.
Beyond the importance of religious liberty to our democracy, any ideology that attempts to establish Christian political domination – in other words, a theocracy – reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ and the Christian faith. At its core, the power of the Christian faith is in its ability to transform the heart, not coerce behavior. Jesus modeled this in his own ministry, refusing to set up a political theocracy on earth even as many in his day expected the Messiah would do just that.
At every turn, Christ confounded these expectations and modeled an understanding of a kingdom "not of this world." (John 18:36). Instead of power and domination, we find Christ modeling sacrifice and forgiveness.
When professing Christians are far more enthusiastic about the glory of America than proclaiming an ancient faith that transcends our nation, they reveal themselves to be at odds with this model.
The message of Jesus seems to be far less a priority for many who name the name of Jesus than "standing for truth" and conflating Christianity with a nationalistic bent. When speakers at events held in the name of Christ are also speakers who wonder aloud whether America needs a coup like we saw in Myanmar, the Great Commandment and the Great Commission have been replaced by exceptionalism and nationalism.
If we believe that the Christian faith transforms lives, we must resist the pull to coerce people into words and behaviors that we know are worthless before God. Instead, we must trust in the power of the Gospel – and only the Gospel – to save.
Christians should embrace freedom of religion because we believe that the Gospel is light in the darkness, hope for the lost, liberation for the captive and revival for the dead. We believe that it is, most fundamentally, good news for a burdened and beleaguered world that is crying out for it.
Seeking God in America
Flynn is right about one thing: God is at work in this country.
Yet his vision of a reestablished church so sadly misses the point. God’s involvement in this country, indeed his involvement in the whole world, will not come through coercion. Rather, He is already working to revive and renew through thousands of churches who chose sacrifice and forgiveness over power and domination.
Former Defense Secretary Michael Flynn served under President Donald Trump. He was charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 2017. Flynn was pardoned by Trump in November 2020.
After one group chanted “Let’s go, Brandon” (a stand-in for insulting President Joe Biden) in San Antonio, I finished up a message at the Galveston Convention Center to 1,500 Texas Christians, also ready to say, “Let’s go.” But in this case, I called them to go in the way of Jesus.
One mission is the way of anger, conspiracies and more. The other involves showing and sharing the love of Jesus to a broken and hurting world.
Christians are going to have to choose which way is the way of Jesus.
Ed Stetzer is a dean and professor at Wheaton College, where he leads the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Michael Flynn, we don't need 'one religion'; we need Jesus
Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary
Oliver Milman
“Environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness,” Le Pen said in 2019, adding that “if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist. Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.” Le Pen’s ally Hervé Juvin, a National Rally MEP, is seen as an influential figure on the European right in promoting what he calls “nationalistic green localism”.
Simply ignoring or disparaging the science isn’t the effective political weapon it once was. “We are seeing very, very little climate denialism in conversations on the right now,” said Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst and founder of Counterpoint, who tracks trends in populist discourse. But in place of denial is a growing strain of environmental populism that has attempted to dovetail public alarm over the climate crisis with disdain for ruling elites, longing for a more traditional embrace of nature and kin and calls to banish immigrants behind strong borders.
Millions of people are already being displaced from their homes, predominately in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, due to disasters worsened by climate change such as flooding, storms and wildfires. In August, the United Nations said Madagascar was on the brink of the world’s first “climate change famine”.
People living in and around Tsihombe, Madagascar, gather at holes dug to access water. Photograph: Alice Rahmoun/AP
The number of people uprooted around the world will balloon further, to as many as 1.2 billion by 2050 by some estimates, and while most will move within their own countries, many millions are expected to seek refuge across borders. This mass upending of lives is set to cause internal and external conflicts that the Pentagon, among others, has warned will escalate into violence.
The response to this trend on the right has led to what academics Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering”, where restrictions on immigration are seen as vital to protect the nativist stewardship of nature and where the ills of environmental destruction are laid upon those from developing countries, ignoring the far larger consumptive habits of wealthy nations. In an analysis of 22 far-right parties in Europe, the academics found this thinking is rife among rightwing parties and “portrays effects as causes and further normalizes racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe”.
Turner, an expert in politics and migration at the University of York, said the link between climate and migration is “an easy logic” for politicians such as Johnson as it plays into longstanding tropes on the right that overpopulation in poorer countries is a leading cause of environmental harm. More broadly, it is an attempt by the right to seize the initiative on environmental issues that have for so long been the preserve of center-left parties and conservationists.
“The far right in Europe has an anti-immigration platform, that’s their bread and butter, so you can see it as an electoral tactic to start talking about green politics,” Turner said, adding that migrants are being blamed in two ways – first, for moving to countries with higher emissions and then adding to those emissions, as rightwing figures in Arizona have claimed; and secondly for supposedly bringing destructive, polluting habits with them from their countries of origin.
A mixture of this Malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking is being distilled into political campaigning, as in a political pamphlet described in Turner and Bailey’s research paper from SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s federal assembly, which shows a city crowded by people and cars belching out pollution, with a tagline that translates to “stop massive immigration”. A separate campaign ad by SVP claims that 1 million migrants will result in thousands of miles of new roads and that “anyone who wants to protect the environment in Switzerland must fight against mass immigration”.
The far right depict migrants as being “essentially poor custodians of their own lands and then treating European nature badly as well”, Turner said. “So you get these headlines around asylum seekers eating swans, all these ridiculous scaremongering tactics. But they play into this idea that by stopping immigrants coming here, you are actually supporting a green project.”
Experts are clear that the main instigators of the climate crisis are wealthy people in wealthy countries. The richest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, research has found, with people in the US causing the highest level of per capita emissions in the world. Adding new arrivals to high-emitting countries doesn’t radically ramp up these emissions at the same rate: a study by Utah State University found that immigrants are typically “using less energy, driving less, and generating less waste” than native-born Americans.
‘Protect our people’
Still, the idea of personal sacrifice is hard for many to swallow. While there is strengthening acceptance of climate science among the public, and a restlessness that governments have done so little to constrain global heating, support for climate polices plummets when it comes to measures that involve the taxing of gasoline or other impositions. According to a research paper co-authored by Fieschi, this has led to a situation where “detractors are taking up the language of freedom fighters”.
“We are seeing the growth of accusations of climate hysteria as a way for elites to exploit ordinary people,” Fieschi said. “The solutions that are talked about involve spending more money on deserving Americans and deserving Germans and so on, and less on refugees. It’s ‘yes, we will need to protect people, but let’s protect our people.’”
This backlash is visible in protest movements such as the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France, which became the longest-running protest movement in the country since the second world war by railing against, among other things, a carbon tax placed on fuel. Online, favored targets such as Greta Thunberg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been shown in memes as Nazis or devils intent on impoverishing western civilization through their supposedly radical ideas to combat climate change. Fieschi said the right’s interaction with climate is far more than just about borders – it is animating fears that personal freedoms are under attack from a cosseted, liberal elite.
“You see these quite obviously populist arguments in the US and Europe that a corrupt elite, the media and government have no idea what ordinary people’s lives are like as they impose these stringent climate policies,” said Fieschi, whose research has analyzed the climate conversation on the right taking place on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
This sort of online chatter has escalated since the Covid-19 pandemic started, Fieschi said, and is being fed along a line of influence that begins with small, conspiratorial rightwing groups spreading messages that are then picked up by what she calls “middle of the tail” figures with thousands of followers, and then in turn disseminated by large influencers and into mainstream center-right politics.
“There are these conspiratorial accusations that Covid is a dry run for restrictions that governments want to impose with the climate emergency, that we need to fight for our freedoms on wearing masks and on all these climate rules,” Fieschi said. “There is a yearning for a pre-Covid life and a feeling climate policies will just cause more suffering.
“What’s worrying,” Fieschi continued, “is that more reasonable parts of the right, mainstream conservatives and Republicans, are being drawn to this. They will say they don’t deny climate change but then tap into these ideas.” She said center-right French politicians have started disparaging climate activists as “miserabilists”, while Armin Laschet, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union who sought to succeed Angela Merkel, has said Germany should focus on its own industry and people in the face of cascading global crises.
Green-cloaked nativism
The interplay between environmentalism and racism has some of its deepest roots in the US, where some of the conservation movement’s totemic figures of the past embraced views widely regarded as abhorrent today. Wilderness was something viewed in the 19th century as bound in rugged, and exclusively white, masculinity, and manifest destiny demanded the expansion of a secure frontier.
John Muir, known as the father of national parks in the US, described native Americans as “dirty” and said they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape”. Madison Grant, a leading figure in the protection of the American bison and the establishment of Glacier national park, was an avowed eugenicist who argued for “inferior” races to be placed into ghettoes and successfully lobbied for Ota Benga, a Congolese man, to be put on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo. This focus on racial hierarchies would come to be adopted into the ideology of the Nazis – themselves avowed conservationists.
There has been something of a reckoning of this troubling past in recent years – a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a native American man and an African man is to be removed from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at least one conservation group named after the slaveholder and anti-abolitionist John James Audubon is changing its name. But elsewhere, themes of harmful overpopulation have been picked up by a resurgent right from a liberal environmental movement that now largely demurs from the topic.
Law enforcement and fire personnel wait to enter an area encroached by flames during the Bear fire, in Oroville, California, in September 2020.
The Republican lawsuit in Arizona may be a prelude to an ecological reframing of Trump’s fetish for border walls should the former president run again for office in 2024, with migrants again the target. “We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directions,” Taylor said. “More walls, more borders, more exclusion – that’s most likely the way we are heading.”
A recasting of environmentalism in this way has already branched out in different forms throughout the US right, spanning gun-toting preppers who view nature as a bastion to be defended from interlopers – “a ‘back to the land’ ideology where you are an earner and provider, not a not soft-handed soy boy,” as Taylor describes it – to the vaguely mystic “wellness” practitioners who have risen to prominence by spreading false claims over the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines.
The latter group, Taylor said, includes those who have a fascination with organic farming, Viking culture, extreme conspiracy theories such as the QAnon fantasy and a rejection of science and reason in favour of discovering an “authentic self”. These disparate facets are all embodied, he said, in Jake Angeli, the so-called QAnon shaman who was among the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. Angeli, who became famous for wearing horns and a bearskin headdress during the violent insurrection, was sentenced to 41 months in prison over his role in the riot. He gained media attention for refusing to eat the food served in jail because it was not organic.
Angeli, who previously attended a climate march to promote his conspiracy-laden YouTube channel and said he is in favor of “cleansed ecosystems”, has been described as an eco-fascist, a term that has also been applied to Patrick Crusius, the Dallas man accused of killing 23 people in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.
In a document published online shortly before the shooting, Crusius wrote: “The environment is getting worse by the year … So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.” The shooting came just a few months after the terrorist massacre of 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, with the perpetrator describing himself as an eco-fascist unhappy about the birthrate of immigrants.
Such extreme, violent acts erupting from rightwing eco-populist beliefs are still rare but the “‘alt-right’ has been adept at taking concerns and making them mainstream”, said Taylor. “It has fostered the idea that nature is a place of savage survival that brings us back to original society, that nature itself is fascist because there is no equality in nature.
Oliver Milman
THE GUARDIAN
Sun, November 21, 2021
Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders.
“When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and all over the place,” the British prime minister said in an interview on the eve of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland. Civilization can go into reverse as well as forwards, as Johnson told it, with Rome’s fate offering grave warning as to what could happen if global heating is not restrained.
This wrapping of ecological disaster with fears of rampant immigration is a narrative that has flourished in far-right fringe movements in Europe and the US and is now spilling into the discourse of mainstream politics. Whatever his intent, Johnson was following a current of rightwing thought that has shifted from outright dismissal of climate change to using its impacts to fortify ideological, and often racist, battle lines. Representatives of this line of thought around the world are, in many cases, echoing eco-fascist ideas that themselves are rooted in an earlier age of blood-and-soil nationalism.
In the US, a lawsuit by the Republican attorney general of Arizona has demanded the building of a border wall to prevent migrants coming from Mexico as these people “directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”. In Spain, Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, has called for a “patriotic” restoration of a “green Spain, clean and prosperous”.
In the UK, the far-right British National party has claimed to be the “only true green party” in the country due to its focus on migration. And in Germany, the rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany has tweaked some of its earlier mockery of climate science with a platform that warns “harsh climatic conditions” in Africa and the Middle East will see a “gigantic mass migration towards European countries”, requiring toughened borders.
Meanwhile, France’s National Front, once a bastion of derisive climate denial, has founded a green wing called New Ecology, with Marine Le Pen, president of the party, vowing to create the “world’s leading ecological civilization” with a focus on locally grown foods.
Sun, November 21, 2021
Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders.
“When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and all over the place,” the British prime minister said in an interview on the eve of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland. Civilization can go into reverse as well as forwards, as Johnson told it, with Rome’s fate offering grave warning as to what could happen if global heating is not restrained.
This wrapping of ecological disaster with fears of rampant immigration is a narrative that has flourished in far-right fringe movements in Europe and the US and is now spilling into the discourse of mainstream politics. Whatever his intent, Johnson was following a current of rightwing thought that has shifted from outright dismissal of climate change to using its impacts to fortify ideological, and often racist, battle lines. Representatives of this line of thought around the world are, in many cases, echoing eco-fascist ideas that themselves are rooted in an earlier age of blood-and-soil nationalism.
In the US, a lawsuit by the Republican attorney general of Arizona has demanded the building of a border wall to prevent migrants coming from Mexico as these people “directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”. In Spain, Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, has called for a “patriotic” restoration of a “green Spain, clean and prosperous”.
In the UK, the far-right British National party has claimed to be the “only true green party” in the country due to its focus on migration. And in Germany, the rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany has tweaked some of its earlier mockery of climate science with a platform that warns “harsh climatic conditions” in Africa and the Middle East will see a “gigantic mass migration towards European countries”, requiring toughened borders.
Meanwhile, France’s National Front, once a bastion of derisive climate denial, has founded a green wing called New Ecology, with Marine Le Pen, president of the party, vowing to create the “world’s leading ecological civilization” with a focus on locally grown foods.
We are seeing very, very little climate denialism in conversations on the right nowCatherine Fieschi
“Environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness,” Le Pen said in 2019, adding that “if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist. Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.” Le Pen’s ally Hervé Juvin, a National Rally MEP, is seen as an influential figure on the European right in promoting what he calls “nationalistic green localism”.
Simply ignoring or disparaging the science isn’t the effective political weapon it once was. “We are seeing very, very little climate denialism in conversations on the right now,” said Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst and founder of Counterpoint, who tracks trends in populist discourse. But in place of denial is a growing strain of environmental populism that has attempted to dovetail public alarm over the climate crisis with disdain for ruling elites, longing for a more traditional embrace of nature and kin and calls to banish immigrants behind strong borders.
Millions of people are already being displaced from their homes, predominately in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, due to disasters worsened by climate change such as flooding, storms and wildfires. In August, the United Nations said Madagascar was on the brink of the world’s first “climate change famine”.
People living in and around Tsihombe, Madagascar, gather at holes dug to access water. Photograph: Alice Rahmoun/AP
The number of people uprooted around the world will balloon further, to as many as 1.2 billion by 2050 by some estimates, and while most will move within their own countries, many millions are expected to seek refuge across borders. This mass upending of lives is set to cause internal and external conflicts that the Pentagon, among others, has warned will escalate into violence.
The response to this trend on the right has led to what academics Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering”, where restrictions on immigration are seen as vital to protect the nativist stewardship of nature and where the ills of environmental destruction are laid upon those from developing countries, ignoring the far larger consumptive habits of wealthy nations. In an analysis of 22 far-right parties in Europe, the academics found this thinking is rife among rightwing parties and “portrays effects as causes and further normalizes racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe”.
Turner, an expert in politics and migration at the University of York, said the link between climate and migration is “an easy logic” for politicians such as Johnson as it plays into longstanding tropes on the right that overpopulation in poorer countries is a leading cause of environmental harm. More broadly, it is an attempt by the right to seize the initiative on environmental issues that have for so long been the preserve of center-left parties and conservationists.
“The far right in Europe has an anti-immigration platform, that’s their bread and butter, so you can see it as an electoral tactic to start talking about green politics,” Turner said, adding that migrants are being blamed in two ways – first, for moving to countries with higher emissions and then adding to those emissions, as rightwing figures in Arizona have claimed; and secondly for supposedly bringing destructive, polluting habits with them from their countries of origin.
A mixture of this Malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking is being distilled into political campaigning, as in a political pamphlet described in Turner and Bailey’s research paper from SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s federal assembly, which shows a city crowded by people and cars belching out pollution, with a tagline that translates to “stop massive immigration”. A separate campaign ad by SVP claims that 1 million migrants will result in thousands of miles of new roads and that “anyone who wants to protect the environment in Switzerland must fight against mass immigration”.
The far right depict migrants as being “essentially poor custodians of their own lands and then treating European nature badly as well”, Turner said. “So you get these headlines around asylum seekers eating swans, all these ridiculous scaremongering tactics. But they play into this idea that by stopping immigrants coming here, you are actually supporting a green project.”
Experts are clear that the main instigators of the climate crisis are wealthy people in wealthy countries. The richest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, research has found, with people in the US causing the highest level of per capita emissions in the world. Adding new arrivals to high-emitting countries doesn’t radically ramp up these emissions at the same rate: a study by Utah State University found that immigrants are typically “using less energy, driving less, and generating less waste” than native-born Americans.
‘Protect our people’
Still, the idea of personal sacrifice is hard for many to swallow. While there is strengthening acceptance of climate science among the public, and a restlessness that governments have done so little to constrain global heating, support for climate polices plummets when it comes to measures that involve the taxing of gasoline or other impositions. According to a research paper co-authored by Fieschi, this has led to a situation where “detractors are taking up the language of freedom fighters”.
“We are seeing the growth of accusations of climate hysteria as a way for elites to exploit ordinary people,” Fieschi said. “The solutions that are talked about involve spending more money on deserving Americans and deserving Germans and so on, and less on refugees. It’s ‘yes, we will need to protect people, but let’s protect our people.’”
This backlash is visible in protest movements such as the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France, which became the longest-running protest movement in the country since the second world war by railing against, among other things, a carbon tax placed on fuel. Online, favored targets such as Greta Thunberg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been shown in memes as Nazis or devils intent on impoverishing western civilization through their supposedly radical ideas to combat climate change. Fieschi said the right’s interaction with climate is far more than just about borders – it is animating fears that personal freedoms are under attack from a cosseted, liberal elite.
“You see these quite obviously populist arguments in the US and Europe that a corrupt elite, the media and government have no idea what ordinary people’s lives are like as they impose these stringent climate policies,” said Fieschi, whose research has analyzed the climate conversation on the right taking place on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
This sort of online chatter has escalated since the Covid-19 pandemic started, Fieschi said, and is being fed along a line of influence that begins with small, conspiratorial rightwing groups spreading messages that are then picked up by what she calls “middle of the tail” figures with thousands of followers, and then in turn disseminated by large influencers and into mainstream center-right politics.
“There are these conspiratorial accusations that Covid is a dry run for restrictions that governments want to impose with the climate emergency, that we need to fight for our freedoms on wearing masks and on all these climate rules,” Fieschi said. “There is a yearning for a pre-Covid life and a feeling climate policies will just cause more suffering.
“What’s worrying,” Fieschi continued, “is that more reasonable parts of the right, mainstream conservatives and Republicans, are being drawn to this. They will say they don’t deny climate change but then tap into these ideas.” She said center-right French politicians have started disparaging climate activists as “miserabilists”, while Armin Laschet, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union who sought to succeed Angela Merkel, has said Germany should focus on its own industry and people in the face of cascading global crises.
Green-cloaked nativism
The interplay between environmentalism and racism has some of its deepest roots in the US, where some of the conservation movement’s totemic figures of the past embraced views widely regarded as abhorrent today. Wilderness was something viewed in the 19th century as bound in rugged, and exclusively white, masculinity, and manifest destiny demanded the expansion of a secure frontier.
John Muir, known as the father of national parks in the US, described native Americans as “dirty” and said they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape”. Madison Grant, a leading figure in the protection of the American bison and the establishment of Glacier national park, was an avowed eugenicist who argued for “inferior” races to be placed into ghettoes and successfully lobbied for Ota Benga, a Congolese man, to be put on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo. This focus on racial hierarchies would come to be adopted into the ideology of the Nazis – themselves avowed conservationists.
There has been something of a reckoning of this troubling past in recent years – a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a native American man and an African man is to be removed from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at least one conservation group named after the slaveholder and anti-abolitionist John James Audubon is changing its name. But elsewhere, themes of harmful overpopulation have been picked up by a resurgent right from a liberal environmental movement that now largely demurs from the topic.
Law enforcement and fire personnel wait to enter an area encroached by flames during the Bear fire, in Oroville, California, in September 2020.
Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
Republicans, aware that many of their own younger voters are turned off by the relentless climate denial as they see their futures wreathed in wildfire smoke and flood water, have sensed an opportunity. “The right is reclaiming that older Malthusian population rhetoric and is using that as a cudgel in green terms rather than unpopular racist terms,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, an educational and research body.
“It’s weird that this has become a popular theme in the US west because the west is sparsely populated and that hasn’t slowed environmental destruction,” he added. “But this is about speaking to nativist fears, it isn’t about doing anything to solve the problem.”
The spearhead for modern nativism in the US is, of course, Donald Trump who has, along with an often dismissive stance towards climate science itself, sought to portray migrants from Mexico and Central America as criminals and “animals” while vowing to restore clean air and water to deserving American citizens. If there is to be another iteration of a Trump presidency, or a successful campaign by one of his acolytes, the scientific denial may be dialed down somewhat while retaining the reflex nativism.
Republicans, aware that many of their own younger voters are turned off by the relentless climate denial as they see their futures wreathed in wildfire smoke and flood water, have sensed an opportunity. “The right is reclaiming that older Malthusian population rhetoric and is using that as a cudgel in green terms rather than unpopular racist terms,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, an educational and research body.
“It’s weird that this has become a popular theme in the US west because the west is sparsely populated and that hasn’t slowed environmental destruction,” he added. “But this is about speaking to nativist fears, it isn’t about doing anything to solve the problem.”
The spearhead for modern nativism in the US is, of course, Donald Trump who has, along with an often dismissive stance towards climate science itself, sought to portray migrants from Mexico and Central America as criminals and “animals” while vowing to restore clean air and water to deserving American citizens. If there is to be another iteration of a Trump presidency, or a successful campaign by one of his acolytes, the scientific denial may be dialed down somewhat while retaining the reflex nativism.
We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directionsBlair Taylor
The Republican lawsuit in Arizona may be a prelude to an ecological reframing of Trump’s fetish for border walls should the former president run again for office in 2024, with migrants again the target. “We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directions,” Taylor said. “More walls, more borders, more exclusion – that’s most likely the way we are heading.”
A recasting of environmentalism in this way has already branched out in different forms throughout the US right, spanning gun-toting preppers who view nature as a bastion to be defended from interlopers – “a ‘back to the land’ ideology where you are an earner and provider, not a not soft-handed soy boy,” as Taylor describes it – to the vaguely mystic “wellness” practitioners who have risen to prominence by spreading false claims over the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines.
The latter group, Taylor said, includes those who have a fascination with organic farming, Viking culture, extreme conspiracy theories such as the QAnon fantasy and a rejection of science and reason in favour of discovering an “authentic self”. These disparate facets are all embodied, he said, in Jake Angeli, the so-called QAnon shaman who was among the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. Angeli, who became famous for wearing horns and a bearskin headdress during the violent insurrection, was sentenced to 41 months in prison over his role in the riot. He gained media attention for refusing to eat the food served in jail because it was not organic.
Angeli, who previously attended a climate march to promote his conspiracy-laden YouTube channel and said he is in favor of “cleansed ecosystems”, has been described as an eco-fascist, a term that has also been applied to Patrick Crusius, the Dallas man accused of killing 23 people in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.
In a document published online shortly before the shooting, Crusius wrote: “The environment is getting worse by the year … So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.” The shooting came just a few months after the terrorist massacre of 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, with the perpetrator describing himself as an eco-fascist unhappy about the birthrate of immigrants.
Such extreme, violent acts erupting from rightwing eco-populist beliefs are still rare but the “‘alt-right’ has been adept at taking concerns and making them mainstream”, said Taylor. “It has fostered the idea that nature is a place of savage survival that brings us back to original society, that nature itself is fascist because there is no equality in nature.
That’s what they believe.”
Advocates for those fleeing climate-induced disasters hope there will be a shift in the other direction, with some advocating for a new international refugee framework. The UN convention on refugees does not recognize climate change, and its effects, as a reason for countries to provide shelter to refugees. An escalation in forced displacement from drought, floods and other calamities will put further onus on the need for reform. But opening up the convention for a revamp could see it wound back as much as it could be expanded, given the growing ascendancy of populism and authoritarianism in many countries.
“The big players aren’t invested in changing any of the definitions around refugees – in fact the US and UK are making it even more difficult to claim asylum,” said Turner. “I think what you’re going to see is internally displaced people increasing and the burden, as it already is, falling on neighbors in the global south.”
Ultimately, the extent of the suffering caused by global heating, and the increasingly severe responses required to deal with that, will help determine the reactionary response. While greater numbers of people will call for climate action, any restrictions imposed by governments will provide a sense of vindication to rightwingers warning of overreaching elites.
“My sense is that we won’t do enough to avoid others bearing the brunt of this,” Fieschi said. “Solidarity has its limits, after all. Sure, you want good things for the children of the world. But ultimately you will put your children first.”
Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship
Advocates for those fleeing climate-induced disasters hope there will be a shift in the other direction, with some advocating for a new international refugee framework. The UN convention on refugees does not recognize climate change, and its effects, as a reason for countries to provide shelter to refugees. An escalation in forced displacement from drought, floods and other calamities will put further onus on the need for reform. But opening up the convention for a revamp could see it wound back as much as it could be expanded, given the growing ascendancy of populism and authoritarianism in many countries.
“The big players aren’t invested in changing any of the definitions around refugees – in fact the US and UK are making it even more difficult to claim asylum,” said Turner. “I think what you’re going to see is internally displaced people increasing and the burden, as it already is, falling on neighbors in the global south.”
Ultimately, the extent of the suffering caused by global heating, and the increasingly severe responses required to deal with that, will help determine the reactionary response. While greater numbers of people will call for climate action, any restrictions imposed by governments will provide a sense of vindication to rightwingers warning of overreaching elites.
“My sense is that we won’t do enough to avoid others bearing the brunt of this,” Fieschi said. “Solidarity has its limits, after all. Sure, you want good things for the children of the world. But ultimately you will put your children first.”
Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship
Ecofascism |
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Author
Ecofascism _Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience_, published by the anarchist AK Press, is a book consisting of two essays by supposed ecological activists Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier.
Ecofascism: An Enduring Temptation
https://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Ecofascism.pdf · PDF file
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