Why Xiomara Castro’s Win in Honduras

Could Address the Country’s Endemic 

Corruption and Violence

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 DECEMBER 13, 2021
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“I am overwhelmed with joy; I just cannot believe it,” says Dr. Oriel María Siu speaking to me from the city of San Pedro Sula the day after Hondurans like herself voted in presidential elections. Siu was ecstatic to learn that Xiomara Castro de Zelaya had an insurmountable lead over Nasry Asfura, the candidate representing the incumbent conservative party. Castro, the wife of ousted former president Manuel Zelaya, is a democratic socialist and will become the first woman president of Honduras. She triumphantly told her supporters, “Today the people have made justice. We have reversed authoritarianism.”

Castro was referring to the 12 years of repressive rule by the National Party, which took power after Zelaya was ousted in a 2009 military coupthat, as per Siu, “the United States orchestrated.” Years after the coup, Hillary Clinton, who was the U.S. state secretary at the time of the coup, justified Zelaya’s removal, saying in a 2016 interview, “I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence.” The Intercept later exposed how U.S. military officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies assisted Honduran coup leaders in their efforts.

National Party leader Juan Orlando Hernández claimed electoral victory in 2013 against Castro and then again in 2017 against Salvador Nasralla in the face of credible accusations of massive fraud. The man who has been deeply implicated in narco-trafficking in the U.S. (his brother was convicted in a New York court of smuggling in hundreds of tons of cocaine) used the Honduran security forces as his personal militia during his tenure.

Terror and violence reigned across Honduras, and among the many victims of the post-coup era was prominent environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who led the resistance to a hydroelectric dam and was killed in 2016. Another victim was a 26-year-old nursing student named Keyla Martínez, who died in police custody in February 2021 after being arrested for violating a curfew. Her death prompted fresh protests.

Over the years, relentless state violence and corruption swept thousands of Honduran migrants northward who preferred the callousness of the U.S. immigration system to the barbarity of Hernández’s security forces. Conservatives in the U.S. refused to acknowledge the push factor of post-coup violence as a reason for Central American migration.

Still, resistance continued inside Honduras, and, according to Amnesty International, “the wave of anti-government demonstrations has been a constant in the country” in the face of massive repression.

Castro’s win may finally end this dark chapter, and it’s no wonder that Hondurans like Siu are celebrating. “People were expecting the narco-dictatorship to again steal these elections,” she says.

Castro, according to Siu, rose to prominence after her husband’s ouster and “was at the forefront letting people know, nationally and internationally, what was going on” in Honduras. Castro campaigned on a socialist platform and brought together a coalition of what Siu described as “local youth, Indigenous, Black, Garifuna movements” that, after the 2009 coup, “became a very strong social movement attempting to fight against the criminality of [the] corruption, militarism, police presence in the streets and extrajudicial killings” that occurred under Hernández.

Although Castro is the wife of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, Siu insists that President-elect Castro “has a brain of her own and has a platform that is beautiful.”

Suyapa Portillo Villeda, a Honduran American and associate professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a transnational studies at Pitzer College, says that Castro won on a proposal of promising “participatory democracy” and that “she is trying to establish a new kind of pact with the people in calling for a national assembly to rewrite the constitution.”

It’s a bold position considering that former President Manuel Zelaya was on the verge of holding a referendum on the constitution when he was deposed in a military coup. “This is the demand that has been there since 2009 that people have been organizing around, to have a new constitution that would get rid of the Cold War anti-communist constitution that was written during the Reagan era,” says Portillo Villeda.

While the conservative backlash to a new constitution ushered in Hernández’s violent tenure, in many ways, Honduras’ democracy may have emerged stronger as a result. A system that Portillo Villeda describes as consisting of two “oligarchic” ruling parties is now a multiparty system, and Castro has managed to build a formidable coalition among several of them. “This was a very Honduran type of win,” says Portillo Villeda, referring to the grassroots organizing around Castro’s candidacy that included a lot of young Hondurans.

Castro’s win also represents a potential end to more than a decade of repression that includes violent misogyny. “Women here die every day and rapes go without any form of justice,” said Siu, who says she doesn’t dare to walk on the streets after sundown. Honduras has been referred to as, “one of the most dangerous places on Earth to be a woman.”

Since 1985, Honduras has also maintained one of the most draconian abortion bans in the world, and under Hernández’s rule, Congress strengthened the ban. Pregnant people are not allowed abortions under any circumstances including rape or incest. Castro has promised to ease the ban.

The coalition that brought Castro to power includes a nascent feminist movement as well as a new queer and transgender movement working alongside traditional activist groups like unions, as well as Black and Indigenous communities. That is a big reason why Hondurans like Siu are hopeful, saying, “she has the support of historically marginalized communities all throughout the nation.”

Taking her broad mandate from a population eager for change and translating that to legitimate power in a nation whose governmental machinery has been decimated will be Castro’s most serious challenge. “Of course, it’s going to be difficult,” says Portillo Villeda, of the task ahead of Castro. “She’s inheriting a broken country, legal system and Supreme Court and is coming into an empty house that has been robbed.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

Countering Liberal Human Rights with the

Black Radical Human Rights Framework

BY AJAMU BARAKA

 DECEMBER 10, 2021

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The West’s fiction of “human rights” has been weaponized by neoliberals to rationalize naked imperialist interventions. But if human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves: a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR).

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions. ~Frantz Fanon

International Human Rights Day is December 10. On that day in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated as the first in a series of covenants, treaties, and legal interpretations that would make up the post-war human rights framework.

However, the history of struggle that produced the UDHR, beginning with the 1945 convention in San Francisco that created the United Nations, is one that can only be characterized as contentious. It is not possible to cover all of that history here. However, it is important that the historiography of Black activism that saw Black activists as central players in UN processes and debates between 1945 and 1951 is well known. Suffice to say that the contentious ideological character around the concept of human rights is still being played out today.

The understanding of what constituted human rights mirrored the post-war ideological polarization that started to reemerge between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies. Human rights, according to the U.S. and Western European powers, were civil and political with economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) — like the right to healthcare, housing, food, education, leisure, and the practice of one’s language and culture — being merely aspirational. Consequently, the breakdown between the two approaches was between the West and civil and political rights grounded in the individual, and the East that championed collective ESCR’s.

Operating from the narrow perspective that marginalizes ESCR’s, but champions political rights, U.S. president Joe Biden is exploiting human rights day to advance the obscene notion that the U.S. and by extension the colonial states of Western Europe are somehow the defenders of “human rights.”

The idea that Western colonial/capitalist states were defenders of human rights struck many in the colonized South as either delusional or an affirmation that in the eyes of the West they were not human. For the colonized and racialized who were burned alive, tortured, and murdered by these champions of human rights, it was understood that whatever human rights were supposed to be they did not include the racialized and colonized peoples of the world.

Yet, the fiction that Western societies were committed to human rights persisted in the colonial metropoles. Today however, after the forty-year onslaught of the neoliberal counterrevolution that begin in the global South in 1973 before moving on to Northern economies, the brutal contradictions of capitalist accumulation meant that the capitalist bribe offered to workers in the North during the post-war years until the 1970s, was withdrawn.

The global economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism exacerbated by the covid pandemic exposed the ethical, moral, and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment and unnecessary deaths that occurred among the population the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., was never condemned as violations of human rights.

Why?

Even though the liberal human rights framework gives a begrudging acknowledgement to ESCRs in its founding documents, in practice liberal capitalist states have been uneven in providing ESCR protections. The U.S., however, has been the most successful in separating the idea of fundamental ESCRs – like the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and real, life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the responsibility of the state and the interests and rights the state should uphold in order to be considered legitimate.

Therefore, similar to Obama’s assertion that a war is only a war when U.S. military personnel die, U.S. policymakers, the press and consequently, the public do not apply a human rights lens to state and private capitalist policies. In other words, human rights violations did not occur with covid because it was determined that whatever occurred in the U.S. they would not be defined as human rights violations.

This categorical conversion and alternation of reality is precisely how the U.S. can continue to assert that it is a champion of human rights, and get away with it, at least for the U.S. public.

But the dangerous contradictions of liberal human rights do not stop at the level of domestic policies.

Operating from the ideological position that human rights are only civil and political such as the right to vote, speech, assembly, etc., and the false premise that human rights are natural, objective and politically neutral, the liberal framework was able to be further weaponized by neoliberals in the nineties as an ideological instrument that rationalized naked imperialist interventions.

Humanitarian interventionism (war) and the “responsibility to protect” became the contemporary expressions of the “white man’s burden” to save natives in the global South from their autocratic rulers. This insidious, white supremacist construction then metastasized from its liberal base into left circles and left discourses with the being left forces giving ideological cover for imperialist interventions and, consequently, making it very difficult to oppose attacks on non-European global South nations.

Liberal-left forces in the West did not recognize the white supremacist implications of aligning themselves with their bourgeoisie against nations in the Global South justified by the dubious position that white supremacist elites in the West were concerned about human rights and democracy in those nations.

It simply did not dawn on them that the “autocratic” rulers to be deposed were usually in nations that were attempting to resist complete domination by the U.S. and its European allies. From Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran to North Korea and Venezuela, subversion, direct military interventions, proxy wars, and sanctions were all deployed to “save” the people from their oppressive rulers. And it did not matter if tens of thousands died from the wars and sanctions that denied population medicines, the white West determined in their privilege and safe capitals thousands of miles away that these losses were acceptable collateral damage to preserve democracy and “human rights.”

The Imperative to Decolonize Human Rights

Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the
ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the
world for what it is, and move to transform it. ~Ella Baker

This cynical ideological manipulation of liberal human rights is the reason so many around the world turned away from using this framework. Yet, from W.E.B. Dubois and Claudia Jones through to Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and on to the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights of today, the radical Black movement still frames crucial elements of the struggles being waged by Africans within the vocabulary of human rights. Are Africans in the U.S. mistaken by using terms like human rights or are we operating from a different framework?

I have argued that from the moment that Black activists first articulated a position on human rights in 1945 that made the fundamental connection between the need to eradicate racial oppression and exploitation in the U.S. and European colonialism as a prerequisite for the realization of human rights, we were operating from a different framework: a framework I labeled as a “People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework.

The assumption of the PCHRs frame is simple and clear. If human rights are to have any relevance for the oppressed, they must be “de-colonized” and given meaning by the oppressed themselves.

And what are People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR)?

They are “those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”

This definition is a description of a process and an ethical framework as opposed to a pre-figured list of items defined as representing human rights. This is one of the key differences between the liberal framework and PCHRs. The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created  from the bottom-up.

The PCHR framework rejects the idea that human rights only emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states, as important as some of the principles represented in some of the texts. PCHRs are a creation of struggle and emerge from the people in formation. Unlike the liberal frame that elevates mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of abstract rights, the “people” in formation create the ethical foundation and are the source of PCHRs.

The process is open-ended. It is informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed and serves as both a counternarrative to the ideological and cultural hegemony of capital and a guide to action. It is based on the assumption that a set of “human rights” can only emerge as part of a de-colonial liberatory process.

The people-centered framework proceeds from the assumption that the genesis of the assaults on human dignity that are at the core of human rights violations is located in the ongoing structural relationships of colonial/capitalist oppression. Therefore, the PCHR framework does not pretend to be non-political. It is a political project in the service of Africans and the colonized working classes, peasants and socially oppressed. It names the enemies of freedom: the Western white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy.

So, we are not confused by or distracted by the clownish antics of Joe Biden with his democracy summit or surprised that the flaccid reforms of the “Build Back Better “legislation were whittled down and then emptied of content. The bourgeoisie is clear and quite serious about the class war that they are waging.

That is why we must be clearer and more determined. Our lives and the planet depend on whether or not we are able to defeat the Pan European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy that would rather destroy the world than surrender power.

Defeat, therefore, is not an option.

The realization of authentic freedom and human dignity can only come about with this victory. With PCHRs, we have an ideological weapon. A weapon that envisions, centers, and legitimizes the understanding that it is only through social revolution that human rights can be realized.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine. 

1. About — Ajamu Baraka
   https://www.ajamubaraka.com/about

   Ajamu Baraka was the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN) from July 2004 until June 2011. The USHRN was the first domestic human rights formation in the United States explicitly committed to the application of international human rights standards to the U.S. Under Baraka, the Network grew from a core membership of ...

The Puzzling Case of Saule Omarosa

BY PAM MARTENS - RUSS MARTENS  

COUNTERPUNCH

 DECEMBER 10, 2021
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Earlier this week, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane.

In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system:

(1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve;

(2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy;

(3) Allow the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a bubble trend,” such as with technology stocks today, to “short these securities, thereby putting downward pressure on their prices”;

(4) Eliminate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that insures bank deposits in the U.S. and prevents panic runs on banks;

(5) Consolidate all bank regulatory functions at the OCC – which Omarova was nominated to head.

By early November, Omarova was facing a new controversy when it was revealed that she had called the very industry that she had been nominated to supervise the “quintessential a**hole industry” in a 2019 Canadian feature documentary.

It’s hard to imagine things going downhill from there – but they did.

At 11:41 a.m. on November 18, as Omarova sat before the Senate Banking Committee for her confirmation hearing, Republican Senator Tom Cotton Tweeted the following:

“Saule Omarova stole $214 (~$400 adjusted for inflation) from T.J. Maxx in 1995. She’s woefully unqualified to supervise the banking system.”

It turns out that someone in President Biden’s inner circle had approved the nomination of Omarova, a person arrested for shoplifting when she was 28 years old, to head a key federal regulatory agency overseeing banks with a total of $14 trillion in assets.

President Joe Biden is now three for three in failing to properly vet his nominees to oversee the crime factory on Wall Street. In April there was Alex Oh who had to resign over scandal after just six days on the job as the Director of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Oh had worked for the past two decades as an attorney for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the law firm that major Wall Street banks repeatedly choose to fight their serial fraud charges. Less than seven hours after Wall Street On Parade ran our negative critique on Oh’s fitness for the job, she was out the door at the SEC.

Then there is Kenneth Polite, Biden’s confirmed nominee to head the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In July we were the only financial news outlet to report the story of the multitude of red flags on Polite’s financial disclosure forms. Polite is still in his job. Like Alex Oh, Polite was a law partner at a law firm that defends Wall Street mega banks. Polite’s former law firm is Morgan, Lewis & Bochius, which has plenty of red flags itself. (See our report: Biden’s Crime Chief Had Screaming Red Flags on His Financial Disclosure Form; Senators Ignored Them.)

There are plenty of questions that remain on why progressive Senators, including Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, continued their support of Omarova long after it was clear that she had been incompetently vetted for the post to which she was nominated. Even yesterday, Brown was doubling down, releasing a statement that included this:

“Despite her unquestioned expertise and her bipartisan record, powerful interests distorted Professor Omarova’s views and writings. In a relentless smear campaign reminiscent of red scare McCarthyism, they have shamefully attacked her family, her heritage, and her commitment to American ideals. I am disappointed that these spurious attacks and misrepresentations of Professor Omarova’s views were not resoundingly rejected in a bipartisan manner.

“One thing is clear: we need regulators at the OCC and beyond who are not in the pockets of Wall Street…”

But that’s the very problem. When Biden nominated Alex Oh and Kenneth Polite, he did not draw from career professionals at the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Department of Justice to fill these key posts. He tapped the law partners of Big Law who make their living defending Wall Street recidivists.

In the case of Omarova, Biden selected a candidate whose writings and statements were so bizarre that it ensured there would be no one permanently at the helm of the OCC for a full year of Biden’s presidency. That must have made mega banks like JPMorgan Chase, which is overseen by the OCC, quite happy. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has been allowed to remain at the helm of the bank by federal regulators, despite his bank being charged with an unprecedented five felony counts since 2014.

Maybe that was the plan all along – to not get someone confirmed to head the OCC.

This first appeared on Wall Street on Parade.

Free the Weed: 50 Years After the John Sinclair Freedom Rally

BY JOHN SINCLAIR 

COUNTERPUNCH

  DECEMBER 10, 2021       Facebook

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Photo: Michael Donnelly.

Hi everybody, welcome to the end of 2021 and the 50th anniversary of the John Sinclair Freedom Rally on December 10, 1971 and my release three days later from a 9-1/2 to 10 year prison sentence for giving away two joints to an undercover policewoman in Detroit just before Christmas of 1966.

This modest gift was a token of my belief in the necessity of giving away marijuana to those who don’t have any. When I was coming up in the marijuana culture of the sixties, we believed that if you had some weed and didn’t pass along a little bit to the next person who didn’t have any, you risked the distinct possibility of never being given any weed again for your own use. I didn’t want to face that particular reality and it was Christmas time, so I went ahead and gave the woman two joints when she asked for one.

I learned quite painfully from my first two marijuana busts—this was the third!—that it was more than just stupid to be selling weed in my position because the police would move in at their earliest convenience and knock you down for sales and possession of narcotics.

That’s right: Believe it or not, marijuana was deemed a narcotic by the forces of law and order from 1937 until the 1970s and carried the kind of heavy penalties we’ve come to associate with narcotics law enforcement: ten years for possession and a mandatory minimum 20-years-to-life sentence for sale of marijuana. I was born in October 1941 and consequently suffered under this law for the whole of my adult life.

Well, not all of it, because when I was 30 years old, early in 1972, after contesting the established laws in Detroit Recorder’s Court for a period of five years since my arrest and initial incarceration on January 24, 1967 and after my release on bond, trying to prove that marijuana was not a narcotic and that twenty years to life constituted cruel and unusual punishment, I finally went to trial on what had become merely a simple possession charge when the prosecution dropped the sales charge against me the day before the trial started in July 1969. My only defense was that marijuana was not a narcotic and, as a marijuana smoker, I was not a narcotics addict nor a criminal of any sort, so it was easy for the judge, the prosecutor and their carefully selected jury members to obtain a conviction for possession of marijuana.

Despite his last-minute amendment to the bill of particulars, the Recorder’s Court judge, Robert J. Columbo, and his virtually hand-picked jury went ahead and convicted me of narcotics possession just the same, and I was sentenced to 9-1/2 to ten years in prison and remanded to the penitentiary at Jackson to serve my time.

To top it off, Judge Columbo refused to grant me an appeal bond while my case was being reviewed in the higher courts, so I had to do every day of the time to which he had sentenced me. Even worse, after my month in the Reception & Diagnostic Center at Jackson where they determined what to do with me for 10 years, I was sent 600 miles north to Marquette Branch Prison to settle in with the heavy criminals.

That’s the way it looked every day for my 29 months in Jackson and Marquette Prisons, although my colleagues and I did everything we could to try to shorten my sentence. Starting with the Trans-Love Energies benefit on January 29, 1967 and continuing until December 10, 1971, my friends and comrades staged countless events in my behalf, from little bitty dances in union halls and high school venues to multiple-day events at the Grande and Easttown Ballrooms in Detroit and everything in between.

Until just before I went to prison in July 1969 I had been functioning as the manager of a great Detroit rock & roll band called the MC-5 who were in the process of building a massive audience and gaining a major label recording contact with Elektra Records and a national and international reputation for themselves.

The MC-5’s support for my case played an important role during my battle against the narcotics laws, and the band’s central position in its hometown attracted the positive attention and undying support of almost every other band in the community—with the exception, of course, of asshole Ted Nugent, then in his early days as an anti-drug propagandist—so that dozens and scores of bands were enlisted to play benefits for my legal defense between 1967 and 1972.

This effort culminated in the John Sinclair Freedom Rally of December 10, 1971, where John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Bobby Seale, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Archie Shepp & Roswell Rudd, CJQ, Bob Seger, the Up, Commander Cody and a host of others gathered with 15,000 supporters at Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena to call for my release from prison. FREE JOHN NOW! was the battlecry, and it generated a whole new dimension of support for my case among the populace and, as it turned out, among the law enforcement community itself.

The Freedom Rally was scheduled for December 10 because, the previous year, the state legislature broke for the Christmas recess without voting on a bill that would have seriously altered the marijuana laws, removing marijuana from the narcotics laws and creating a special category called “controlled substances” to cover the weed. When the legislature passed on dealing with this question, they virtually sentenced me to an additional year in prison since I was sure that, if the new law ere to be passed, my incarceration would be at an end.

Thus it was my singular concern that we exert enough pressure on the state law-makers to force them to a vote on this bill in 1971, and our strategy was to push them and push them until it was done. The Freedom Rally was organized as a means to force them to deal with this proposed legislation before the year ended, and the Freedom Rally was planned for December 10th to accomplish this goal.

I wanted to make the biggest possible splash, and accordingly our pal at the University of Michigan, Peter Andrews, who was my business partner in the Trans-Love Energies non-profit corporation through which we did our work in the music business, and who was employed by the U of M to teach them how to produce and profit from large rock concerts, managed to rent for us the 15,000-seat Crisler basketball arena as the venue for the Freedom Rally.

Of course our efforts were doomed to failure unless we could secure enough big acts to fill the arena, and everything appeared lost until Jerry Rubin let us know that he had talked the Lennons into being part of the show. That insured our success, and then other big names invited themselves onto the bill, like Stevie Wonder and Bob Seger, and everything was groovy. We had created a major attraction, and our reward was that the Michigan Supreme Court voted to release me on appeal bond three days later, and I was sent home from prison on Monday, December 13th. On March 12, 1972, the same court voted to remove marijuana from the narcotics law and create a new category to cover the medicine of our choice, from now on to be known as a “controlled substance.”.

That’s what we’ve celebrating at the Ralston Holistic Health Center this month, and we’d be seriously remiss if we let this historic moment pass without singling it out somehow and blowing our horn in triumph 50 years after this miraculous accomplishment. Thanks, everybody, and may we never cease our efforts to FREE THE WEED!

Recycling Science Denial

BY CHRISTOPH IRMSCHER 

DECEMBER 10, 2021Facebook

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Photograph Source: Becker1999 – CC BY 2.0

Science denial is alive and well in the United States, and the mainstream media are often complicit with it. “I represent science,” Anthony Fauci, the anti-science movement’s favorite whipping boy, was recently quoted as having said. “GOP Anger with Fauci Rises,” The Hill exclaimed, as if the frenzied Fauci-blaming were a legitimate visceral reaction to scientific overreach and not part of a calculated campaign that, to quote Fauci himself, “you’d have to be asleep” not to recognize at such. And the Washington Post gave airtime to Bloomberg’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who, in a finger-wagging opinion piece, informed Fauci that he can’t “use science to excuse his missteps.”

The science deniers have become so comfortable these days that they don’t even try to hide their tracks. Even some of the most staunchly conservative outlets quoted Fauci’s remarks in full, which should have made it clear to all mildly attentive readers that the offending statement had been deliberately taken out of context. What the chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had in fact said was that, to anti-science Republicans, he represented a more convenient target than science itself, a constantly evolving, fuzzy thing, the concerted effort of many people at arriving something like a temporary agreement on the truth. Which is, undeniably, harder to criticize than an identifiable human being, and who’d be a better punching bag than Tony Fauci from Brooklyn? It helps that Fauci, with his close-cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses, constantly raspy voice, and a tendency to speak off the cuff, looks less like a modern Alexander Fleming fresh from the lab than your bank’s local branch manager about to deny you an extension of your credit line.

Context is not what matters to GOP politicians, especially Senator Rand Paul, who immediately shouted that Fauci, in his obvious arrogance, was like the medieval church. Which, to complete the analogy, also means that science deniers like Paul (whose claim to scientific expertise comes from the fact that he once worked as an eye doctor) represent progress, the forces of light battling the encroaching darkness.

That’s not an unfamiliar narrative, alas. Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana and now president of Purdue University, in a recent op-ed, also published in the Washington Post, defended contrarian physicist Steven Koonin, one of the new darlings of American climate skepticism, as the new Galileo, brave enough to withstand the onslaught of the ideologically benighted scientific establishment, which Daniels, not a scientist himself, pegged as the modern equivalent of papal Rome.

Engaging with such narratives is tiresome, a waste of precious time. And it is intended to be precisely that. Remember Steven Bannon, Trump’s chief ideologue even after he was half-heartedly dismissed from White House, who early on defined his strategy as wanting to “to flood the zone with shit.” Ten months after Trump had to be dragged out of the White House, that flood shows no signs of subsiding. Recently, the City Journal published a piece titled “In Defense of ‘Misinformation’” by the multiply credentialed Brendon Patrick Purdy (the proud holder of, his byline tells us, “degrees in philosophy, mathematics, the mathematical behavioral sciences, and data science”). Dr. Purdy’s message is a simple one: science—especially when used by the authorities to justify public health measures such as the wearing of masks—has long become ideological and authoritarian, the enemy of reason and logic. Fortunately, those things (reason and logic) still count for something with the likes of Dr. Purdy. The online version of his article puts a face on that corrupt scientific establishment: a Brown person (our current Surgeon General, Dr. Murthy, though he’s not identified as such) holding up a brochure titled “Confronting Health Misinformation,” the epitome of everything Purdy’s article sets out to ridicule.

As Hannah Arendt pointed out a long time ago, the authoritarian’s ultimate disguise is the appearance of utter rationality. The playbook for that was written a long time ago. Consider the Swiss-American scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who, as I showed in my biography, was instrumental in creating American science as we know it today. In his desperate fight against the onslaught of Darwinism, Agassiz, a staunch segregationist, perfected the technique still used by science deniers today. Despite the fact that he himself had no proof that, as he never tired of repeating, all living beings (and especially the human races) had been created by God to stay in their assigned places, following a divine plan worked out from the beginning of time, Agassiz sought to hammer into the minds of Americans that Darwin’s theory was “merely conjectural,” and not even “the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.” Ironically, in an unguarded moment, the great Agassiz once told one of his duly shocked students that he’d long written his scientific descriptions from memory only.

Stanford student Perry Blodget with the fallen Agassiz statue after the 1906 earthquake (Collection of Christoph Irmscher).

Even if modern science deniers have lost some of their battles (the most visible reminder of that are the “no smoking” signs in public places today), they still are, I fear, winning the war. For decades now they have been instilling a parody of science in the minds of the public. Scientific truth, they suggest, requires a 100 % consensus, facts that have been firmly established for all time. And until there is consensus, everything is inquiry and open debate. And if nothing is settled yet, why act now? And thus, we see science deniers everywhere mimic the language of supposedly disinterested scientific inquiry, as if they really meant it, as if all they, too, were doing is long for that perfect consensus. Even Trump knows the rules of this game. One of the lowest points in the recent history of science denial came during that infamous press conference last year when Trump proposed, that one should “test” the effect of sunlight on the virus.

At a more elevated level, Steven Koonin, himself a trained physicist, has suggested in his recent book that the climate science was still “unsettled”: “I would wait,” he concluded, “until the science becomes more settled–-that is, until the climate’s response to human influences is better determined or, failing that, until a values consensus emerges.” In their brilliant refutation of Koonin’s argument, the physicists Tim Londergan and Steven Vigdor point out that we already have what is needed for action, “a preponderance of evidence.” But action is precisely what Koonin and others want to forestall. His recommendation to do nothing, at least for now, will surely please the fossil industry. But it’s a luxury, as Professors Londergan and Vigdor rightly emphasize, the world can no longer afford.

As depressing as the story of American science denial is, it still offers some opportunities, too. If, as I understand them, the strategies used by Paul et al. are not primarily about the facts, let’s not waste any time debating them. Let us focus instead on identifying the absurd, fake scientific framework they employ and call out their enablers, including the Washington Post. We don’t have to be scientists to do that. Almost sixty years ago, Rachel Carson, demanded an end to “false assurances” that everything was fine and reminded us that good science, like the survival of our species, is a shared, public responsibility, a collective effort involving all of us. It’s an endless task, to be sure. For science denial might be the only product its proponents use that is fully and infinitely recyclable.

Christoph Irmscher is the editor of the Library of America edition of Audubon’s Writings and Drawings and the co-editor, with Richard King, of Audubon at Sea, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.